Kelly came to University of North Carolina Chapel Hill knowing that she wanted to do research. One of the reasons she selected the school itself was because it’s known nationally as a big research institution. During her first year, she found descriptions of professors’ research on departmental websites and emailed five or six professors. About half of the professors responded, and she accepted a research position that summer with a professor that was the principal investigator of a marine microbial ecology research lab.

That same year (2010), Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill happened, which posed long-term consequences for the the microbial community and entire ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico. The lab in which Kelly worked received a grant to study the oil spill, and even though only graduate students were originally eligible for a field trip, Kelly received a chance to go as well. Kelly spent two weeks at sea collecting sediment and water samples and brought over two hundred pounds of sediment back to the lab! Following her experience on the research cruise int he Gulf she received financial support through the UNC’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship or SURF to carry out her own project with the samples she collected. Kelly used this funding to analyze water and sediment samples to determine how the microbial community responded to the oil spill. 

As the Commissioner of Academic Affairs at the University of California Santa Cruz, Shiku Muhire has aligned her work in the Student Union Assembly with her classes in politics and legal studies, focusing on how current issues translate to working directly with students. As an example, American student loan debt recently surpassed credit card debt, […]

David Sengeh is our former classmate and a researcher whose work truly changes the lives of others. He creates bionic limbs for the amputees and victims of conflict at Sierra Leone and across Africa. He is currently a graduate student at MIT Media Lab. David is not only a brilliant student and an accomplished researcher, […]

Thomas Herndon is a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst working on a simple homework assignment - pick an economics paper and see if you can replicate the results. Thomas tried Growth in a Time of Debt, a famous manuscript of two Harvard Professors, and a paper that argues that economic growth slows dramatically when the size of a country’s debt rises above 90% of Gross Domestic Product, the overall size of the economy.

No matter how hard Herndon was trying, he could not replicate the results. “My heart sank,” he says. “I thought I had likely made a gross error. Because I’m a student the odds were I’d made the mistake, not the well-known Harvard professors.”

Eric Dietrich, and environmental engineering major at Montana State University has a passion for improving water quality and resource management in underdeveloped communities. Through working with the national organization Engineers Without Borders, Dietrich, along with a team of engineers and product developers has worked to bring a water and sanitation structure to roughly 60 primary […]

Photo: Kathy Tarantola Photography

In the honor of International Cosmonautics Day (the day when the Soviets sent the first man Yuri Gagarin to space on April 12th, 1961) our Research Superstar today is a space systems engineer!

Marwan Hussain is German-born and of Iraqi descent. He lived in Jordan before moving to Canada, and his work takes him to places ranging from the Arizona desert to the Arctic. His job is literally out of this world.

Hussein is a space systems engineer. His latest work for Canadian aerospace firm Optech Inc. involved leading the design and development of critical guidance and navigation systems for a pair of robotic landers that are slated for launch. “One is on a NASA mission that is going to an asteroid four years from now and the other one is on an Indo-Russian mission that’s going to the moon in 2014,” he said.