News

In recognition of their exceptional teaching, Ashley Bryan, Nishi Bryska and Ian Marriott have received the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences’ Excellence in Teaching Awards for 2017. Dean Nancy A. Gutierrez and the awards committee chairs commended the honorees and award finalists for their innovation, creativity and focus on engaging students in scholarship and research.

Erica Cherian, a junior at UNC Charlotte who is devoted to addressing issues of healthcare access and utilization by Charlotte’s most vulnerable citizens, has been named a Newman Civic Fellow. Newman Civic Fellows are student leaders who have demonstrated an investment in finding solutions to challenges that face their communities.

UNC Charlotte history professor Mark Wilson has won two top international prizes from the Business History Conference for his book, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II, including the Hagley Prize for the best book in business history in the previous year. Wilson also was co-recipient of the Gomory Prize, in the first time a scholar has won the organization’s two major book awards.

UNC Charlotte researchers have examined over one million tweets sent during the protests of the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte in September 2016. This research holds implications for understanding the role of cluster tweets and other public relations strategies in relation to online activism.

As temperatures spike each spring, mosquitos start to swarm. They bring with them an increased risk of mosquito-borne diseases and a need to understand how to guard against these pesky – and at times dangerous – insects. Researchers at UNC Charlotte and the Mecklenburg County Health Department are collaborating on a study to determine which factors in the environment lead to hotspots of mosquito activity, in a project led by doctoral student Ari Whiteman.

Heather Smith, professor of geography and earth sciences and director of the doctorate in Geography and Urban Regional Analysis, is the 2017 recipient of the Harshini V. de Silva Graduate Mentor Award. She was honored at a ceremony on Thursday, March 30, at the Harris Alumni Center at Johnson Glen.

For his leadership in foreign language education throughout North Carolina and nationally, UNC Charlotte’s Bobby Hobgood has received a “lifetime achievement award” as the recipient of a Foreign Language Association of North Carolina Honorary Life Member Award.

Nancy Gutierrez, dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at UNC Charlotte, has been named a trustee of the North Carolina Humanities Council for a three-year term. The organization provides ways for North Carolinians to engage with one another through the humanities. All the programs support lifetime learning in North Carolina through the humanities, especially literature, history, art, music and philosophy.

Allison Stedman, associate professor of French at UNC Charlotte, has received a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to complete a book project with relevance for understanding mind-body connections, the history of medicine, miracles, mysticism, holism, and metaphysical theology. The year-long fellowship will support the outcome of in-depth research to be conducted at the Arsenal Library and the French National Library in Paris, France for a book she is writing.

Drug use is the main motivation for women who burglarize, while money ranks as the top motivation for male burglars, new UNC Charlotte research has found. The study, published in the January 2017 Journal of Drug Issues, was led by Criminal Justice and Criminology Professor Joseph B. Kuhns and is one of the few that interprets data from both male and female burglars.