Alan Bi is a Ph.D. student in the department of history within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences. (Photo by Megan Mendenhall/UNC Research)

Alan Bi is a Ph.D. student in the department of history within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences. He examines how the language from financial institutions influenced how investors conceptualized risk leading up to the 2008 financial crisis in the U.S.

Q: How did you discover your specific field of study?

A: For my bachelor’s degree, I double-majored in accounting and history at Furman University. I’ve always been fascinated with Buffet-style investing — buying durable businesses that will succeed in the long-term versus making short-term predictions that are usually volatile. Accounting provides the tools to analyze annual reports and determine the true financial health and value of publicly traded companies. I also wanted to diversify my skills for the job market, and it’s far easier to find employment with accounting than with history.

After graduating in 2025, I decided I wanted to try to merge my two interests, studying the history of financial disasters by relying on my experience in forensic accounting.

Q: Academics are problem-solvers. Describe a research challenge you’ve faced and how you overcame it.

A: The lack of literature on the 2008 financial crisis. I normally face a lot of skepticism when I refer to the 2008 financial crisis as “history” — it only happened 18 years ago, and it sometimes makes people mildly uncomfortable to see events they’ve lived through placed in a historical context. But whether something occurred 18 or 1,800 years ago, the true role of the historian is to analyze what happened, why it happened, how it connects to other historical ideas, and to shape how that historical reality is written in a way that is nuanced and factually accurate.

Right now, I just have access to annual reports, interviews and transcripts from CEOs. I will have to break a lot of new ground. Given the lack of literature on such a defining moment of the 21st century, I believe that thinking about the 2008 financial crisis in these terms is critical for society to understand what truly happened during the crash in a politically unbiased way. I hope that the research I produce can be used by people within the financial world to contextualize their understanding of financial risk through history.

Q: Describe your research in five words.

A: True history is about people.

Q: Who or what inspires you? Why?

A: My grandfather and my dad are my biggest inspirations. My grandfather gave everything to send my dad to be educated in the United States when he himself never received anything more than an elementary school education, and I can never thank my dad enough for enduring the hardships he faced so that I could have a better life here. I’m publishing a biography that will be released later this year about both of their journeys from China to the U.S.

Q: If you could pursue any other career, what would it be and why?

A: A jazz pianist. While history and finance are my biggest passions, Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack are another.

By UNC Research

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SERC trainees Perry Holtzclaw, Graciela Villalpando and Ben Travis (from left inside doorway) cut the ribbon at SERC’s launch event. (Photo by Jon Gardiner/University Communications and Marketing)

In front of a small crowd gathered around her research poster, chemistry Ph.D. candidate Jaeyoung Lee removes a button cell battery from a plastic case and shows how it can activate an LED light.

The prototype battery contains carbon-based materials that could be more sustainably manufactured than current lithium-ion batteries. Lee’s research on environmentally friendly batteries, conducted in the lab of assistant professor Megan Jackson, is partially supported by a seed funding award granted by Carolina’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the North Carolina Collaboratory.

Jaeyoung Lee demonstrates her battery, made with help from SERC’s Battery Assembly and Testing Facility. (Photo by Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

Beside Lee, postdoctoral fellow Graciela Villalpando describes Carolina’s new Battery Assembly and Testing Laboratory, which helped bring Lee’s design from theory into practice. In the facility, Villalpando and her colleagues help researchers make electrodes, build and test batteries and discover ways to improve their designs.

The facility and Creativity Hub project are both managed by the Sustainable Energy Research Consortium, based in the chemistry department within the UNC-Chapel Hill College of Arts and Sciences. The consortium recently hosted an event to celebrate the launch of these battery research activities and other initiatives.

“These projects are noteworthy because they bring together teams of investigators from across disciplines,” said Jim White, Craver Family Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, in remarks at the event. “They bridge fundamental science to applied science and engineering, and they represent new growth areas with the potential for … innovations that impact the lives of North Carolinians.”

