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Carolina’s Morehead Planetarium and Science Center is extending its mission outside its Chapel Hill facility this summer by bringing free interactive STEM learning to children across North Carolina.
Lindsey James came to Carolina to get her PhD in 2005 and never left.
Eighteen years later the chemist runs a lab in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy exploring medicinal chemistry and epigenetics with the goal of making strides in cancer care and treatment. It’s a method of research defined as translational — bridging the gap between promising early-stage science and the development of products and services that benefit society.
James and her team develop small molecules that target specific proteins believed to play roles in the development of cancers. These small-molecule tools could be useful against an array of cancers.
The continuous development of new molecules requires funding and resources. This part of project development diverts time and energy from conducting the research itself. Grant writing and editing along with back-and-forth communications with funding agencies can take months, even years.
James has found great success in internal Carolina grants, built to reduce the struggle in obtaining funds to advance research. She has secured funding and support from multiple other research translation resources at Carolina, all the while receiving support and guidance from AdvanTx, an initiative to advance therapeutics research from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.
While James currently has two major National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants that sustain her work, these additional Carolina resources have given her a break from applying for more federal funding.
“The research space I’m in is competitive,” James said. “I was worried that if I only focused on securing NIH funding then I may lose my window of discovery because it takes a long time for NIH grants to get reviewed, approved and funded.”
SAS is partnering with the UNC Center for Galapagos Studies to apply crowd-driven artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to help protect endangered sea turtles.
Through an app called ConserVision, citizen scientists are invited to match images of turtles’ facial markings to help train a SAS computer vision model. Once the model can accurately identify turtles individually, researchers will have valuable information more quickly to better track each turtle’s health and migratory patterns over periods of time. The goal is that in the future the model can perform facial recognition on any sea turtle image, whether it comes from a conservation group or a vacationing tourist.
In addition to sea turtle facial recognition, SAS will partner with the center on two other projects: identifying hammerhead shark patterns and predicting phytoplankton populations change over time.
“For over 10 years, the Galapagos Science Center has hosted exceptional scientists doing innovative research that increases our understanding of the environment and results in positive real-world outcomes,” explained UNC-Chapel Hill Interim Vice Chancellor for Research Penny Gordon-Larsen. “This innovative public-private partnership with SAS will enhance the center’s capacity for analyzing data that will positively impact both the environment and the people who inhabit these magnificent islands.”
“As our challenges as a global community get increasingly more complex, we need dynamic ways to access and use information to ramp up conservation efforts,” said Sarah Hiser, principal technical architect at SAS. “By using technology like analytics, AI and machine learning to quantify the natural world, we gain knowledge to help protect ecosystems and tackle climate change.”
Organizational experts at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School emphasize four pillars of teamwork: identification with group and mission, trust, distributed expertise and shared leadership.
Building these pillars takes time and lots of positive interactions as a team. For the staff of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, also known as DigitalNC, that means dedication to their mission as well as time for taste-testing Oreos and sharing pet photos. The team — eight University Libraries employees in the Wilson Special Collections Library in Chapel Hill plus three Elizabeth City State University employees in a satellite office — are there for the work and for each other.
They work hard to preserve the state’s heritage. They have digitized more than 630,000 newspapers, yearbooks, photos and other items from 320 partners in all 100 counties. Nearly half a million people visited the online DigitalNC archive last year alone.
“It’s such a great team,” said Kristen Merryman, digital projects librarian. “You can be transparent about what’s going on, and you know you’re going to receive empathy and support.”
That mutual respect radiates out to the center’s relationship with its partners statewide, team members said. In April, the Office of the Provost recognized their partnership with the State Library of North Carolina with an Engaged Scholarship Award.
Nominator Judy Panitch, director of library communications, praised the staff’s generosity, openness and inclusion. “No partner is too small; no document too minor; no user unimportant,” she wrote. “NCDHC’s values include the belief that ‘community history and culture have the power to enrich the lives of all North Carolinians.’ Every aspect of the program enables and promotes these encounters.”
“Our mission is to support cultural heritage organizations around the state in their goals for access to their collections,” said Lisa Gregory, the program coordinator who supervises the team. “Everyone who works for the center has a passion for access to information and the cultural heritage mission. That helps make us a strong team.”
