Artificial intelligence (AI) is quietly working behind the scenes in many aspects of everyday life — from personalized recommendations on apps like Netflix and Spotify to predictive text and autocorrect features on smartphones.

Creating personalized food plans

Deborah Tate (photo by Megan Mendenhall)

Imagine a future where a person’s diet can be customized to align perfectly with their body’s unique makeup, helping to prevent the effects of chronic and progressive diseases like obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

This vision is the driving force behind Nutrition for Precision Health, powered by the All of Us Research Program. This $170 million investment from the National Institutes of Health Common Fund aims to explore how genetics, gut bacteria, environment, and lifestyle influence our responses to food. What makes this initiative particularly innovative is its use of AI.

“Historically, we’ve been looking at the average effects. For every intervention we’ve tried, half the people have succeeded, and half the people haven’t,” explains Deborah Tate, who is co-leading the study with nutrition professor Elizabeth Mayer-Davis. “We’re trying to move away from what works best on average to what works best for the individual.”

The goal is to develop algorithms to retreat from one-size-fits-all diets and instead personalize nutrition for each person’s unique needs. These algorithms look at weight, age, blood sugar levels, and other health information to predict a food regimen that can meet specific health goals like controlling blood sugar or lowering blood pressure. These advances provide unprecedented opportunities to generate new data offering insight into precision nutrition.

“Many of these lifestyle changes have profound impacts on health, and it’s been undersold because we have not been personalizing,” Tate shares. “So, imagine our ability to use AI to help personalize in real-time to find the right intervention and support so that prevention reaches its full potential and people live healthier lives.”

Mapping safer roads

Raghavan Srinivasan (photo by Megan Mendenhall)

Behind every safe road trip lies significant but often unseen effort: research, innovation, and collaboration. Researchers like Raghavan “Srini” Srinivasan, a senior transportation research engineer at the UNC Highway Safety Research Center, play a crucial role in this process by studying how drivers behave, analyzing traffic data, and developing solutions to prevent crashes and injuries on the road.

Many state agencies have information about their roads, like the number of lanes, their width, traffic volume, and features like shoulders and curves.

“But gaps come in when you’re talking about the roadside beyond the shoulder, like if guardrails, poles, or other objects are present,” Srinivasan explains. “Many state agencies do not have the information about poles and other objects that are beyond the shoulder.”

Inserting guardrails can prevent vehicles from straying too far off the road, while strategically placing utility poles in areas where runaway cars are less likely to collide with them can help reduce the severity of accidents.

“If state agencies have this information, they could be proactive in trying to mitigate any potential issues,” he says.

To address this, Srinivasan and his colleagues at the HSRC partnered with RENCI, Carolina’s computing institute, to use AI to assist in identifying these objects.

The RENCI team created an annotation tool to help N.C. Department of Transportation personnel review video logs of North Carolina roadways to identify the presence of guardrails or utility poles along the roadside. This process generated a dataset to train AI models to detect these objects. In the next phase of the project, the team is developing an AI model that can pinpoint the exact coordinates of these objects and is using a mapping technology called LiDAR to verify it.

“Traditionally, research in transportation safety was focused on analyzing data that could be collected within the confines of budgets and schedules,” Srinivasan says. “Over the next few years, I hope researchers will have access to data that were not available earlier.”

Improving science education

Ha Nguyen (photo by Megan Mendenhall)

AI is helping educators and researchers create innovative ways to support student learning.

Ha Nguyen, a professor in the UNC School of Education, focuses on the intersection of education and technology, especially how students learn in science classes. Her work explores how chatbots and other digital learning technology can help promote collaborative learning, critical thinking, and understanding of scientific concepts.

Nguyen thinks through how chatbots can help students identify with scientists and construct their own scientific identity. For her current project, she’s interviewing local residents and students about topics like sustainability, the values they associate with their sense of place, and the effects of severe weather on these values to train chatbots to create more relatable and realistic responses.

While ethical considerations like trust and privacy are important, Nguyen wants to create interactions that support students and build their understanding. Instead of simply providing facts, the chatbots ask follow-up questions and offer resources, giving students more control and encouraging active learning.

Another strand of Nguyen’s work is designing AI technology to help researchers analyze and understand data more effectively. Some of this involves using models that can handle non-textual data, like images and audio, to process science assessment outcomes and other information that teachers already collect from the classroom. The goal is to provide students with tailored feedback and follow-up questions related to their performance.

