College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

Mario Röllig spent three months in East Berlin’s Hohenschönhausen Prison in 1987 for trying to flee communist East Germany. He will tell his story at 2 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 9, at UNC Charlotte Center City, during an afternoon of public activities to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  

Eric Heberlig, professor of political science, is a co-recipient of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation’s D.B. Hardeman Prize for the work “Congressional Parties, Institutional Ambition and the Financing of Majority of Control.”

The flow of life along the Catawba River changed dramatically about 50 years ago when Duke Energy created Lake Norman with the construction of Cowans Ford Dam in 1963. The lake and its surrounding region saw small farms, large plantations, mills and more replaced by state-of-the-art homes and businesses, nuclear power structures and a recreational lake culture – along with less visible changes such as shifting fish populations and a rise in community activism and environmental protection.

Yele Aluko, senior vice president of Novant Health and medical director of the Novant Health Heart and Vascular Institute, will present “North Carolina’s Rejection of Medicaid Expansion: Politicizing the Health of Our Society” at 5:30 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 22, in the Rowe Arts Building, Room 130. A reception will follow Aluko’s presentation, which is free and open to the public.

The UNC Charlotte Botanical Gardens will hold its annual Fall Plant Sale from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.,  Friday and Saturday, Oct. 17-18, at the McMillan Greenhouse.
A wide selection of shrubs, perennials, wildflowers, ferns, cool weather annuals and native plants will be on sale. Proceeds support operations of the greenhouse and the gardens.
Botanical Gardens members and the campus community can attend a pre-sale from noon to 4 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 16.

Calculus courses are foundational for a number of majors, and a recently implemented redesign has created a fresh, modernized approach to the sequence.

Mohammad Kazemi, professor and associate chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, said, “If students do well in Pre-calculus and Calculus I and II, then they can proceed and do well in a number of other disciplines, such as biology, pre-med, chemistry, physics, math, of course, geology, engineering and computer science.”

The second annual Center City Literary Festival will be Friday and Saturday, Oct. 17-18, at UNC Charlotte Center City. This festival will showcase authors and performers associated with the University; it is sponsored by UNC Charlotte Center City and the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Nathaniel Hendren, assistant professor of economics at Harvard University, will discuss “Intergenerational Mobility and Equality of Opportunity in the United States” at 2 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 2, in the College of Health and Human Services, Room 159.

English professor Elizabeth Miller interviewed 18 adult immigrant small business owners about their experiences learning and using English in their places of work to form the foundation for the recently published “The Language of Adult Immigrants: Agency in the Making.”
Multilingual Matters published the book as part of its “New Perspectives on Language and Education Series.”
Miller’s book focuses on the role of agency in adult immigrant language learning. Agency can be described as the ability of individuals to take action within society.

Glenn Boreman, chair of the Department of Physics and Optical Science, recently was named the 2015 vice president of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, effective Jan. 1.
Boreman also is director of UNC Charlotte’s Center for Optoelectronics and Optical Communications and co-founder and chairman of the board of Plasmonics, Inc. His research interests include infrared detectors and systems, infrared antennas and frequency-selective surfaces, image-quality characterization and modulation transfer function.