UNC Charlotte

The magazine of The University of North Carolina at Charlotte for Alumni and Friends • v15 n4 q4 • 2008

Closer to Kickoff
49ers move toward gridiron debut
UNC CHARLOTTE | c h a n c e l l o r ’s l e t te r
Football and the Future
As loyal 49ers, you know that the
question of whether UNC Charlotte will
start an intercollegiate football program
has been under discussion for some time.
In fact, some would say it has been under
discussion since we abandoned our one and
only football team in 1948!
More recently, though, I convened a
Football Feasibility Committee in early
2007 to study the “F question” and, in
February of 2008, that group unanimously
recommended that we move forward with
developing a football program.
After having completed my own
independent process of “due diligence”
with respect to the committee’s
recommendation, I concluded that the
timing is right to build a UNC Charlotte
football program. On Nov. 13, the Board
Chancellor Phil Dubois took questions
of Trustees strongly endorsed the plan
from the media after making his
recommendation to trustees on Sept. 18. I had presented at its September board
meeting (see www.uncc.edu and click on
“Chancellor’s Outbox”).
UNC Charlotte already has a successful
athletic program supported by thousands
of 49er alumni, friends, and students. We
I convened a anticipate that many new fans will be happy
with the outcome of our deliberations since
Football Feasibility the prospect of warm Saturday afternoons,
the gathering of friends at tailgate parties,
Committee in early and the celebration of football victories are
2007 to study things to which we can all look forward
with great anticipation. And I certainly
the “F question” believe that football will enrich the student
experience, enliven school spirit among
and, in February alumni, and serve as one more bond of
engagement between the students, our
of 2008, that alumni, and their university.
On the other hand, I’ve never viewed
group unanimously this simply as a decision affecting athletics,
student life, or alumni relations. Football
recommended that is not just about football. Rather, the
question of football has as much to do
we move forward
with what kind of institution we want to
with developing a be 20 or 30 years from now. And so a
question of this magnitude has required us
football program. to attempt to look into the future with its
many unknowns and uncertainties. Our
best guess tells us to expect that we will be a
very different institution, measured against
an entirely different set of institutional peers
and much higher community expectations.
UNC CHARLOTTE magazine www.UNCC.edu
Twenty years from now we will be a
leading urban research university with
an enrollment of approximately 35,000
students. Such institutions typically have
a comprehensive array of undergraduate,
graduate, and professional academic
programs, leading cultural arts programs,
and comprehensive and competitive
intercollegiate athletic programs. In fact,
91 percent of the institutions that currently
have enrollments in excess of 35,000
students play football at the Division I level.
If you are judged by the company you keep,
football must be one component of our
future programmatic mix as a major urban
research university.
Football is important for another key
reason. Whether one likes it or not, athletics
is a galvanizing force in American society.
People pay attention to their local college
football team, even if it is not their alma
mater. They take pride in that school
when the football team does well and
success opens doors that were not open
before. We’ve borrowed a phrase coined by
UNC President Erskine Bowles to use in
this context — that football can help the
Charlotte region to “own” its only public
four-year university and, in the process,
to help the University reap the secondary
benefits that come with such ownership
— political and financial support, research
and technology transfer partnerships, and
employment and internship opportunities
for our students.
Stay tuned for more information about
UNC Charlotte football, scheduled to
kick off in the fall of 2013. I’ll be there
to flip the coin (and I’m betting I know
who wins the toss!). In the meantime,
basketball season has arrived and both our
men’s and women’s basketball teams promise
exciting seasons. Join us in Halton Arena at
any time.
Go Niners!
Philip L. Dubois
Chancellor
 contents | UNC CHARLOTTE

3 E.K. Fretwell
Celebrates 85th Birthday

features
12 49er Football
Almost a Reality departments
Major financial objectives
4, 17 News Briefs
lie in the way
10 49ers Notebook
6
19 microbiologist 17 Giving Report
Battles the Coming 40 Alumni Notes
of the “Superbug” 19

25 Choir for
the Unsung alumni profiles
Humanitarian Award recipients 21 Kent Ellington
do good at home and abroad
22 Robyn Massey

32 UnC Charlotte 30 Glenn Hutchinson

at a Crossroads 36 Melissa Gayan

34 trying Research
on for Size 25

36 one Giant Leap:

Creating Healthy
Communities and NC-CATCH

On the cover:
On Nov. 13 the UNC Charlotte Board of Trustees endorsed Chancellor Dubois’
recommendation of starting an intercollegiate football program in 2013.
Photo illustration by SPARK Publications. 32

www.UNCC.edu 4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 1

U N C C H A R LOT T E | e d i to r ’s d e s k

A Great University’s People

In editing the articles that appear in this edition, one of the basic
truths about UNC Charlotte revealed itself like a revelation wrapped
in a campaign slogan: “It’s the people, stupid.” The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Let me explain. Sometimes an editor thinks of stories by their Volume 15, Number 3
topics — “Super-germ Research,” the “Student Humanitarian
Award,” and “Alumni Profiles,” all of which appear in these pages. Philip L. Dubois
Chancellor
But, perhaps more significantly than the topics, what you have before
you is a digest of stories about amazing people who enrich Ruth Shaw
Chair of the Board of Trustees
our community.
Vice Chancellor for University Relations
Start with the facing page. E. K. Fretwell, UNC Charlotte’s and Community Affairs
second chancellor, led UNC Charlotte in serving the world of research and David Dunn

scholarship while also providing public service to the greater Charlotte region. He Editor
Director of Public Relations
also helped lead the University to greater national recognition. John D. Bland
Flip to the “Super-germ” article on page 19 and you’ll meet Michael Hudson, a
Creative Director
brilliant and dedicated researcher who is passionate about saving lives. The sidebar Fabi Preslar
on his protégé Kent Ellington gives you some insight into how a promising physician Contributing Writers
was inspired and driven to do good. Rhiannon Bowman
James Hathaway
Peer into the “Student Humanitarian Award” article and you will be dazzled by Lisa Lambert
Allison Reid
the exploits of more exceptional human beings — current and former 49ers who Katie Conn Suggs
have worked selflessly to teach and learn and to improve the human condition for
Class Notes
people at home and abroad. Talk about ambassadors for UNC Charlotte! Katie Conn Suggs
Then troll through the alumni profiles on pages 20, 30, and 36. You’ll read how Photographer
Robyn Massey is bringing an exciting new vision to the Alumni Association, how the Wade Bruton

plays of Glenn Hutchinson tackle complex social issues while delighting audiences, Circulation Manager
Cathy Brown
and you’ll read how Melissa Gayan got an education of a lifetime amid the recent
warfare in the Republic of Georgia. Design & Production
SPARK Publications
A lot of amazing people populate the UNC Charlotte family. It’s our pleasure to
introduce you to a few of them.
UNC Charlotte is published four times a
year by The University of North Carolina
at Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd.,
Regards, Charlotte, NC 28223-0001
ISSN 10771913

Editorial offices:
Reese Building, 2nd floor
The University of North Carolina
at Charlotte
John D. Bland, Editor 9201 University City Blvd.
Charlotte, NC 28223
Director of Public Relations 704.687.5822; Fax: 704.687.6379

The University of North Carolina at

What you have before you is a Charlotte is open to people of all races and
is committed to equality of educational
digest of stories about amazing opportunity and does not discriminate
against applicants, students or employees
people who enrich our community. based on race, color, national origin, religion,
sex, sexual orientation, age or disability.

Printed on
recycled paper
17,000 copies of this publication were printed
at a cost of $.70 per piece, for a total cost of $11,968.35.

2 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu

Chancellor Emeritus
Celebrates 85th Birthday
Friends of the university, faculty and
staff gathered Oct. 24 at Bissell House
to celebrate the 85th birthday of UNC
Charlotte’s second chancellor, E.K. Fretwell.
When Fretwell took the reins of
UNC Charlotte in 1978, he inherited
from Bonnie Cone and Dean Colvard a
regionally accredited university with many
nationally accredited programs, more than
10,000 alumni, nearly 9,000 students and a
competitive athletics program.
In his remarks at the birthday reception,
Chancellor Philip Dubois cited Fretwell’s
accomplishments and hailed him as the
right man at the right time to position
UNC Charlotte for future opportunities
and challenges.
During his tenure as chancellor at UNC
Charlotte, bilateral institution exchange
agreements were forged between the
University and prestigious universities in
England, France, Germany and Taiwan.
During a period when diversity did
not have the same academic priority as
it does today, Fretwell set the stage for
UNC Charlotte to become a truly diverse,
open and multicultural public university.
He encouraged qualified women and
minorities to attend college and appointed
individuals from diverse backgrounds to
key administrative posts while extending
the University’s reach into the community
through new partnerships.
After his retirement from UNC
Craig Ramsey
Charlotte, Fretwell served as chair of
the North Carolina Standards and
Accountability Commission, a group
photo by
convened by the Legislature to identify
what North Carolina high school students
www.UNCC.edu 4Q08
should know and how that knowledge
should be assessed. He later served terms
as interim president of the University of
Massachusetts System and the University of
North Florida.
Fretwell’s life has been devoted to
education, and he has taught at virtually
every level in a distinguished career that
spans more than four decades.
He earned a master of arts degree in
teaching from Harvard University, and later
a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and
has taught public school in Massachusetts,
as well as at high school and community
college in Illinois.
Prior to accepting the post at UNC
Charlotte, Fretwell served as president
of the State University of New York
College at Buffalo. Throughout his
distinguished career, he earned a national
and international reputation in higher
education administration. Among the
many organizations to which he provided
leadership are the American Association
for Higher Education, the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching, and the American Council on
Education Commission on Plans and
Objectives for Higher Education.
The connections Fretwell made through
these influential organizations served UNC
Charlotte well, and contributed to a seismic
shift in the University’s image — under
his leadership, UNC Charlotte became
known as one of the top universities in the
state system.
E.K. Fretwell as chancellor, talking with students
on campus and flanked by Chancellor Philip
L. Dubois and Fretwell’s successor, Chancellor
Emeritus Jim Woodward.
| UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 3
UNC CHARLOTTE | n ew s b r i e f s
news briefs
Coastal County Gets
Fine-tuned for Hurricane Weather
August 28 and 29, UNC Charlotte
meteorologist Matthew Eastin and his
students turned North Carolina’s coastal
Brunswick Co. into one of the country’s
most densely and carefully monitored
weather sites.
The team installed five new complete
weather stations in the communities of
Calabash, Ash, Leland (which will get two),
and Boiling Springs Lakes, supplementing
the detailed data already being provided by
nine existing coastal weather-monitoring
sites in the 855-square-mile county. The
new stations are being funded by a faculty
research grant from UNC Charlotte.
The aim of the researchers is to get an
uniquely detailed, landscape-wide record of
severe weather as it occurs — especially in
the event that a hurricane passes nearby.
“Our goal is to try to improve the forecast
of severe weather — as opposed to the daily
forecast of weather that might disrupt a
softball game but it’s not really going to tear
your house down,” he said.
In particular, Eastin hopes to find further
proof for a new theory that he and other
researchers have developed that challenges
the conventional view of tornado formation
during hurricanes.
4 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine www.UNCC.edu
With a more detailed analysis, the
researchers hope to develop monitoring
and forecasting methods that might lead
to earlier warning for the tornados that
commonly occur in a hurricane’s outer
rain bands. Hard to forecast accurately,
hurricane-spawned tornadoes develop
rapidly across broad areas and generally
cause about 10 percent of a hurricane’s
total damage.
Eastin points out that hurricane-
generated tornadoes can be a big problem
especially because they are so unpredictable.
“You are watching the hurricane move
towards the coast and you think, ‘Oh,
it’s making landfall down by Savannah,
Georgia, and I live in Myrtle Beach, so
I’m clear,’ and then, bam, you get hit by a
tornado,” he said.
“They happen a lot, and people are
caught unaware. Across the Carolinas in
2004 and 2005 alone there were over 130
tornadoes in association with just seven
tropical cyclones — none of which actually
made landfall on the North Carolina coast —
it was just the remnants moving through. It’s
a fairly important forecast issue for our area.”
According to Eastin, part of the problem
in forecasting hurricane associated tornados
has been that meteorologists have always
assumed that the parent storms that spawn
the tornadoes do not develop until the
hurricane rain bands move onshore.
“The traditional conceptual model is
that the individual storms that comprise
the hurricane rain bands are ‘ordinary’
over the ocean, and the increase in surface
friction over land creates the miniature
supercells,” Eastin said. “Supercells
frequently produce tornadoes.
“What we have been finding is that you
can actually have these miniature supercells
form out over the ocean, and then produce
tornadoes on or very near the beach,” he said.
The observations that Eastin is interested
in collecting will come from his stations,
five others maintained by the Renaissance
Computing Institute (RENCI) in Chapel
Hill and from four RENCI flood sensors.
Eastin hopes to collect data detecting
sudden wind shifts and abrupt temperature
shifts that are tell-tale signs of strong down-
drafts and gust fronts, often the pre-cursors
to tornado formation. The information
will, in turn, allow him to more accurately
identify the specific over-water storms that
preceded the dangerous land storms.
“We are trying to provide proof-of-concept
through high-density observations,” Eastin
said. “Ultimately, if we can understand what
causes the supercell out over the open ocean,
then we can help forecasters to detect them
earlier with radar and give everyone a little
more forewarning.”
“Our goal is to try to
improve the forecast of
severe weather — as opposed
to the daily forecast
of weather that might
disrupt a softball game
but it’s not really going to
tear your house down.”
 news briefs | UNC CHARLOTTE

