Resilience Drives Discovery 

April 16, 2026

by Penny Gordon-Larsen

Federal funding uncertainty. Budget pressures. A research landscape that looks different than it did a year ago. Carolina’s researchers are navigating this difficult terrain and overcoming its many hurdles. 

Their work spans adaptive cancer trials and AI-powered health platforms, a decades-long archaeological excavation, and a humanities project to strengthen teacher training and student engagement in K-12 classrooms. That range is not accidental. It’s what a great public research university actually looks like: not a single bet on a single field, but a full-spectrum commitment to discovery that serves people. 

Here’s what resilience looks like at Carolina right now.  

UNC’s ARPA-H Portfolio Expands

The U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA‑H) funds the science that is bolder, more complex, or too early-stage for traditional mechanisms. Winning that funding isn’t just about having a great idea. It requires years of infrastructure building, cross-disciplinary relationships, and institutional credibility that can’t be assembled on short notice.  

Carolina’s recent ARPA-H awards are evidence of exactly that. Each award is built on long-term strategic investments: in platforms, in people, in the kind of research environment where ambitious science becomes possible. At a moment when federal funding is uncertain and the stakes are high, these awards send a clear signal — Carolina is an engine of discovery and impact, and the long-term work of building the infrastructure where ambitious science flourishes is paying off. 

Cancer Identification and Precision Oncology Center (CIPOC)

Ashok Krishnamurthy, Melissa Troester, Jennifer Elston Lafata, and Caroline A. Thompson 

When researchers from RENCI, Gillings School of Global Public Health, and Eshelman School of Pharmacy came together to rethink how cancer is identified and treated, they weren’t aiming small. 

Through a $10 million investment from ARPA‑H, Carolina has launched CIPOC, an ambitious university‑wide effort that brings together experts in data science, epidemiology, pharmacy, medicine, and computer science. 

The premise is straightforward. If you can connect large-scale health data with advanced analytics, you can find cancer earlier, treat it more precisely, and close the equity gaps that have persisted for decades. Spanning more than a dozen UNC schools, centers, and institutes, CIPOC is built to do exactly that, using tools designed to work beyond Carolina’s walls. 

In a competitive national funding environment, this ARPA-H award is a vote of confidence in something specific. UNC’s ability to marshal complexity across disciplines and turn it into research that changes outcomes for patients. 

Evolutionary Clinical Trial for Novel Biomarker-Driven Therapies (EVOLVE) 

Lisa Carey, Charles Perou, and Naim Rashid 

Metastatic breast cancer is relentless in part because tumors evolve, and traditional clinical trials don’t. Treatments are fixed at enrollment, even as the disease changes underneath them. The EVOLVE initiative is built to change that. 

The UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center was awarded up to $28 million in ARPA-H funding to lead a next-generation adaptive trial that adjusts treatment in near real time as each patient’s tumor evolves. Drawing continuously on biopsies, blood samples, imaging, and medical records, the trial responds to biology as it unfolds, not to where the disease was at the start. The effort spans 15 institutions through the Translational Breast Cancer Research Consortium, bringing the scale necessary to make that kind of learning possible. 

This is what it looks like when clinical science is built for the complexity of the disease rather than the convenience of the trial design. 

Public Humanities in Action

Resilience at Carolina isn’t confined to labs or datasets. Across the arts and humanities, scholars continue to advance work that helps communities understand the past, engage the present, and shape a more informed public life. 

Carolina K-12, the statewide K–12 educator engagement arm of Carolina Public Humanities, received funding from the U.S. Department of Education to launch a three-year initiative designed to strengthen teacher training and student engagement in North Carolina classrooms. The project will create regional seminars, educator retreats, and curriculum resources that emphasize inclusive storytelling, civic literacy, and connections between local and national history. 

Carolina Talent, Global Impact 

Not all of Carolina’s most consequential research happens in a lab or even in the U.S.  

The Huqoq Excavation Project, led by UNC‑Chapel Hill faculty with students and partners from around the globe, has spent years uncovering one of the ancient world’s most remarkable synagogues, its mosaics rewriting what scholars thought they knew about Jewish religious and cultural life in late antiquity. A new $1.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of State supports conservation, research, and public access at the historic site, demonstrating a commitment to supporting cultural heritage and international collaboration. 

This kind of research — field-based, long-term, globally connected — doesn’t fit neatly into a single funding cycle or a single discipline. It requires exactly the kind of sustained scholarly commitment and institutional support that defines what a great research university is for. The fact that it’s happening at Carolina, right now, is not incidental. It’s the point. 

AI for Public Good: Carolina’s Mission in Action

On April 13, nearly 600 attendees gathered at UNC-Chapel Hill’s first‑ever AI for Public Good Conference, including 212 professionals from outside Carolina and 155 students. A highlight was the hackathon, which was so captivating that it encouraged outside observers to put down their notebooks and join in. 

The day went deep. Researchers, policymakers, technologists, clinicians, and artists explored what responsible AI actually requires: trustworthy data, equitable design, and governance that keeps pace with capability. One line from genetics researcher Melissa Haendel captured the stakes, “AI lets us treat zebras, not just horses,” meaning that the ability of AI to find patterns across massive datasets can finally surface rare disease patients who have spent years being missed.  

In the concurrent sessions, researchers shared how two new Carolina platforms are making that possible: SHIRE, a secure health informatics environment for large-scale clinical data analysis, and ORDR(D), a new de-identified research data repository built jointly by NC TraCS and RENCI that gives researchers faster, more secure access to electronic health records data at scale. These aren’t ancillary investments — they are the foundation. 

The conference wasn’t just a convening, it was Carolina planting a flag. We will define what responsible AI looks like at scale. AI is a force multiplier, it amplifies whatever it’s built on. While others race to deploy, we’re doing the harder work of getting the foundation right. Building data infrastructure, establishing robust governance frameworks, training current and future talent. This isn’t optional work for a public university, and it positions us exactly where transformational partnerships get built. Carolina’s brand of AI is application. We connect computational power with clinical insight, algorithmic innovation with real-world problems, and research breakthroughs with the industry partnerships that turn findings into societal impact. 

This is What Research Universities are Built For

None of these efforts happened in isolation. Each one required collaboration across disciplines, persistence through obstacles, and partners willing to take a chance on an idea before it was proven. 

That’s worth saying plainly: this is what a research university actually does. Not in spite of uncertainty, but sometimes because of it. Constraints force creativity. Pressure reveals what a community is made of. 

To every member of Carolina’s research community writing grants, building tools, mentoring the next generation, asking inconvenient questions: the work you are doing right now to weather this storm is extraordinary and will set each of you in the right direction for sunnier times.