Research

As people react to the 2020 U.S. presidential election results, we have turned to the animal kingdom to see how animal societies make decisions and resolve conflict. We asked CLAS researchers to consider what we can learn from animal societies. Alan Rauch, an English professor, earned degrees in zoology and literature, and he studies and writes about dolphins. Stanley Schneider, a biologist, studies honey bees and their hive behavior. Anthropologist Lydia Light researches gibbons and other primates.

A mentoring program co-led by UNC Charlotte researcher Sandra Clinton that aims to retain undergraduate women in the geosciences is on the shortlist for the international Nature Research Awards for Inspiring and Innovating Science. The program also has received almost $3 million in new NSF funding.

A multi-discipline, multi-university project housed at UNC Charlotte and led by political scientist Jason Windett seeks to develop an easy-to-search hub of vast amounts of data on life-affecting issues, complete with analytical tools for easy visualization of the data.

As pandemic restrictions begin to lift and cities start to bustle, we take a closer look at UNC Charlotte research into urban intensification and its impact on forest birds. This study by UNC Charlotte landscape ecologist Sara Gagné with two alumni and a colleague suggests ways to help forest birds in cities.

Colleen Hammelman, assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, has received a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Grant to study population change and gentrification in urban foodscapes. Her five-year funding is expected to total $461,555.

Since 2012, the somewhat unusual research pairing of a geologist and mechanical engineer at UNC Charlotte has led to some important scientific results, and has recently earned recognition of their work with a top award for interdisciplinary research and publication.

As communities relax COVID-19 restrictions, a study by UNC Charlotte geographer Eric Delmelle and two of his former doctoral students could provide decision-makers with timely data about spikes in COVID-19 cases to help guide their decisions.

An interdisciplinary team from UNC Charlotte has received a $29,000 Research Grant in the Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for the project “Arts-based social mobility: Exploring cultural capital in Charlotte, NC.” Sociology Associate Professor Vaughn Schmutz will lead the team, which includes faculty and staff from the College of Arts + Architecture.

UNC Charlotte’s Gerald G. Fox Master of Public Administration program and Clinical Health Psychology doctoral program in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences have earned high marks in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 rankings.

When the Jamil Niner Student Pantry opened on campus in 2014, professor Nicole Peterson decided to focus a research project on campus, working to determine the depths of the food insecurity problem on the UNC Charlotte campus.