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Brad Hendricks – assistant professor of accounting at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School – is an expert on corporate disclosure, initial public offerings (IPOs) as well as entrepreneurship. So it’s only fitting he’s teaching a new course, Profits, People, Planets and Purpose, designed to inspire undergraduates to pursue business education and opportunities.
The course also presents undergrads with a unique experiential learning opportunity to apply theory to practice. Students manage “companies” while competing against their classmates in a simulation.
Hendricks likes to see their competitive natures show: “This generation is so adept at self-learning, experiential learning, that putting them in a gaming scenario that mimics the workplace is a fun, intuitive and risk-free way for them to learn how to make smart business decisions.”
Profits, People, Planets and Purpose is just one example of Hendricks’ impactful teaching at UNC Kenan-Flagler.
“Brad is a top-tier researcher and an amazing teacher,” said Jana Raedy, associate professor and EY Scholar in accounting and senior associate dean of business and operations. “He has not only made a major impact on the academic community with his research, but also has had a significant impact on the business community more broadly. He teaches extremely difficult material in a way that, while challenging the students to think critically, is accessible to them.”
He won the Business School’s 2021-22 Bullard Faculty Research Impact Award, which recognizes a professor each year whose research has had a significant effect on the practice of business. He is the first assistant professor to win it. Additionally, Hendricks received the Glenn McLaughlin Prize for Research in Accounting and Ethics and the Morgan Stanley Prize for Best Paper in 2021.
UNC Kenan-Flagler students also recognized his work in the classroom: He won the prestigious Weatherspoon Teaching Excellence Award in the Master of Accounting (MAC) Program in 2016 and again in 2022.
“Teaching really matters here at UNC Kenan-Flagler. There’s a high value placed on it, and I do the best I can. I am glad that students find such value in my class, despite its reputation for also being the most difficult class in the MAC Program,” said Hendricks.
Vincent Brown is on a mission to open minds to a much broader view of American history, one that incorporates Black history and Black perspectives into the canon.
“We need to have a much broader sense of what American history is, who counts within American history and how it develops over time,” said Brown, the Charles Warren Professor of American History and professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University. He teaches courses on the history of slavery in the Americas.
Although Brown grew up in Southern California, his visit to Carolina “is going to be a bit of a homecoming for me,” he said, pointing out that he did research in Wilson Library and completed his dissertation at neighboring Duke University.
Brown returned to North Carolina to give the first Dr. Genna Rae McNeil Endowed Black History Month Lecture, named for the first Black tenure-track faculty member in the history department. McNeil retired in 2021 after 36 years at Carolina, where she helped establish what was then known as the African American History Month Lecture.
The University’s establishment of an endowed lecture series on Black history and Brown’s talk come at a critical time.
“It has always been a struggle to establish the very idea that Black history is something worthy of study. It is something that people have had to fight for, from when Carter G. Woodson established Negro History Week way back in 1926. Even today, it’s something that is contentious,” Brown said.
Brown believes both Black history and Black perspectives are worthy of study, for understanding racism and much more. “Certainly the history of race and racism is fundamental to the way we have to understand the Black experience in the Americas and in the United States. But then the Black experience and Black struggles exceed the history of racism as well. And I think if we collapse the two too neatly, we can miss all of those things that Black people have done, all the consequences of their history that are not easily reducible to the study of racism.”
When people living with HIV take antiviral therapy, their viral loads are driven so low that a standard blood test cannot detect the virus. However, once the therapy is stopped, detectable HIV re-emerges with new cells getting infected.
This is called “rebound” virus and comes from a population of cells in blood and lymph tissues that were dormant while individuals were on therapy.
It’s a problem called latency, and overcoming it remains a major goal for researchers trying to create curative therapies for HIV — the special focus of the UNC HIV Cure Center.
Now, scientists led by virologist Ron Swanstrom, PhD, director of the UNC Center for AIDS Research and the Charles P. Postelle, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry & Biophysics at the UNC School of Medicine, have discovered another layer to the challenge of HIV latency.
Swanstrom and colleagues, with collaborators at UCSF, Yale and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, have found indirect evidence for a new reservoir of latent HIV-positive cells in the central nervous system.
By studying cerebral spinal fluid in patients who had just quit antiviral therapy, researchers found that dormant infected cells in the central nervous system are separate to infected cells in the already known reservoir in the blood.
The upshot: Any curative therapy to treat HIV would need to activate this dormant reservoir in the central nervous system, as well as the reservoir in the blood and lymph tissue.