The original iteration of SERC — called the Solar Energy Research Center — was founded in 2008 by professor emeritus Thomas Meyer (a special guest at the relaunch event). The center served as a hub for research, education and outreach related to solar energy. However, around 2020, its leaders began wondering if they could broaden their scope.

“We took a step back and said, ‘what do we want a UNC energy entity to do?’” said Alex Miller, a chemistry professor and the director of SERC since 2022. “We started germinating this idea of going bigger, going broader and covering the energy space more holistically.”

Two years of thoughtful planning led to the reincarnation of SERC under its current name, with a focus on sustainable energy. Now housed in newly renovated collaborative office space in Caudill laboratories, SERC has built an operating model based on three key pillars.

The first is the development and support of large, interdisciplinary teams. In addition to helping researchers find new collaborators across the University, SERC also helps large teams with the logistical challenges of applying for state and federal grants.

“When you’re writing a grant that involves 10 or more researchers, there are a lot of moving parts,” said Jillian Dempsey, a chemistry professor and director of the Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy and Liquid Fuels, which acts as a hub for solar energy researchers tackling complex problems in the field. “The Sustainable Energy Research Consortium lowers the barriers by providing substantial pre- and post-award support.”

SERC’s second pillar is the maintenance of shared core facilities that empower researchers to explore new avenues in sustainable energy.

The Battery Assembly and Testing Laboratory, for instance, was designed to lower the barriers to entry for scientists whose work might complement battery design research, but who don’t have the necessary tools or experience to break into the field. Instead of purchasing expensive equipment to develop their ideas, researchers can benefit from centralized tools and the expertise of facility staff.

SERC director Alex Miller (standing) shakes the hand of Thomas Meyer, who founded the original iteration of SERC in 2008. (Photo by Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

“We realized we had specialists in these different aspects of chemistry that could be used to make a battery,” Miller said. “We didn’t have a place to help them build complete battery assemblies, so we built such a facility.”

The consortium’s support of bold new ideas extends beyond core facilities. They are also developing a seed grant program to fund high-risk, high-reward projects in the sustainable energy space.

SERC also seeks to advance sustainable energy field as a whole through its third pillar, connecting with the energy research community.

SERC has the resources to organize research meetings and conferences that position Carolina as a sustainable energy leader. In a state rich with natural resources such as lithium and sunlight, Miller and colleagues recognized the need to connect academic researchers with industry leaders to further new technologies.

As one example, SERC researchers partnered last year with professors in the department of economics to write an energy storage report outlining best practices, challenges and recommendations for policymakers to advance North Carolina’s energy storage landscape.

For Miller, supporting the field includes workforce development in the form of trainees like Lee and Villalpando. This year, SERC offered its first pair of fellowships to Ph.D. students, allowing them to assist with and gain experience in its core labs while pursuing energy-related thesis projects. SERC is also funding two undergraduate students this summer to undertake full-time research on sustainable energy projects.

“The consortium is intended to be a nexus where teams can come together and grow,” Miller said. “We want to empower Carolina’s energy innovators and give people what they need to do amazing things in the sustainable energy space.”

By Calley Jones

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Hans Paerl (Submitted photo)

After a nearly 50-year career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Hans W. Paerl, a world-renowned researcher and professor, was inducted into North Carolina’s Order of the Long Leaf Pine. As the highest honor bestowed by the governor of North Carolina, the award serves as a fitting bookend to a career recognized by peers as globally significant and defined by a transformative impact on the state’s critical ecosystems. Though Paerl retired in June 2025, his legacy will continue to make waves at Carolina and throughout the state for years to come.  

“Hans’s career generated an incredible volume of highly impactful work focused on understanding the causes, effects, and potential mitigation strategies for declining water quality and harmful algal blooms, both in North Carolina and globally. His fundamental and applied contributions to science are staggering, and his energy for translating his work to resource managers is equally remarkable,” wrote Mike Piehler, director of the UNC Institute for the Environment and chief sustainability officer at UNC-Chapel Hill, in his nomination letter.  

Paerl arrived at Carolina in 1978, just as the Clean Water Act was enacted. He dedicated the next five decades to understanding the causes, impacts and solutions for the state’s water quality issues—from headwaters to the coast. 

