Well Said: Recent Episodes
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
From March Madness to Cuban relations, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill community is playing a role in some of the most important topics and issues making headlines around the world.
Join us every Wednesday for the UNC-Chapel Hill's “Well Said” podcast as we talk with Carolina’s newsmakers and experts. Each week, students, faculty, staff and alumni will discuss whats going on in classrooms, labs and around campus, and how it pertains to the local, national and international headlines.
Morganton, North Carolina, has historically been known for its strong manufacturing and textile industries, but those industries took a significant hit during the 2009 recession and companies moved much of their operations overseas. Unemployment in the town rocketed to 15%.
Carolina alumna Sara Chester '07 saw that critical time as a chance to reshape the city's economy and build a better future by encouraging businesses to plant their roots in Morganton.
She is now working to bring Morganton back to life as the co-executive director of the Industrial Commons, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing an inclusive economy throughout western North Carolina and creating a culture of dignity for manufacturing workers.
On this week's episode, Chester talks about how Industrial Commons is redefining Morganton and the industries it has relied on for decades by harnessing the power of local workers and small businesses.
There are 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week and 366 days in 2020.
“The Earth doesn't orbit the sun in exactly 365 days. There's a little bit extra,” said Jordan Sheely, a senior astrophysics major and science educator at Morehead Planetarium and Science Center. “It's about .24 days, so just about a quarter of a day. Every year we're behind by just a little bit.”
That means people like Carolina sophomore Lauren Stiller only get to celebrate their true birthday every four years.
“Every year that passes is basically a fourth of a year for me,” Stiller said. “So, as a 19-year-old, I say, ‘I'm four and three fourths.’ So, I'll be turning 5 this year.”
On this week’s episode, hear about the little struggles and big celebrations that come with having a rare birthday and the science behind it, too.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Negro Leagues — professional baseball leagues comprised mostly of African American players. The leagues were created in 1920 as a response to non-white players being kept out of major league baseball.
“As long as there has been baseball, there have been African Americans playing baseball,” said Matthew Andrews, a teaching associate professor in the College of Arts & Sciences' history department. “But as baseball got organized, African Americans found themselves excluded from organized baseball.”
Andrews and other historians study the Negro Leagues using primary sources like newspapers, but a large portion of the leagues’ history is actually unknown.
On this week’s episode, Andrews shares the history of the Negro Leagues, tells some of the leagues’ stories that have survived the test of time and examines the true reasons that the leagues were created in the first place.
Love songs have the power to define big moments in our lives.
“You have a proposal song or a wedding song or a prom song, and then people remember that moment and they remember that song,” Jocelyn Neal said.
The Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of Music in the College of Arts & Sciences, Neal specializes in Southern music studies, but she said love songs fulfill the same purpose in all genres.
“They come in so many different layers,” she said. “There's been a number of people who've done great research on what songs are about, and without a doubt, three-quarters of songs in country music — and slightly higher in pop— are either about happy love or lost love, and that's the framing device.”
No matter what state of love someone might find themself in, there’s a song out there to express it.
On this week’s episode, Neal shares what makes a good love song.
“Each day, each event measured in hours, minutes, seconds and then lost to eternity. A precious few are not. They linger, committed to memory, treasured. This rivalry is just that, timeless.”
Those are the words of Freddie Kiger ’74, ’77 (M.A.) describing Carolina’s rivalry with Duke. It’s a subject he knows well, having watched about 100 basketball games between them from courtside. While finalizing his master’s degree in history, Kiger began working with the men’s basketball team as a statistician. The first time he worked a Carolina-Duke game in Chapel Hill was on March 2, 1974. That game featured a Carolina comeback from eight points down with only 17 seconds to play. Walter Davis made a buzzer-beater to send the game to overtime, which the Tar Heels then won comfortably.
“I thought Carmichael’s roof was going to collapse,” Kiger said.
On Saturday, as Carolina hosts Duke in the latest installment of the rivalry, Kiger will be at the scorer’s table relaying statistics to the television broadcasters. He’s worked with ESPN, CBS, NBC and other networks for major events like the Olympics and the X-Games, but nothing, he said, compares to a Carolina game against Duke because of the success of both men’s basketball programs.
“Let’s just talk NCAA titles,” Kiger said. “You’re talking about two schools eight miles apart who have won 11 national championships. That’s staggering.”
On this week’s episode, Kiger will share the stories he’s accumulated over nearly 50 years of being involved with Carolina basketball and what he’s learned along that journey.
Growing up, Lindsey James always loved solving problems and puzzles. She even majored in chemistry in college because it combines science with the problem-solving she liked about math.
James liked chemistry so much, she earned her doctoral degree in it from Carolina in 2010, and she’s been here ever since.
Now at the Eshelman School of Pharmacy, her research into possible treatments for cancer, HIV and other diseases helps to add pieces to the puzzles of these diseases. In her lab, she creates molecules that target specific proteins that are believed to play roles in the development of those diseases.
In December 2019, Pinnacle Hill, the medical innovation investment partnership between Carolina and Deerfield Management Company, awarded James with funding to continue trying to develop better treatments for multiple myeloma, the second most prevalent blood cancer in the country.
“The Pinnacle Hill funding definitely takes everything to a new level,” James said.
This project is trying to create a compound that inhibits a specific protein that research literature suggests plays a significant role in the progression of a specific subtype of multiple myeloma. If she’s successful, James’ research will lead to greater understanding about the diseases and might lead to more effective treatments.
James knows that her success might reveal more problems about the disease that need solving, but that’s what she loves about her career.
“There’s a lot of failure, but then those successes are really rewarding,” James said. “You tackle it one day at a time and solve problems.”
On today’s episode, James explains how she tackles medical problems one day at a time and why she loves doing it at Carolina.
Daniel Wallace wasn’t a voracious reader growing up.
“I was an average reader. I was an average writer. Nobody took me aside when I was a kid and said, ‘You’re one of the lucky ones, you’ve got that special spark,’” Wallace said.
But Wallace had that spark after all. Today, he is Carolina’s J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English and the director of the College of Arts and Sciences' creative writing program. He’s also the author of "Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions."
“All I wanted to do is a book,” Wallace said. “Once I got that published, or once I was told, ‘We are going to publish your book,’ I was so happy. I thought, and this is not an exaggeration, ‘I’m going to be happy forever.’”
At Carolina, he shares with his students what being a writer is really like.
“I feel like everything that I’m working on, when I’m working on it, is wonderful. It’s only the next day that I realize that it’s not,” Wallace said. “I have a lot of rejection. In other words, I understand the process.”
On this week’s episode, Wallace shares his writing journey from the beginning — the good, the bad and the creative.
“It really does change your life and the trajectory that your life can take,” said Erin Hager, a senior psychology student from Wilmington who studied abroad in Santiago, Chile, for the fall semester in 2018.
Those changes in trajectory come from the personal and social growth you experience while abroad.
“A big realization was that I can do anything that I want to by myself,” she said. “That squashes a lot of fear because if you want to do something, you know you can do it by yourself.”
And those changes affect academic and professional opportunities, too, with study abroad participants traditionally doing better in the classroom, said Heather Ward, the associate dean of UNC Study Abroad and International Exchanges.
By 2023, Carolina wants more than half of its students to study abroad before graduation to give more students the opportunity to have those benefits.
“It’s our obligation as a public university to make that opportunity available for every student and to not make it a privilege for some,” Ward said.
Ahead of the Study Abroad Fair and the Feb. 10 application deadline for summer, fall and year-long programs, Hager shares what she learned in Chile and how those lessons shaped the rest of her Carolina career.
Today is the first day of classes of the spring semester, but before we jump into all the excitement it has in store for campus, we are revisiting some of our top stories from this past fall — the Tar Heel Bus Tour and FallFest.
In October, Maria Estorino, the associate university librarian for special collections and director of Wilson Library, rode one of the three buses that together covered more than 1,600 miles across North Carolina. Jovan Sheshbaradaran is a first-year student from Gastonia, North Carolina, who began his time as a Tar Heel the same way as thousands of others — signing up for many Carolina student organizations at FallFest in August.
On this week’s episode, Estorino shares the new perspective participating in the Tar Heel Bus Tour gave her regarding her role at Wilson Library, and Sheshbaradaran reflects on his experiences from his first semester at Carolina.
More than 1,500 undergraduate, graduate and professional students turned their tassels to signify their graduation Sunday at Winter Commencement.
The celebration acknowledged more than just the students, as commencement speaker Bill Ferris reminded the graduates to consider the contributions they have received from friends and family.
“When you see a turtle sitting on a fence post, you know he had some help getting there,” said Ferris, a two-time Grammy Award-winner and beloved Carolina professor. “Each of us are like that turtle, and the families and special friends who helped us arrive at this place, we are celebrating today.”
Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz presided over the ceremony, which was his first as chancellor after he was named to the position Dec. 13. He called upon the words of Fred Rogers, who defined a hero as someone who responds to the needs of the world, to inspire the graduates to be heroes of whom their hometowns would be proud.
On this week’s episode, we share the excitement surrounding the Winter Commencement ceremony and the thoughtful advice graduates received.
Winter Commencement is a time to celebrate the graduating Tar Heels.
But, Bryan Hernandez, a graduating UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School business administration major, knows the day is about more than him.
It’s a day to celebrate all of the people who have helped him get to this moment, like classmates, professors, mentors and, especially, his parents.
“They gave up everything, so we had the chance to go to college,” he said. “It’ll definitely feel like their hard work paid off, too.”
Hernandez has certainly put in some hard work of his own, though, to get to this day. He applied to Carolina as a high school senior in Sanford, North Carolina, but he was not offered admission. Instead of attending another university, Hernandez decided to take advantage of the Carolina Student Transfer Excellence Program.
He completed his general education requirements during two years at Sandhills Community College. Then, he transferred to Carolina in the fall of 2017 as a junior.
On this week’s episode, Hernandez explains how he took advantage of every opportunity available at Carolina and why he feels so prepared for his next journey in life — a position at Cisco.
Everyone gets stressed. It’s a natural part of life. We all face many stressors every day.
Stressors can take many forms — jobs, relationships, children. For college students, final exams are one of the stressors they face throughout the semester. Final exams begin Dec. 6 at Carolina.
To appropriately deal with stress, Anthony Zannas said, you don’t want to avoid it.
“There are certain things in life that we have to come to terms with,” said Zannas, an assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine who studies how stress interacts with our bodies. “There are many studies showing that the more you avoid a stressful situation, the more stressful it will become when you actually face it.”
