Scholarship and Academic Life

Balaka Basu, a faculty member in the English Department, is co-editor of the recently published “Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers.” The book is the latest volume in Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture Series, and it includes a chapter by Basu titled “What Faction Are You In?  The Pleasure of Being Sorted in Veronica Roth’s ‘Divergent.’”
Basu joined the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences faculty in 2013. She earned a doctorate in English from City University of New York; her bachelor’s degree is from Cornell University.  

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. 

The TweetChina project is designed to explore how China is discussed and represented on Twitter. China-related tweets were selected from several dozen billions of tweets archived by UNC Charlotte’s Charlotte Visualization Center and visually represented in map, picture, text and event modes.

UNC Charlotte and Sarajevo School of Science and Technology (SSST) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to initiate joint projects and to partner on scientific research programs common to both institutions.

Eric Heberlig, a faculty member in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, will be a guest on WFAE’s “Charlotte Talks” on Thursday, July 18. The program, which airs live at 9 a.m. with a rebroadcast in the evening, will focus on the current North Carolina political scene.

Jennifer Weller, an associate professor of bioinformatics and genomics in the College of Computing and Informatics (CCI), is helping Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS)students to fight chestnut blight, an Asian fungus that has killed off billions of American chestnut trees since 1904.
Weller is working with Olympic High School science teachers Jeanne Smith and Erica Putnam through the school’s B-3 Summer Program, which focuses on biotechnology, biodiversity and bioinformatics at Olympic’s School of Biotechnology, Health and Public Administration.

UNC Charlotte Center City will be the location for a transit-oriented breakfast on Monday, July 8, where panelists will discuss a variety of issues that resulted from a project that began with students in the Master of Urban Design program.

The College of Arts + Architecture hosted more than 20 engineers and executives from Ingersoll Rand, Wednesday, June 26, to assist in building the Solar Decathlon house UrbanEden. The Ingersoll Rand guests helped pour geopolymer tiles that will be used in the structure’s rain catchment troughs.

Juan Vivero-Escoto, an assistant professor of chemistry, is the 2013 recipient of the Ralph Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award from Oak Ridge Associate Universities (ORAU), a 109-member university consortium affiliated with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
Vivero-Escoto was among 30 winners in a pool of 147 applicants from consortium institutions. Only two faculty members per institution were permitted to apply; they underwent a highly competitive peer-review process organized by ORAU from among its members.

Many elementary students’ math performance improves when their teachers collaborate, work in professional learning communities or do both, yet most students don’t spend all of their elementary school years in these settings, according to a new study by UNC Charlotte researchers recently published in the journal Sociology of Education.