Research

Full understanding of how natural resources relate to rebel forces in the developing world is crucial to U.S. national security policy, and a Department of Defense-funded project at UNC Charlotte is expected to provide greater insights into the impact of those resources.
James Walsh and colleagues Beth Whitaker and Justin Conrad, all from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Department of Political Science and Public Administration, have received an $825,537 grant from the Department of Defense and its Minerva Initiative for the project “Natural Resources and Armed Conflict.”

The TweetChina project is designed to explore how China is discussed and represented on Twitter. China-related tweets were selected from several dozen billions of tweets archived by UNC Charlotte’s Charlotte Visualization Center and visually represented in map, picture, text and event modes.

UNC Charlotte and Sarajevo School of Science and Technology (SSST) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to initiate joint projects and to partner on scientific research programs common to both institutions.

College of Health and Human Services professor Jeffrey Shears recently partnered with local nonprofit organization, Communities In Schools, to host the Mecklenburg County Fatherhood Summit.
The event, which took place on Thursday, July 11, at UNC Charlotte Center City, drew nearly 200 attendees. The Fatherhood Summit is part of a larger initiative to bring greater attention to the importance of offering resources and programs for fathers in order to increase the number of men involved in the lives of their children.  

An unprecedented partnership of academic and industry organizations at the North Carolina Research Campus is launching a $1.5 million program to engage college students from across the state in a first-of-its-kind education and research endeavor – the Plant Pathways Elucidation Project (P2EP).

Eric Heberlig, a faculty member in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, will be a guest on WFAE’s “Charlotte Talks” on Thursday, July 18. The program, which airs live at 9 a.m. with a rebroadcast in the evening, will focus on the current North Carolina political scene.

Jennifer Weller, an associate professor of bioinformatics and genomics in the College of Computing and Informatics (CCI), is helping Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS)students to fight chestnut blight, an Asian fungus that has killed off billions of American chestnut trees since 1904.
Weller is working with Olympic High School science teachers Jeanne Smith and Erica Putnam through the school’s B-3 Summer Program, which focuses on biotechnology, biodiversity and bioinformatics at Olympic’s School of Biotechnology, Health and Public Administration.

UNC Charlotte Center City will be the location for a transit-oriented breakfast on Monday, July 8, where panelists will discuss a variety of issues that resulted from a project that began with students in the Master of Urban Design program.

The College of Arts + Architecture hosted more than 20 engineers and executives from Ingersoll Rand, Wednesday, June 26, to assist in building the Solar Decathlon house UrbanEden. The Ingersoll Rand guests helped pour geopolymer tiles that will be used in the structure’s rain catchment troughs.

Juan Vivero-Escoto, an assistant professor of chemistry, is the 2013 recipient of the Ralph Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award from Oak Ridge Associate Universities (ORAU), a 109-member university consortium affiliated with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
Vivero-Escoto was among 30 winners in a pool of 147 applicants from consortium institutions. Only two faculty members per institution were permitted to apply; they underwent a highly competitive peer-review process organized by ORAU from among its members.