University hosting
ACE Fellow
During the 2008-09 academic year, UNC
Charlotte is hosting UNC Pembroke’s Alfred
Bryant as part of the American Council of
Education (ACE) Fellows program.
Bryant, a faculty member in the UNC
Pembroke School of Education, was one
of 36 fellows named from a national
competition. UNC Charlotte was his top
choice to spend the next academic year.
“As fellows, we are supposed to select
campuses that would provide us an excellent
learning opportunity regarding campus
administration,” said Bryant. “Chancellor
Dubois, his staff and UNC Charlotte have
an excellent reputation, not only across
North Carolina, but the nation. I am elated
the University agreed to host me this year.”
A Pembroke native, Bryant began
his career in education as a high school
counselor. He later earned a doctorate
in counselor education from NC
State University.
Founded in 1965, the ACE Fellows
program’s goal is to strengthen leadership
in higher education by identifying
promising senior faculty and administrators
and preparing them for key positions in
university administration.

Fall enrollment includes 3,000 new freshmen,

2,000 new grad students and 2,000 transfers
UNC Charlotte welcomed back students this fall, including
the largest freshman class in the university’s history. This year’s
approximately 23,300 student enrollment includes more than
3,000 new freshmen.
The University also has welcomed nearly 2,000 new graduate
students and approximately the same number (2,010) of new
undergraduate students who are transferring from other schools.
The influx of new students raises the targeted number of
undergraduate students at UNC Charlotte to nearly 18,000 and
the projected number of graduate students to nearly 5,200.
As the fall semester kicked off, UNC Charlotte came in at No.
9 in the new category of “Up-and-Coming Schools” in the latest
ranking of America’s colleges and universities by U.S. News &
World Report.
UNC Charlotte draws students from 46 U.S. states and
89 foreign countries. More than 5,000 students live on
campus and nearly as many live in housing adjacent to the
1,000-acre campus, which is located less than 10 miles from
downtown Charlotte.
The university currently offers 18 doctoral programs, 62
master’s degree programs and 90 bachelor’s degrees. More
than 900 full-time faculty comprise the university’s academic
departments, along with more than 2,000 staff employees.
Students new and old were greeted by some major
improvements to the campus, including Dickson Gate, the
new front entrance. Nine 20-foot tall brick pylons have
been installed along Highway 49 marking the arrival to
UNC Charlotte.
Work also is progressing on the new $65 million Student
Union, which will include dining hall services, the bookstore, a
movie theatre, a multi-purpose room, and other amenities. The
Student Union will open in the summer of 2009.
Plans also call for a 400-bed residence hall adjacent to Laurel
and Lynch Halls along Cameron Blvd. near the Student Union.
The hall is scheduled to be open for fall semester of 2011. A
1,000-car parking deck will open at the same time the new
residence hall is occupied.
And a new $35 million Bioinformatics Building on the
Charlotte Research Institute (CRI) campus is expected to be
completed in the summer of 2009.
These current construction projects, plus others in design,
will enable the University to serve the growing population of
students. UNC Charlotte is projected to have an enrollment of
35,000 students by the year 2020.

www.UNCC.edu 4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 5

UNC CHARLOTTE | n ew s b r i e f s
news briefs
English Professor Receives
Top Teaching Award
Margaret (Meg) Morgan was selected as
the 2008 recipient of the highest teaching
honor bestowed by UNC Charlotte —
the Bank of America Award for Teaching
Excellence. Morgan, an associate professor
of English, was chosen from a prestigious
list of finalists for the honor, which was first
awarded in 1968.
The other nominees for the award were:
 ouis Amato, professor of economics.
L She organized North Carolina and South
Banita Brown, associate professor
of chemistry.
Michael Hudson, professor of biology.
Zbigniew W. Ras, professor of
computer science.
Morgan began her UNC Charlotte
tenure as a lecturer in 1987 after completing
a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition from
Purdue University. She was promoted to
assistant professor in 1989 and associate
professor in 1995. Her bachelor’s and
Meg Morgan conducts class
6 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine www.UNCC.edu
master’s degrees in English are from
Kean University and the University of
Maryland, respectively.
Throughout her career, Morgan has
worked to facilitate student learning.
She championed efforts to improve the
curriculum and teaching of freshman
composition courses and implemented
new placement procedures for students
for whom English is a second language.
Carolina writing administrators who now
hold biannual meetings. Internationally, she
collaborated with colleagues from Germany
and Thailand to share information on
writing instruction and student support and
taught a writing workshop for elementary
school teachers in a South African village.
“Dr. Morgan is knowledgeable about
the subject she is teaching, and she makes
sure that all her students understand what
is expected of them,” one of her former
students wrote. “On days that her students
follow easily, she moves quickly; on days
that her students are having trouble
understanding, she slows down. The thing
that I like best about Dr. Morgan is the fact
that she knows each one of her students by
name and treats us all as individuals.”
A non-traditional student wrote Morgan
was “quick to encourage and not afraid to
tell it like it is. Her encouragement and
guidance helped me to believe in myself,
causing me to work harder at accomplishing
my goals. I am uncertain if she realizes how
much I appreciated her help. I’m also sure
I’m not a special case. She appears to treat
every student with the same respect and
attention that I received from her.”
Morgan describes her work at UNC
Charlotte succinctly, the same way she
teaches her students how to write.
“I teach writing, not how to write stories,
or poems or novels, but how to write
technical proposals, instructions, arguments
about whatever,” said Morgan. “I teach
theories of technical communication and
argumentation, ultimately, because I believe
in my heart that language is our soul and
we cannot survive at any level (physically,
emotionally, spiritually) without it.”
“I teach theories
of technical
communication
and argumentation.
Ultimately, because
I believe in my heart
that language is
our soul and we
cannot survive at
any level (physically,
emotionally, spiritually)
without it.”
 news briefs | UNC CHARLOTTE

Kilmer named Cone

Chancellor Philip L. Dubois
congratulated all the Bank of America
Award finalists. “While each of our finalists
has a unique teaching style, all embrace
the dynamic nature of the teacher-student
interaction,” he said. “They foster dialogue
in their classrooms, encourage their students
to question, and expect to learn as much
from their students as their students
learn from them. They are leaders who
know when to follow their student’s lead.
Margaret was selected from a group of her
colleagues who are truly some of our best
and brightest faculty members.”
Meg Morgan (center) is surrounded by, from
left, Robert Qutub, chief financial officer for
global corporate and investment banking,
Bank of America Corp.; Provost Joan Lorden;
selection committee chair and former award
recipient James McGavran and Chancellor
Philip L. Dubois.
The five nominees were honored during
the evening ceremony and gala attended
by hundreds of UNC Charlotte faculty
members and their guests, Friday, Sept. 19,
at Founder’s Hall in the Bank of America
Corporate Center. All the honorees drew
strong praise from their students and peers
at UNC Charlotte.
Professor at convocation
Ryan Kilmer, associate professor
of psychology, received the Bonnie E.
Cone Early-Career Professorship
in Teaching at the University’s
annual convocation.
Established to recognize a faculty
member who exhibits excellent teaching
early in his or her career, the Cone
Early-Career Professorship in Teaching
is a three-year appointment, which
includes an additional salary stipend
and faculty development funding. In
addition, the
recipient’s name
is inscribed
on a special
permanent
plaque.
In nominating
Kilmer, Bruce
Cutler, chair of Ryan Kilmer
the Psychology
Department, wrote, “Since the time
Dr. Kilmer was hired as an assistant
professor, he has demonstrated an
unusual level of commitment to and a
natural talent for teaching.”
Kilmer earned a doctorate in
psychology with specializations in
clinical and community psychology
from the University of Rochester in
1999. He joined UNC Charlotte
that fall as an assistant professor. He
obtained tenure at the end of the 2004-
05 academic year and was promoted to
associate professor.

Nursing faculty receive $706,000 In his philosophy of teaching, Kilmer

wrote, “My classes are for my students; I

workforce diversity grant strive to promote their learning, training

and professional development in all of
my courses… I have high expectations
Nursing faculty Lienne Edwards and Tama Morris received a $706,000 grant from for my students, and I have even higher
the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), a branch of the U.S. expectations for myself. I view the
Department of Health and Human Services. This Nursing Workforce Diversity grant enhancement of my teaching as a career-
will fund a three-year effort to increase nursing education opportunities for educationally long goal and am always working to
disadvantaged and minority students. improve my teaching and effectiveness.”
According to a widely cited Sullivan Commission report published in 2004, African Cutler noted Kilmer’s efforts in his
Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans comprise 25 percent of the United nomination letter, stating that Kilmer
States population but only 9 percent of the nation’s nurses. Research underscores the need sought out peer-observations from
for a health care workforce that reflects the diversity of the patients it serves. nine faculty members, many of whom
The grant “Crossing Borders: Empowering Nursing Students for Academic Success” will were recognized for the quality of
result in the addition of 30 students to the UNC Charlotte program during its three years. their teaching.