Two of his innovative observation programs, called ModMon and FerryMon, have underpinned the understanding of North Carolina coastal systems for more than three decades. 

ModMon monitors water quality at multiple sites along the Neuse River Estuary and supplies data for the state’s Department of Environmental Quality and in support of modeling various hydrologic scenarios. FerryMon uses North Carolina Department of Transportation ferry boats as “ships of opportunity” to collect samples to monitor water quality in the Neuse River Estuary and Pamlico Sound. FerryMon serves as an early warning system for identifying potentially harmful changes in the ecosystem and has become a model for automated monitoring of water ecosystems across the nation and internationally.  

Paerl was an early champion and member of the Carolina Environmental Program when it was formed in 1998, the CEP later became the UNC Institute for the Environment in 2007. During the early years, the CEP, in partnership with the College of Arts and Sciences, launched two degree programs for undergraduate students — a bachelor of science in environmental science and bachelor of arts in environmental studies. Paerl taught and mentored students in the CEP and through the program’s Morehead City Field Site, housed at UNC’s Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS).   

Paerl’s Atlantic Coast Environmental Indicators Consortium, funded by the U.S. EPA’s Science to Achieve Results and Estuarine and Great Lakes Program was one of CEP’s early projects—launching what would become a robust research portfolio for the organization. The consortium convened scientists from all over the East to monitor estuarine systems along the Atlantic coast and established a model for Paerl’s future large interdisciplinary programs.  

At Carolina, he earned the distinguished title of Kenan Professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences at IMS and held joint appointments in the department of earth, marine and environmental sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences and the department of environmental sciences and engineering at the Gillings School of Global Public Health.  

He authored more than 600 publications and has been cited more than 90,000 times.   

Paerl’s legacy also extends to those he mentored over his career. Many of his former students and postdocs came to Morehead City last summer to celebrate his career and share his ‘Paerls’ of wisdom, with one calling him her “science dad.”   

He spent his career at UNC-Chapel Hill teaching undergraduate and graduate students as well as numerous post-doctoral researchers, including Piehler, instilling in them the importance of protecting the world’s precious water resources, and reminding them that as a global human population, “we can survive without oil, but not safe drinking water,” Paerl said.   

Although he retired last summer, Paerl continues to be involved at IMS as a research professor, in his monitoring programs and in various advisory roles.  

The Order of the Long Leaf Pine, considered the state’s highest civilian honor, was first given in 1963 to recognize individuals who have provided extraordinary service to the state. See Paerl’s name and a full list of recipients on the website’s roster. 

By Emily Williams, Institute for the Environment

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Lauren Jarvis

Lauren Jarvis, an associate professor of history in UNC-Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences, has been selected for a National Humanities Center summer residency to work on an individual humanities-related research project.

The NHC announced the appointment of 40 scholars for its summer residency program, recognizing leading humanists from universities and colleges in 19 U.S. states and India.

Jarvis, who also holds an adjunct appointment in the African, African American and diaspora studies department, studies the history of South Africa, with special interest in how people lived through and with extreme economic inequality. Her first book, A Prophet of the People (2024), explored religious change in South Africa during the country’s industrial revolution. Jarvis is also an editor of a forthcoming volume entitled Agency in African History and is completing a book about the global history of anti-apartheid, geared toward non-specialist audiences.

During her summer residency, Jarvis will be working on a book project that traces how South Africans shaped international debates about economic inequality in the 20th century.

Economic inequality is usually measured in statistics and numbers. Officials in South Africa’s government often pushed through misinformation and inaccurate data as part of their strategies of maintaining segregation and later apartheid. The book asks how South Africans worked around the absence of reliable data in a world where policymakers, government officials and international observers increasingly sought statistics to assess problems. Jarvis’ goal is to highlight South Africans’ creative contributions to international debates while considering some of the limits of metrics and measurement in our age of big data.

At Carolina, Jarvis teaches courses in South African, African and world history. She serves as the faculty director of the Lab at UNC History (LAUNCH), a digital humanities lab, and on the editorial boards of the journals Church History and Safundi.