Zannas researches epigenetics and examines how stressors influence the chemicals on top of DNA that determine whether genes will be active or not. His research can help identify people with stress-related disorders earlier.
“If we can detect these epigenetic changes that happen in response to stress early on,” he said, “then we might have a chance of targeting those individuals earlier.”
On this week’s episode, Zannas explains the differences between good and bad stress and shares some tips on how we can better deal with the stressors we face every day.
What’s your favorite food?
How you answer that question probably isn’t only about how the food tastes but also the memories you associate with the food.
For Andrew Hardaway, a research assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine, his favorite food is mashed potatoes. Specifically, his mother’s mashed potatoes. He’ll make sure to go back for a second — or even a third — helping of them on Thanksgiving.
As a member of Thomas Kash’s lab, Hardaway researches how food interacts with the brain. He recently found that cells in the central amygdala — the area of the brain associated with memory, decision-making and emotional responses — drive the consumption of food after basic needs are met.
“At Thanksgiving, when you sit down and you think about your favorite food, think about how your amygdala is being activated in that moment,” Hardaway said.
It’s not something that most of us need to think about, but it’s crucial for helping treat people with binge eating disorders. In addition to eating a large amount of food in a short amount of time, binge eating is also associated with a loss of control. People with binge eating disorders cannot control their eating behavior, which can lead to other problems, like obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular issues.
Although there are some treatments and medications available, understanding what’s going on in the brain can help treat people with binge eating and other food disorders.
“For those people, it’s very difficult to just flip a switch in their brain and change behaviors,” Hardaway said. “They need another tool in the toolbox, and that’s what we’re going to provide.”
On this week’s episode, Hardaway shares his favorite Thanksgiving traditions, defines comfort foods and explains the differences between binge eating and the overeating we all might do to celebrate the holiday.
It’s hard to describe a “typical” classroom experience at Carolina. From makerspaces to research labs, learning spaces are designed to provide hands-on experiences.
On this episode of Well Said, Katz shares what drew him to research and teach hip-hop and discusses the culture of DJing.
The room is decorated with graffiti Katz commissioned from alumni artists and filled with turntables, recorders and CD players for his Art and Culture of the DJ and Rap Lab classes.
On this episode, Katz shares what drew him to research and teach this hip-hop and discusses the culture of DJing.
When Nikole Hannah-Jones ’03 (MA) was in high school, she became obsessed with one year: 1619 — the year African slaves were first transported to an English-speaking colony in the Americas.
As the 400th anniversary of that voyage was approaching, Hannah-Jones found herself at the New York Times Magazine, where she works as an investigative reporter. She pitched a project to re-examine the legacy of slavery in this country tied to that event.
“I feel like my whole career and, in some ways, my whole life was geared toward this moment,” said Hannah-Jones, who received her graduate degree from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
Her 1619 Project debuted in August with essays, poems, short fiction, a photo essay and an audio series, and they all work together to build a case that slavery is one of the foundational elements of the country’s development.
“We can’t understand why things are like they are in the country until we grapple with the fact that slavery is at our foundations,” she said.
Significant amounts of research, investigation and fact-checking went into this project, and Hannah-Jones learned those skills at Carolina.
“I think you see what I learned here in my work every day,” said Hannah-Jones, who was a Roy H. Park Fellow at the journalism school.
And she’ll be returning to Carolina on Nov. 16 to officially kick off a collaborative relationship between Carolina and the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a national organization she co-founded to train investigative journalists of color.
On this week’s episode, Hannah-Jones will explain how Carolina helped prepare her for that pivotal moment to lead the 1619 Project and why she’s returning to Carolina to train more journalists.
Do you remember what the internet was like back in the early ‘90s? It wasn't at all like what it is now.
There were about 1,000 websites then. Today, there are more than a billion, and that's growing every second.
“The coming of the World Wide Web set a different expectation about how the internet would be used,” said Paul Jones, a clinical professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science.
The internet was initially mostly used to share files, like email, audio or software. Now, we use it for nearly everything, including streaming media. Jones was instrumental in creating the internet as we know it today.
Jones led a group of students to work with emerging technology and archive the digital world in 1994. The archive was called SunSITE, but is now known as ibiblio.org. One of those students was working as a student DJ at WXYC — Carolina’s student radio station — and asked a groundbreaking question, “Why can’t we broadcast the radio everywhere?”
That question led Jones and Michael Shoffner, the student DJ, to organize the first radio broadcast streamed over the internet on Nov. 7, 1994.
On this week’s episode, Jones and Shoffner, who is also a faculty member at the School of Information and Library Science, explain the challenges they had to overcome to make history.
With more than two centuries of history, Carolina is bound to have ghost stories. The campus has legends filled with duels gone awry, top-secret student societies and friendly, pranking ghosts.
In this episode of Well Said, the UNC Visitors Center staff shares spooky stories from some of Carolina’s most famous ghosts and legends.
When you think of critical moments in American history, what do you think of? The Mayflower, the Declaration of Independence, Pearl Harbor?
This year is the 400th anniversary of another seminal moment in American history — when African slaves were first brought to an English-speaking colony in the Americas.
“This anniversary is an important moment to go back and interrogate the meanings in different ways, from different perspectives and with a new eye,” said Joseph Jordan, the director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History.
The Stone Center will investigate the meanings of this moment with its 1619 Collective Memory(ies) Project, which will feature a conversation among a panel of experts engaged with their audience.
“We want to have a multi-vocal conversation where different voices are able to talk about their interpretation of the events,” Jordan said. “It opens up so many possibilities for new discoveries.”
On this week’s episode, Jordan shares details behind the collective memories project, explains why it’s so important to remember this moment in American history and examines how this project fits in Carolina as a place for intellectual discoveries.
On this week’s podcast, Lynn Blanchard, the director of the Carolina Center for Public Service, explains why 90 faculty members and administrators are spending fall break on buses touring the state.
On Oct. 12, 1793, the cornerstone of Old East was laid, making Carolina the first public university in the nation. To mark that occasion and to celebrate Carolina’s future, we celebrate University Day on Oct. 12 every year.
“Our history as the nation’s first public university gives us a unique opportunity to celebrate what makes us uniquely Carolina,” said Interim Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz.
What makes Carolina unique is its commitment to serving the state of North Carolina, which is this year’s University Day theme.
“We’re celebrating the fact that we are passionately public, that we are the leading global public research university that has stayed true to its mission,” Guskiewicz said.
As a member of the faculty since 1995 and the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Exercise and Sport Science, Guskiewicz knows how fundamental serving the state is to Carolina’s identity. Before serving as interim chancellor, Guskiewicz led the Department of Exercise and Sport Science and was dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.
What keeps him committed to Carolina is the faculty, staff and students who are devoted to serving our state.
“I stepped foot on this campus 24 years ago and felt something special. It just felt right, and it’s felt right for 24 years,” he said. “It comes back to the people and the mission.”
On this week’s episode, Guskiewicz explains what he thinks differentiates Carolina from its peers.
Michael Kosorok, the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics and chair of the biostatistics department at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, believes that we are in the early stages of the precision medicine revolution
This budding revolution, which involves biology, genetics and other aspects of the lifestyle of individual people, could seriously improve clinician’s ability to provide personalized care. One way the medical model can do that is by designing more effective clinical trials, like one Kosorok is helping with now.
The Precision Interventions for Severe and/or Exacerbation-Prone Asthma Network by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute was designed with precision medicine as a goal.
“In other studies, it’s often been an afterthought,” said Kosorok, who used his expertise in precision medicine to help design the study.
The clinical trial, which was awarded to Carolina’s Collaborative Studies Coordinating Center in 2017, will enroll 800 adults and children with severe asthma in the coming months.
On this week’s episode, Kosorok explains why he’s excited about precision medicine and how it applies to the PrecISE study on severe asthma.
The term “fake news” skyrocketed in popularity in late 2016, and for many Americans, it’s most closely associated with politics. But according to Alice Marwick, assistant professor in the College of Arts & Science's communications department, the spread of false information isn’t limited to only political headlines.
“You can make a lot of money just by spreading these kinds of viral stories through Facebook,” explained Marwick.
High-traffic pages can sell advertisements to sponsors and reap the financial reward of a false headline.
Marwick explained that sometimes, though, the fake news, which she defines as "problematic information," is created because the writer really believes it to be true. “They have a very strong ideological belief, and they're trying to persuade people to their point of view,” she said.
Marwick and the team at Carolina’s Center for Information, Technology and Public Life are analyzing fake news and other major problems surrounding the dissemination of information.
On this week's episode of Well Said, Marwick’s discusses her research on fake news and shares her tips on how to determine if information is true.
Paul Cuadros has been coaching the soccer team at Jordan-Matthews High School in Siler City for so long that some former players have kids on the current team.
“I feel like I’m sort of their grandfather coach,” said Cuadros, who is also an associate professor in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
When Cuadros first arrived in Siler City in 1999 to report on immigration, there was no soccer program at the school. After coaching in the local soccer league for a couple of years, he launched the high school's program in 2002 and won a state championship in 2004.
Cuadros has used the lessons from creating that program and leading it to a championship in many ways. He wrote a book, “A Home on the Field,” which led to a documentary series produced by Jennifer Lopez.
He’s also been able to see the impact that visibility, leadership and development can have on a community — lessons he’s brought back to campus by creating various organizations for Latinx faculty, staff and students. Those endeavors include the Carolina Latinx Center, which will be opened this year and will hold its official ribbon-cutting on Oct. 4.
“I’m going to feel elated,” Cuadros said of the upcoming ceremony. “We need to have these sorts of institutions to establish ourselves, to have a presence and to develop leadership.”
On this week’s episode, Cuadros explains why he got involved in Siler City and how his involvement there has had an impact on campus.
In late September 2001, current Chapel Hill Fire Chief Matt Sullivan found himself sleeping on a cot in a fire station in Somers, New York — an hour north of Manhattan.
He was there with about 20 other police officers, firefighters and medics from around the country who were providing support to first responders at the World Trade Center.
To wind down every night after 14 hours walking around those city blocks and showing love, care and support to first responders, Sullivan wrote responses to hundreds of kids who wrote in letters to the responders.
“Everybody was hurting,” said Matt Sullivan, who graduated from Carolina in 1989 with a degree in political science and received a master’s degree in social work eight years later. “It wasn’t just the folks who lost somebody in law enforcement and firefighters in New York City. The whole country was hurting.”
