Scholarship and Academic Life

Emmanuel Bello-Ogunu, a doctoral student in the College of Computing and Informatics (CCI), is the 2013-14 recipient of a Google United Negro College Fund  (UNCF) Scholarship. This $10,000 award, funded in part by the UNCF, is presented annually to a select group of African American students pursuing a computer science/engineering degree.

James Cook, professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is the first recipient of the Provost’s Faculty Award for Community Engagement.

Established in 2012, the award honors a tenured faculty member whose teaching, research and service embodies the University’s commitment to civic involvement and whose work strengthens the relationship between UNC Charlotte and the larger community.

Balaka Basu, a faculty member in the English Department, is co-editor of the recently published “Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers.” The book is the latest volume in Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture Series, and it includes a chapter by Basu titled “What Faction Are You In?  The Pleasure of Being Sorted in Veronica Roth’s ‘Divergent.’”
Basu joined the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences faculty in 2013. She earned a doctorate in English from City University of New York; her bachelor’s degree is from Cornell University.  

Deeptak Verma, a 2012 graduate with a doctorate in bioinformatics and computational biology, is this year’s recipient of the Graduate School’s Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award.
 Verma was honored for the dissertation “Elucidating the Effects of Mutation and Evolutionary Divergence upon Protein Structure Quantitative Stability/Flexibility Relationships.”  During his time at UNC Charlotte, his research focused on the movement of atoms within a protein, and he co-authored nine published papers based on this research. 

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.

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.