Graduate School

The Charlotte 49ers inaugural football season is underway, and Niner spirit is at an all-time high leading up to celebrations and activities planned for the Oct. 12 Homecoming game against UNC Pembroke.

Deeptak Verma, a 2012 graduate with a doctorate in bioinformatics and computational biology, is this year’s recipient of the Graduate School’s Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award.
 Verma was honored for the dissertation “Elucidating the Effects of Mutation and Evolutionary Divergence upon Protein Structure Quantitative Stability/Flexibility Relationships.”  During his time at UNC Charlotte, his research focused on the movement of atoms within a protein, and he co-authored nine published papers based on this research. 

UNC Charlotte’s Charlotte Research Scholars (CRS) program provides undergraduate students the training and experience to be successful in research, a critical component for graduate education. Sixty scholars have been selected for the research program’s second year. Starting Tuesday, May 28, they will conduct original research during a 10-week program in collaboration with a faculty member.

The 13th annual Graduate Student Research Symposium will be Saturday, March 23, in Atkins Library.  Participants will vie for more than $7,000 in cash prizes with awards presented in multiple research categories that honor the work of University graduate students. 

Yujie Lin, a doctoral student in computing and information systems in the College of Computing and Informatics, will defend “Exploratory Visualization of Graphs Based on Community Structure” at 3:30 p.m., Friday, Dec. 7, in Woodward Hall, Room 338. Jing Yang is the dissertation advisor.

David Askay, a Ph.D. student in organizational science, has received one of the most prestigious national research awards presented to students doing communication studies research.
 The National Communication Association (NCA) presents the Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award for the top-ranked student-authored paper from all NCA units that competitively rank papers for programming at the NCA annual convention.

The Graduate School is accepting nominations for its annual Master’s Thesis Awards, which are presented based on the clarity of style and presentation, scholarship, research methodology and contributions to the field or discipline. 

Each year, the competition rotates between disciplines. This year, two awards will be presented – one in the category of math, physical sciences and engineering and the other in the category of humanities and fine arts.