www.UNCC.edu UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 7

UNC CHARLOTTE | n ew s b r i e f s
news briefs
University partners to
strengthen teachING;
initiative director named
UNC Charlotte, through the College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences, is joining efforts
to strengthen teaching and learning in local
schools. This effort, the Charlotte Teachers
Institute (CTI), is a partnership between
the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,
Davidson College and the Charlotte-
Mecklenburg Public Schools.
To head this initiative, Molly Shaw
recently joined UNC Charlotte as CTI’s
planning director.
“The goal of CTI is to foster professional
and personal development in the teachers,”
said Shaw. “We want to instruct the teachers in
subjects that they are passionate about so they
UNC Charlotte Among Select Institutions
to Host Saudi Arabian Students
Twenty new first-year students have
arrived at UNC Charlotte from Saudi
Arabia. Some of the highest-achieving
students in their country, they were selected
for full sponsorship of all their educational
expenses by the Aramco Services
Company (ASC). ASC is part of Saudi
Arabian American Oil Co. (ARAMCO)
headquartered in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. It
is the largest oil company in the world.
Through ARAMCO’s Education
Sponsorship Program, more than 150
Saudi Arabian students have completed
their bachelor’s degree programs at UNC
Charlotte during the past 15 years.
ARAMCO invests in the education of
future employees, giving students the
opportunity to attend the best academic
institutions in the world.
While UNC Charlotte’s collaboration
with ASC/ARAMCO is a longstanding one,
this marks the first year that women have
been sponsored. Eleven of the 20 students
are women.
UNC Charlotte is one of 14 universities
in the United States welcoming ARAMCO-
sponsored women this fall.
After completing secondary school in
8 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine www.UNCC.edu
can then carry that passion into the classroom.”
CTI will help public school teachers
by offering semester-long seminars taught
by faculty from UNC Charlotte and
Davidson on subjects public school teachers
themselves request. Teachers will play a
leading role in determining how CTI and
each seminar it offers can be of assistance to
them, according to Shaw.
Teachers accepted into the program
will be called fellows, and they will be
considered members of the University
community with all the benefits of enrolled
students. While participating in seminars,
fellows will prepare curriculum units that
draw on the content of the seminar to teach
in their classroom the following school year.
No tuition or fees will be charged for the
Saudi Arabia, the
selected students
completed one year
of pre-university
orientation that
helped prepare them
for the academic
culture in the United
States and to master
the English language.
The students
are studying
accounting, business
administration,
computer science,
engineering and management information
systems. Upon graduating, they will fill
critical company positions at ARAMCO
subsidiaries throughout the world.
The Office of International Admissions
and the International Student/Scholar
Office helped facilitate the arrival of the
Saudi students. Director of International
Student/Scholar Office, Marian Beane
traveled to ASC headquarters in Houston,
Texas earlier this month to accompany them
to Charlotte.
“The Saudi women are excited about
participants. UNC Charlotte, Davidson and the
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public School System
will contribute financial support for CTI.
The first class of fellows will start in the
2009-10 academic year. Until then, Shaw
will work closely with teachers, faculty and
administrators to plan for the launch.
“This initiative is one that has already
received a lot of attention and work on the part
of teachers and university leaders,” Shaw said.
CTI is part of a national project led
by the Yale National Initiative. It will be
the fifth such institute created as part of
the project. Only four other U.S. cities
(New Haven, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and
Houston) have launched similar institutes,
and there are six other cities considering
the program.
Anwaar Zawad, Fatimah Lajami
the opportunity to study in the United
States and be pioneers for their country.
Their presence on the UNC Charlotte
campus also provides rich opportunities
for expanding and deepening cultural
understanding,” said Beane.
Undergraduate international students
represent more that 25 countries this
semester. They are part of the nearly 1,000
international undergraduate and graduate
students from more than 80 countries.
 news briefs | UNC CHARLOTTE

University Collaboration Seeks

to Enhance Cancer Vaccine
UNC Charlotte and ImmuneRegen BioSciences, Inc., dendritic cells to present tumor antigens effectively
announced a collaborative relationship to evaluate ImmuneRegen’s to T cells,” stated Dr. Mukherjee. “Either or both
Viprovex as a possible cancer-vaccine adjuvant. Adjuvants are mechanisms are critical in generating a robust
agents that stimulate and, subsequently, augment the immune anti-tumor cellular immune response. We are
system’s response to a foreign antigen. therefore excited about the opportunity to test
The studies will be under the direction of Viprovex as a potential adjuvant to our cancer
Pinku Mukherjee, Ph.D., an accomplished vaccines and further the understanding of its
cellular immunologist focused on developing possible immune-modulating functions.”
novel immunotherapies against solid Studies have demonstrated Viprovex’s
adenocarcinomas, especially pancreatic adjuvant activity when administered with
and breast cancers. She is the Irwin Belk model antigens, such as chicken ovalbumin.
Distinguished Scholar in Cancer Research. Pinku Mukherjee Further, when administered with vaccines
This collaboration, part of a material transfer targeted against avian influenza, Viprovex
agreement with the university, will evaluate the potential adjuvant not only increased antibody responses
activity of Viprovex on cancer vaccines currently being developed but also demonstrated cross-reactivity,
by Dr. Mukherjee. which confirms that Viprovex may
The aim of cancer vaccines are to treat existing cancers or also broaden the immune response.
prevent the development of cancer, termed therapeutic and Additionally, Viprovex treatment
prophylactic vaccines, respectively. While therapeutic vaccines resulted in enhanced survival of
stimulate the immune system to attack cancerous cells, prophylactic small animals upon challenge
vaccines are administered to attack viruses that cause cancer. There with H5N1 avian flu virus. For
are currently only two cancer vaccines licensed by the United States these reasons, combined with
Food and Drug Administration. These vaccines are intended to the potential to increase
prevent hepatitis B virus and human papillomavirus, viruses known antigen presenting cells
to cause liver and cervical cancer, respectively. and/or natural killer cell
“As tumor immunologists, we are constantly seeking new activity, ImmuneRegen
immune modulating adjuvants that may function either directly believes Viprovex may be
on the innate immune effector cells such as the natural killer cells, an ideal candidate for use
or indirectly, by enhancing the antigen presenting capability of as a cancer-vaccine adjuvant.

Ozimek One of Nine Finalists
for NCAA Woman of the Year
Former Charlotte 49ers women’s soccer
star Lindsey Ozimek (2004-07) is one of
nine finalists for the 2008 NCAA Woman
of the Year award. This honor recognizes
outstanding female student-athletes who
have excelled academically and athletically
in addition to demonstrating strong
community service and leadership.
One of 130 female student athletes
nominated, Ozimek is the only Division I
soccer player among the nine finalists. The
NCAA Committee on Women’s Athletics
chose the winner, who was announced at a
banquet in Indianapolis, Ind., October 19.
Ozimek, the 2007 Atlantic-10 (A-10)
Midfielder of the Year, dished out a league-
leading 13 assists last season as a senior
while garnering first-team All-Conference
Lindsey Ozimek as a 49er honors for the third consecutive year. The
Charlotte, N.C., native led the 49ers to the
2007 A-10 regular and post-season titles and
was named to the All-Championship team
for the third time. She ended her career with
43 assists, tops in program annals.
Off the field, Ozimek was named the
A-10 Female Student-Athlete of the Year
this past June. She was tabbed a first-
team “ESPN The Magazine” Academic
All-American for the second straight
season. This was the third time Ozimek
was honored by the magazine; she earned
third-team honors as a sophomore. She was
also three-time Academic All-Atlantic 10
selection. The 2007 A-10 Women’s Soccer
Student-Athlete of the Year was named
to the National Soccer Coaches Association
of America Scholar All-America second-
team this past year while boasting a
4.0 grade point average majoring in
special education.

www.UNCC.edu 4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 9

UNC CHARLOTTE | 49 e rs n o te b o o k
Niners Lend Hearts and
Hands to Race Playce
The Charlotte 49ers entire athletic
department used the final days of
September and the first days of October
to assist the Mecklenburg County
Parks and Recreation Department’s
Hearts and Hands Playground Build at
Nevin Park. The 49ers student-athletes
joined volunteers from throughout the
community to build a NASCAR-themed
playground paradise, coined Race Playce.
“This was a big project that our entire
Department could participate in that really
makes a difference,” said 49ers Director of
Athletics Judy Rose. “A playground helps
highlight fitness and wellness and is a
means to keep children active.”
And so, with power saws buzzing,
hammers pounding and the groaning
of hard labor, Race Playce became a
mini-motor speedway for the area youth,
landing a spacious playground in the
Nevin Community Park.
“I feel that schools need to do more
things like this to let the communities know
that we care,” commented Associate Head
Track and Field Coach Timothy Vaught.
A portion of the 49ers track team that
knows a lot about strength and power
moved not just pounds, but tons of gravel
through the park with a wheelbarrow train
10 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu
49er Notes:
MEN’S BASKETBALL NOTES
The Charlotte 49ers men’s basketball
team returns four starters from last year’s
squad that won 20 games, reached the
that made rush hour look like a pleasant Atlantic 10 semifinals and advanced to the
drive up Highway 29 on a Sunday morning. NIT. At the heart of that success was an
“The throwers moved five dump truck intensity and enthusiasm that recharged
loads of gravel into the playground by the team and fans alike. Senior forwards
wheel barrel which took most of the five Lamont Mack and Charlie Coley are the
hours of their volunteer time,” program’s centerpieces while junior point
said Assistant Track and Field coach guard DiJuan Harris and sophomore wing
Kevin Fitzpatrick, who noted that An’Juan Wilderness energize a lineup that
sprinters, hurdlers and distance
runners also joined the work crew in
moving gravel.
Later in the day, the 49er softball,
golf and tennis players joined the gravel
brigade, while both basketball teams
helped sand and varnish fences. Soccer
and tennis used their time cutting and
drilling the many features of the park,
which includes tool chests, trophy cases
and replica race cars.
Charlotte’s defending A-10 champion
baseball team took a break from
hammering the ball over the fence to
hammer nails throughout the day.
Race Playce opened to the children
of the greater Charlotte area on October
29 with a special observance of the event
slated for 5:30 p.m. that evening.
49er softball players cart gravel during a
community service work day at Nevin Park’s
Race Playce.
Lamont Mack
boasts athleticism, depth and a fast-pace
style. Head coach Bobby Lutz, who became
the program’s all-time winningest coach,
leads a unit that publications are picking to
battle for the A-10 crown and an NCAA
Tournament berth.
The schedule includes 17 games against
2008 post-season teams, including nine
such games at Halton Arena. The non-
conference season opens with home games
against UNC Greensboro, Old Dominion
and Clemson while the A-10 slate will bring
UMass, Dayton, Rhode Island and Xavier
to Halton Arena. Check out charlotte49ers.
com for complete schedule listings.