“That level of teasing out student thinking and their responses is really important,” Nguyen says. “But teachers don’t always have the time to do it.”

Her work also explores how researchers can use AI to help them analyze challenging educational data like interviews and survey responses.

“Education is going to change, and the way we support learning is going to change,” Nguyen shares. “It’s important to think about how these technologies can support and transform people’s learning.”

The post AI Insights appeared first on UNC Research Stories.

Q: Describe your research in five words.

A: AI agents enable scientific discoveries.

Q: Who or what inspires you? Why?

A: Research for human beings. The world faces many threats in terms of food, energy, climate, health, and more. Some of these issues seems far away from us, but they actually impact everyone’s day-to-day lives. One of my dreams is that my research benefits more people.

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

A: Working for a startup focused on AI for science that would affect a lot of people.

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Mapping mechanics

Growing up, Franz spent his summers on the eastern shore of Maryland with his grandfather. Over time, he saw the toll that aging could take on a man that had once been active.

“I watched him go from being the most physically capable person that I knew to becoming frail,” Franz says.  “He had difficulty with walking and standing up out of a chair and eventually started falling. And it struck me that we could probably do better as engineers in coming up with solutions to meet the needs of those in our rapidly aging communities.”

His lab’s research has led to important findings about how aging impacts walking and mobility. Older adults experience changes in how the body moves and how the nervous system controls movement — changes that can make someone more likely to feel tired or to fall.

One key finding is that older adults often exhibit less vigor when pushing off the ground, which leads to shorter, shuffling steps and slower walking speeds. This change is primarily due to muscle redistribution. Older adults rely more on their hip and thigh muscles, which cost us more energy than the ankle muscles used by younger adults.

Franz’s team also found that the Achilles tendon, which plays a critical role in pushing off the ground during walking, loses its stiffness with age. As the tendon loosens, it doesn’t stretch and recoil as effectively. This change means the muscles attached to it, mainly those in the calf, must contract more to produce the same movement, leading to higher muscle activation, increased energy consumption, and more fatigue.

This makes older adults more vulnerable to losing their balance, especially during longer walks or on uneven terrain. The lab’s work is focused on developing interventions to mitigate this.

They use tools like wearable sensors, 3D motion capture cameras, force sensors on a treadmill, and video X-ray to provide real-time biofeedback or inform assistive technologies. That data can help individuals adjust their gait and walking patterns, making them more dynamic and less prone to falls.

Lasting balance

Franz meets with study participants, physical therapists, and members of the older population regularly to ensure his work is having the impact he intends and to address their needs directly.

“We want to have genuine impact when we’re doing a study, and the only way we can do that is by speaking the language of the individuals who might make use of the work we’re doing,” he explains.

“I find that I do kind of trip on my foot every now and then just walking outside,” Christopher says. “My mother has experienced a couple of falls, and she’s 90 now. And so I want to avoid that in my future.

Franz also prioritizes mentoring and teaching in his lab. The curiosity and tenacity that postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate researchers bring to his research gives him hope for the future of the field.

“As we advocate for the fields of rehabilitation engineering and biomechanics more broadly, I would love to see a greater understanding of the impact we’re having on the world,” he says.

The post Science in Every Step appeared first on UNC Research Stories.

He eventually pivoted to research in pharmaceutical outcomes and policy, driven by a deeper desire to understand — not just treat.

Decoding deprescribing

If prescribing is an action — something a doctor does — then deprescribing is more of a question. It asks: Is this still the right medication for this person at this stage of their life?

Deprescribing doesn’t mean cutting corners or taking people off meds just for the sake of it. It means zooming out, seeing the full picture of someone’s health, and reconsidering the long list of prescriptions that may have accumulated over years, even decades. It means choosing quality over quantity. Relief over routine.

“The ultimate goal is to reduce the number of pills someone takes, making it easier for them to manage their prescriptions,” Niznik explains. “I mean, it’s a lot to take 10 pills. It’s more about personalizing the goals of each of the treatments that they’re receiving so that it’s more aligned with maximizing safety and minimizing risk.”

Take diabetes, for example. For younger adults, the focus is often strict blood sugar control and keeping glucose levels in a tight range. But for an 85-year-old with a history of falls, memory issues, or other chronic conditions, the risks of that aggressive control — like low blood sugar or dizziness — can outweigh the benefits. In that case, backing off the medication can actually be the safer choice.

