“Accelerated” isn’t just the term for the classes Prachi Patel took starting in middle school, it’s been her whole approach to education. Patel sees life as one big interdisciplinary world, so when she loved everything she was doing and discovered more passions during her fast-track educational journey, she didn’t switch lanes, she simply added on. This December, after just three and a half years of college, Patel is graduating with three degrees: a Bachelor of Science in Math, a Bachelor of Science in Finance, and a Bachelor of Science in Economics.

Growing up, Patel looked up to her older brother, who has both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science from UNC Charlotte, and “he’s the reason why I didn’t do computer science,” she said, laughing. “My brother is a genius– he was building computers in middle school– so I was too intimidated and I thought ‘I can’t do that.’” Little did she know what she was capable of.

“Starting out I didn’t know what I wanted to do, that’s why I did finance, it was general and would get me into the real world, and it’s applicable in a lot of places.” But when considering a minor, her accelerated nature kicked in and she thought “why do a minor when I can just do a major in econ?”

While working on two degrees, Patel wanted to maximize her experience and looked for opportunities to learn outside of the classroom. “My second semester I started working for the library, and then I saw that a TA [teaching assistant] position was open for Calculus I, and I got introduced to Dr. Desire’ Taylor and Dr. John Taylor. I TA’d for them for a good amount of time, and it was Dr. John Taylor that convinced me to do my bachelor’s in math.”

Patel recalled the conversation, and marveled about how it happened. “I told him it’s far too late, I’m in my third year, it is not possible! And he told me to come by his office and let’s see what we can do. So he set up a plan for me, he said ‘you can test out of these classes, but you’re going to need to learn the material in order to do that.’ So, I sat in those classes and I audited them– I even took the tests and did the homework, even though I knew they wouldn’t count– but that was me trying to determine if I knew the material.”

Patel learned the material, and when she was eligible for the Early Entry Program for a Master’s of Science in Mathematical Finance, the Taylors were there again to write her a letter of recommendation. She stacked her classes and kept the pace, even with adding the master’s classes. “I was taking seven classes –they allow 21 credits [per semester]– but I needed more to get my major in math. I was testing out of classes, so I had eight classes at one point with master’s courses, and summer courses while I was working full time. There was a lot.”

“So when I got to Calculus III, I realized I wanted to do engineering. And it’s too late to be switching majors at this point” said Patel, laughing again. “It is so confusing, because I love everything I do.”

Loving everything doesn’t mean that it came easy. Patel  worked through learning to code because her internship at Bank of America and co-op at Wells Fargo showed her the need for this critical skill. She struggled in a class to learn C, the programming language, since it was something she stayed away from earlier in her education. Patel said she dropped the class, “wiped my tears,” and picked up a Java class to start with the basics.

Patel built her coding knowledge by learning Java first, and moved on to C again the next semester. “I knew what I was doing and I felt so much better, and realized I definitely could have done computer science. It’s a process; it’s determination. There have been points in my life where I wondered if it was really worth going through all this, but when I think about what I wanted to do, it was all of this. Finance was what I needed for my major, and then I loved econ and I loved math more.”

For now, three bachelor’s degrees will just have to do– until May 2024, when Patel will cross the stage again, next time with her master’s, and for the job offer that’s waiting.

Working weekends as an emergency medical technician while an undergraduate at UNC Charlotte, Andrew Brotherton ’22 learned that quick, accurate diagnosis of heart attacks saves lives and improves patient outcomes. He also realized that emergency responders — and patients — would benefit from diagnostic tools on ambulances and fire trucks. 

“There is no worse feeling than having someone’s life in your hands and not being able to help,” Brotherton said. 

Now, he is working to invent a new tool for exactly that purpose as a doctoral student in chemistry at Northwestern University. His research is funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship awarded while he was at Charlotte. 

“With the biosensor I am developing,” Brotherton said, “an EMT could prick a patient’s finger, get the patient’s blood and test their troponin levels, which is an indication of a heart attack that you can’t see with an electrocardiogram. Troponin is an enzyme that heart muscle cells excrete when someone is having a heart attack.”

If the biomarker test shows that cardiac-specific troponin has leaked into the bloodstream, emergency responders could give more detailed and immediate data to doctors, provide targeted treatment and potentially route patients directly to cardiac units or hospitals with more specialized services. 

Currently, such blood tests are not routinely used in the field for many reasons including a need to send the blood samples to labs for analysis. The main tool available to medical responders for suspected heart attacks is the electrocardiogram machine, which measures and records electrical signals traveling through the heart, looking for blockages or other causes. 

