Awards and honors

A Chicago production of Cordelia Lynn’s play “Lela & Co.,” directed by Associate Professor of Theatre Robin Witt, has received three Joseph Jefferson (Jeff) Awards honoring non-Equity Chicago theatre. 

The production received six Jeff Award nominations and won in the categories of Best Director (Play), Best Actor (Play) and Best Production (Play).

Assistant Professor Xinghua “Mindy” Shi, Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, has earned a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for the project “Integrative Approaches to Uncovering Complex Genotype-Phenotype Relationships in High Dimensional Genomics Data.”

Charlotte 49ers junior softball star Meredith Harris is among 14 student-athletes who received the Conference USA Spring Spirit of Service Award. This honor is designed to recognize the league’s student-athletes based upon significant community service, good academic standing and participation in their elected sport. 

The Spirit of Service award is presented three times throughout the season. These most recent honorees represent spring sports: baseball, golf, softball, tennis and outdoor track and field.

Judy Rose, special assistant to the chancellor for intercollegiate athletics, recently received high honors from the University and the state of North Carolina. 

Rose, who retires effective June 30, 2018, was named athletics director emerita by Chancellor Philip Dubois and received the state’s Order of the Long Leaf Pine. In April, she earned a UNC Charlotte Honorary Alumna Award.

Dubois noted Rose’s well-documented success story in leading the 49ers Athletics Department during the past 28 years.

The UNC Charlotte Astrobotics Robotic Team, the 49er Miners, recently finished third in the Caterpillar Autonomy Award at the 2018 NASA Robotic Mining Competition at Kennedy Space Center.  The team joined an elite group of few schools in the history of the competition to accomplish a fully autonomous mining run (approximately 50 colleges and universities have competed each year for the past nine years).

Glenn Boreman, chair of the Department of Physics and Optical Science in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, was elevated to the status of IEEE Fellow by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in recognition of his significant contributions to optical and infrared antenna technologies.

Andrea Pitts, an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, has received a six-month Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Alumna Amy Kennemore is one of 21 Charlotte Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows for 2018; this honor is presented by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. 

Counseling master’s student Amie Begg has received a national fellowship to support her education and facilitate her addictions counseling service to underserved minority youth.

The National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC) Minority Fellowship Program-Addictions Counselors (MFP-AC) is awarded annually. The program’s goal is to reduce health disparities and improve behavioral health care outcomes for diverse populations by increasing the available number of culturally competent behavioral health professionals.

A classroom approach in which students seek solutions to problems rooted in real meteorological data; nontraditional teaching techniques to help students grasp organic chemistry; and a focus on students choosing research projects geared to their interests are just some of the innovative, hands-on approaches this year’s CLAS Excellence in Teaching Awards recipients use to challenge students.