And then there are over-the-counter drugs, like Benadryl. It’s easy to grab from a pharmacy shelf, but for older adults, the active ingredient — diphenhydramine — can cause confusion and memory problems.

“As we age, we get more vulnerable to the negative side effects of medications,” Niznik says. “Our bodies don’t process or eliminate medications as well. And so what would be a normal dose for a younger, healthier person can end up being a really high systemic exposure.”

And older adults are vastly underrepresented in research. Although he is no longer a practicing clinical pharmacist, Niznik is driven to encourage a sense of agency and purpose in patients as they age, with support from their caregivers and providers.

Purposeful pills

Niznik’s research may be driven by patient stories and interactions, but that is only part of the work he does. He interviews patients, caregivers, and health care providers to gather insights that don’t always show up in lab results or charts. These conversations often reveal the emotional terrain of deprescribing, like the fear of change.

The other side of his work is rooted in data — and lots of it. Niznik analyzes enormous health care datasets like Medicare records, electronic health records, and databases from the Veterans Health Administration.

Thanks to Carolina’s robust hospital system, access to this information is much easier. Niznik uses their anonymous data to look for patterns over time, like who is on what prescriptions, when their medications get discontinued, and what happens after. He hopes to connect the dots between medication use and real-world health outcomes, especially for older adults with complex needs.

“I try to identify groups of people who would be targets for deprescribing,” he clarifies. “So often it’s people with dementia or with a prognosis of less than six months, and people who are near end-of-life. We look at their prescription refill records and basically try to piece it together like a daily diary.”

In one study, Niznik found that people who take 10 or more medications are less likely to discontinue or have doctors deprescribe any of their prescriptions. While these patients seem like logical candidates for deprescribing, Niznik and his team realized they need a more nuanced approach for identifying candidates for medication reduction.

Even though this research might start with interviews and spreadsheets, it is helping reshape how health care systems think about prescribing in older adults.

Niznik is also using data from electronic health care records to compare documents that list patient goals with their medications and determine if those two factors are aligned. For example, if a patient prioritizes staying mentally sharp enough to play with their grandkids, that value should guide how doctors approach drugs that might impact cognition.

“Patient awareness and engagement are what our field needs to drive deprescribing,” Niznik says. “Patients have access to more information, they can ask more questions, and they should ask questions. They should feel empowered to check the decisions that are being made.”

The post Rewriting the Prescription appeared first on UNC Research Stories.

Boosting mobility for people with Parkinson’s disease

photo by Megan Mendenhall

UNC School of Medicine researcher Mike Lewek is running a clinical trial with colleagues Eran Dayan and Nina Browner to improve walking for people with Parkinson’s disease.

What is your research focus?

We work with people who have Parkinson’s disease (PD), a brain disorder impacting movement, balance, and coordination. These individuals often walk with slow, short, shuffling steps. As part of our rehabilitation process, we help them take longer steps by synchronizing their steps to a metronome, a tool used to maintain tempo in music.

Metronomes provide timing cues that aid in learning to move more effectively. Our practice facilitates use-dependent learning, repeating desired movements over and over to change movement patterns.

Tell us about the clinical trial you’re running.

We are examining how we can use various forms of motor learning to create durable, long-term effects on walking for people with PD. My lab has developed a unique method of using a metronome that addresses both the timing and the distance of the steps that people take, parameters that are important to improving walking.

In our clinical trial we are comparing walking with and without this cueing to improve long-term retention of walking. Participants do a series of baseline tests and then complete 12 training visits over a month. They then repeat the walking tests after we complete training, and again three months later to determine how much of the changes they have retained.

Participants also undergo an MRI of their brains to see how the brain changes as it learns. This information will help us understand how to structure interventions that make use of intact pathways, connections, and subsections of the brain. Ultimately, we hope to make our walking changes more durable for longer-term impacts.

What would you like to see happen in the future for your research in the clinical trials space?

I would like to expand my clinical trials to multiple sites and move into community settings. Currently, our work is done in a research lab due to specific data collection needs, but training can be done anywhere with a treadmill. I’d like to partner with outpatient facilities to replicate our findings on a larger scale and measure longer-term outcomes. Just because something works well in a research setting doesn’t mean that it will work everywhere, so translating those findings is critical.

Expanding life expectancy for people with brain cancer

photo by Megan Mendenhall

UNC School of Medicine researcher Soma Sengupta is running clinical trials to develop new treatments for an aggressive type of brain cancer called glioblastoma.