Brotherton is investigating the use of self-assembled monolayers as biosensors. Monolayers are one-molecule-thick layers of material that bond to a surface in an ordered way through either physical or chemical forces. His aim, broadly, is to discover new properties and create new or more efficient techniques to detect disease and advance treatments to save lives.

BY LYNN ROBERSON

Read More at UNC Charlotte Digital Features

With a $2.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation, Bao-Hua Song aims to achieve two goals: develop new soybean varieties diverse enough to resist the world’s most damaging soybean pest and advance UNC Charlotte as a leader in plant science. 

Soybean cyst nematode, a plant-parasitic roundworm that targets the roots of soybean and other legume plants, ravages soybean crops across the United States at a rate that surpasses the annual yield loss from the next five most-damaging soybean pathogens combined. Annual losses nationwide due to SCN alone equal up to $1.5 billion.

“High levels of crop losses have implications not only for farm viability but for worldwide food production,” said Song, a professor of biological sciences whose research encompasses understanding the molecular basis and evolution of complex trait variations significant to agriculture, human health and climate adaptation. “The most efficient and environmentally friendly approach to mitigating SCN damage is to develop and deploy new soybean varieties that can withstand it.”

To keep pace with rapidly evolving SCN populations — and because current resistant soybean varieties are becoming less so — Song and her colleagues plan to apply her lab’s characteristic and reliable approach to reaching solutions: use crop wild relatives as study systems as they identify new genetic resources (with broad SCN resistance) and their underlying molecular mechanisms. 

“We know that the wild soybean Glycine soja, for example, possesses genomic diversity that holds untapped genetic resources for identifying novel SCN-resistant genotypes,” said Song. “This will remain important as we move forward with developing new soybean varieties.” 

Research, teaching, career growth

While the overarching goal for Song and co-principal investigators, Mukhtar Shahid, University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Chen Sixue, University of Mississippi, is to uncover molecular bases of broad resistance of wild soybeans to SCN, Song’s research grant, which is part of the NSF’s Plant Genome Research Program, also includes support for expanding the level of computational expertise in the field of plant science.

To grow the number of scientists and educators qualified to work in and teach systems biology — the computational and mathematical analysis and modeling of complex biological systems — Song will collaborate with Charlotte Teachers Institute to develop ways to provide hands-on education and training to undergraduate and graduate students and high school science teachers. Among these are the development of a new course in systems biology and a number of workshops and seminars and symposia accessible to scientists and teachers. 

Of particular significance to Song is the opportunity it offers to intentionally enhance her research and advance her career trajectory. 

“The NSF recognizes that mid-career scientists benefit from support that allows them to secure research time,” she said. “Support of this kind affirms my desire and potential to become an international leader and teacher-scholar as UNC Charlotte moves to the forefront of this exciting field.”

Inside UNC Charlotte

UNC Charlotte Observatory and Society of Physics Students bring you this semester’s Halloween themed star party. Look at the stars through our numerous telescopes and connect to faculty and students.  Enjoy a refreshing beverage while watching a science expose!

WHEN:
Saturday, October 28th
8pm to Midnight

WHERE:
UNC Charlotte Observatory located behind the police building, |E-SE| of North Deck, or |W| of Poplar Terrace Dr.

WHO CAN ATTEND?
Anyone and everyone! Open to the public.

INCLEMENT WEATHER:
If weather/cloud cover does not allow telescopes to be brought out, we will have a backup the following Saturday November 4th.

FOR UPDATES:

Join our Discord or check our X (formerly known as Twitter)

Gerwood (Jerri) is the Co-Founder and Co-owner of an award-winning lifestyle brand (704 Shop) that strives to connect their supporters 
to each other and to the region. With a non-traditional path to the industry, Gerwood has a unique perspective on accomplishing goals and becoming an entrepreneur. He looks forward to becoming a Ventureprise board member and helping entrepreneurship become part of the collegiate conversation while helping those in the community be successful entrepreneurs. 

Dr. Dan Han received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 2019 from UNC, Charlotte under the gudiance of Professor Molchanov. She joined as a tenure track Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Louisville in 2019. Her research interestes include probability theory & stochastic, statistics and their applications to problems in population dynamics, data sciences, social network science, public health, finance,  numerical analysis, big data, machine learning, and FinTech. 

Education: Doctor of Science in Mathematics, subject area “Inverse Problems for Partial Differential Equations,” Computing Center of The Siberian Branch of The Russian Academy of Science, Novosibirsk.