The new scholars constitute the seventh class of summer residents since the NHC initiated the program in 2018.

“I am honored to welcome my first class of summer residents as director and president of the National Humanities Center,” said Blair LM Kelley. “Having been a summer resident myself in the past, I know well how much these scholars will gain from their time together here.”

The National Humanities Center is the world’s only independently funded institute dedicated exclusively to advanced study in the humanities.

Learn more about all of the fellows.

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One Saturday Carter French was playing right field and scoring four runs in a 22-5 win against Duke.

A week later, the Carolina senior was taking the Medical College Admission Test on a rare Saturday off for the Diamond Heels during exam season.

No wonder his teammates on the No. 2 Carolina baseball team appreciate the senior walk-on for his on-field contributions and love calling him “doctor.”

Balancing high-level college baseball and a pre-med curriculum is the story of French’s time at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“I didn’t think that it was going to turn out the way it did,” French, a biology major and chemistry minor, said of his college experience.

For starters, he thought his playing days were over in high school. The spring of 2022, French picked Carolina over the University of Florida and University of Virginia — strictly for academics.

But after French won a high school state championship, the idea of that being his final game was unsettling. “This is going to be weird,” he thought.

French reached out to Carolina baseball head coach Scott Forbes, shared his high school stats and asked for a chance to walk on to the team.

“I’ll give you a locker for the fall. But I can’t promise you anything after that,” Forbes told French.

Four years later, French is approaching the end of a Tar Heel baseball career in which he’s contributed from start to finish.

French was a key reserve during his first season in 2023, stepping into the lineup when star center fielder Vance Honeycutt was injured. As a sophomore, he was part of a Tar Heel team that reached the 2024 College World Series.

Last season, French hit .280 and started the final 28 games in left field as Carolina became ACC champions. This year, he’s provided veteran leadership and strong defense to a Tar Heel team full of fresh faces.

Excelling athletically and academically

His first fall with the team, French quickly realized how high the level of play was. “Everyone was good,” he said.

There was a similar realization when going to class.

“People on campus in the classroom are honestly just as competitive as the athletes are here on the field,” said French, a 2025 ACC All-Academic Team member and a two-time recipient of the Bubba Cunningham Athletic Director’s Scholar-Athlete Award.

His Carolina courses have been worthwhile. French was “locked in” during each lecture in Gidi Shemer’s physiology course. This semester he enjoyed analytical chemistry with Todd Austell, who makes a tough subject “a bit more welcoming,” French said.

When French began shadowing doctors instead of focusing on summer ball, his teammates embraced the “Dr. French” nickname.

The bit has extended to the team’s X account, where a game-winning, over-the-fence catch by French against Clemson was called an “emergency extraction.”

“The ball bypasses the Cal defenders with surgical precision,” the account wrote to describe French’s first career triple.

To be clear, French knows he’s not a doctor yet. But he’s bullish on the career because it would be “challenging but very rewarding.”

Sort of like baseball.

Maybe that’s why he’s drawn to orthopedics as a potential specialty. He sees parallels between the batter’s box and the operating room, both places where you need to perform under pressure.

French and his fellow seniors made the walk from Boshamer Stadium following their May 9 win against Pittsburgh to nearby Kenan Stadium for Spring Commencement, an apt metaphor for French’s balancing act in Chapel Hill.

“The standard here is so high, whether it’s athletics or academics,” he said. “It definitely has pushed me to become a better version of myself because I’m held to a high standard by so many people here on campus.”

By Brennan Doherty, University Communications and Marketing

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Aristotle, once considered the father of biology, is recognized today as a central figure of Western ancient philosophy. Despite his empirical observations, Aristotle’s false claims and assumptions about women and women’s health create a complex image of the ancient philosopher.

A complicated image of Aristotle

Philosophy professor Mariska Leunissen doesn’t want to excuse or ignore these ideas, but insists on confronting them head-on. Leunissen argues that doing so will help us better understand how similar biases persists, even today.