Sullivan uses every anniversary of the attacks to ponder those who were and are hurting. Every Sept. 11, he begins this day by climbing the steps at Kenan Stadium. Climbing 2,076 steps — the same number that were in each of the towers — honors the efforts of first responders to fight fires at the World Trade Center and rescue people there.
On this week’s podcast episode, we remember the 9/11 attacks, and Sullivan reflects on his service in New York City. He shares the lessons he learned from the first responders at the World Trade Center and how those lessons apply to his service to the Town of Chapel Hill.
In a special episode of the University's official podcast, we celebrate a historic gift made by Carolina alumnus Walter Hussman Jr. and his family.
Today, the family announced it was donating $25 million dollars to the University's journalism and media school. To recognize the contribution, the school has been renamed the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
With this, the largest single gift ever made to the school, the Hussman School will become the fifth named school at Carolina, joining Kenan-Flagler Business School, Gillings School of Global Public Health, Eshelman School of Pharmacy and Adams School of Dentistry.
Ahead of the gift, Hussman and Susan King, dean of the Hussman School of Journalism and Media, discussed the future of the news industry for an episode of the school's Start Here/Never Stop podcast.
Finance professor Camelia Kuhnen from the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School studies neuroeconomics — a field that combines neuroscience and economics to understand how people make financial decisions.
“I realized that my two degrees – neuroscience and finance – were both about decision-making,” said Kuhnen.
Her research indicates that it’s not only our brains that play a part in why some choose to invest and others do not.
While it is easy to assume that some people may make more risky investments because they have a higher risk tolerance, Kuhnen discovered that there is another factor at play: the environment people grew up in.
“If you experienced adversity growing up, your brain literally reacts differently to information than if you didn’t experience it,” Kuhnen said.
Her research suggests that this causes people to view the world differently, possibly adopting a pessimistic lens around financial investment and ultimately choosing not to invest.
Hear more from Kuhnen about this research as well as the impact it could have on the economy on this week's episode.
As a Chancellor’s Fellow in 2015, Carolina alumna Emily Auerbach turned her examination of the campus’ agricultural potential into reality.
Since then, the Edible Campus initiative has grown to provide free and fresh produce through 11 satellite gardens. It also now provides educational outreach.
“The goal of the program,” said Laura Mindlin, who coordinates Edible Campus through the North Carolina Botanical Garden, “is to foster critical thought, communication and community through food systems.”
On this week’s episode, Mindlin shares how this program applies the growing trend of community gardens to a higher education setting.
A new academic year is upon us at Carolina and the community is welcoming a new group of Tar Heels to campus.
The first official week of the year is called the Week of Welcome, which helps make the transition to college easier for new students.
The week began Aug. 16 when students moved into their new homes in campus residence halls, and it will continue through Aug. 25 with events throughout campus.
On this week’s podcast, we highlight some of the biggest events from the Week of Welcome, including move-in day, New Student Convocation, Sunset Serenade and the first sip at the Old Well
Founded in 1795, the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies are the oldest organizations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
At 7:30 p.m. every Monday of the academic year, you’ll hear laughter along with serious debate from the Dialectic Chamber of New West Hall. This is the location of the weekly joint senate meetings between the once-feuding Dialectic and Philanthropic societies.
Once a requirement for all Carolina students, the societies have maintained a tradition of lively debate over current issues that span from politics to pop culture.
“We have people talking about political concepts,” said George Gildehaus, former president pro tempore. “What they're thinking about current events, and we even have people talking about bad Tinder dates and other things of a more relatable nature.”
On this episode of Carolina’s Well Said podcast, Gildehaus and former Joint Senate President Katrina Smith reflect on the evolution of these historical societies since their founding, and how current DiPhi senators maintain the tradition of debate today.
David Braudt, a recent graduate student affiliated with the Carolina Population Center, defended his dissertation in July, and he will start as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Before leaving Chapel Hill, though, he also published research about the social influences of early life mortality, or dying between the ages of 1 and 24.
Braudt’s research was the first such investigation in 22 years. It updates that study and offers a multidimensional approach to family resources. He examined four aspects of family resources, the mother’s education, the father’s education, household income and whether or not each parent was present in the household.
On this week’s episode, Braudt explains the personal connection that drove him to study early life mortality and how he hopes this research will save the lives of children across the country.
While sharks are often cast as the villain in movies, sharks on the coast of North Carolina aren’t ill-intended — they’re just trying to find food while avoiding risk.
With 50 species of sharks visiting the North Carolina coast throughout the year, they're typically foraging for meals in the same areas that tourists spend their summers in.
But Joel Fodrie, an associate professor and researcher at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences, explains that the likelihood of a shark encounter is incredibly low.
Swimmers can be within 10 or 20 yards of a shark more often than they think, and while movies will tell us that this can spell disaster, Fodrie disagrees.“Sharks are highly evolved,” he explained.
They can smell blood in the water much farther away than humans ever could, and also use electric fields and sound waves to sense injured animals closeby, but humans don’t put out the same cues as what sharks are foraging for, and these underwater visitors stay away from what they aren’t familiar with.
On this episode of Well Said, Fodrie discusses the ongoing shark survey performed by IMS researchers, as well as shares what any beachgoer should understand about sharing the water with sharks this summer.
When Katrina Morgan explains to people that she studies math as a doctoral candidate in the College of Arts & Sciences, they often respond unfavorably, saying they just “aren’t a math person.”
“You wouldn’t just say, "Oh, I’m not a history person,’” Morgan said.
She argues that mathematics is a field where people decide whether they “are” or “are not” fit for the field very early in their academic careers. This is especially true for girls because there is less representation of women in mathematics, Morgan explained.
In 2016, Morgan, along with fellow doctoral student Francesca Bernardi, set out to change that by founding Girls Talk Math, which invites high school girls from North Carolina to UNC-Chapel Hill to participate in a two-week day camp that explores mathematical concepts.
The campers are given problem sets to solve as groups, with topics that span from quantum mechanics to computer engineering. But the camp also teaches the importance of communication skills. Aside from working on math problems, participants can record podcasts, research female mathematicians and write blog posts.
On this week's episode of Well Said, Morgan discusses Girls Talk Math and how the program has been giving local high school girls a new outlook on mathematics.
Are there other Earth-like worlds in the universe at the right size and with the right atmosphere to support life?
Carolina astronomers are trying to figure that out right now.
One candidate for such a planet is Proxima b, an exoplanet that orbits the closest star to our sun. Carolina researchers recently conducted a study using a first-of-its-kind telescope that sheds new light and poses questions about whether or not that planet could support life.
Currently, Amy Glazier of the physics and astronomy department has been using the Evryscope to find the nearest “Tatooine”-type worlds to Earth. With the Evryscope imaging the entire sky every two minutes, she can measure the small variation in the time taken for one star of a binary system to eclipse the other due to the gravitational influence of circumbinary planets perturbing the stars’ motion.
In this week’s episode, assistant professor Nicholas Law from the physics and astronomy department discusses his Evryscope, how researchers use it to monitor 50 million stars and what they’ve found so far.
Before enrolling at Carolina as an incoming first-year or transfer student, Tar Heels first complete an orientation program that acclimates them to Chapel Hill.
Each summer, current Tar Heels help guide these new students as orientation leaders.
Rising junior Excellence Perry is one of those students leading others. The public relations and advertising and management and society double major is helping welcome new students in this role for the second time.
He says the key to being a good orientation leader is going beyond simple logistics.
“Obviously, I want them to know where their classes are going to be, but those things come after the feeling of, ‘I can be here. I can do great things here. I can succeed here. I belong here,’” Perry said.
On this week’s episode, Perry shares how he empowers these new students to come to Carolina ready to pursue their passions — through answering questions, listening to students and dancing on stage.
Many people find themselves driving away from their house in the morning and thinking, “Did I leave the garage door open?"
It may bother them for a few minutes — even enough to turn around and check. Then, they get on with their day.
But people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Carolina psychology and neuroscience professor Jon Abramowitz explains, get “stuck” checking if that the door is really closed over and over again.
Abramowitz has researched anxiety disorders for over two decades and works with patients who display several different types of OCD behavior, which can include obsessive or intrusive thoughts and habits like the ritual of washing their hands several times or trying to “undo” an odd number with an even one.
He recently released the second edition of his workbook, “Getting Over OCD: a 10-Step Workbook for Taking Back Your Life," which includes a new method of treatment.
On this episode of Well Said, Abramowitz describes what OCD is, what it's not and explains how exposure and response prevention combined with a new method of treatment called "Acceptance and Commitment Therapy" can be beneficial for some patients with OCD.
With more than 300,000 maternal deaths throughout the world each year, Carolina researchers are working to help pregnant women avoid becoming part of a startling statistic.
Dr. Jeffrey Stringer, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology in the UNC School of Medicine, is leading two studies that address the role of technology in predicting and revealing key risk factors associated with pregnancy, labor and delivery, with the goal of ultimately lowering the staggering rate of mortality during childbirth.
After receiving a $14 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in May, Stringer teamed up with experts from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and UNC School of Medicine to use common technology to reach their goal.
One study leverages small sensors, similar to a Fitbit, to monitor pregnant women and develop new algorithms that could predict the risk of complications during and after pregnancy.
“We can use the information from that [technology] to know which women are going to have a complication before they have it, and also make diagnoses earlier so that we can intervene earlier,” Stringer explained.
The second study considers another way to predict future complications for the mother or child using portable sonograms that plug directly into a smartphone. While this seems to provide significantly more access, Stringer explains there is one problem.
“Sonography is a very specific skill,” Stringer said. “Our sonographers here go to school for several years to get those skills. We’re trying to leapfrog that and teach computers to make these interpretations.”
The study would create data for artificial intelligence to read and analyze the sonograms.
On this episode of Well Said, Stringer explains the methods and reasons behind these two studies and how it can change childbirth worldwide.
The 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup is underway in France, and the United States is looking to defend its title from 2015. With three World Cup titles and four Olympic gold medals, the American team is certainly a dynasty in international women’s soccer.
The foundations for that dynasty were laid by Carolina’s legendary women’s soccer coach Anson Dorrance, who coached the national team from 1986-1994 and led the United States to victory in the first Women’s World Cup in 1991.
Throughout that time, he was still coaching the Tar Heels, too. His Carolina team is another women’s soccer dynasty. More than half of the national titles awarded in women’s soccer history have been won by the Tar Heels.