What is your research focus?

I’m a physician-scientist specializing in brain tumor treatment and research, and my primary focus is to improve treatment outcomes for patients with brain cancer. The standard approach for treating glioblastoma does not significantly extend the survival outcomes of patients. The journeys of the patients and their families are so hard that I feel my colleagues and I need to shift treatment paradigms to make a difference.

Tell us about the clinical trials you’re running.

My team, which consists of scientists, research coordinators, and regulatory personnel, is currently running over nine trials.

An example of one of these clinical trials is for patients with a new diagnosis of unmethylated MGMT promoter glioblastomas — a type of aggressive, malignant brain tumor.  Participants will be randomly assigned to two different doses of a new cancer drug called ropidoxuridine during six weeks of radiation therapy.

We also have an expanded access program for patients who have exhausted available treatments. They will try a new oral therapy called gallium maltolate, which has proven effective for patients with various cancers.

Have you made any discoveries thus far?

I have discovered how a neurotransmitter receptor in the brain, called GABA-A, works in cancer and immune cells and have established how it can be targeted with a new class of molecules for treatment. GABA-A receptors are a therapeutic target for drugs like benzodiazepines, which can help alleviate anxiety, insomnia, and nausea.

GABA is also found throughout nature. Plants and insects need it to survive. It helps transport metabolites — small molecules that break down substances — into cells. For example, if you go into a field of lavender, you’ll start to feel relaxed because the fragrance is acting on your GABA-A receptor.

The same receptor is present in cancer cells, but it acts differently in non-cancerous cells. We have identified a class of drugs that can kill the cancer cells through this receptor, without affecting normal cells in the same way.

What are your hopes for the future of clinical trials?

A huge part of my research is centered on advocating for patients and caregivers and advancing technologies that have the potential to improve patient quality of life through art, music, and creative writing.

I’m currently collaborating on a study assessing an app for young adults who have survived cancer. It provides them with digital art therapy through weekly prompts to improve their moods. The app was created by a team of designers, artists, art therapists, and clinicians working together to find new ways to help patients.

Whether I’m advocating for the patient, working in the lab, or studying apps, my focus is on improving the quality of life for these patients and improving their outcomes.

Preventing and treating diseases with omega-3s

photo by Megan Mendenhall

UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health researcher Saame “Raz” Shaikh is running clinical trials to test how omega-3 fatty acids may prevent and treat various diseases.

What is your research focus?

Long chain omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in oily fish and as dietary supplements, are poorly consumed in the Western diet. In fact, some argue that we are highly deficient in omega-3s, which may help prevent and treat various diseases.

I am focused on understanding how increased dietary consumption of omega-3 fatty acids can improve differing aspects of human health. For example, I am interested in understanding the mechanisms by which long chain omega-3 fatty acids lower chronic inflammation in obesity and other diseases.

Thus far, select omega-3s are clinically approved for lowering elevated triglycerides — a type of fat — and lowering the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Data also suggests they may have a role in infant development, preventing pre-term births, and treating select aspects of depression.

Tell us about the clinical trials you’re running.

We recently completed a clinical trial with a unique fish oil that is high in a fatty acid known as omega-7 to treat inflammation in healthy adults. We are also starting a study with a unique omega-3-enriched fish oil in adults with obesity. Our work is being conducted at the UNC Nutrition Research Institute in Kannapolis, N.C.

Have you made any discoveries thus far?

We are studying how metabolites made from omega-3s, which we think are critical for inflammation, increase upon omega-3 consumption. Thus far, we have found that some metabolites increase in the blood after a month of dietary supplementation in adults with obesity. Our goal now is to test a long-term, 12-week intervention to determine if key molecules made from omega-3s are increased in the blood.

What would you like to see happen in the future for your research in the clinical trials space?

Our immediate goal of the research program is to further test the effects of omega-3 fatty acids for improving inflammation by establishing mechanisms and efficacy in the adult population with obesity. The proof-of-concept efficacy part will require placebo-controlled clinical trials focused on inflammation in select patient populations based upon their genetic background and other variables. We also aim to increase consumption of omega-3s in North Carolinians with increased consumption of fish off our own coast.

Transforming care for people with breast cancer

photo by Megan Mendenhall

UNC School of Medicine researcher Lisa Carey is running clinical trials to improve breast cancer treatments.

What is your research focus?