“If we want to use Aristotle as a sort of paragon – as one of the greatest philosophers – and we want to preserve some of his theories, we ought to reckon with the dark spots as well,” said Leunissen.

Her engagement with Aristotle is not just academic, but reflective of her internal struggles. “I spend all my time trying to understand this guy who thinks that as a foreign woman, I am inferior and cannot be happy, cannot be virtuous.”

Leunissen’s most recent monograph examines Aristotle’s views on women, including the scientific falsehoods he perpetuated.

This encouraged Leunissen to think about how Aristotle learned about women. This culminated in Leunissen’s third monograph, Aristotle’s Gynecology: Facts, Evidence and Early Medicine, published last year by Oxford University Press.

Aristotle believed that women were inferior by nature and therefore could not become fully virtuous, and though many of his scientific claims and observations about women are empirically correct, his works also include several that are false, some of them obviously so. Often relying on secondhand reports of early medical texts for phenomena tied to female sex and bodies, Aristotle would not always independently verify information. This oversight led to his claims that women had fewer teeth than men, or that when menstruating women looked into a mirror, the mirror turned red.

This creates a complicated image of Aristotle. On one hand, he believed in authoritative observations to explain natural phenomena, and that when we can’t observe phenomena ourselves, that we rely on other scientific methods a credible truth. On the other hand, Aristotle himself often relied on incorrect reports from early medical writers about gynecological phenomena and accepted the contemporary view about the biological inferiority of women without scrutinizing it. This paradox is one that Leunissen also grapples with.

“I want to understand why he had these views, and then maybe I can understand better our own world,” she said.

Bringing ancient philosophy to the modern campus

Leunissen’s work in the classroom reflects her commitment to make philosophy more inclusive, accessible, and engaging. Early in her career, she taught ancient philosophy traditionally, through the lens of canonical texts and a focus on metaphysics and epistemology.

More recently, with support from the Chapman Family Teaching Award, Leunissen has redesigned her courses to revolve around themes that resonate more directly with students’ lives, including love, friendship, and family, and that include the perspectives of women and non-Greeks in the ancient world. This has allowed her to introduce more diverse voices like Sappho and treat her account of love alongside that of Empedocles, noting the evident absence of texts written by women in ancient philosophy.

These conversations invite students to connect texts of Plato and Aristotle to contemporary concerns and experiences. The ancient philosophers ask what love can do, a contrast to the hate we see in today’s political climate. “What would it cost us? What does it take for us to see other people in our community as friends or as family?”

The Chapman Award has also supported the development of a new lecture series, intended to be an interdisciplinary discussion to rethink how ancient philosophy is taught. Scholars in adjacent fields like political science and history would engage in pedagogical lectures – not only presenting their research in their respective sectors, but also how less familiar texts can be integrated into their classes, all with the goal of “expanding the canon.”

Looking ahead, Leunissen is already developing future projects. One book explores Aristotle’s “natural” concepts of love and friendship-relationships, such as those between parents and children, or enslavers and the enslaved. She also plans to continue her research on how women’s emotions, sleep, and the concept of aging have been represented in ancient philosophy.

Across her research and teaching Aristotle, one idea persists: unbridled curiosity.

“Even if you make mistakes, you should push to expand your knowledge and not settle,” said Leunissen. “You run into obstacles and you come up with creative ways to overcome them.”

By Victoria Yang, Institute for the Arts and Humanities

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Three UNC-Chapel Hill faculty members — Peter Coclanis, Myron Cohen and Audra Rankin — received this year’s Faculty Awards for Global Excellence.

UNC Global Affairs invites nominations from faculty, staff and students to recognize faculty members whose contributions advance the University’s “unwavering commitment to excellence as one of the world’s great research universities.”

In April, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Magnus Egerstedt, Vice Provost for Global Affairs and Chief Global Officer Barbara Stephenson and Associate Provost for Global Affairs Heather Ward presented the awards during a reception for awardees, their families, and other Carolina faculty, staff and alumni.

“With lux, libertas — light and liberty — as its founding principles, the University has charted a bold course of leading change to improve society and to help solve the world’s greatest problems,” Stephenson said. “At this great research university, we are competitive, committed to excellence. These three awardees have set quite the example for us.”