On this week’s episode, Dorrance discusses how his two dynasties come together at the World Cup — when former Carolina student-athletes represent their countries on the world’s biggest stage. He also shares what excites him about this upcoming Carolina season, when the Tar Heels will return to Chapel Hill after playing their home games off campus for two years while a new stadium was under construction.
On average, children are diagnosed with autism between 4 and 6 years old, but assistant professor of psychiatry Mark Shen says that’s too late.
“The earlier you detect it, the earlier you can intervene and start treatment,” said Shen, who is also a researcher at the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities.
He’s seen those implications firsthand having spent six years training in behavioral treatment for children and adults with autism before returning to graduate school. Now, he’s on a mission to identify the signs of autism in the first year of life.
On this week’s episode, Shen shares what clues he’s been able to find and explains why they’re so important.
It’s hot outside, and you want to cool off with a dip in the water. Before diving in, you know you need to protect your skin by putting on sunscreen. But you also need to protect your ears after you get out of the water.
As an assistant professor of otolaryngology in the UNC School of Medicine and an eye, ear, nose and throat doctor, Dr. Christine DeMason treats a lot of common issues, like ear infections, tonsil issues and thyroid nodules.
During the summer, though, she sees a spike in cases of a specific type of ear infection called swimmer’s ear.
On this week’s episode, DeMason will explain what swimmer’s ear is, who is most at risk and some things you can do to protect yourself from this painful ear infection.
With video streaming services such as Netflix becoming more and more popular, associate professors of economics Brian McManus and Jon Williams are researching the economic implications of these services and the impacts of net neutrality laws on consumers’ wallets.
The increase in Americans’ reliance on video streaming services has, according to McManus and Williams, also forced internet service providers to provide faster speeds, leaving cord-cutting consumers with internet and streaming services costs equaling their original cable bill.
Despite the popularity of video streaming services in the United States, McManus and Williams explained that there is little research on the economic impact of this new trend.
On this episode of Well Said, McManus and Williams describe their preliminary research and explain other interesting hypotheses they plan to investigate.
Summer School is already underway in Chapel Hill, but before we move on to the summer, we want to revisit some stories from the previous semester.
In this episode, Bill Ferris, the Joel R. Williamson eminent professor emeritus of history, tells us what it’s like to win a Grammy and Sarah Birken, an assistant professor in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, shares how difficult it is to start a new podcast.
Chapel Hill was bustling with graduates and their supporters over the weekend as Carolina celebrated more than 6,000 students who are prepared to take on the biggest problems around the world.
With words of advice from Interim Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz and alumni Ramesh Raskar and Jonathan Reckford, the graduates turned their tassels and became Carolina alumni at Doctoral Hooding and Spring Commencement.
This episode of Well Said captures the excitement of Commencement weekend and the thoughtful advice graduates received before heading out on their next adventures.
As the CEO of Habitat for Humanity International, Carolina alumnus Jonathan Reckford knows a thing or two about the value of home.
“When you think about the idea of home, it’s really a foundation and a launching pad for the kind of lives we want everyone to have the opportunity to have," said Reckford, who graduated from Carolina in 1984 with a degree in political science.
The Chapel Hill native will return home on Sunday to deliver Carolina’s Commencement address, in which he will challenge the Class of 2019 to aspire toward bigger ambitions.
“I think sometimes we settle to lightly for either material things or for short-term happiness against that deep reward of finding real joy that comes from deep relationships and losing yourself in a purpose bigger than yourself,” he said.
On this week’s episode, Reckford will share the experiences he had at Carolina that served as a launching pad for his career of serving others.
Flavio Frohlich has always been interested in the human brain.
He became even more interested in its inner-workings after learning how brain cells produce a small amount of electricity, which results in “rhythms” in the brain.
Even more interesting was his discovery that rhythms would respond to electric stimulation.
When he arrived at Carolina in 2011, he recruited a team of students and academic colleagues to investigate the possibility that small electric charges could alter the brain rhythm of patients with schizophrenia.
“We have a good scientific understanding of what to give to whom in terms of strength of the stimulation or duration of the stimulation,” said Frohlich, an associate professor. “There’s all these different things that you can choose when you do brain stimulation, which you can't really with medication. But with stimulation, millisecond-to-millisecond you can define and individualize how you want to stimulate.”
Now, the team is applying those findings to depression.
On this week's episode of Well Said, Frohlich discusses his team's research and how low-level electric stimulation on the brain can be used to treat chronic pain and mental illnesses.
On a previous episode, global studies associate professor Jonathan Weiler and political science professor Marc Hetherington discussed the political divide in the United States. This week, the conversation continues on how our choices — such as the coffee brand we drink or the car we drive — can cause others to assume our political preferences.
“These non-political tastes and preferences are just such clear political signals nowadays,” Weiler said. “You tell me what kind of food or beer you like, and I download a whole bunch of associations about you and how you see the world, and who you probably voted for."
Weiler and Hetherington, co-authors of Prius or Pickup?: How the answers to four simple questions explain America’s great divide, believe that the root of the acrimonious divide in the United States spawns from the growing affinity Americans have for their own political party, and in turn, the adversarial feelings developed for those across the aisle.
“Our identities are so driven by how negatively we feel about our opponents,” Hetherington said. “One of the odd things that's happened in this period of polarization is that we don't love our own side any more than we used to, but what we really have grown to do is hate the other side.”
On this week's episode, Weiler and Hetherington discuss their research and how stereotypes are adding to the challenges of the political divide.
Like many kids, Matt Cannon grew up playing video games. For him, it was a hobby that eventually grew to something much more substantial.
Cannon spent years playing and coaching video games professionally, even while he was a student at Carolina.
He made his mark in Overwatch, a first-person shooter game with several modes of competitive play, but retired as a player in 2016. Cannon still maintains a top-500 rank in North America, and he retired as a coach in 2018 with six tournament championships.
Now, he's helping Carolina enter the esports world.
On this episode of Well Said, this Tar Heel explains how Carolina keeps calling him home and how he hopes to make collegiate esports more mainstream.
When Kate Sheppard graduated from college in 2006, the path for young journalists was pretty straightforward. You started at a small, local paper, then moved onto a bigger one and then a regional newspaper.
Maybe then you’d make it to a big market like Washington, D.C.
But Sheppard, an enterprise editor at the HuffPost, said that path is fundamentally broken now because the current business model in journalism isn't working.
As a teaching associate professor at the UNC School of Media and Journalism, she works with students to reshape the future of journalism in her class called “Creating Tomorrow’s News Products.”
On this week’s episode, Sheppard explains how she encourages her students to explore problems and develop ideas — while teaching them valuable lessons they’ll need throughout their journalism careers.
UNC School of Government professor Anita Brown-Graham fell in love with North Carolina when she first attended UNC-Chapel Hill as a law student.
Now, she’s giving back to the state through ncIMPACT.
Brown-Graham’s goal in launching ncIMPACT in 2017 was to find solutions to significant issues like human trafficking and the state's opioid crisis by bringing resources to communities across North Carolina and embracing the idea of teamwork to find solutions for these statewide problems.
The initiative aims to tackle all sides of a problem by recruiting experts from Carolina’s School of Medicine, Eshelman School of Pharmacy, School of Social Work, Gillings School of Global Public Health and School of Law.
“There's something very magical that happens in the room,” Brown-Graham said. “I'm just always reminded when I'm in the room with them about not just the enormity of what we've taken on, but about the hardiness of the human spirit.”
As the scope of work grew, ncIMPACT also grew into a different resource for North Carolina. First airing in February, ncIMPACT developed television segments highlighting these issues in the state, with Brown-Graham serving as the host for the 20-minute segment, which airs every Thursday at 8 p.m. on UNC-TV.
When Amy Locklear Hertel enrolled at Carolina in 1993, she wanted to join the Greek community, but as a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, she couldn’t find an organization that fit her needs culturally.
"We needed something uniquely matriarchal that represented our nature of our tribes," said Hertel, who now serves as the chief of staff to Interim Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz.
She and three other students decided to create their own sorority to express themselves and to help retain native women at Carolina.
Alpha Pi Omega was established in 1994 as the first historically American Indian sorority in the country. In 1995, the organization inducted its first pledge class, the 15 Warrior Women. Since the induction of that first class, chapters have been established at North Carolina State University, UNC-Pembroke, Oklahoma State University, Dartmouth College and others.
On this week’s episode, Hertel and other founding members — called The Four Winds — tell us what it means to them to have a lasting legacy of leadership and sisterhood.
In the workplace, the terms “status” and “power” are often used interchangeably, but they're not really true synonyms.
“Status and power are both associated with hierarchy in groups and organizations,” said Alison Fragale, associate professor at UNC Kenan-Flagler School of Business, “but they have different definitions. They are theoretically and conceptually different.”
According to Fragale, power is measured by the number of resources one controls — like the office budget. Status, on the other hand, is a measurement of how well-liked someone is. These two factors, when considered together, consequently cause people to stereotype their co-workers.
These stereotypes are hard enough for many to manage when a person holds a leadership role, but it's an especially difficult balance for women, Fragale said.
“Women are supposed to show up as high on the warm-cold dimension,” she explained, “and leaders are supposed to show up as high on the dominant dimension. That doesn't mean they can't be warm as well, but what ends up happening is if those stereotypes conflict. What I expect of a good leader is to be confident, assertive, ambitious and decisive. And what I expect of a good woman is to be other-oriented, nurturing, caring and kind.”
And when those stereotypes clash, it can create problems.
In this episode of Well Said, Fragale of UNC Kenan-Flagler School of Business discusses stereotype conflict often found in the workplaces of female leaders, and how it can be managed.
Sarah Birken, an assistant professor in the Gillings School of Global Public Health, focuses her research on applying lessons learned from academic studies to clinical practice, especially in cancer care. When she wants to share something with the world, her first instinct is to write an academic paper.
But an academic paper didn’t seem like the most effective way to share her experiences as a woman in academia. She pitched the idea of starting a podcast to tell her story and to help other women share theirs.
When the idea was approved, Birken had a realization.
“I just volunteered to do something that I have no idea how to do,” she said.
With the help of Whitney Robinson and other women across campus, Birken launched AcaDames earlier this year, a podcast which discusses the experiences of women in academia.
On this week’s episode of Well Said, Birken shares with us how this idea developed and explains the challenges she and her team overcame in taking AcaDames from an idea to iTunes.