Tracy Ray
WomEn’S BASKEtBALL notES
The Charlotte 49ers women’s basketball
team has enjoyed a school-record string of
six straight post-season appearances. And
the fans are turning out in droves, including
three crowds of over 3,000 last season.
Second-year head coach Karen Aston’s team
has the makings to deliver a seventh straight
post-season bid while thrilling the Halton
Arena crowd.
With a lineup that includes a strong
frontcourt in Danielle Burgin and Erin
Floyd, an athletic transition game led by
senior point guard and three-point specialist
Traci Ray and sophomore wing Shannon
McCallum. With eyes set on the Atlantic
10 Women’s Basketball Championship,
which will be played at Halton Arena, Mar.
6-9, the 49ers hope to turn the home-court
advantage into an A-10 title and NCAA
Tournament berth.
The 49ers will host the Atlantic 10
Women’s Basketball Championship, Mar.
6-9, 2009. Ticket packages are available
for the event through the 49ers athletic
ticket office. Five A-10 women’s programs
advanced to post-season play, last year,
including the host 49ers and NCAA
qualifiers George Washington (Sweet 16),
Temple and Xavier.
Charlotte owns a .833 winning
percentage all-time at Halton Arena, and
this year, the 49ers have a slew of top
opponents coming to town. Nationally-
televised games against NCAA Tournament
foes Notre Dame (ESPNU) and Xavier
www.UNCC.edu
49 e r s n o t e b o o k | UNC CHARLOTTE
(ESPN2) highlight a home slate that The Annual package includes all the great
includes NCAA Sweet 16 finalist George audio and video content from the Monthly
Washington, NCAA participant Temple package as well as streaming video of select
and WNIT qualifiers Dayton and North CBS College Sports broadcasts of Charlotte
Carolina A&T. 49ers athletic events. Monthly subscribers
can only receive those games on a pay-
CHARLottE 49ERS per-view basis. The XXL Annual package
ALL ACCESS viDEo includes all of the 49ers audio and video
Fans can catch live video of nearly all content plus every pay-per-view game
49ers home contests through the 49ers (49ers and otherwise) that the CBS College
“Niner Network All-Access” program at Sports Network offers.
www.charlotte49ers.com. In addition to To subscribe to Niner Network All-
live game broadcasts of men’s and women’s Access, log on to Charlotte49ers.com.
basketball games, baseball, softball, soccer,
volleyball, cross country, and track and tHE 49ERS inSiDER tv SHoW,
field, Niner Network All-Access features AvAiLABLE on-LinE
player and coach interviews, exclusive Did you know that there is a television
behind-the-scenes video, “Classic” game show dedicated to Charlotte 49ers
broadcasts, highlights and additional Athletics? “The 49ers Insider” airs every
original programming. Some free content Thursday-Saturday at 12:30 p.m. and 7:30
is available without a subscription, but an p.m. on Time Warner Cable’s Channel 22
All-Access pass delivers an abundance of in Mecklenburg, Iredell and parts of Union
video content straight to your computer. County. The show, hosted by 49ers student-
The Niner Network All-Access will athletes and produced by Mark Nunn of
provide live video coverage of nine of the university’s Broadcast Communications
the 49ers men’s and women’s sports with Department, includes highlights, coaches’
highlight and feature content from all interviews and player features. For those
16 sports. outside of broadcast area, an on-line
Fans can purchase a monthly version of the show can be accessed at
subscription for $9.95, an Annual package Charlotte49ers.com.
for $79.95 or the CBS College Sports
Network XXL Annual package for $119.95.
men’s and Women’s
Basketball
Set for national tv
Following a year in which eight men’s and five women’s basketball teams
advanced to postseason play, the Atlantic 10 will again have a major presence on
national television.
Charlotte’s six nationally-televised games include a trio of games at the 76 Classic
in Anaheim, Calif.; the 49ers A-10 game at Saint Joseph’s (Jan. 18) on CBS College
Sports; the 49ers A-10 contest at Temple (Jan. 24) on ESPNU and the 49ers home
game vs. Xavier (Feb. 19) on either ESPN or ESPN2.
Two 49ers women’s home games will be broadcast nationally: Charlotte vs.
Xavier, Jan. 11 (ESPN2) and Charlotte vs. Notre Dame, Dec. 28 (ESPNU).
4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 11
12 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu

49er Football
Almost a Reality
major financial objectives lie in the way
By John D. Bland
During the last two years, three historic
decisions have moved UNC Charlotte closer
to fielding an NCAA football program, but
the deal is not yet done.
First, a football feasibility committee
recommended in favor of football after
studying the issue for several months.
Then, after several more months of
due diligence, Chancellor Philip L.
Dubois in September recommended
to the Board of Trustees that the
University start a program in 2013
— if specific financial challenges
are met. In November, the trustees
affirmed Dubois’ recommendation.
So where do we stand now? For starters,
UNC Charlotte and the community at large need
to surmount two hurdles:
The Athletics Department must secure commitments
for 5,000 seat licenses at $1,000 per. At press
time (in mid November), more than 3,800
licenses had been pledged.
The Athletics Foundation and the Division of
Development and Alumni Affairs must secure
up to $45 million to fund capital investments.
www.UNCC.edu
fe a t u re | UNC CHARLOTTE
Dubois’ September recommendation came after 21 months of
deliberation and research by the Football Feasibility Committee,
Dubois and others at the University. In his September presentation
Dubois said he felt the time was right for football at UNC Charlotte
because it helps foster a full university experience that many students
crave in their undergraduate careers. The University is expected to
enroll 35,000 students by 2020.
“No question has not been asked; no stone has been left
unturned,” Dubois said in his report to trustees. “Our diligence has
been done, and we hope you are satisfied with that effort.”
“It is often believed that having
a successful football program
increases student enrollment,
stimulates alumni fund raising,
and the like. As it turns out,
conventional wisdom cannot
often be confirmed by rigorous
empirical research.”
That “due diligence” has included the preparation of what Dubois
called “the devil’s advocate brief ”—a series of hard questions that, in
essence, took apart the report of the Football Feasibility Committee
line by line to question its assumptions and analysis so that Dubois
was satisfied with the conclusions in the report.
Athletics Director Judy Rose and her staff assisted Dubois with
his research, learning for example the addition of football and new
women’s sports will more than double the number of full-time
Athletics employees.
“It is often believed that having a successful football program
increases student enrollment, stimulates alumni fund raising, and
the like. As it turns out, conventional wisdom cannot often be
confirmed by rigorous empirical research,” Dubois said.
“If, as my mother used to say, you are judged by the company
you keep, then our long-term aspiration must be to have a
comprehensive array of undergraduate, graduate, and professional
4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 13
UNC CHARLOTTE | fe a t u re
academic programs, leading cultural arts programs, and
comprehensive and competitive intercollegiate athletic programs,”
Dubois said in his recommendation to trustees.
“So, for me, this is not just a question about whether we will play
football in 2013,” Dubois said. “For me, and I believe as Trustees for
you, this should be a question of where UNC Charlotte wants to be
20 years after 2013.”
He called it a question of institutional strategy. For example,
can football contribute to strengthening the reputation of UNC
Charlotte, first regionally and then nationally?  And can football
contribute to strengthening the “ownership” of the Charlotte
community of this institution over the long-term?
“Being situated in the most vibrant city in North Carolina, UNC
Charlotte is growing into a complete university that offers a full
array of experiences to its students, alumni, supporters and friends,”
he said. “Football contributes greatly to that full array.”
After Dubois made his report, the board deferred a final vote and
took the recommendation under advisement.
The 49ers began taking reservations for FSLs (49ers Seat
Licenses) immediately following the Sept. 18 announcement
by Dubois and in the first month after the announcement had
surpassed 67 percent of the initial goal of 5,000 FSLs.
“The early reservations illustrate the ability to attack two given
goals:  greater connectivity and ownership with the community and
greater ties to alumni,” Rose said. “Of the initial FSL reservations,
69 percent have come from individuals who were not existing 49er
Club members and 70 percent have come from alumni.”
In June, Dubois delivered a comprehensive report on football to
the full board. Since then, he continued to study the topic, focusing
14 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu
“So, for me, this is not just a question
about whether we will play football in
2013,” Dubois said. “For me, and I believe
as Trustees for you, this should
be a question of where UNC Charlotte
wants to be 20 years after 2013.”
on key issues on both sides of the question.
Most of the costs of a football program would be borne by
students and private donors because state law prohibits the use of
public money for building athletic facilities.
In February, the University’s Football Feasibility Committee,
chaired by former Board of Trustees Chairman Mac Everett and
appointed by Dubois,  recommended the university should begin
playing football in 2012 on the Division I-AA level before moving up
to Division 1-A in 2016.
Dubois recommended that 2013 be the first year of play and he
recommended there should be no specific timetable to move up from
the lower-tier level to Division 1-A.
Dubois’ recommendation called for a more moderate scale than
was proposed by the feasibility committee, with students paying an
additional $25 fee each semester beginning in the fall of 2010 for
the football program. That would rise to $50 per semester in 2011
In September hundreds
of UNC Charlotte students
and supporters rallied in
favor of football.
 fe a t u re | UNC CHARLOTTE

and 2012, and $100 per semester in the first year of competitive play, 2013.
Those costs don’t include the costs of building training and practice facilities and either
renovating the university’s track and field complex or building a new stadium. The latest
estimate for football-related facilities was $45.3 million.
Dubois estimated that fundraising efforts by the 49er Athletic Foundation could raise
between $10 million and $15 million and another $5 million could come from the sale
of Forty-Niner Seat Licenses to alumni and other season-ticket holders at a cost of
$1,000 apiece.
“Even if we are successful in raising $20 million dollars from these two approaches,
you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that we are well short of our $45 million
requirement,” he said. “My hope is that community awareness of this problem will spark
some creative thinking about some possible creative solutions.”
The 49ers are utilizing the Luquire George Andrews marketing firm to create, promote
and market the 49ers football program.

John D. Bland is UNC Charlotte’s director of public relations.

Athletics Director Judy Rose and Board of
Trustees Chair Ruth Shaw addressed the
media at a press conference in September.

A look at the
[the students] are my children,” Cone said.
Looking back over records from the
infant years of the University, it’s clear
that Bonnie Cone was actually a strong

past and
supporter of the CC UNC (Charlotte
Center of the University of North Carolina,
as UNC Charlotte was known) football
team and all of the Charlotte Center’s other
athletic programs.

possible future
By James Maneva, University Times Sports Editor
(This article is reprinted with permission from
UNC Charlotte’s University Times student newspaper.)
Just as the University is embattled over
the addition of football to the school’s
athletic program today, this same tug-of-war
between students and administrators has
been happening since Charlotte College
became UNC Charlotte in 1964.
A recent search of the University archives
shows over 30 different occasions that
college football at Charlotte has been the
topic of choice. Whether football was
mentioned in the modern day equivalent of
“You don’t say” student voices in the paper,
or one of the many opinion pieces written
about the need for “big time athletics” on
campus, college football has remained a
hot topic.
One of the chief urban myths circling
the campus for many years has been the role
of Bonnie Cone, the school’s founder, in
keeping college football from becoming a
reality once again at Charlotte.
As the legend goes, a child of one of
the University’s founding leaders suffered
a serious injury in a football accident
and Cone abolished the idea of football
for her university. The University Times
actually ran an editorial piece about Cone
literally blocking a football program in
the fall of 1991. Only three years later did
the University Times come to the truth of
the issue, when reporter David Stringer
interviewed Cone on the issue in 1994.
“That’s not true!  That’s the biggest story
I’ve ever heard!  I love all sports … and unless
I had a son out of wedlock, which I don’t
know about, I don’t have any children. You
Records show that in 1947, Cone wrote
the management of the Southern Railway
System asking permission to hang a sign
promoting CC UNC’s football team on the
underpass of East Trade Street.  Cone was
granted permission to hang signs for the
Owls’ home games against Davidson and
Appalachian State Teachers College.
A 1948 quote from the CC UNC News
shows Cone’s continuing support of the
school’s football program. “Miss Bonnie
Cone, director of the Charlotte Center,
has promised full cooperation in arranging
schedules and excusing cuts for the players.”
During the 1970s, the University’s
student newspaper conducted an interview
with the 49ers’ first full-time athletic
director, Dr. Harvey Murphy. When asked
about the revival of football, Murphy
responded, “I would like to see [football]
ignored for a couple of years because it’s too
energy-absorbing, but that’s an unrealistic
view. We will probably be faced with it and
we must consider it.”
Four years later, The Carolina Journal
conducted a similar interview with the