Peter A. Coclanis is the Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and director of Carolina’s Global Research Institute.

Since arriving at UNC-Chapel Hill more than 40 years ago, Peter Coclanis has helped to achieve UNC-Chapel Hill’s mission through, according to Stephenson, his “invaluable and enduring contributions to infusing our campus with a global mindset.”

In the early 1990s, Coclanis traveled to Singapore as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar. Since then, he helped orchestrate Carolina’s long-standing and prolific partnership with National University of Singapore (NUS). That experience led to decades of sustained collaboration between the two universities, including study abroad and exchanges that have sent more than 700 Carolina students to Singapore. Coclanis also helped launch initiatives like the Carolina Southeast Asia Summer (SEAS) program, which enabled more than 300 students to study in the region.

“Getting to know scholars (and institutions) 10,000 miles away has allowed me to see how much brilliance there is in the world,” Coclanis said. “How much talent there is elsewhere, and how much better scholars and institutions would be if they were able to tap into that brilliance and talent in creative, sustainable and mutually beneficial ways.”

From 2003 to 2009, Coclanis served as associate provost for international affairs during a key period for Carolina’s international engagement. In that role, he expanded Carolina’s commitment to study abroad, strengthened global partnerships and helped oversee construction of the FedEx Global Education Center.

He has also advanced Carolina’s research mission as founder and director of the Global Research Institute, where he often connects the American South to broader global economic and historical questions, linking regional expertise to international debates and policy challenges. Under his leadership, the GRI has convened thinkers on the 2007-2008 financial crisis, global water systems, food security and the future of capitalism. The latest GRI project culminated in the recent publication of a book, Challenging Capitalism: Paths Taken, Roads Ahead.

This summer, Coclanis will retire from the University, ending a career defined by globally engaged scholarship in and out of the classroom and service to the University and the state.

“I’ve been here 42 years and have been deeply involved in international activities since the 1990s, so I’ve been able to watch the University evolve and become more globally oriented without straying from its mission to serve the people of the state of North Carolina,” Coclanis said. “The evolution of the University gives me great satisfaction, and I feel honored to have been involved to some degree in the process.”

Learn more about the award and all three of this year’s recipients.

By UNC Global Affairs

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Using her extensive experience understanding the interplay between light and chemistry, Dempsey will use the award to study how light energy could be used to make chemical compounds that can’t be made any other way. (Submitted photo)

Jillian Dempsey has made an illustrious career studying how to harness and convert energy from the sun.

As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she became interested in how light and chemistry interact, particularly in how negatively charged particles called electrons organize themselves within molecules. Dempsey was especially fascinated by how photons — microscopic particles of light with incredible properties — can shift that organization.

Currently the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill, Dempsey researches how to convert the sun’s energy into chemical fuels. Her work has earned her many accolades, including the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, the Air Force Young Investigator Research Program award and a coveted Sloan Research Fellowship.

Dempsey has also become a leader in the solar energy community, empowering her faculty colleagues and both graduate and undergraduate students. She serves as director of Carolina’s Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels (CHASE), a hub for solar fuels research and part of the University’s Sustainable Energy Research Consortium.

But now, Dempsey is ready to try something new. Thanks to the prestigious Brown Investigator Award from the Brown Institute of Basic Sciences at California Institute of Technology, she can.

The award, established in 2020, offers mid-career scientists up to $2 million for high-risk, high-reward projects that could substantially benefit society. Dempsey is the first awardee from Carolina, and she joins just 36 other researchers who have received the award since 2021.

“My hope is that these awards will provide talented mid-career researchers with stable and secure funding at a moment of their career when they are poised to make a significant impact in their field, giving them time to focus and develop their line of thinking,” said Ross M. Brown, whose philanthropic gift established the Brown Investigator Award program.

“The Brown Award offers mid-career investigators the opportunity to keep their research programs dynamic and take risks,” Dempsey said. “I’m excited that I have a chance to try something I’ve been thinking about for a while now.”