In the early days of the University of North Carolina, classrooms were filled with only male students. But with trailblazers like Sallie Walker Stockard, Kitty Carmichael and Inez Stacy, women at Carolina progressed to a central role in campus life.
"This history of women at Carolina is a movement from being concerned with how we would be talked about on campus to thinking about how we want to talk about ourselves," said Sarah George-Waterfield, a graduate student at Carolina who has shared the story of women’s history at Carolina with many campus visitors.
On this week’s episode, she tells the stories of several pioneers, including the first group of female students who enrolled at Carolina in 1897.
Growing up in a segregated Georgia in the 1940s, Howard Lee didn't know where his life would lead, but eventually, it led him to earn a master’s degree from the UNC School of Social Work in 1966.
“The students in the School of Social Work embraced us, and of course we just simply didn't feel any different from any other student,” Lee said. “That started me on a road of feeling recertified as a person.”
But outside the classroom, Lee and his family continued to feel the racial tensions they experienced in Georgia. It was this tension that pushed him to run for mayor of the town in 1969.
“I decided to run for mayor not so much to win — because I didn’t think a black person would be elected mayor in Chapel Hill — but to make a point to push certain issues that needed to be dealt with,” Lee said.
Lee’s victory helped to pave the way for future black leaders.
On this episode of Well Said, Lee details living life in the segregated South and his path to the mayor's office.
As a 10-year-old in Chicago, Priscilla Layne was obsessed with Indiana Jones.
She knew the movies forward and backward — except for a few parts in “The Raiders of the Lost Arc” and “The Last Crusade" when characters speak German without accompanying subtitles. So Layne decided she would learn German to understand what they were saying.
“It became a hobby of mine,” she said. “Everyone knew my thing was German.”
On this week’s episode, Layne explains how a simple hobby developed into a career of professing her love for German.
Each year, about 610,000 people die from heart disease in the United States.
But thanks to UNC School of Medicine professor Sam Cykert and Heart Health Now, practices are getting better access to patients’ health data and helping people build healthier habits with dedicated coaches.
In 2015, Cykert — in partnership with Healthcare Research and Quality, Community Care of North Carolina and North Carolina Area Health Education Centers — developed Heart Health Now, a project working toward combating cardiovascular disease in North Carolina.
On this episode of Well Said, Cykert explains the Heart Health Now project, its impact on the state and where it’s going next.
In 2009, political science professor Jonathan Weiler and global studies associate professor Marc Hetherington released their research on the relationship between four questions and the political divide.
Those relationships continue to have implications in the current political climate today.
Weiler and Hetherington became interested in the acrimonious nature of politics as they watched the unfolding of the 2000 presidential election. They agreed that the political divide was intensifying, and as they investigated further, they discovered what might be a correlation between our intrinsic values and our passion for politics.
“At some point, we stumbled on these four parenting questions,” Weiler said. “Those four parenting questions don’t really tell you anything about how people feel about taxes, but they tell you a lot about how people feel about race, gay rights, gender, family structure [or] immigration.”
On this episode of Well Said, Weiler and Hetherington discuss the findings from their initial study, as well as their new book, "Prius or Pickup?"
Ever since he was a young boy on a farm in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Bill Ferris was drawn to music. When he was 12 years old, he started to document the music he loved after he received a camera for Christmas.
Documenting songs, storytellers and other artists all around him soon quickly become a new hobby.
And that hobby eventually became a profession that ultimately led Ferris to Chapel Hill, where he is the Joel R. Williamson eminent professor emeritus of history at Carolina.
That profession also led to “Voices of Mississippi,” a compilation of songs, stories and films that Ferris has recorded over the years. The box set was nominated for two Grammy Awards this year for best historical album and best album notes. The Grammy Awards ceremony takes place Feb. 10.
On this week’s episode, Ferris discusses his life’s work as a folklorist and how these Grammy nominations make good on promises he gave to his subjects many years ago.
As a husband, father, faculty member and full-time student, Kessonga Giscombé is no stranger to stress, but he doesn’t let stress affect him by staying in the moment.
Specifically, he uses mindfulness, which he defines as paying attention to the present moment on purpose without judgment.
Giscombé, a faculty member in the UNC School of Medicine’s Program on Integrative Medicine, teaches mindfulness courses at Carolina designed to introduce people to the practice of mindfulness and to reinvigorate the practice of others. These courses are open to the public, and his next course for beginners starts Jan. 29.
On this week’s episode, we discuss mindfulness — what it is and what it isn’t — and the benefits that can come from its practice.
As the son of Kenny Moore, founder of Hwy 55 Burgers and Fries, Andy Moore helped the national burger chain throughout his childhood and formative years. He had several responsibilities, including working behind the counter and at the grill.
After graduating from Duke University, however, Andy Moore applied for jobs outside of the restaurant industry, ultimately relocating from North Carolina to New York City.
“You know, after a couple of years I kind of — not kind of I really did — miss the job,” Andy Moore explained. “I missed the people I had worked with, and I felt like I wanted to do something meaningful with my family's business. So I made a pretty tough decision to come back, but I don't regret it.”
Since returning to the restaurant chain in 2014, he has transitioned from his role as director of communications to area developer, focusing on expansion efforts in Texas, while also enrolled in the MBA@UNC program at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.
Not only is Andy Moore learning practical skills he can immediately implement at Hwy 55, but he also works with the school’s Family Enterprise Center, launched with the mission of preparing next-generation family business leaders through conferences, workshops and personalized resources.
On this episode of Well Said, he tells the story of Hwy 55, discusses the unique nature of a family business and explains his experience as an online MBA student at Carolina.
As part of her role in UNC Athletics, Rachel Manor works with student-athletes on a weight-neutral approach to food consumption, which she likes to call “fueling.”
She teaches students not about diets, but about intuitive eating — the intentional body check-ins before eating a meal.
“I tend to steer people away from diets,” Manor explained. “Research has shown that not only do diets not work, but restrictive eating is actually harmful in the college population for individuals of all sizes.”
On this episode of Well Said, Manor discusses the benefits of intuitive eating and some strategies anyone can use to be more mindful to eat healthier and the right amount, leading to weight loss and a healthier mindset.
The new year will feature new stories about Carolina’s faculty, staff and students and their impact on the state, the nation and the world.
Before telling those new stories, this week’s episode will update three stories from this past fall semester.
For Jack Morton, Carolina basketball is more than just sports fandom.
It's a lifeline.
On this week’s episode, we continue Morton's story of his journey that led him to follow his grandfather’s footsteps into photography and how the basketball team helped him through one of the most challenging times in his life. It’s a tale of two families, a family of photographers and the Carolina basketball family.
Jack Morton considers himself a “basketball junkie."
It’s good for the 2000 Carolina graduate, then, that he spends so much time on Carolina’s baseline. The freelance photographer said he wouldn’t trade his seat on the floor for any other spot.
“I’m so spoiled,” said Morton, who’s in his 13th year of photographing Carolina basketball games. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch a game from the stands again because the perspective is so unique.”
There’s a good chance that Morton won’t have to watch the game from the stands ever again. His grandfather Hugh Morton was a famous North Carolina photographer and nature conservationist, and he photographed Carolina basketball for more than 60 years.
Jack Morton hopes to continue that legacy.
On this week’s episode, Jack Morton shares the journey that led him to follow his grandfather’s footsteps into photography. It’s a tale of two families, a family of photographers and the Carolina basketball family.
As graduating senior Carlos Perez-Heydrich was preparing for Winter Commencement, he tried to prevent the magnitude of the celebration from overwhelming him.
It worked until he saw one of his graduation photos.
“It kind of hit me in that moment,” said Perez-Heydrich, a biology major from Miami who is minoring in chemistry and neuroscience. “I was like, ‘Oh, gosh. I’m graduating.’ It hit me like a waterfall.”
Perez-Heydrich will graduate from Carolina at Winter Commencement, which takes place on Dec. 16 in the Dean E. Smith Center.
On this episode, Perez-Heydrich shares how he was able to find a home away from home in Chapel Hill with the Chancellor’s Science Scholars and what he’s learned about himself during his time at Carolina..
As Franklin D. Roosevelt said in an address to millions of Americans decades ago, Dec. 7 1941 is a date that lives in infamy.
In remembrance of the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, UNC-Chapel Hill history professor Joe Glatthaar explains the context surrounding the events leading up to – and following – the attack.
When Dr. Lisa Hightow-Weidman was in medical school, she saw that people with HIV were affected not just by the disease itself but also by the stigma of having something that they might not have told their friends or families about.
As the principal investigator of the UNC Behavior and Technology Lab and the UNC/Emory Center for Innovative Technology, Hightow-Weidman tries to tackle that stigma through mobile technology.
“The ability to empower patients and participants to have control over their health and their sexual health is a really important thing,” said Hightow-Weidman, an associate professor in the UNC School of Medicine.
December 1 is World AIDS Day. Every year since 1998, the first day in December has been dedicated to raising awareness about the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV. On this week’s episode of the podcast, Hightow-Weidman explains why her innovative work is so important for helping health care workers reach the people who need HIV and AIDS information the most.
It’s tradition for many families to go around the table at Thanksgiving and say all the things they’re thankful for. This practice of gratitude, according to associate professor of social psychology Sara Algoe, is actually beneficial to our health and relationships.
In this episode of Well Said, Algoe describes the positive effects of gratitude on our lives, including improvements in physical health. Listen in for helpful tips on how to practice gratitude daily.
For senior Covenant Scholar Gabrielle James, coming to Carolina required a leap of faith. She hadn’t even stepped foot on the campus before enrolling.
But she was familiar with one thing — the Carolina Indian Circle. It’s a group created about 40 years ago by American Indian students with the goal of building a support network for members from a wide variety of tribes and showcase their culture with the rest of campus. Members of the club came to visit her high school in Robeson County when Gabrielle was a senior. She joined when she first got to campus and has been serving the club ever since.
In this week’s episode, Gabrielle discusses her experience with the Carolina Indian Circle, why it’s important to celebrate this American Indian Heritage Month at Carolina and what she plans to do after she graduates.
She also reflects back on the leap of faith that brought her to Carolina years ago.
“I have absolutely loved my four years here,” said Gabrielle, a political science and American Indian indigenous studies double major who’s minoring in social and economic justice. “It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.”
For Steve Davis, archaeology is everywhere.
“I mean, it’s literally right underneath your feet if you know what to work for,” said Davis.
As the associate director of Carolina’s Research Laboratories of Archaeology, Davis leads excavations on campus. Sometimes, he knows what he’s looking for; other times, people find something they need him to inspect.
