Awards and honors

The UNC Charlotte Astrobotics Robotic Team, the 49er Miners, recently finished third in the Caterpillar Autonomy Award at the 2018 NASA Robotic Mining Competition at Kennedy Space Center.  The team joined an elite group of few schools in the history of the competition to accomplish a fully autonomous mining run (approximately 50 colleges and universities have competed each year for the past nine years).

Glenn Boreman, chair of the Department of Physics and Optical Science in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, was elevated to the status of IEEE Fellow by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in recognition of his significant contributions to optical and infrared antenna technologies.

Andrea Pitts, an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, has received a six-month Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Alumna Amy Kennemore is one of 21 Charlotte Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows for 2018; this honor is presented by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. 

Counseling master’s student Amie Begg has received a national fellowship to support her education and facilitate her addictions counseling service to underserved minority youth.

The National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC) Minority Fellowship Program-Addictions Counselors (MFP-AC) is awarded annually. The program’s goal is to reduce health disparities and improve behavioral health care outcomes for diverse populations by increasing the available number of culturally competent behavioral health professionals.

A classroom approach in which students seek solutions to problems rooted in real meteorological data; nontraditional teaching techniques to help students grasp organic chemistry; and a focus on students choosing research projects geared to their interests are just some of the innovative, hands-on approaches this year’s CLAS Excellence in Teaching Awards recipients use to challenge students.

Category winners and finalists received more than $20,000 at the 2018 Charlotte Venture Challenge; this year’s event featured 13 innovative startup finalists.

UNC Charlotte’s Celine Latulipe, Sybil Huskey, David Wilson and Vikash Singh are the researchers behind Video Collaboratory, a recent winner of the Blue Diamond Award from the Charlotte Area Technology Collaborative.

Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau, associate professor of German, is the 2018 recipient of the International Education Faculty Award. The honor was presented at the 24th annual UNC Charlotte International Education Celebration, held in the Atkins Library Halton Reading Room.

Aliaga-Buchenau, also associate chair of the Department of Languages and Culture Studies, has been a UNC Charlotte faculty member since 2002. During her tenure, she has embraced international education in her teaching, service and research.

Joyce Dalsheim, a cultural anthropologist in the Department of Global Studies, was named a 2018 Luce/ACLS Fellow in Religion, Journalism and International Affairs.

She will use her ethnographic research in Israel/Palestine to engage in a critical examination of the relationship between sovereignty and liberation, focusing on questions of religion and religious freedom. Her work adds new perspective to a broad set of interdisciplinary conversations on secularism and citizenship in the modern world.