Biography: Dr. Klibanov has recently been recognized by the Stanford University Study as among the top 2% of the world’s most cited researchers. He was also awarded the Golden Medal for “Distinguished Impact in Mathematics” from Sobolev Institute of  Mathematics, Russia in 2017. He is an author of more than 175 papers in the leading mathematical journals and a world renowned expert in inverse problems for partial differential equations, iII-posed problems, mathematical physics including microwaves and nanoscience and more. He has made original and groundbreaking contributions in the area of coefficient inverse problems by introducing Carleman estimates for proofs of uniqueness theorems and constructions of  globally convergent numerical methods for these problems. Dr. Klibanov’s research has been supported by the US Army Research Office for his work on applied inverse problems and has continuously received funding every three years since 2005 with a total of over 3.3 million dollars. Dr. Klibanov supervised 7 postdocs and 5 PhD students. Learn more about Dr. Klibanov here.

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Shan Yan, professor and associate chair for research in the Department of Biological Sciences, is the 2023 recipient of the Education Award from the Environmental Mutagenesis and Genomics Society.

Yan was recognized for his long-standing dedication to educating and mentoring future generations of scientists in the field of environmental mutagenesis. He is an active member of the EMGS DNA Repair and Mutagenic Mechanism Special Interest Group and has served on several of the society’s committees including as current chair of the EMGS Publication Policy Committee.

In 2021, Yan proposed and initiated the EMGS Undergraduate Research Scholarship Program to encourage research by underrepresented undergraduate students and support their attendance at EMGS annual meetings. As an editorial board member of EMGS flagship journal Environmental and Molecular Mutagenesis, Yan has edited special issues related to DNA repair, genome integrity and environmental health.

Since joining UNC Charlotte in 2010, Yan has established a productive and inclusive research laboratory. He has mentored two junior tenure-track faculty members, four research faculty and staff members or postdoctoral fellows, 13 graduate students and 23 undergraduate students. His research lab focuses on the molecular mechanisms of genome integrity and cancer etiology using Xenopus egg extracts and mammalian cells as model systems. The Inside UNC Charlotte article, “Finding a cure for cancer, one DNA damage pathway at a time,” details how Yan and his lab tackle basic but significant questions in the field of genome science and cancer. 

His research findings and discoveries, often in conjunction with his mentees, have been published in top-tier peer-reviewed journals such as Trends in Cell Biology, Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, Cancer Research, Nucleic Acids Research, eLife and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I am honored to accept the 2023 EMGS Education Award, and I greatly appreciate the support and help from my mentors, mentees, collaborators, colleagues, friends and family over the years. As a scientist-educator, I view this award as one kind of recognition of my dedication to mentoring future researchers and scientists,” Yan said.

Brown University’s Robert W. Sobol, EMGS past president and current dean’s professor of cancer research and associate director for basic research and co-leader of the Cancer Biology Program at Legorreta Cancer Center, nominated Yan for the Education Award.

Inside UNC Charlotte

The NIH proposal titled “Statistical Methods for Efficacy Trials of Vaccines and Monoclonal Antibodies Against Genetically-Diverse Pathogens”, Co-PIed by Dr. Yanqing Sun with the investigators from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and UNC Chapel Hill, has received the MERIT extension award. The award gives five additional years of $100,000 each year of funding support to Dr.Yanqing Sun as the PI from UNC Charlotte from 2024 to 2029. Yanqing has received NIH funding continuously since 2006.

Creating supportive learning environments that enable students to succeed is a hallmark of Charlotte faculty members, and this year’s nominees for the University’s teaching excellence awards exemplify that commitment.

For the Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence, finalists are Paula Connolly, professor, English; M.Lyn Exum, associate professor, criminal justice and criminology; and Amy Good, associate professor, reading and elementary education.

Deborah Beete, senior lecturer, public health sciences; Jeanne-Marie “Ree” Linker, lecturer, mathematics and statistics; and Hannah Peach, assistant teaching professor, psychological science, are this year’s finalists for the UNC Charlotte Award for Teaching Excellence. 

Recipients for each award will be announced Friday, Sept. 22, during a reception in the Popp Martin Student Union Multipurpose Room. 

About Ree Linker

Jeanne-Marie “Ree” Linker ’98, ’23 is devoted to statistics and makes sure her students leave with the same appreciation. Focused on adaptive and active learning, along with real-world applications, Linker ensures her students and peers are set up for success.

To achieve this transition of student perspective, Linker uses group work to encourage students to engage with one another, finds relatable applications of the course material and gives a one-on-one experience for every student she encounters.

“I love my students who come in capable and self-motivated, but the students who keep me in the classroom semester after semester are the ones who are going to fall in love with math and just don’t know it yet,” said Linker.

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