That’s what happened in August when construction was happening at the Carolina Inn.
On this week’s episode of Well Said, Davis discusses that discovery at the Carolina Inn and how he uses 3D technology to preserve moments in time.
In this special episode of Well Said, the UNC Visitors’ Center shares spooky stories from some of Carolina and Chapel Hill’s most famous legends and haunts. From friendly campus ghosts to top-secret student societies, the Visitors’ Center has the inside scoop. Visit them online or in person to learn more about Carolina’s history, traditions, legends and landmarks.
Hanger isn't a word your mom made up, after all.
It's actually defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “feeling irritable or bad tempered when you’re hungry,” and has become the research focus of doctoral student Jenn MacCormack, who is studying how physical states — like hunger — impact human emotions — like anger.
Her research shows that hanger is not automatic whenever you need a snack. The environment you’re in and whether or not you’re aware of your hunger play a role in going from hungry to hangry.
On this week’s episode of Well Said, MacCormack and her advisor, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience Kristen Lindquist, take us through some research they’ve conducted on hanger.
To help celebrate University Day, Tar Heel alumni participated in community service projects across North Carolina, the country and the world for the annual Tar Heel Service Day.
In this episode of Well Said, alumna and UNC General Alumni Association Coordinator of Outreach Jennifer Chandler explains the variety of projects that took place this year and Charlotte Carolina Club board member Suzanne Cowden gives us insight on the club’s annual project.
On this week's podcast, Vice Chancellor for Workforce Strategy, Equity and Engagement Felicia A. Washington discusses University Day and shares her vision for Carolina's future.
Triffin Morris has more than 20 years of experience costuming Broadway stars in some of the most well-known plays and musicals, including Wicked, Shrek, and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
Now she’s bringing her expertise to Carolina as a professor in the College of Arts & Sciences and as head of costume production at PlayMaker’s Repertory Company. An expert in quick-change and other trick costumes, she teaches Carolina students how to make costume-change magic on stage.
In this episode of Well Said, Triffin lets us in on a few of the costuming tricks she uses every day and how she's sharing her talents with students.
The gentle stream that flows beside McIver Residence Hall hasn’t always been part of the campus landscape. It just looks as though it has.
A pipe beneath the street combined with the natural path of rainwater and nearby springs presented an opportunity for staff in UNC Finance and Operations to collaborate on a unique solution for the perpetually wet field near McIver.
Instead of merely repairing and reburying the entire pipe, Sally Hoyt, a stormwater engineer in Energy Services, and landscape architect Jill Coleman worked with a team of consultants and Carolina staff to create an aboveground stream with a filtration process that naturally filters pollutants and contaminants out of runoff water.
On this episode, Hoyt explains the importance of the Battle Grove Restoration project and how it moves the University toward its Three Zeros goal.
Hans Paerl has lived in North Carolina since 1978, and in those 40 years, he hasn’t seen a storm quite like Hurricane Florence, which made landfall near Wilmington early in the morning on Sept. 14.
In this week’s episode, Paerl — the Kenan Professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences — updates us from the North Carolina coast on the damage caused by Florence, explains what made this storm so unique and addresses the lingering long-term danger left behind by storms like Florence: pollutants in the watershed that could poison people and kill fish.
To better understand the concerns about how this storm will affect water quality for weeks and months to come, we will also revisit our conversation with Paerl from 2017.
Rameses, a 7-year-old horned Dorset ram who roams the sidelines of Kenan Stadium during football games, has become one of Carolina's most famous and beloved Tar Heels.
Away from the football field and the public light, the same family has been caring for UNC-Chapel Hill's mascots since the first Rameses walked campus in 1924.
In this episode, three members of that family share their story and explain why they love caring for everyone’s favorite Tar Heel.
Two Carolina journalism professors have set out to change the narrative around one of the most pressing global issues of our time: sex trafficking.
In today’s episode, we talk with Anne Johnston and Barbara Friedman about their organization, The Irina Project, and how they’re empowering journalists to report on human trafficking in a responsible and ethical way.
This episode features music by So Far As I Know (“The Conqueror”), Lee Rosevere (“Keeping Old Letters”) and Scott Holmes (“Epic Cinematic.”)
Dr. Jonathan Parr of the UNC School of Medicine has spent his career studying diseases that disproportionately impact lower-income communities throughout the world.
His interest in conditions like malaria and hepatitis took Parr to central Africa to assist in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's first country-wide health survey and study the spread of hepatitis C. After discovering approximately 1 percent of patients were infected with the virus, the team was asked to conduct a similar survey on hepatitis B.
In this episode of Well Said, Parr describes his experience in the Congo and the expected impact this research will have on the country.
Legend has it that a sip from the Old Well on the first day of classes brings students good luck — even a perfect GPA. Thousands of Carolina students line up at the well every year to test the theory for themselves.
But the legend’s origin has been a bit of a mystery.
To find out when the tradition started, University archivist Nicholas Graham turned to a trusted tool: Facebook. He reached out to UNC-Chapel Hill alumni who graduated in the '70s, '80s and '90s to learn the whole story.
When incoming first-year student Alex Longo begins taking classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this fall, he'll have something more on his mind than finding his classrooms.
With a little more than two months until NASA announces the landing site of the Mars 2020 Rover, Longo will be anxiously waiting to see if his proposed site will be selected. The Gusev Crater site that he nominated as a 13-year-old is now among the final three locations in consideration.
In this week's episode, we talk with Longo about the Mars 2020 Rover and the start of his Carolina journey, which he hopes will lead him to a walk on Mars.
“I want to keep all my options open, because as I work with NASA I’ve learned you never really know what door is going to open to you," said Longo, who plans to study physics and astronomy. "It may be something you thought was absolutely impossible. The future isn’t something to fear. It’s something to look forward to.”
This episode of Well Said includes music by Scott Holmes (“Corporate Uplifting”) and The Freeharmonic Orchestra (“Mission to the Centre”).
John Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Mitch Prinstein always found himself interested how popularity influence the way we see the world and have relationships with those around us.
On this episode of Well Said, Prinstein discusses his research and explains the different forms of popularity and why it doesn’t always pay to be the most popular. Prinstein’s book, “Popular: Finding Happiness and Success in a World that Cares Too Much About the Wrong Kinds of Relationships” dives deeper into his research and was selected as the 2018 Summer Reading Program book for incoming first-year and transfer students.
Professor Gary Bishop was doing virtual reality before it was cool. Now he uses his computer science background to create books for children with visual impairments and developmental disabilities.
Bishop created Tar Heel Reader, a user-generated collection of books for beginning readers with various needs created with enabling technology.
In this episode of Well Said, we learn about what Bishop calls "computer science magic," and about how he found that magic here in Chapel Hill.
Carolina’s Spring Commencement will take place on May 13 in Kenan Stadium with more than 6,000 students graduating with bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral or professional degrees.
Among those graduates will be Damian Walker, a senior who majored in political science and minored in the Shuford Program in Entrepreneurship. The first-generation student and Carolina Covenant Scholar spent his four years at UNC-Chapel Hill exploring the possibilities of entrepreneurship.
In this week’s episode, we talk with Walker about graduation, his plans after college and what Carolina means to him.
Are there other Earth-like worlds in the universe at the right size and with the right atmosphere to support life? That’s what astronomers are trying to figure out right now.
One candidate for such a planet is Proxima b, an exoplanet that orbits the closest star to our sun. Carolina researchers recently conducted a study using a first-of-its-kind telescope that sheds new light and poses new questions about whether or not that planet could actually support life.
In this week’s episode, assistant professor Nicholas Law from the physics and astronomy department discusses the Evryscope, how he and his team use it to monitor 50 million stars and what they’ve found so far.
Of the 3.5 million Americans living with autism, no two cases are exactly the same. And as they navigate life in school and the workplace in their own ways, their support services should reflect their particular needs.
Today, Carolina researchers are working to create more comprehensive and personalized supports that will help people with autism spectrum disorder throughout their entire life course.
In this week's podcast, we talk with Laura Klinger, an associate professor of psychiatry and the executive director of the UNC TEACCH Autism program, about Carolina’s world-leading autism research, the various intervention programs developed by TEACCH and new intervention techniques being implemented for people from 9 months old to 70 years old.
A century ago, the 1918 influenza outbreak wreaked havoc in Chapel Hill, across North Carolina and around the world.
There were as many as 50 million deaths — about 3 percent of the world’s population at that time.
In this week’s episode, UNC School of Medicine professor Ralph Baric discusses the impact of 1918 flu and the developments we’ve seen in 100 years to respond to the next outbreak. He also explains why this has been a particularly bad flu season.
To mark the 100th anniversary of the 1918 flu – and to assess the threat that an outbreak of this scale poses today – the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and its partners will host an interdisciplinary symposium from April 4-6 titled “Going Viral: Impact and Implications of the 1918 Influenza Flu Pandemic.”
In 1985, Carolina elected its first woman student body president, Patricia Wallace.
It was a campaign and election that paved the way for future student leaders at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
But with unexpected media attention and naysayers, it wasn’t an easy path for Wallace.
In this week’s episode, we talk to Wallace about her legacy as the University’s first woman student body president, leadership styles and those who have inspired her.
After a decorated career in Hollywood writing for “Carol & Company,” “JAG,” and “Bones,” Dana Coen came to Chapel Hill to teach the next generation of writers for television, film, stage and web.
As the director of the Writing for the Screen and Stage minor in the communication department, Coen inspires students to find their voices and compels them to say something meaningful in everything they write. One way he does that is a production called, “Long Story Shorts,” an annual festival of short plays written by students in the program.
In this week’s episode, we talk about how the writing for the screen and stage minor prepares Tar Heels for a career in Hollywood and briefly preview the upcoming Oscars with Coen, the director of the program.
Although he’s researched sports marketing and the Olympics in particular for years, Carolina assistant professor of sport administration Jonathan Jensen is attending the Winter Olympics for the first time ever this month to do more than just cheer on Team USA.
With the help of the Jim and Judy Cox Asia Initiative Faculty Research Travel Award from the Carolina Asia Center, which funds trips to Asia for faculty to learn more about Asian culture and to integrate what they learn into their teachings, Jensen will be conducting research on how brands leverage their sponsorships at the Olympics.
In this week’s episode, we talk with Jensen about his trip to South Korea and how brands tap into exclusive Olympic sponsorships.