www.UNCC.edu 4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 15

UNC CHARLOTTE | fe a t u re
assistant athletics director at the time, Dr.
Larry C. Bostan. Bostan is quoted as saying,
“Football will probably be the last sport we
ever get here … for economic reasons … it’s
not that we don’t want it — we just don’t
have the money.”
Which comes to another major topic
that has trailed every football debate and
discussion throughout the years — money.
With every mention of adding football
to the University’s athletic department
comes another educated (or in many cases
uneducated) guess as to the price tag that
such an operation would cost the school.
Students, faculty and school
administrators alike have all given their
two cents on what they thought football
would cost. Whether $300 thousand to $10
million, $18 million, or $100 million, the
bottom line was always more than people
wanted to swallow. Even the University
Times entered the bidding war. During
the Times’ April Fools edition in 2004, the
paper reported that alumni and singer Clay
Aiken had donated $25 million toward a
football stadium.
Money also played a role in ending
the short career of UNC Charlotte’s club
football team back in the mid 1970s.  With the permission of then-Chancellor
With no collegiate football program in
sight, members of the student body began
16 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu
their own club football program in the
fall of 1973. With little support and few
resources, the students funded their own
team and played several other college club
teams through the region.
The team grew in numbers and support
in the spring and fall of 1974. So did the
team’s budget, which quickly surged in
excess of $7,000. While student government
allocated money to help cover the
University-sponsored club sport, most of the
team’s revenue came from fundraising.
The Niners club football team appeared
to be becoming a mainstay on the campus
of UNC Charlotte, but in the fall of 1975,
The Carolina Journal ran an article showing
that the team was nearly $6,000 in debt.
Members of the team tried to defray some
of the debt and asked student government
to help pay off the remaining costs. A few
weeks later the football club’s charter was
revoked, leaving Charlotte once again
without a football team.
Athletic Director Judy Rose whose career
at Charlotte began as the University’s first
women’s basketball coach, said that football
only began to simmer in the minds of the
administration in the late 1990s.
Jim Woodward, Rose and several members
from the Athletic Foundation formed a
49er footballers of the 1970s
committee to look into the possibility of
fielding a football team at UNC Charlotte
in 2000.
In a January 2000 interview with the
Charlotte Observer, Chancellor Woodward
acknowledged the fact that football may one
day come to UNC Charlotte, saying, “I think
football is in the future of this institution. To
be honest, you don’t see many comparable
universities that don’t have a program. But I’d
hate to put a timeframe on it.”
The committee completed its report
and presented it to Chancellor Woodward
in 2001, and Rose then pushed for a
“marketing analysis” of the Charlotte region
to see if businesses and the public would be
willing to support the startup of a football
program at UNC Charlotte.
As Rose and the committee were
preparing their market analysis, the terror
attacks of Sept. 11 occurred, realigning the
priorities of not only the nation, but also
of the University. The idea of a football
program was once again shelved, but the
issue would not remain dormant for long.
This article first appeared in UTimes, on
Sept. 15, 2008, and is available
online at www.nineronline.com 
Campus Safety and Security
Committee delivers report
and recommendations
After spending several months studying
ways to make the UNC Charlotte campus
a safer and more secure environment, the
University’s Campus Safety and Security
Committee recently submitted its findings
to Chancellor Philip L. Dubois.
The 17-member committee, led by
Associate Vice Chancellor David Spano,
presented a 44-page report to Dubois, who
will review the findings with top members
of his administration before deciding how to
implement recommendations. The General
Assembly has appropriated funding for
campus safety and security measures; UNC
President Erskine Bowles will disburse the
allocations.
Formed by the chancellor last January,
the committee had as its charge to deliver
a blueprint to develop and implement a
comprehensive plan to ensure the physical
safety and security of UNC Charlotte’s
main campus.
Key elements of the committee’s action
plan included:
Development of a comprehensive campus
safety education program for students,
staff and faculty. In addition, safety
information for parents to include a
description of safety initiatives present
or near campus and an emergency/safety
plan for parents in response to a campus
event. The report recommended similar
safety education materials for camp and
conference guests.
Completion and maintenance of an
Involuntary Protective Withdrawal Policy,
which would allow the University to
have an assessment performed for those
students who may pose a significant and
immediate threat to themselves or others.
Addition of a case manager to the
University’s Counseling Center staff to
maintain and establish a streamlined
process for follow-up of students referred
to on- or off-campus resources.
Plans to conduct annual exercises within
colleges, departments and administrative
units to practice and evaluate emergency
plans and continuation of emergency
exercises for the University’s crisis
management team.
Increased levels of visible police or security
personnel presence based on campus
schedule, specifically after night classes,
and more foot and bicycle patrols.

GIVING
Belk College of Business
Gifts have been committed for the Center for Real Estate
from each of the following: American Asset Corporation; K&L
Gates LLP; Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein LLP; Wells Fargo;
Merrifield Partners; Myers & Chapman, Inc.; NAIOP Charlotte
Chapter; Beacon Properties; Chandler Concrete Co., Inc.;
Faison Enterprises; Richard and Shirley Buttimer; Cambridge
Properties, Inc.; Bailey W. Patrick; Frank Warren; Bill Wilson;
SunTrust Carolinas Group Foundation, Inc.; and Ron Hinson.
The Real Estate Alumni Association (REAA) has established
a scholarship to provide financial assistance to a student
studying real estate in the Belk College of Business. Gifts have
been committed to the REAA Scholarship from the following:
Ben Collins ’07; Holly Stump ’05; Travis Stowers ’05; John ’07
and Jennifer Schwaller; Brent Royall ’07; Dr. Steve Ott; Dr.
Dustin Read; Heritage House Realty, Inc. All alumni are invited
to support this fund.
The Graduate School
The Wayland H. Cato Jr. Foundation completed their final
pledge payment creating The Wayland H. Cato Jr. Fellowship,
an endowment for the purposes of providing fellowship funds
for doctoral students. The UNC Charlotte Graduate School
awarded two annual fellowships in the amount of $18,000 each
for the first time.
The Graduate School’s appetite for external funding to
support graduate students is significant. These are the students
who fuel research and establish the Charlotte Research
Institute’s initiatives. This past year the UNC Charlotte
Foundation awarded a total of $250,000 for graduate student
fellowships from both endowed and non-endowed funds.
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Development Dimensions International made a
contribution to the Organizational Science Summer Institute.
The institute is designed to give African American and Latino
students representation in the Organizational Sciences.
Qualified undergraduates will have the unique opportunity to
learn more about graduate studies and advanced research in
organizational science.
The Japanese Foundation made a contribution to provide
a visiting lecturer in Japanese Studies for the 2008-09
academic year.
Joe Marcucci ’85 has established the Dr. Judith Suther
Scholarship. This scholarship honors Dr. Judith Suther, former
French Professor, who had a long lasting impact on the lives
of many UNC Charlotte students who studied in the French
program. This award will be given to a student in the Language
and Cultural Studies French program to assist the student in a
semester or summer study abroad program.

www.UNCC.edu 4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 17

UNC CHARLOTTE | fe a t u re

Michael Hudson studies the evolution

of deadly
18 UNC “super bugs.”
CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu

Microbiologist Battles
the Coming of the
“Superbug”
By James Hathaway
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
professor Michael Hudson sees a human
catastrophe looming and he is warning
everyone he can about it.
When people hear what he has to say,
they are scared, too. A recent appearance by
Hudson on WFAE FM’s “Charlotte Talks”
call-in show broke the show’s record for the
amount of listener response it received, and
the station promptly scheduled Hudson for
a second appearance.
What has Hudson so alarmed is not
international terrorism, global warming,
global financial meltdown, the rising
cost of energy, or any of the other front
page issues that vie for our attention and
concern. What worries the UNC Charlotte
microbiologist is something that has been
going on silently and invisibly for decades:
the growing resistance of disease-causing
bacteria to antibiotic treatments — the
evolution of deadly superbugs.
Though you may barely have heard of
them, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a
very serious issue — one superbug alone,
methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus,
(aka MRSA) killed 18,000 people in the
United States last year — even more than
AIDS. The crisis is maybe even more
serious than that statistic implies, but what
most concerns Hudson is the fact that
the situation has also been largely of our
own making.
“Antibiotics have been used for a long
time, on a grand scale and they select for
resistant bacteria,” said Hudson. “Antibiotics
don’t create resistant bacteria, but they select
for the oddball that is resistant. The oddball
then grows and then becomes the dominant
population. We are directing evolution in a
very dangerous way.”
www.UNCC.edu 4Q08
Hudson is not shy about emphasizing how
serious the issue is: “This is perhaps the worst
problem currently facing humans on the
planet,” he said quietly. “Pretty soon we are
going to be back in the 1930’s, where the only
treatment for infection was amputation.”
For the last 73 years, antibiotics have
given humanity real protection against
our worst enemies, pathogenic bacteria
that infect wounds and also cause many
deadly diseases ranging from scarlet fever
and pneumonia to typhus, cholera and
bubonic plague.
“The list is so long it is beyond belief, there
were so many diseases that were untreatable
without antibiotics,” Hudson noted.
Now, bacteria are evolving and are
becoming immune to antibiotic medicines.
Several kinds of bacteria have already
developed resistance to most of our stock of
currently available antibiotics, making the
infections and diseases the microbes cause
nearly untreatable once again.
If bacteria evolve to become completely
resistant to all the antibiotics available, we
will be returning to the condition humanity
lived in before they existed — where small
cuts and scrapes could result in unstoppable,
fatal infections, where childbirth and
routine operations were exceedingly
dangerous, where common colds could turn
into pneumonia and other deadly diseases,
and where general human life expectancy
was much, much shorter than it is now.
Hudson points out that the main mistake
we make with antibiotics is unnecessary
over-use: In order to increase profits in
the livestock industry, we add drugs to
animal feed to make livestock grow faster.
We demand that our doctors prescribe
unneeded and ineffective antibiotics in
fe a t u re | UNC CHARLOTTE
the hopes of shortening harmless colds
(which are caused by viruses, not bacteria).
We wash our counters and hands with
soaps containing antibacterial agents like
triclosan, when ordinary soap would be just
as effective.
From Hudson’s point-of view, because
antibiotics lose effectiveness when bacterial
populations are over-exposed, they should
only be used as a weapon of last resort.
Antibiotics, in fact, can be counter-
productive in treating some infections
because they also eliminate other bacteria
— harmless bacteria that compete with
disease-causing bacteria and help keep them
in check. In this way, antibiotics actually
improve the environment for drug-resistant
superbugs to cause disease.
The end result is that we eliminate
most of the bacterial “flora” (think of your
body as a giant garden with trillions of
microscopic plants and weeds growing in
it) except for those that are tough enough
to resist the effects of antibiotic agents
(think of drugs as weed-killer). Through
modern chemistry, we have unwittingly
created a kind of bacterial training-camp
that eliminates the weak and friendly (the
petunias and the pansies) and creates a
deadly army of hostile superbugs (special-
forces-tough crabgrass).
We got into this mess because modern
biochemistry gave us antibiotics as weapons
against our most ancient and feared
enemies. The drugs were so effective and
the enemies so bad that we went on a war
of extermination, not realizing that we were
actually starting an unwinnable arms race.
The news from this war front has been
bad for a while, but many people are just
beginning to hear about it now.
| UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 19
UNC CHARLOTTE | fe a t u re
Hudson has been on the front lines and
he thinks the general public really needs
to know that we are in danger of losing.
However, he also wants to tell people that
the battle is not over. Science and modern
chemistry are inventive and may hold some
answers. Much of Hudson’s own research
follows that avenue.
Dr. Hudson’s nano-battle
against the multi-talented
S. aureus
Perhaps the first organism to be near
overcoming our defenses completely is the
Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, formerly
one of humanity’s
worst and most familiar
foes. It has been long
familiar in medical
science as one of the
most common causes
of tissue infections.
Before antibiotics, S.
aureus was terrifying — Michael Hudson
once started, S. aureus
infections were hard to stop and often
turned even minor cuts and wounds into
death or disfigurement. The microbe is also
one that Hudson knows well as one of the
world’s leading authorities on its biology.
Recent discoveries by Hudson and others
have also shown that drug resistance is
only part of the problem with S. aureus.
The bacterium has been shown to have a
stealth ability that increases its danger: S.
aureus enters many human cells, giving it a
refuge from the immune system and also,
critically, from the few antibiotics that are
still able to kill it. Hudson uncovered this
problem when he was the first researcher to
demonstrate that S. aureus enters and lives
within cells that make bone (osteoblasts).
What Hudson discovered helped explain
both why S. aureus had been such a
dangerous pathogen before it had evolved
multiple-drug resistance, and why it was
emerging now as one of the first and most
worrisome superbugs.
“S. aureus can kill human cells as an
extracellular bacterium because it has an
array of toxins, but it also invades our cells
and in that environment it is protected from
20 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu
the body’s immune response,” Hudson said.
“That means that there is a reservoir of
bacterial cells in the tissues in a protected
environment,” Hudson said. “Inside our
cells, S. aureus can replicate and emerge
again and as a result you can have a long-
term chronic infection that is very difficult
to treat effectively.”
Hudson notes that the bacterium’s
intracellular habit now may be making
serious infections by MRSA completely
untreatable. This is not because MRSA
has developed resistance to all known
antibiotics, but rather because Vancomycin,
the last remaining drug that is effective
against some MRSA strains, cannot cross
human cell membranes. Bacteria that have
entered the intracellular environment are
thus protected by the cells themselves
against the remaining effective drug.
Hudson believes that the only solution
may be to beat S. aureus at its own game
and put the drugs inside the cells as well.
Using nanotechnology to encapsulate the
antibiotic in biodegradable, membrane-
permeating nanoparticles, Hudson and
UNC Charlotte chemist Craig Ogle
are developing a system that can deliver
antibiotics both outside and inside cells,
reaching bacteria in all their hiding places.
The approach has the added benefit of
being able to deliver doses of the antibiotic
precisely to the places where S. aureus lurks.
Particularly important for wound victims —
such as soldiers and accident victims — the
particles can be applied topically as a spray.
The nanoparticle drug delivery system
that Hudson and Ogle are developing
proposes using nanoscale spheres of a
biocompatible polymer which biodegrades
harmlessly in the presence of water, is
already FDA-approved for medical use,
and readily encapsulates significant
quantities of antibiotic, making the
drug-containing particles capable of
killing intracellular bacteria.
The polymer provides chemical packaging
with two key features: By controlling the
size of the polymer nanoparticles, the drug
can be specifically targeted for bacteria
either inside or outside cells, since only
particles below 150 nanometers in size
can pass through cell membranes. And by
manipulating the structure of the polymer,
the researchers are able to control the speed
at which the particles are broken down by
water, releasing the drug molecules. The
time-release feature allows the drug to be
delivered either quickly outside the cell,
or later, after the cell membrane has been
crossed, or for repeated dosages outside.
In lab tests using mouse cells, Hudson has
shown that PLGA nanoparticles containing
fluorescing quantum dots readily pass
through cell membranes before degrading
and releasing their contents. In further
tests, the researchers have found compelling
data demonstrating that when the PLGA
particles are loaded with an antibiotic, they
effectively eliminate entire populations of
S. aureus established inside the cells, while a
non-encapsulated antibiotic does not.
Hudson notes that one of the advantages
of the PLGA antibiotic delivery system is
that the polymer particles can be formulated
to control the rate of release of the antibiotic
in a direct, targeted application at a wound.
“We think this approach will be
particularly useful as a first line treatment
following injury,” Hudson said. “S.
aureus is the bacterium that causes the
most trouble in wounds,” Hudson noted.
“When people get injured we propose that
the most effective treatment might be to
irrigate the wound and then spray it with
this nanoparticle preparation so you have
something that gets at the extracellular and
intracellular bacteria immediately.”
Because it would be topically applied,
rather than administered systemically
through injection, Hudson’s nanotechnology
delivery system also may be an important
way to fight drug resistance.
“The system is unique because it targets
both extracellular and intracellular bacterial
pathogens. This would obviate the need
for systemic drugs, which actually select
for resistant bacteria,” Hudson explained.
“Systemic Vancomycin doesn’t get into cells,
so it doesn’t treat the chronic form of the
infection and it encourages the development
of further drug resistance.”
James Hathaway manages research
communications for UNC Charlotte’s
Division of Academic Affairs.