In addition to being a breast cancer doctor, I design and run clinical trials, either testing treatment approaches or examining biologic features as predictors of treatment effectiveness or survival. Those trials are based on clinical challenges I see my patients struggle with every day.

Tell us about the clinical trials you’re running.

There are many trials at Carolina — we have a very engaged group of researchers! I have two that I am particularly involved with. One is testing whether knowledge of the underlying biology of breast cancer helps oncologists make better treatment decisions for incurable or metastatic disease, when cancer cells have spread to other parts of the body. The other trial is examining features of antibody-drug conjugates, a type of cancer treatment that combines a monoclonal antibody — a protein made in a lab to mimic a part of the immune system — with a chemotherapy drug.

Beyond my work at UNC-Chapel Hill, I co-chair the breast cancer committee for a national clinical trials network that runs National Cancer Institute-sponsored clinical trials in the U.S. and Canada. In this setting, I have helped develop and run several trials, including two that are designed to evaluate if therapy can be safely shortened to improve patient comfort. A third trial is testing a lower dose of a common drug to see if it is as effective as a higher dose in order to reduce side effects. Another trial is examining whether adding more medications for high-risk breast cancer can improve the cure rate.

Have you made any discoveries thus far?

The work that I did at Carolina, along with multiple international collaborators, led to the development of a test that may allow us to tailor therapy safely and effectively in a particular kind of breast cancer.

For the national clinical trials network, trials that I oversee have demonstrated that:

• aspirin does not help prevent breast cancer recurrence;
• combining two antiestrogen therapies together does not provide additional benefits compared to using just one;
• adding a targeted drug to metastatic treatment of a particular kind of breast cancer doubled the amount of time that the cancer was controlled; and
• you can safely perform lumpectomies, instead of a mastectomy, in patients diagnosed with multiple breast cancers.

What would you like to see happen in the future for your research in the clinical trials space?

I think there is a huge challenge in supporting young physician scientists getting started in research. We also need to simplify clinical trials so that they can be less expensive and easier to run.

The post Trial and Discovery appeared first on UNC Research Stories.

Now at Carolina, Zimmerman is the nation’s top-ranked social work scholar on aging and long-term care. She is a distinguished professor in the UNC School of Social Work; co-director of the Program on Aging, Chronic Illness, and Long-Term Care at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research; and executive director of CEAL@UNC — a national center advancing the well-being of people who work and live in assisted living communities.

She has written five books and published over 450 peer-reviewed studies, and her work has been cited nearly 31,000 times. In 2022, she was recognized for her incredible contributions to the field with the Kleemeier Award from the Gerontological Society of America, and in 2024, she received the Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Social Work and Research.

“The welfare of older adults affects everyone,” Zimmerman says. “We’re all growing older, and we all have someone in our family who already is older, from parents to aunts and uncles. And in the next 10 years, the number of older adults is going to exceed the number of people aged 18 and younger.”

A researcher at heart

Growing up as a middle child in the suburbs of Chicago, Zimmerman would watch her family’s daily interactions. She’s always been tuned into how people affect each other within systems.

“In some ways, having a psychosocial perspective was the core of who I was from a young age,” she says.

Psychosocial research explores the intersection of psychological and social conditions — and how those factors impact behavior, physical health, and well-being.

Inspired by her intro to psychology class at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and her older brother’s research with police departments, Zimmerman decided to major in social work and minor in criminal justice. She began conducting research as a first-year undergraduate student and went on to earn a master’s and PhD in social work. Her dissertation assessed interactions between police officers and social workers affiliated with police departments.

When Zimmerman landed her first faculty position in the epidemiology department at the University of Maryland in 1989, she attended a gerontological conference that provided insight about the huge gap in research in assisted living, now the largest residential long-term care provider overall and for people with dementia.

“At that point, I was a strong psychosocial and health services researcher — and I think someone who’s a researcher at heart can find passion to study almost anything,” she says. “As soon as I started getting involved in research with older adults, I realized it’s a population where so much could be done and where a little would go a long way. And so from the beginning, I saw it as a place where I could make the most impact.”

Life-saving interventions

With 40 years in the field and hundreds of studies to her name, Zimmerman has worked on countless projects, from the impact of reducing antibiotic prescribing in nursing homes to dementia prevalence in assisted living to how this demographic was affected by the COVID pandemic.

One of her most impactful projects to date is an oral health intervention.

“You can tell the quality of care in a nursing home by looking at someone’s mouth,” she says.