Despite being a Carolina faculty member for the past five years, actually being in Chapel Hill has become a rarity for Satish Gopal.
Normally he's halfway across the world treating cancer patients in Malawi, where he is the only board-certified medical oncologist in the country of 18 million people.
As the cancer program director for UNC Project-Malawi, Gopal is working to build the care infrastructure that will both help Malawi address its rising cancer burden and serve as a model for effective cancer care in low-resource settings across the globe.
This weekend, however, Gopal will be returning to Carolina to deliver the commencement address at the Winter Commencement on Dec. 17 at 2 p.m. in the Dean E. Smith Center.
In this week's episode, we talk about UNC-Project Mawali and the upcoming Winter Commencement with Gopal, UNC Project-Malawi’s cancer program director.
The first five years of a child's life is a crucial period where they learn the skills they'll need to navigate life.
And for most, that education no longer happens primarily at home — it comes from childcare and preschool teachers.
In this week's episode, we're talking about the importance of high-quality early childhood education and research done at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute with Margaret Burchinal, a research scientist at the institute and a research professor in developmental psychology.
With 1.1 million Americans already living with HIV and another 40,000 new cases every year, Carolina researchers have been working to hone treatments and find a cure for the virus for decades.
Through partnerships with pharmaceutical and collaborations with units across campus, the University's HIV researchers are getting closer to discovering a cure.
In this week's episode, we're talking about Carolina HIV research and the next step toward a cure with Nancie Archin, an assistant professor of medicine at the UNC School of Medicine.
For the past decade, artists and performers from across the country have been coming to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to participate in the Process Series and work on the final pieces of their performances.
As Carolina’s Process Series celebrates its 10th anniversary, we talk about the series and how it’s been helping artists finish their work with Joseph Megel, an artist-in-residence in the College of Arts and Sciences’ communication department and the artistic director of the Process Series.
Genetic testing has changed the way doctors can treat their patients.
By sequencing sections of a person's DNA, medical professionals can determine if a person is at a higher risk of getting a specific disease or disorder.
But is our health care system — and the patients — ready to handle this new generation of medical care?
In this week's episode, we talk about predictive genetic testing and how it's impacting doctors and paitents with James Evans, the Bryson Distinguished Professor of Genetics and Medicine at the UNC School of Medicine, and the editor-in-chief of Genetics in Medicine.
Throughout his three-decade career as a professional artist, Patrick Dougherty has designed and constructed more than 300 stickwork sculptures across the world.
Now, the world-renowned Carolina alumnus has brought his talents back to Chapel Hill with his recently finished "Step Right Up" sculpture, which will be on display outside the Ackland Art Museum for the next year.
In this week's episode, we talk with Doughtery about his artistic process and his most recent sculpture on Carolina's campus.
As hospitals in rural communities around the country continue to close due to financial problems, thousands of people are being left without the medical care they need.
With both medical and economic consequences surrounding the closures, the UNC Sheps Center for Health Services Research's North Carolina Rural Health Research Center is working to keep rural hospitals open and help those rural communities thrive.
In this week's episode, we talk about rural health care and how hospital closures are impacting the communities with Mark Holmes and George Pink, the director and deputy director of the North Carolina Rural Health Research Center.
This week, Carolina will celebrate its 224th birthday at University Day.
In this week's episode, we look back on the founding of the University with Jim Leloudis, the Peter T. Grauer associate dean for Honors Carolina, a professor of history and the co-chair of the Chancellor's History Task Force.
Join Carolina in celebrating University Day on Oct. 12 at 11 a.m. in Memorial Hall. Governor Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s 75th Governor, will deliver the keynote address.
Consumers and investors aren't always totally rational when it comes to making financial decisions.
When emotion seeps into the equation, all bets are off.
To find out why our emotions tend to lead us away from making more calculated decisions, Camelia Kuhnen is combining neuroscience, psychology and economics to better understand how people use their brain to make financial decisions.
In this week's episode, we talk about neuroeconomics with Kuhnen, an associate professor of finance at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.
There are a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings about learning filling classrooms today.
Is it better to cram a topic into one class period or space out the learning process over several days? Should teachers be focusing on student's learning styles?
In this week's episode, we talk about some keys to better learning with Brian Cartiff, a doctoral student in the learning sciences and psychological studies program at UNC School of Education.
Being global ready and having the ability to work with other cultures and countries has become a crucial skill in an increasingly globalized society.
For the past two decades, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's World View has been connecting the University's professors, experts and resources with educators throughout the state to help them prepare their students to be global ready.
In this week's episode, we about World View and how it's helping teachers throughout the state with program director Charlé Lamonica.
Whenever a hurricane hits, the big story is how the storm has impacted people and towns with flooding and storm surges.
But the storms also leave behind a quieter and long-term danger: pollutants in the watershed that could poison people and kill fish.
In this week's episode, we talk about how hurricanes impact water quality with Hans Paerl, Kenan Professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences.
Each year, millions of people die from exposure to air pollution. And if unaddressed, climate change could bring those numbers up even higher by the end of the century.
Carolina researcher Jason West predicts that the climate change's effect on air pollution could actually cause 260,000 more premature deaths in 2100.
In this week's episode, we talk about climate change and air quality with West, an associate professor of environmental sciences and engineering in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.
As the new school year gets underway, two Carolina students are prepping for much more than just new classes.
Elizabeth Adkins and Madelyn Percy are hard at work establishing their administrations that will represent the University's student population this year.
In this week's podcast, we talk with Student Body President Adkins, and Graduate and Professional Student Federation President Percy about the upcoming year.
North Carolina will witness something next week that it hasn't seen is more than 40 years.
At 2:43 p.m. on Aug. 21, the daytime sky will go dark as the moon's shadow blocks out the sun and creates the first solar eclipse visible in the state since 1970
In this week's episode, Morehead Planetarium educators Amy Sayle and Mickey Jo Sorrell tell us what to expect during next week's solar eclipse.
In this week's episode, we talk about stress management with William Frey, an organization and professional development specialist with UNC-Chapel Hill's Office of Human Resources.
Whether it's youth sports or the NFL, talk about concussions and their damaging effects has dominated the sports world for the past several years.
With fall sports gearing up in the coming weeks, we talk about concussions and managing them with Johna Register-Mihalik, an assistant professor of exercise and sports science with the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center and the Injury Prevention Research Center.
Popularity may actually be as important as we thought it was in high school.
That teenage quest for popularity appears to follow us long after our high school days and impacts the way we interpret the world as adults.
In this week’s episode, we talk about popularity, how people chase the wrong kind of popularity and how that follows us into adulthood with Mitch Prinstein, the John Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and author of the book “Popular.”
The way Emil Kang sees it, the arts are for everybody and every place could be a creative space.
Through a campus-wide initiative launched by Chancellor Carol L. Folt, Kang is actively working to bring the arts to every corner of Carolina.
In this week's episode, we talk about the Arts Everywhere iniaitive and the upcoming Carolina Performing Arts season with Kang, the executive and artistic director of the Carolina Performing Arts.
Zena Cardman was among the more than 18,300 people who applied to NASA's most recent class of astronaut candidates. Shortly after submitting her application, Cardman heard those numbers and figured she'd try again next time.
But then came a call from Houston for her first interview. Then another call for the finalist interview. And last week, Cardman had her named called as NASA introduced its 12 newest astronaut candidates.
This week, the two-time Carolina graduate calls in from Houston to talk about her new position, her time at Carolina and her future as a potential astronaut.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is home to some of the world’s best HIV research. Numerous teams of researchers are tirelessly investigating the virus, which infects nearly 37 million people around the world.
One of the those projects, led by Jenna Bone Honeycutt, has recently made to a key discovery that could change the way treatments target the virus.
In this week’s episode, we’re talking about the recent findings with Honeycutt, a postdoctoral research fellow with the UNC School of Medicine.
For a young cancer patient, the tools and medical devices in the UNC Hospitals' Pediatric Hematology–Oncology Clinic can be terrifying.
But two UNC School of Medicine students are working to provide medical play kits to help the children better understand their surroundings and ease their fears as they're treated at the clinic.
In this week's episode, we talk about medical play and its benefits for the young patients with Ashley Thrower and Charlotte Story. The medical students have organized a fundraiser to restock the clinics medical play kit supply.
Learn more about the fundraiser here.
On May 14, Alexis Miller will be one of the more than 600 first-generation college students to graduate from Carolina at the Spring Commencement.
It wasn't the easiest path to graduation but with a little help from Carolina Firsts, Miller will become the first person in her family to receieve a college degree.
In this week's episode, we talk about the upcoming Spring Commencement and the Carolina Firsts program with Miller, the president of the Carolina Firsts student organization.
As technology advances and robots are further integrated into daily life, the line between tool and a potentially living thing is becoming more blurred.
But do robots actually have minds? And if they do, how will human interaction with robots change?
In this week's episode, we talk about robots and minds with Kurt Gray, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience.
Part of the Wilson Special Collections Library, Carolina's Southern Folklife Collection is home to nearly a quarter of a million recordings of music ranging from blues and folk to gospel and rock-and-roll.
Beginning this weekend, on Record Store Day, the Southern Folklife Collection and it's partner Yep Roc Records will be releasing rare archival recordings from its collections — starting with Dolly Parton's first single "Puppy Love."
In this week's episode, we talk about the collection's partnership with the local record label and the upcoming record release with Steve Weiss, the curator of the Southern Folklife Collection.
At any given level of American government, women hold only 20 percent of the public service leadership roles.
The UNC School of Government is working to change those statistics.
In this week's episode, we talk about women in leadership roles in government with UNC School of Government associate professor Leisha DeHart-Davis.
Those low-fat and no sugar labels in the grocery store may not be leading consumers to healthier options after all.
In this week's episode, we talk about the low-content food labels and their claims with Lindsey Smith Taillie, a research assistant professor in the department of nutrition at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health and Carolina Population Center Fellow.
To stay competitive and ahead of the curve in today's business world, companies have become focused on continuously learning.
It's an evolution process that relies on learning from past experiences — even the unsuccessful ones.
In this week's episode, we talk about learning organizations and how we can learn to succeed from failing with Brad Staats, an associate professor of operations at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School.
It's time for March Madness.
With Carolina's tipoff a few days away, we're talking about the tournament with former All-American and starting center of the Tar Heels' 1993 national championship team Eric Montross, who currently serves as a commentator for UNC Basketball.
With the high price of running for elected office and the costs of living in a capital city, being a politician isn't cheap.
