What do you get when a research psychologist marries a clinical psychologist? Two Carolina chemists. UNC-Chapel Hill psychologists Eric and Jen Youngstrom both joined the faculty in 2006. Through their research and global travels, their daughters Diane and Kay have developed a love of science, immense school spirit, and a deep desire to help the world.
As climate change continues to impact daily life, researchers at the UNC Institute for the Environment want to discover the best way to teach the next generation to build a more equitable, resilient society. To do this, they are studying how young people learn about the environment and enact change in their communities.
Ganga Bey is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Epidemiology within the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and a fellow in the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity. She studies how people’s beliefs about identity, worth, and ability affect their stress, aging, and susceptibility to disease.
Researchers at the UNC Injury Prevention Research Center began studying the long-term effects of injury and violence well before they were recognized as public health problems. For 30 years, they have addressed vital societal issues including domestic abuse, car crashes, traumatic brain injury, home and workplace safety, and opioid overdose — and have worked closely with practitioners to change policies and save lives.
Cynthia Fraga Rizo is an associate professor within the UNC School of Social Work. She researches intimate partner violence, sexual abuse, and human trafficking to prevent such acts and provide survivors with effective services and interventions.
Christina Rudosky is a teaching assistant professor of French in the Department of Romance Studies within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. She studies surrealism and why objects were coveted, collected, and brought to life through writing and art during this 20th-century avant-garde movement.
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.
Julian Rucker is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences and a fellow in the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity. He studies beliefs about structural racism, perceptions of societal racial inequality, and motivations to rectify racial disparities.
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.
Zardas Lee is a PhD student in the Department of History within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences. They explore how people from small colonies in South and Southeast Asia pursued dreams of freedom and independence in the 1940s and ’50s while empires and superpowers dominated the world order.