Scholarship and Academic Life

The Paul Taylor 2 Dance Company is on campus through Friday, Sept. 30, for the company’s first-ever “reconstruction residency” in the Department of Dance. Capping an 18-month research project led by Associate Professor of Dance Kim Jones, the residency brings the Taylor 2 dancers from New York City to Charlotte to teach students in master classes and to bring back to life a work not seen in more than 50 years. That dance, “Tracer,” will be performed in a concert scheduled for 7:30 p.m., Sept. 30, in the Anne Belk Theater of the Robinson Hall for the Performing Arts.

A team of four UNC Charlotte students was recognized with the People’s Choice Award in the 2016 Teradata University Network (TUN) Data Challenge, an international data analytics competition.

Laxmi Narayana Atluri, Sri Harsha Degala, Vrushali Sawant and Freddy Cabrera, all graduate students in data science and business analytics, demonstrated their findings at the 2016 Teradata PARTNERS Conference and Expo, and won the support of 3,500 of the world’s most advanced data and analytics experts and business leaders.

Is the economic forecast partly sunny or partly cloudy? Both, said UNC Charlotte economist John Connaughton. On the bright side, North Carolina’s unemployment rate is now lower than the U.S. rate, and the economy continues to grow. However, the economic expansion is slowing down, Connaughton stated during the Babson Capital Management/UNC Charlotte Economic Forecast.

A recently published work by history professor Gregory Mixon analyzes one state’s process of freedom, citizenship and the incorporation of African Americans within the political and economic structure of the United States after the Civil War.

Historian Mark Wilson studies the business and politics of the American industrial mobilization for World War II in the new book “Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II.”

Wilson spent 10 years researching the archives of companies that made weapons for the war as well as military and government archives. His search led him to the records of Boeing Aircraft and Manufacturing, Ford Motor and DuPont U.S.

Questions like “Why am I here?” and “What is the meaning of life?” are essential inquiries in many people’s lives. The intimacy and importance of such topics often leads their discussion to be limited.

Social work professor Jim Dudley is trying to change that. It is precisely because of their intimacy and power to heal that spirituality and religion must become more closely connected with the helping process, he stated.

The lack of women in the information technology workforce directly affects the nation’s economic future — only 26 percent of IT professionals are women. This lack of gender diversity is a key factor to the growing shortage of tech talent; future U.S. graduates with bachelor’s degrees in computing can fill only 40 percent of the country’s projected tech jobs.

UNC Charlotte’s College of Computing and Informatics (CCI) Women in Computing Initiative aims to tackle this national challenge.

Technology can be a force to improve various aspects of a community, and UNC Charlotte is issuing a public challenge for developers to create applications or games to advance a social good.

The UNC Charlotte Data Science Initiative, through its Partnership for Social Good, is sponsoring a virtual hackathon to address economic mobility in the Queen City. Participants will compete for $10,000 in prizes, and their challenge is to create a mobile platform-based application or game that addresses this problem:

The UNC Charlotte Gerontology Program celebrated its 25th anniversary earlier this year and took the opportunity to help state leaders roll out North Carolina’s first plan to comprehensively address dementia.

Andrew Hartley, Robinson Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare in the Department of Theatre, has written a new fantasy-adventure-mystery for young adult readers. “Steeplejack: A Novel” will be released by Tor Teen on June 14.

Set in 19th-century South Africa, the book has received glowing reviews, particularly for its young female protagonist. The monthly book review publication BookPage named it the “Top Teen Pick” for June 2016. Steeplejack is the first book in a series of three.