Dempsey’s innovative project builds upon her experience with solar energy. Thus far, she has explored how photons can provide the energy necessary to convert basic chemical building blocks into complex fuels. This can help overcome some of the current limitations of solar energy, such as storage and portability.

“If the energy that goes into these reactions comes from the sun, effectively, we are storing the sun’s energy in the fuel’s chemical bonds,” Dempsey said.

But recently, Dempsey has wondered if she can use her knowledge of how light energy rearranges electrons to try and make other complex molecules. She’s taken inspiration from organic chemists studying how photons can drive the creation of pharmaceuticals.

The advantages of using light to power these processes are twofold. Light energy could replace the heat typically required to drive these reactions, making them more energy efficient. But Dempsey is more interested in the other advantage: The unique ways in which photons rearrange electrons could, in conjunction with a metal catalyst, create compounds that can’t be made any other way.

“Interactions with light may give you a totally different energy landscape that leads to a different product,” Dempsey said. “These hidden reaction pathways may take us to molecules that could never otherwise be synthesized or offer a more direct and efficient way to create existing molecules.”

That sort of potential reminds Dempsey of the start of her career, when the sustainable energy movement was flourishing, and the downstream impacts on society were clear. She’s thankful that, after all this time, the work she loves continues to make a difference in the world.

“We can go into the lab every day ready to save the world, but we have to solve some very fundamental challenges using very basic chemistry. And we have to love that type of chemistry,” Dempsey said. “I’m grateful I found that perfect match between beautiful science that excites me and makes me curious and work where I can see the impact.”

Learn more about Dempsey’s research.

By Calley Jones

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Janani Shivakumar founded Girls Play Global to give rural Indian girls the chance to play the sport she fell in love with as a teenager. (Submitted photo)

In middle school, Janani Shivakumar moved from New Jersey back to her family’s native India. Shivakumar’s parents wanted to give their daughter a more global perspective and share their family’s cultural heritage with her.

But she was frustrated. Just before the move, a teenage Shivakumar had fallen in love with soccer, watching U.S. women’s soccer stars like Alex Morgan dominate on the world stage. When Shivakumar tried to sign up for a girls soccer team in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, she discovered no such team existed.

“In India there is a huge taboo around girls playing sports, especially male-dominated sports like soccer,” said Shivakumar, a 2026 UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School graduate who also majored in economics in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences.

Janani Shivakumar’s family moved to India to broaden her worldview; however, when she had no place to play soccer, she resolved to change that. (Submitted photo)

“When I had approached my school at the time, they basically were like, ‘We don’t have a girls soccer team, and we don’t plan on starting one anytime soon.’”

Undeterred, Shivakumar joined a boys club team. She was the only female player among 100 boys and barely spoke the native language.

When the family moved back to New Jersey four years later, Shivakumar resolved to fight back against the taboo she experienced in India. With the help of her parents, she started a nonprofit called Girls Play Global to empower young girls in rural India.

Since 2019, Shivakumar has held yearly soccer tournaments (with a break during the pandemic) in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, reaching nearly 1,000 girls.

Each year, the tournaments center around one of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals — themes such as promoting peace, gender equality and climate action — and include workshops and learning opportunities for the participants.

“I didn’t want any other girl to go through what I had,” said Shivakumar, asked by the United Nations to speak about her work many times. “There was a lack of support from coaches, my peers, and I think a lot of that very early on in your life changes the way that you think about yourself and other people. I made it my priority to do something to help those girls, which led to me wanting to pursue a career in impact.”

Making a difference

Janani Shivakumar with participants at the 2025 tournament. Since 2019, Girls Play Global has brought nearly 1,000 girls to the field. (Submitted photo)

The Honors Carolina student balanced these efforts with a rigorous course load at Carolina and studied abroad in Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Uruguay, South Africa and Argentina.

Before graduation, she credited Carolina, especially Kenan-Flagler, for helping her crystalize her career goals.

“When I came to Carolina, I knew that I always wanted to have a career with some sort of impact, and I just didn’t know what that looked like,” she said. “Once I got into the B-School, I was so surprised by how much impact you can actually have in the business world.”