Kent Ellington:
From Bench to Bedside
By Allison Reid
UNC Charlotte alumnus Dr. Kent Ellington (B.S. ’98, MS
’00) remembers the day he first learned about the work of biology
professor Michael Hudson. “Great story,” Ellington chuckles,
betraying his fondness for the professor with whom he’s been
collaborating on research for over a decade.
When Ellington was a junior biology major at UNC Charlotte,
he decided that he wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon. He began
attending the biology department’s weekly research seminars, even
though they were technically only meant for graduate students.
Hudson gave a presentation about his work on bone infection and
the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, and Ellington immediately
knew Hudson’s research was a good fit with his interests.
“I asked if I could join his lab,” Ellington says, “and he said ‘No’!”
At that point, Hudson did not have enough funding or lab space to
bring in a student, but Ellington persisted. “So I basically bugged
the man for a solid year,” Ellington says. “I would send him emails,
leave him voicemails, slide notes under his door.” His perseverance
paid off when Hudson took him in the next year — still lacking
the lab space and the funding — and Ellington was able to do the
research that would become his senior honors thesis. And it would
also serve as the basis of a 10-year research collaboration that will
mean big things for fighting, and preventing, infection.
Ellington stuck around Hudson’s lab and got his Master’s in
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fe a t u re | UNC CHARLOTTE
Biology, writing his thesis on the same subject as his undergraduate
senior honors thesis: “Mechanisms of Staph aureus Invasion into
Osteoblast.” What does that mean to the layperson? Basically,
Ellington and Hudson have been studying how to treat surgical
site Staph infections, particularly in bone, which are a multi-billion
dollar a year medical complication that can double the healthcare
costs of the patient and increase their mortality ten-fold. The two
scientists are developing a product that could be applied directly to
a wound and not only treat infection, but prevent it. Their work is
of interest to the Department of Defense and several pharmaceutical
companies, according to Ellington, and they currently are awaiting
patent approval for their products.
Getting to this point for Ellington has meant a lot of sleepless
nights and long hours in the lab. “My friends laugh at me and the
hours I keep,” he says. “I don’t sleep too much — maybe three to
four hours a night.” Ellington was able to continue his research
with Hudson even while attending medical school at Wake Forest
University. One of the chairmen of infectious disease at Wake
Forest gave Ellington some bench space in his lab and let him
use materials. To fund his research while in medical school,
Ellington received grants from the NIH and from the Orthopedic
Trauma Association.
Now a senior orthopedic resident at Carolinas Medical Center
(CMC) in Charlotte, Ellington still finds time to pursue his
work with Hudson. Having already received around $90,000 in
research grants, he is writing one grant for $100,000, another one
for $250,000 and a third for $1 million from the Department of
Defense. That’s not counting the grants that Hudson is working on.
“We’re trying to take it from the couple hundred thousand to the
million dollar mark,” he says.
Ellington confides that one will not find a bigger UNC Charlotte
supporter than him. His white lab coat is adorned with a green
UNC Charlotte button, and he attends as many basketball games
as his schedule allows. “I think UNC Charlotte is a great all around
university with tremendous faculty,” Ellington says. “And they gave
me all the resources and tools that I needed to succeed.”
Ellington, who graduated in the top 10 of his class at Wake
Forest, has been told by medical school professors and CMC
colleagues that his research portfolio — the published papers, the
presentations at scientific and medical conferences and now the
nearly patented products — is many years ahead of his cohort. He
credits Hudson for that: “I can honestly say I wouldn’t be where I
am today if it wasn’t for his support, leadership and guidance.”
Next year, when Ellington has completed his internship at
CMC, he will be doing a one-year fellowship in Baltimore at
Mercy Medical Hospital in adult reconstructive foot and ankle
surgery. He will then return to Charlotte and CMC to be an
orthopedic foot and ankle trauma surgeon. “And I’ll keep doing
research,” he says. For Ellington, that’s when all the sleepless
nights in the lab will pay off. “They call it from bench to bedside,”
Ellington says. “That’s when I’ll actually be able to apply the
outcomes from my research to my trauma patients and help treat
and prevent infection.”
Allison Reid is communications director for
the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
| UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 21
UNC CHARLOTTE | a l u m n i p ro f i l e s
Robyn Massey
Finding New Ways
to Engage Alumni
By Katie Conn Suggs
“It’s been quite a run,” admits Robyn
Massey when asked about her many years
of involvement with UNC Charlotte and
the Alumni Association. Serving on the
Alumni Association’s Board of Directors
since 2003, she was recently elected as
President of the Board. With this title,
Massey joins only seven other women and
is the first African-American in the role.
“I haven’t had time to really think about
being president; I just know there is so
much I want to accomplish,” says Massey.
Growing up in the Triangle area of North
Carolina, Massey always thought she would
attend NC State, but as time grew nearer
to making a decision on where to attend
college, she didn’t like the idea of attending
a school that size.
“I started looking for schools in North
Carolina with good technology programs
and came across UNC Charlotte. At the
time, UNC Charlotte was very small —
only 10,000-12,000 students. Its reputation
was fairly young, but the programs I saw
around computer science and math were
something I was immediately drawn to.
UNC Charlotte was a good fit for me,”
says Massey.
Graduating with a degree in mathematics
in 1981, Massey went on to receive her
master’s degree in business administration
from Wake Forest University. “Education
was always a priority,” says Massey.
In addition to working for IBM full-time,
Massey and her husband, Greg, own the
successful Avant Garde Shoes and Accessories
in Concord, N.C. “My husband and I
wanted to run a business around something
that we both liked, and unfortunately that
revolves around clothing!”
22 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu
Shopping in New York City, Las Vegas, to find friends, classmates, or roommates
and Atlanta, Robyn and Greg wanted to with whom they may have lost contact.
find a way to bring one-of-a-kind things Hopefully, we can bring people together
to Charlotte. “It’s nice being able to bring and engage them with UNC Charlotte,”
distinctive things to Charlotte,” says Massey. says Massey.
Between working for IBM and owning In addition to seeing more programming
Avant Garde, Massey still finds time to give and more involvement with the University,
back to her alma mater. Massey will serve as Massey would also like to see more diversity
president of the Alumni Association’s Board on the Board of Directors.
of Directors for the next two years, and “We have done a great job soliciting
she already knows what she wants folks to the Board who are passionate about
to accomplish.
“I would like to increase the ways that
we engage alumni. What I mean by that is
that we have some alumni programming,
but I don’t know that we have a diversified
base of alumni programming. For example,
the way we draw alumni to campus is
typically around athletics, but not everyone
is necessarily interested in sporting events.
I would like to utilize the University’s staff
and faculty to develop alumni programs
so we can expose alumni to the talent on
this campus.”
One way to get alumni connected to
the school and highlight individual college
events will be through iModules, the
Alumni Association’s online community.
“The iModules community is really
fantastic, and I think it is going to help get
the University’s message out to our alumni.
With the online community, we can really
feature what the individual colleges are
doing and allow alumni to make informed
decisions about what events they would
like to attend. More importantly, through
the community our alumni will be able
Massey will serve as president
of the Alumni Association’s Board
of Directors for the next two years.
 a l u m n i p ro f i l e s | UNC CHARLOTTE

UNC Charlotte. What we have not focused

on, however, is ethnicity and age diversity.
I would like to see our Board with more
people of Latino and Asian descent. A lot
of people on the Board are 70s, 80s and 90s
grads, but we do not have any people who
graduated from Charlotte College. I think
we only have one person from the 2000s. I
want to make the Board more representative
of our alumni base,” concludes Massey.
There is no doubt that over the next two
years, under Massey’s leadership, the Board
and the Alumni Association will pursue
these goals with enthusiasm.
“I want our alumni to be proud to be
a part of this University. I want to see our
80,000 alumni give back to this University
— not just financially but by being involved
with this great University. In concert with
the recent change to the UNC Charlotte
mission statement that ‘UNC Charlotte is
North Carolina’s urban research university,’
I would like to see the efforts of the Alumni
Association and Board culminate in broad
recognition of that statement.”

