Convergent science is characterized by cross-disciplinary research teams created to tackle big problems and speed the application of new breakthroughs to commercialization. At UNC, the Institute for Convergent Science is at the forefront of this pioneering framework.
Since he was in high school, Craig Cameron has been interested in viruses and vaccines. Now, he and a team of microbiologists and immunologists are studying viral infection on a single-cell level to help create better medicines.
Sayan Banerjee is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. He studies emerging patterns in large random systems.
For most of her life, Ayana Monroe has been fascinated by how people and computers connect — a field called human-computer interaction. Now, as a UNC-Chapel Hill junior and Chancellor’s Science Scholar, she engages in research to improve how we use technology to acquire information. She wants to teach the next generation to do the same.
As a result of systemic oppression, there are fewer than 200 native Cherokee speakers in North Carolina. To keep the language alive and pass it to the next generation, UNC-Chapel Hill researcher and Eastern Band Cherokeean citizen Benjamin Frey has teamed up with computer scientists Mohit Bansal and Shiyue Zhang to create a new translation model and grow the literary library of works available in Cherokee.
The pace of life varies often. Sometimes it drags, others it races. But if time always moves at the same rate, why does it feel different? That’s a question UNC-Chapel Hill philosopher Carla Merino-Rajme strives to answer.
Nihar Vaidya is a junior double-majoring in computer science and statistics and analytics within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. He is also a Chancellor’s Science Scholar. He uses computational neural networks to analyze brain patterns found in MRI data sets to predict when patients may encounter seizures caused by epilepsy.
As a UNC graduate student, Greg Dusek’s dissertation was the development of a rip current prediction model for the North Carolina coastline. That was back in 2006. Since then, Dusek and his colleagues have continued to develop that project into what is now part of the most comprehensive and widespread rip current model in the U.S.
In 2000, researchers in the School of Information and Library Science’s Interaction Design Lab were at the forefront of information retrieval on the World Wide Web. While technology and research methods have changed in the past 20 years, the basic premise of their research has not: how people navigate the internet in search of information.
UNC researchers Jianping Lu and Otto Zhou have spent the last two decades refining technology that makes X-ray machines smaller, faster, safer, and sharper — research that’s changing the world of dentistry, medicine, and security.