Specifically, Shivakumar learned about the fields of impact investing and sustainable investing, joining the Impact Investing Club at Carolina and connecting with the Ackerman Center for Excellence and Sustainability, where she helps conduct diligence and make early-stage investments through the Impact Investing Fund.

Those experiences have also helped Shivakumar scale Girls Play Global. Each year she’s held the tournament, she’s seen more girls come from farther away to play. Gradually, she’s witnessed the taboos she encountered lessen. The competition has grown fiercer, and girls soccer teams have formed throughout Tamil Nadu with the sole purpose of participating in Shivakuar’s tournaments.

“There was one moment in the most recent tournament where I was just standing there in awe of how good these girls were,” said Shivakumar, noting that it used to be a challenge to get girls on the field.

“Seeing the skill level grow over time has probably been the most inspiring thing for me.”

By Michael Lananna, University Communications and Marketing

The post Girls Play Global thanks to this Tar Heel appeared first on College of Arts and Sciences.

“I am so thankful for the people at Carolina who allowed me to cultivate and pursue the college experience I had: faculty, peers, advisers and everything in between,” Yang said. (Submitted photo)

Willow Taylor Chiang Yang ’25 of Burlingame, California, has received the Barry scholarship to pursue a master’s in political research at the University of Oxford. She will begin her graduate studies this fall.

The John and Daria Barry scholarship for study in the University of Oxford began in 2019 and is awarded to the leading students of the United States in recognition of their dedication to the pursuit of truth.

Yang earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction in American political economy and a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences. She is the third Barry scholarship recipient from UNC-Chapel Hill.

For Yang, the decision to pursue graduate study at Oxford grew out of her academic interests and her study abroad program at the London School of Economics.

“It’s at the intersection of a lot of things I’m excited about personally and professionally right now,” said Yang, who created her own interdisciplinary studies major as an undergraduate.

At Oxford, Yang plans to focus on questions related to work, labor and decision-making, interests she developed through coursework and research at Carolina.

“I’ve found that I’m drawn to questions about work and labor: What individual-level factors influence our work choices?” Yang said. “What does it mean to do ‘meaningful’ work, and what would that look like on a broader scale? What can macroeconomic trends in labor supply tell us about the cultural and social moment?”

At Carolina, Yang pursued research and civic engagement at the intersection of politics and economics. She conducted research on political polarization with faculty, participated in voter mobilization efforts and contributed to the Krasno Events Series, helping organize international policy discussions with scholars and practitioners. She also wrote a senior honors thesis examining the relationship between socioeconomic status and career decision-making.

“I am so thankful for the people at Carolina who allowed me to cultivate and pursue the college experience I had: faculty, peers, advisers and everything in between,” Yang said.

Through Morehead-Cain, Yang participated in summer enrichment internships, independent projects and travel supported by the Lovelace Fund for Discovery, which she described as an opportunity to pursue self-directed projects.

“You just have this ultimate financial freedom at your disposal with which to do something cool, powerful, fascinating. That opportunity was a little paralyzing at first, but I’m so glad I was able to use that funding over the years to build some one-of-a-kind experiences that would’ve been near-impossible otherwise.”

Yang also reflected on her Outdoor Leadership as informing her sense of resilience.

“Just knowing that I survived being almost totally off grid for three weeks … is such a source of comfort and pride and assurance that no matter what, even if I have to retreat into the Minnesota Boundary Waters for a month, I’ll be OK,” Yang said.

At Oxford, she plans to continue developing her quantitative research skills through coursework and independent study.

Marc Howlett, executive director of the Office of Distinguished Scholarships in Honors Carolina, said Yang’s time on campus prepared her well to succeed at Oxford.

“At Carolina, Willow developed a track record of pragmatic, open-minded and collaborative leadership to address pressing issues,” he said. “We are excited to see her wide-ranging impact at Oxford and beyond.”

By Sarah O’Carroll, Morehead-Cain

The post Willow Taylor Chiang Yang selected as Barry scholar appeared first on College of Arts and Sciences.