Katie Conn Suggs is director

of communications for UNC Charlotte’s
Division of Development and Alumni Affairs.

www.UNCC.edu 4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 23

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24 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu

 fe a t u re | UNC CHARLOTTE

A Choir for
the Unsung
By Lisa A. Lambert

Sometimes ordinary people lead extraordinary lives, whether Askari wa amani,

by circumstance or choice. You don’t have to travel beyond Guardians of the
the UNC Charlotte campus to find these people. Many of our peace: Andrew Clark
Andrew Clark summarizes his experience as
students are among their ranks, though their triumphs and trials a Peace Corps volunteer: “It’s probably safe to
say that the first year of service was the hardest
often go unrecognized. and the second year the best year of my life.”
Clark, a UNC Charlotte alumnus and
2004 recipient of the Jamgotch Humanitarian
But a vehicle to herald these unsung heroes and stand out Student Award, returned from Tanzania, Africa
in November 2007 after serving as a math
students does exist, thanks to the Nish Jamgotch Humanitarian teacher at a remote boarding school for girls.
Student Award. Political science professor emeritus Nish From his residence in Washington,
D.C., where he began graduate studies in
Jamgotch Jr., who taught at UNC Charlotte for nearly 30 years, international science and technology policy
this fall, Clark discussed his time at
established the annual $10,000 cash award to honor students UNC Charlotte, the Peace Corps, and life
after Africa.
whose creative achievements have improved the quality of life While a double major in mechanical
engineering and international relations at
and well-being of humankind. UNC Charlotte, Clark helped coordinate a
program to bring leftover food from campus
The individuals profiled are the award recipients to date. to a local soup kitchen and participated in
volunteer projects at Lifespan, a program
Their collective achievements include local, national and for children and adults with developmental
disabilities.
global humanitarian work and address a range of issues from As president of United Christian
Fellowship, an ecumenical campus ministry,
poverty relief to disaster response. All carry on their work with Clark volunteered locally at Crisis Assistance

selflessness and dedication, and share the insights they’ve

gained in the hopes of inspiring others. Perhaps you will be
inspired, too.

LEFT: Brett Tempest, recipient of the 2007 Jamgotch Humanitarian Student

Award, participated in relief efforts in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami and
Hurricane Katrina.

RIGHT: Andrew pictured with Kongei student Maryam at a school function

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UNC CHARLOTTE | fe a t u re

Ministries and traveled to Haiti and the Bahamas during spring

break to work on relief projects.
“The trip to Haiti was a real slap in the face — to see poverty
first-hand, walk around Port au Prince and visit the slums was very
eye-opening,” Clark said. “I developed a real passion for the third
world and how our policies affect other countries, as well as a desire
to keep an eye out for the people who go unnoticed in society.”
The Haiti trip coupled with additional volunteer activities at
International House, an organization in Charlotte that promotes
cross-cultural understanding through outreach, ignited Clark’s
desire to see the world.
Upon arrival in the mountainous region of Tanzania that would
be his temporary home, Clark was welcomed warmly by the people,
many of whom lamented his departure nearly two years later.
Clark kept a blog from Africa whenever he had access to the
Internet. In his writings, he expounds on his encounters with
Pedro, a pesky rat and worthy adversary; a car chase in Dar es
Salaam; life without electricity; the challenges his students faced;
and the culture shock common among Peace Corps volunteers
upon return to America.
During his assignment, Clark fulfilled his teaching duties while Top Left: Students at the Kongei boarding school in Tanzania.
also acting as an ambassador of sorts for the United States.
“They were curious to talk to me and hear my perspective — Top Right: Students Winnie and Bahati pose for the camera at the
graduation ceremony.
there wasn’t any hostility even though they don’t like our policies,”
Clark said. “They have an idea of America from what they see on Bottom Left: Grace, a student at Kongei, greeted Andrew every day
television, and it was hard to get them to realize that wasn’t what with an enthusiastic handshake.
America was.”
Bottom Right: Andrew Clark taught math as a Peace Corps volunteer
Clark recalled one encounter when a 13-year-old girl asked in Tanzania, Africa, after graduating from UNC Charlotte.
him why Americans hate Muslims. He did his best to alleviate
her concern.
Conversely, Clark finds Americans harbor many misconceptions service volunteers gain a more in-depth understanding of the causes
about Africa. “Now that I’m back, I try to explain to Americans that of social problems and their wide-spread effects. Clark’s collective
Africa is not as simple as they think,” he said. experiences have led him to believe that such problems must be
The time Clark spent in what he describes as one of the most addressed through incremental change.
beautiful and unspoiled places in the world left him with deeper “Nothing happens overnight, and one person isn’t going to do
self-awareness and appreciation for human adaptability. “Being anything alone, but with the right motivation you can get enough
able to adjust and learn a completely new way of life makes people behind you to get anything done,” he said. “I think problems
you feel there’s really no situation you can’t handle,” he said. facing the world and America can be dealt with the same way.
Though few people have the kind of immersive volunteer If people are truly inspired and see the necessity of fixing these
experience provided by the Peace Corps, Clark notes that through problems, they will be fixed.”

A History of Helping Others:

Lakeisha Rainey
At age 15, when friends, movies and malls are usually priorities
for teenagers, Lakeisha Rainey was volunteering at a local nursing
home. As a biology major at UNC Charlotte, Rainey continued
her work with the Autumn Care Nursing Home in her hometown
of Raeford, while she balanced life as a student with other
volunteer activities.
In 2005, Rainey was recognized with the Jamgotch
Humanitarian Student Award.

26 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu

 fe a t u re | UNC CHARLOTTE

Under a Big Sky: Laura Mesec However, Mesec’s favorite memory involves community building, not
bricks and mortar.
A volunteer team from Minnesota that had previously traveled to the
Unemployment runs rampant on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation reservation came to rehabilitate the village’s only outdoor basketball court.
in northern Montana. The most impoverished Native Americans in The court was in no condition for competition; it was replete with cracks,
the United States reside on a swath of land slightly larger than the state overgrown by weeds, and lacking discernable boundary lines or hardware.
of Delaware. The group of 30 young adults worked furiously for three days to refurbish
Senior theatre and English education major Laura Mesec, 2008 recipient the court. Then, they successfully hosted a three-day basketball tournament
of the Jamgotch Humanitarian Student Award, spent the summer months for the community.
in Heart Butte, a small village on the reservation. “We had at least 350 people there every night. Kids, adults, elderly
Mesec, who coordinated the efforts of incoming volunteer groups people were there — it was amazing,” Mesec said. The event was a
as an intern with UNC Charlotte’s United Campus Fellowship (UCF) milestone for Mesec — it marked the first time during her stay in Heart
organization, lived in a church and enjoyed few amenities among fewer than Butte when a sizable number of residents came together.
700 people. Throughout her life, Mesec has demonstrated a history of service and
“There is no gas station, no grocery store, leadership. In addition to traveling twice to the Gulf
no restaurants of any kind — all of those Coast region in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to
things are at least 30 minutes away,” she help with the reconstruction efforts, she founded
said. “I was kind of cut off from the world the HomeWork Service Organization at UNC
— cell phones don’t work there, and there Charlotte. Two Saturdays each month Mesec
was no Internet access at the church.” organizes a community service activity in
Problems, including teen pregnancy Charlotte — students, faculty and staff are
and drug and alcohol abuse, permeate the welcomed to participate.
social fabric of the community in Heart Currently, she is working with UCF pastor
Butte and across the reservation. Mesec’s Steve Cheney to coordinate a UNC Charlotte
charge was to provide constructive activities Habitat Build through Habitat for Humanity
for residents as well as a safe haven for of Charlotte.
individuals (adults and children) going “To do a build, you have to raise $60,000, so
through difficult circumstances. we’re working on that,” she said. A local family in
From the outset, Mesec said she was need will benefit from the build, which will rely
welcomed into the community. on volunteer labor from UNC Charlotte students
“People would call to see if I was okay and Habitat volunteers.
and if I needed anything, or visit me at Mesec is preparing to begin student teaching
the church and bring dinner,” she said. in the Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools. She
“I struck up friendships with quite a hopes to inspire her students to become active
few people.” in their communities, but she doesn’t believe in
The relentless winters on the reservation mandating service.
often leave ample volunteer opportunities Laura Mesec, 2008 recipient of the Jamgotch “It’s not something you have to do every day or
in their wake — visiting volunteer groups make Humanitarian Student Award, spent the every week,” she said. “Any kind of contribution is
repairs to homes and complete other construction summer coordinating volunteer efforts at the enough.” But, she added, once you get the service
Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana.
related tasks. bug, there’s no going back.

At UNC Charlotte, Rainey co-chartered the American
Medical Student Association, the first premedical organization
at the university. As president, she helped plan events that better
prepared students for graduate work. For three years, Rainey was
a resident adviser on campus and volunteered at the Charlotte
Rescue Mission; the H.E.L.P Store, which provides packages
of food and clothes to needy families; and Meals on Wheels
of Charlotte.
Additionally, Rainey lobbied to improve pharmaceutical
drug coverage for seniors and worked with the Breast Cancer
Resource Center in Fayetteville to which she donated some of
her award money.
Rainey spent the summer of 2004 in Costa Rica studying
Spanish and teaching English as a second language to a small group
of health care professionals. A chemistry and Spanish minor, she
hopes to one day practice internal medicine and geriatrics.
This story appeared in the summer 2005 issue of UNC Charlotte
magazine. Rainey was unavailable for comment.