Consider what happens sometimes while eating dinner with friends. While talking and chewing, food might go down “the wrong pipe,” meaning it enters the lungs and we, in response, cough until it comes out. That’s called aspiration.

Older adults who experience coughing or trouble breathing can aspirate bacteria from their mouth into their lungs, which could lead to an infection like pneumonia — which affects more than 250,000 nursing home residents annually, according to Zimmerman. The likelihood of pneumonia is higher when the teeth and gums harbor bacteria, and people who have experienced stroke or are living with Alzheimer’s disease or other cognitive impairments may not be able to brush their teeth.

In response, Zimmerman and Carolina colleagues Philip Sloane, John Preisser, and Patricia Poole developed an evidence-based training program for people with cognitive and physical impairment called “Mouth Care Without a Battle.” In a 2020 study, they found that training nursing home staff to provide daily mouth care using this program reduced pneumonia by 26%.

This toolkit provides information about cleaning older people’s teeth — like gentle brushing for broken teeth, dentures, and sensitive gums — and has been provided free of charge to nursing homes across North Carolina, Connecticut, Florida, and West Virginia.

“It’s not rocket science, but someone with dementia might back away and close their mouth when someone approaches them with a toothbrush,” Zimmerman says. “So staff need to learn sensitive care practices, like approach from the front and go slow.”

Zimmerman is equally proud of her research on a lighting system for doorframes that’s reduced falls at night by 34%. Falls are the leading cause of injury for adults 65 and older, according to the Centers for Disease Control. They can lead to muscle strains, bone breaks, and even death.

Not only was Zimmerman’s intervention successful, but it’s low-cost and easy to implement.

“I told my friend about it, and she decided to string Christmas lights around her mom’s bedroom door,” she shares with a laugh. “It’s a good start. Our lighting system is more fine-tuned than that.”

A center of aging expertise

For hundreds of years, families have taken care of older adults themselves. It wasn’t until the mid-1900s when private and public nursing homes started to develop nationwide, partially due to a shift in hospital rehabilitative care after World War II. As Medicare and Medicaid expanded coverage for care, more and more nursing homes were built.

By the 1980s, it became clear that not everyone needing supportive care required nursing care, and so assisted living — a model more focused on person-centered care rather than medical care — mushroomed. Assisted living communities help people with housekeeping, medications, and other daily tasks, but don’t provide nursing care. Between 1990 and 2002, the number of assisted living beds grew by 97%.

In the early 2000s, the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging convened a hearing on assisted living to better understand this burgeoning industry, resulting in a workgroup to address guidelines for policy, regulation, and operations. One recommendation was to create a national Center for Excellence in Assisted Living (CEAL). Founded in 2003, the center brought together experts from across the country to inform care practices — from medication management to information disclosure — and policies for the people who work and live in these communities.

Zimmerman has been involved with CEAL since its founding, and in 2023, oversaw its transition to Carolina. Today, she leads CEAL@UNC, which strives to bridge the gap between academic research, practice, policy, and public understanding; develops tools for medical and mental health care in assisted living; confers with legislative representatives to inform policy; and works with more than 100 organizational representatives and researchers involved in assisted living.

“I’ve never done research solely to publish papers,” Zimmerman says. “I do research because I want to inform practice and policy — and CEAL is all about that.”

Real-world application is key for Zimmerman. She wants to supply caregivers with knowledge they can implement immediately. We all know someone who is aging and needs care, even if they’re not dealing with decline from dementia.

After four decades of working with these communities, and taking care of her own parents, Zimmerman offers advice to anyone who might benefit from it.

“First, take a deep breath, and take stock of your capacity and well-being,” she advises. “If you over-tax yourself, no one wins. Second, learn about the issues affecting your family member or friend, which can inform how you interact on a day-to-day basis. Third, learn about and take advantage of the resources that are available. As the population has grown, so too have the resources to support their care and yours.”

The post Aging with Care appeared first on UNC Research Stories.

During my project, multiple clinicians told me that not only did they feel like they were being heard, but that they hoped this would bring about some of the changes they have been wanting to see. Our next challenge is living up to that promise and ensuring those improvements are implemented.

Q: Describe your research in five words.

A: Contextual clues uncover burnout blues.

Q: Who or what inspires you? Why?

A: Women scientists and leaders. My mentors. My family. My partner. They have all impacted and inspired me in different ways at different time periods of my life and motivated me to get to where I am today. They also give me inspiration when things in the world don’t seem great.