For blue-collar workers who may be living off hourly wages, those high costs — combined with income lost while in legislative session — could keep them from running for political office at all.
Could paying politicians higher salaries encourage more blue-collar workers to run for office and create a more economically diverse legislature that more accurately represents the population?
In this week's episode, doctoral candidate in political science Eric Hansen weighs in on that question.
It's estimated that nearly 30 million Americans will have an eating disorder at some point in their lives.
But eating disorders are still an issue mostly kept quiet.
In this week's episode, we talk about eating disorders and National Eating Disorder Awareness Week with Cynthia Bulik, the director of the UNC Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders and the director of the Center for Eating Disorders Innovation at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.
Self-regulation skills in childhood can be predictors of long-term outcomes from economic success to risks for substance use.
Fortunately, they are skills that can be taught in the classroom the same way schools teach literacy.
In this week's episode, we're talking about why self-regulation is important and how to teach the skills with Desiree Murray, a senior research scientist and associate director of research at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, who recently published a report on self-regulation as part of a collaboration with researchers at Duke's Center for Child and Family Policy.
The maker movement is in full force at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Carolina's Be a Maker Network is connecting students, faculty and staff to design and create physical objects in makerspaces equipped with tools for woodworking, metalworking and digital fabrication.
In this week's podcast, we talk about the maker movement at Carolina with Rich Superfine, the Taylor-Williams Distinguished Professor of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Sciences, and the director of the Be a Maker Network.
When Jim Ketch founded the Carolina Jazz Festival 40 years ago as a small Music Department event, the goal was to give his students a chance to rub shoulders with professional musicians.
In the decades that followed, the festival morphed into a much larger event, inspiring not just Carolina students but high schoolers from across the state. This year, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Carolina Jazz Festival from Feb. 15 to 18.
In this week's episode, we talk about the history of the Carolina Jazz Festival and the upcoming 40th anniversary of the event with Ketch, a music professor and the director of jazz studies at Carolina.
When Carol Ann McCormick began sorting through the thousands of fungal specimens stored at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Herbarium, she was shocked by what she found.
Included in the collection, which had fallen into disarray throughout the years, were fungal specimens collected the renowned botanist George Washington Carver. Born into slavery, Carver developed techniques to help repair soil damaged by cotton plantings, and taught at the Tuskegee Institute for nearly 50 years.
In this week's episode, we talk about Carver's fungal specimens with McCormick, the herbarium's curator, and Van Cotter, a retired industrial mycologist who volunteers at the herbarium.
For more than 40 years, Carolina alumnus Sheldon Peck and his wife, Leena, have been building an art collection full of 17th-century Flemish drawings by masters like Rembrandt van Rijn, Pieter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens and Paul Bril.
As of today, 134 masterpieces of that collection are now part of the Ackland Art Museum after the Peck's donated the collection — valued at $17 million — as part of an overall $25 million donation to the museum.
In this week's episode, we talk with Sheldon Peck about the collection and role the fine arts play in modern society.
With the inauguration just a few days away, the presidential transition of power is in the limelight.
In this week’s episode, we talk about the complex transition process with associate professor of political science Terry Sullivan. Sullivan is also the executive director of the White House Transition Project, which helps prepare the incoming president and their administration for the daunting task ahead of them.
People are always trying to be more creative. But is it a learned trait or are some people just wired to be more creative than others?
In this week's episode, we talk about creativity and how people can hone the skill with R. Keith Sawyer, the Morgan Distinguished Professor in Educational Innovations from the UNC School of Education.
In the past several decades, HIV has gone from being a death sentence to a virus manageable with medications.
With the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill becoming a hub for HIV research, Carolina's labs have helped push that progress along.
In this week's episode, we're talking about Carolina's HIV research with Mike Cohen, Yeargan-Bate Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology and Epidemiology, and the director of the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases.
The massive increase of tourists visiting Ecuador's Galapagos Islands is bringing a new set of challenges for the islands' ecosystem.
In this week's episode, we discuss the impact the increase in tourism is having on the islands and what it means for the future of its renowned wildlife with Steve Walsh, the Lyle V. Jones Distinguished Professor of Geography and director of Carolina's Center for Galapagos Studies.
As news organizations continue to pay closer attention to the bottom dollar of the business, the fate of local newspapers and community journalism hangs in the balance.
In this week's episode, Penny Muse Abernathy, the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the UNC School of Media and Journalism, discusses her recently released report “The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts," and how many communities could soon become "news deserts" by losing their of local news.
After months of campaigning, the 2016 Election is over and the United States has a new president-elect.
In this week's episode, we take a dive into the demographics that impacted the results with Thomas Carsey, the Thomas J. Pearsall Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science.
They're promoted as a safer alternative to smoking, but e-cigarettes may be posing its own serious health risks.
In this week's episode, Ilona Jaspers, the director of the toxicology program at the UNC School of Medicine, discusses the how inhaling the vaporized flavored liquids is altering genes important to the immune system.
With the World Series underway, we're talking with major league baseball insider — and Carolina junior — Chris Cotillo.
As a high schooler outside Boston, Cotillo launched a career in sports reporting with the simple creation of a Twitter account, @ChrisCotillo. Now he's a student in the UNC School of Media and Journalism, honing the skills of the field while juggling a budding career and the classroom.
In this week's podcast, Cotillo discusses the start of his journalism career, balancing reporting and school, and his World Series prediction.
Jodi Magness hasn't just studied history with books. She's dug it up herself.
The Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism from the College of Arts and Sciences, Magness has spent her career working on archaeological excavations to better understand the history of ancient Palestine.
In this week's episode, Magness talks about the importance of archaeology and her work at Huqoq in Israel, where crews have uncovered unique mosaics.
Learn more about Magness' work at Huqoq and find out how students can work on the excavation at Huqoq.org.
College football was once far behind the NBA and MLB in popularity. But not anymore.
Right below the NFL, college football has become the second most popular sport in the United States. And the rise of college football has changed more than just the sport.
In this week’s episode, we talk with sports administration professor Jonathan Jensen about how businesses like Nike, Under Armor and Adidas tapping into college football's rise.
For four decades, PlayMakers Repertory Company has been a staple at Carolina, bringing world-class actors and directors to campus.
Based in the College of Arts and Sciences, PlayMakers is the professional theater in residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has become North Carolina's premier resident professional theater company.
As the company celebrates its 40th anniversary, we talk with Producing Artistic Director Vivienne Benesch about PlayMakers' storied history and its future.
The traditional one-size-fits-all mentality in business and the workplace just isn't cutting it in the United States anymore. Aging baby boomers and adjustments to immigration laws are rapidly changing the country's demographics and creating major challenges for companies.
We're talking about those disruptive demographics with James Johnson, William R. Kenan Distinguished Professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Kenan-Flagler Business School and director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center in the Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Entrepreneurship.
Carolina’s classrooms are changing.
Professors Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy are transforming theirs to be more interactive and inclusive — an effort that has helped overcome achievement gaps.
This week, we’re talking about the teaching innovation with Hogan, a senior STEM lecturer and the director of instructional innovation at the College of Arts and Sciences, and Sathy, Special Projects Assistant to the Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and a senior lecturer in the department of Psychology and Neurosciences.
Political campaigns are transforming as social media creates new ways for politicians to reach voters and showcase their platform. From well-timed tweets to digital missteps, social media has become a game-changer for politicians running for office. In this week's episode, we're talking politics and social media Daniel Kreiss, School of Media and Journalism associate professor and author of Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy.
It's almost football time at Carolina. With the opening kickoff only a few days away, we're talking with Voice of the Tar Heels Jones Angell about his broadcast career and the upcoming football season, which begins Saturday evening against the University of Georgia.
With the new school year underway, we're talking with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Student Body President Bradley Opere. Born and raised in Kenya, Opere was first thrown into a leadership role as a high schooler in an effort to keep peace at his boarding school where students were staging strikes, and then honed his skills at the prestigious African Leadership Academy in South Africa. Now, a senior business administration student at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, Opere takes on the new role of student body president.
Of all the Tar Heels heading back to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the new school year, nearly 20 percent of them are first-generation college students. In this episode, we talk with Vice Provost for Enrollment and Undergraduate Stephen Farmer about first-generation college students, their impact at Carolina and a new project designed to welcome them to campus.
The Olympic games may have been founded to serve as a political-free zone to foster peace, but it hasn't always worked that way. As the world turns its attention to for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro we're talking about the intersection of politics and the Olympics with UNC College of Arts and Sciences' history lecturer Matthew Andrews.
Hurricane season has been relatively quiet on the East Coast so far this year. But the season is far from over and coastal areas need to be prepared to handle the dangerous storm and potentially deadly storm surges. In this week's episode, Rick Luettich, director of the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences, discusses hurricanes and the damaging storm surges that wreak havoc in areas before and after the storms.
With summer in full swing and the sports world gearing up for the Olympics in Brazil, we're talking the Zika virus with Blossom Damania, Boshamer Distinguished Professor of microbiology and immunology. The incoming vice dean of research at the UNC School of Medicine, Damania discusses Carolina's role in Zika research.
This week, John Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Mitch Prinstein and doctoral student Jackie Nesi discuss social media and its influence on adolescents.
Barry M. Popkin, W. R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, discusses the increase of obesity in the United States and how sugar taxes may be crucial in the fight against the health concern.
We're talking earthquakes with UNC-Chapel Hill postdoctoral research associate Berk Biryol of the Geology Department. Biryol has been studying the possible causes of earthquakes in the Southeastern United States — an area located in the middle of the plate that shouldn't be prone to quakes.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Commencement is right around the corner, and today we are talking with graduating senior and student body president Houston Summers. The Greensboro, North Carolina native played minor league baseball for six years before attending Carolina.
In this week's episode, sociology professor Charles Kurzman discusses terrorism and his research on the small number of Muslim-Americans who join militant groups.
In this week's episode, we're talking Earth Day and sustainable food sources with Carolina alumna and current Chancellor's Fellow Emily Auerbach. The director of the University's Edible Campus Initiative, Auerbach has been helping transform the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill into an edible landscape.
In this episode, Sarah Treul, assistant professor of political science in the College of Arts and Sciences, discusses the 2016 congressional and presidential elections.
Lou Perez, J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's history department in the College of Arts and Sciences, discusses Cuban history and what restoring diplomatic relations means for the two countries.
In the debut episode of Well Said, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham discusses his career, the NCAA tournament and changes in college athletics.