I also can’t forget my cat Billie Jean and dog Eleanor Rigby, who inspire me to keep working hard so I can continue feeding them fancy food.

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

A: I think it would be cool to be a food and travel journalist. I love to eat, travel, and eat while I travel, so to be paid to do that would be amazing.

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When she began studying at The Nueva School outside San Francisco, Chiang Yang took a seventh-grade elective on game theory and economics — her first academic introduction to the subject. Her teacher in that class became a key mentor, inspiring her interest in the intersection of economics, philosophy, and social justice. Years later, Chiang Yang was a student in his high school economics class. Now, she fondly recalls his support.

“He said to me, ‘I knew you as a seventh grader, and you were going to absolutely annihilate all those eighth-grade boys in the class,’” she says with a smile. ”At that moment, I thought economics was something that I could potentially do.”

Chiang Yang explored these interests outside the classroom, too. She founded her high school’s newspaper and began writing for a magazine. Through these experiences, she deepened her understanding of social issues and began to see the connections between media, activism, and the power structures that shape our lives.

Because of her diligent work in high school, Chiang Yang was awarded the Morehead-Cain scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill, which focuses on developing the next generation of leaders. She knew that Carolina was the place to continue exploring meaningful ways to engage with the world.

Finding her focus

When Chiang Yang started her undergraduate studies in 2021, she studied philosophy and created her own major in American political economy. Her academic path set the stage for her evolving research focus, which began to take shape during the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the pandemic reshaped labor markets, particularly with an increase in voluntary resignations, Chiang Yang became intrigued by the idea of a “values reorientation” in the workforce. She initially wanted to analyze long-term trends in work values, comparing shifts in the U.S. and China, even traveling to Shanghai to explore the cultural landscape. Faced with limited access to data, she pivoted her research to focus more narrowly on college-age students at UNC-Chapel Hill.

This pivot was influenced in part by her own experiences as a graduating senior, grappling with the same career anxieties and uncertainties she aimed to explore. She saw that college seniors were at a critical crossroads, making significant decisions about their futures, and recognized that their perspectives could offer invaluable insights into the evolving landscape of work values.

“When we talk about labor and the thing that we spend over a third of our lives doing, of course this is going to be a huge part of how you derive value, how you identify, how you explain living to other people,” she says.

With a clear focus in mind, Willow designed a survey that asked participants to rate 10 key work considerations — from job stability to reputation to personal interest — by placing each into one of three categories: “value it,” “don’t consider it,” or “actively try to reject it/avoid it.” Then, she had them rank the values by importance, providing insight into the magnitude of their preferences.

After hundreds of emails and numerous in-person surveys, Chiang Yang gathered responses from over 240 graduating seniors at Carolina.

“I’ve been lucky to have known and been friends with a lot of different kinds of people from different backgrounds,” she says. “And I’ve heard the variety of things that they’re thinking about.”

So far, Chiang Yang has uncovered some interesting results. For example, participants from lower and middle socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to place higher value on job stability and social impact compared to people from more affluent families. And people of all backgrounds rank their desire for personal fulfillment the same: It’s important.

Her thesis also examines the concept of “economic self-realization,” which explores whether people from different socioeconomic backgrounds truly have sufficient access to the career opportunities that align with their values.

Exploring divides

Outside of her thesis, Chiang Yang has found other ways to engage in research.

After taking a class with Carolina philosophy professor Luc Bovens, she began learning a programming language for data analysis. For the last three years, they’ve been analyzing data from the American National Election Survey and the General Social Survey to understand ideological differences between democrats and republicans with and without a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Their preliminary results indicate that, over the past few decades, preferences have become more strongly aligned with party affiliation rather than education level — a flip-flop from an earlier trend where educational level had a more significant correlation with political views. But Chiang Yang and Bovens have yet to run tests of statistical significance.

“It seems like our hypotheses are holding up, which is super cool,” Chiang Yang reflects.

While she hopes to continue contributing to this project after she graduates, she’d also like to spend a year traveling and then a few years working before pursuing a PhD. She’s enjoyed the research process so much that she knows she wants to do more of it in the future.

That’s because her research isn’t just an academic pursuit — it’s a lens through which she’s examining the world around her. She’s not just asking important questions about career values; she’s considering how to reshape the systems that influence those values.

“I think work has always been a really big part of my identity and a part of how I choose to interact with the world,” she reflects. “And it will continue to be so.”

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