www.UNCC.edu 4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 27

UNC CHARLOTTE | fe a t u re
In It Together: Brett Tempest
Brett Tempest believes in the power of individuals to collectively
make a difference in the world. He believes in community service
and volunteerism. The affable UNC Charlotte doctoral student will
tell you that his volunteer experiences have impacted every aspect of
his life, and in turn, the lives of countless others.
Tempest admits to being a restless student who was on a
vocational path in high school but ultimately chose to pursue a
college degree. Judging by his record, he made a sound choice:
He earned a bachelor’s degree in international studies from UNC
Chapel Hill in 2001; a bachelor’s in civil engineering (magna
cum laude) from UNC Charlotte in 2004; and a master’s in civil
engineering from UNC Charlotte in 2007.
By alternating between schooling and community service
work, he was able to employ his skills and talents in the service
of those in need. In 1999, he joined AmeriCorps/National
Civilian Community Corps, where he served as an assistant team
leader, primarily working in the western United States; then in
2005 he served as a team leader, focusing on the Hurricane Katrina
relief effort.
“The experience of it [AmeriCorps] was so intense that at the
end of it, you are off of whatever track you were on,” he
said. “Being nothing but in service to
your country for a year really alters
your outlook on things.”
Tempest said AmeriCorps members
are welcomed into the communities
in which they serve. “The community
takes an interest in you. You’re invited
to their pageants, their basketball
games, you play against their baseball
league, and you get to know people
in this different way. You’re in the
community to help — that’s an
awesome way to arrive somewhere.”
As an AmeriCorps member, Tempest
lived in seven different states and
traveled to countless communities
working on projects to address
environmental issues as well as unmet
housing construction needs. During
his deployment to the Gulf Coast in
the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he
worked with volunteers to move people
out of temporary shelters and into semi-
permanent living arrangements, including
onto cruise ships contracted by FEMA.
After his work in the Gulf Coast area relief effort, he served as
a global assignee for a one-year period with Habitat for Humanity
International. He was assigned to the 2004 Indian Ocean
Tsunami reconstruction effort and was stationed for 11 months
in Pondicherry, India, working as a project manager supervising a
seven-member engineering field staff and a large number of local
contractors and construction personnel. In this capacity, he was able
28 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08
to put his education and experiences in working with diverse
communities to good use, helping villages ravaged by the ocean
rebuild themselves.
Tempest learned a great deal from the experience, including
how to navigate cultural differences.
“When I would try to impose what I thought would be standards
of a simple, decent house, often it wasn’t culturally appropriate,”
he said. “We had to rely a lot on the community to help us design
something that would be acceptable to them and comfortable for
them to live in.”
For instance, Tempest advocated converting the veranda in
the building plan into a storage area or small kitchen, but his
suggestions were met with resistance.
“It turns out having the veranda is really culturally important
— you entertain on the veranda; there are a lot of people you don’t
want to come into your house but you’ll entertain them there.
Americans do the same thing — you don’t just invite everybody into
your house.”
Tempest explained the homes in the path of the tsunami were
constructed of sticks and thatch, which melted to the ground
as the giant wave overtook them, leaving thousands of Indians
homeless. He said the Indian government embraced the disaster as a
chance to eradicate substandard housing in
Pondicherry and elsewhere.
“We were building solid houses, of
approximately 300-square-feet, that were
designed to withstand a future tsunami or
cyclone - within reason,” Tempest said.
Tempest said his experiences have
illustrated how resilient, and resourceful,
people can be in the face of difficulty.
“When people decide they want to do
something, they have the strength and
capacity to make it happen,” he said.
In Pondicherry, one of the challenges
the international relief
team faced was a brick shortage because of
the high demand for building materials in
the region.
“A women’s group in the town decided
to make the bricks, and problem solved,”
he said. “The shortage turned into
an opportunity to contribute to the
livelihood of the village — they were out
of work, already in a pretty impoverished
condition, and we were able to give them
equipment they could keep there.”
Tempest, who is passionate about environmental issues, remains
hopeful in the face of challenges such as global warming. His hope
is a testament to the belief that people can overcome even daunting
obstacles when they work together.
Tempest reinvested his Jamgotch award into education and
is now a Ph.D. student in UNC Charlotte’s infrastructure and
environmental systems program, where his research is focused on
sustainable construction design.
www.UNCC.edu

Transforming Society One
Building at a Time: Chip Howell
Charles “Chip” Howell has been building things for most of his life. As a
graduate student in architecture at UNC Charlotte, he was able to apply his
knowledge, amassed after years of volunteering with Habitat for Humanity
and enhanced as a student of historic preservation and community design at
the College of Charleston, to help communities and organizations in need.
Howell, who earned his master’s degree from UNC Charlotte, resides in
Los Angeles where he works for an architecture firm. I spoke to him early
one morning by phone; despite the time zone difference (by the time we
talked, I’d been awake three hours and had imbibed two cups of coffee),
Howell spoke fluently and passionately about his commitment to using his
skills for the betterment of communities in the United States and abroad.
“When I was an undergraduate in college I worked in a run-down
neighborhood on a building that was going to be a community center
-- that’s when I came to understand that I could use my architecture and
building skills to do something positive in the community,” he said.
As a student at UNC Charlotte, the 2006 Jamgotch Humanitarian
Student Award recipient worked with fellow architecture students in the
design build studio and Charlotte housing services to build a house for an
individual who had been on a waiting list for five years.
He then began volunteering with the Latin American Coalition. As a
volunteer, Howell directed a campaign to create Charlotte’s first community-
based Latin American Cultural and Service Center. A talented designer,
Howell developed a strategy whereby art and architecture become a
springboard for cross-cultural connections. In addition, he outlined strategies
for low-income Latino youth to help develop programs for the center.
Though he works full time, Howell makes time to volunteer, whether
it’s in northern California helping a non-profit organization install solar
panels on low-income housing or traveling to Nicaragua to build a public
bathroom facility.
“Exporting diplomacy works best when you’re sending human resources
with skill sets to a place where few people have these skills sets,” Howell said.
He viewed the trip to Nicaragua, financed in part by the Jamgotch award, as
an opportunity to shift attitudes through cross cultural connections.
Howell has learned from his volunteer experiences that when others see
your enthusiasm, in tandem with competence, it catches on like wild fire.
“I’ve always been surprised by the scope of reactions you get from people.
They become invested [in a project] in their own way, which shine’s a light
on each individual’s talents.”
As an apprentice architect, Howell has had the opportunity to indulge
his interest in green design and building. Currently, he is working on a
child care facility for a large corporation that will be LEED Gold certified.
The project will be a first for the company, and Howell hopes its success
will inspire other corporations to incorporate green building principles into
future construction.
Before heading off to work, Chip stressed that as potential volunteers and
agents of change, university students have a lot to offer, both in the application
of their skills in the community and in their capacity to teach others.
“University students are learning something that can be valuable to
someone – you have skills others might not necessarily have,” he said.
“You’ll be surprised to learn how much you know, and other people
will be appreciative that you took the time to volunteer – and there’s the
opportunity for them to learn from your skills.”
www.UNCC.edu
fe a t u re | UNC CHARLOTTE
Professor Emeritus
Pays It Forward
UNC Charlotte Professor Emeritus Nish Jamgotch Jr.
knows firsthand the importance of the right amount of
support at the right time in a student’s career. In the early
1960s, he won a competitively awarded federal grant to fund
his doctoral studies. “I’ve said to myself all along would I have
taken that jump to the Ph.D. at a fairly expensive private
university like Claremont had I not had financial support. It
would have been dicey. It would have been tough.”
One good turn deserves another. That break led Jamgotch
to devote his professional career to inspiring young
people. And just as he taught
and mentored scores of UNC
Charlotte students, the former
leader of UNC Charlotte’s
political science faculty is using
his estate plans to ensure his
inspiring legacy lives on for future
generations at UNC Charlotte.
Through a charitable estate
commitment, Jamgotch established
the Nish Jamgotch Humanitarian
Student Award, a prestigious
annual competitive award honoring
creativity and humanitarianism within the UNC Charlotte
student body. The award was established in 2003 and was
first bestowed at UNC Charlotte in the spring of 2004. The
student winners receive a $10,000 cash prize, unprecedented
in the history of the university, for creative pursuits of
humanitarian issues.
“We have so much in our society that is divisive and
conflict-laden,” Jamgotch says. “We need more vigorous
efforts that will bring us together for joint, creative problem
solving. This humanitarian award says to the students of UNC
Charlotte and students elsewhere, ‘What can you do to make
a difference in this enormously complicated and frequently
fractionalized society in which we live?’ I would like this
program to be a model for other institutions as well.”
Jamgotch is a distinguished political scientist whose
academic focus includes Russia, international relations and
U.S.-Soviet cooperative agreements. He is a past recipient
of the North Carolina Bank Award, now known as the
Bank of America Award for Excellence in Teaching. It is the
University’s most prestigious teaching honor. He has been
a Hoover Scholar at Stanford University and an associate of
the Russian Research Center at Harvard University. He was
honored by one of the first 10 research grants awarded by the
U.S. Institute of Peace, founded by the U.S. Congress in 1984.
Watch www.uncc.edu for information about how to
nominate a student for the award. Nominations will be sought
in January 2009.
4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 29
UNC CHARLOTTE | a l u m n i p ro f i l e s
Glenn
Hutchinson
Playwright helps others rethink immigration and education
By Rhiannon Bowman
Inspired to write and become involved in
theater by his professors at UNC Charlotte,
Dr. Glenn Hutchinson is modest about his
latest creative success, calling the process
a collaboration. An associate professor at
Johnson C. Smith University — and a
former lecturer at UNC Charlotte — it
was Hutchinson’s international students in
his English Composition classes, however,
who provided the initial inspiration for his
award-winning play “Limbo.” “I started
listening to their stories about why they
came to the school to study,” he said.
“We had a lot of interesting discussions
about the American Dream, and what
that might mean.”
Around the same time, as a volunteer for
the Hispanic Cultural Center of Charlotte,
a nonprofit organization whose mission
“I started
listening to their
stories about
why they came
to the school to
study. We had a
lot of interesting
discussions about
the American
Dream, and what
that might mean.”
30 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu
is to encourage Latino youths to attend Hutchinson’s ability to portray both sides
college, he stumbled upon the story of of the issue — the federal government’s and
Marie Gonzales. Soon after, they cultivated the students’ — convincingly. He did not
a long-distance friendship and “Limbo” was set out to change people’s minds, however.
born. “So much of the play came from our “I think once people hear stories about
first 30-minute interview,” says Hutchinson, people who have lived here nearly all of their
who also began discussing immigration and lives, who are in this situation of limbo,
education issues with other area students in that, at a minimum, they might connect
similar situations. or relate in some way in the sense that
Gonzales grew up in the United States. we’ve all had that feeling of being caught
Her family immigrated to Missouri from in-between something.”
Costa Rica when she was five years old, He will not accept the label of
she graduated from an American high immigration activist, however, saying, “I
school and enrolled in college — her don’t want the play to be too preachy and
father even worked for the governor of force people to think things. I hope that it’s
Missouri. Nevertheless, because she and her
parents are undocumented, Marie’s desire
to graduate from an American college was
threatened. Eventually, though her parents
were deported, she was allowed to stay in
the country to finish college. Since then she
has become an advocate for the D.R.E.A.M.
Act, which stands for Development, Relief
and Education for Alien Minors, and
fine-tuned her scholastic goals — she now
aspires to become an attorney.
The act would allow undocumented
immigrants brought to America by their
parents as minors to reside in the country
until they complete either their degree
or two years of military service. First
introduced to Congress in 2001, the bill
has stalled — even with solid congressional
support on both sides of the isle.
“Limbo,” which reflects Marie’s story,
ran for three weeks in Charlotte to
sellout crowds. Local critics applauded
Hutchinson has authored the plays “Limbo,”
“Brainwrap” and “The Dream Catcher.”
 a l u m n i p ro f i l e s | UNC CHARLOTTE

“He encouraged
us to write.
He brought
a passionate
excitement—like
we were doing
something
important—to each
class. He took a
personal interest
in us. That class
probably made the
most impact on me.”

enjoyable and that people can connect with

people in some way, but it is a political play
that does sympathize with the students.
Personally I have been disappointed in the
community college system that has decided
to ban undocumented students — even
Washington, D.C., doesn’t say you have to
do that.”
Not only is he an in-demand playwright,
he also is in his first semester as an associate
professor at Johnson C. Smith University—
with 120 freshman English students—and
he is an accomplished poet, too. In Hutchinson credits professor Sam Watson for igniting his love of writing.
addition to reformatting “Limbo” for UNC
Charlotte’s McKnight Hall stage, where the Watson’s tradition of writing a letter to his UNC Charlotte who shaped me.”
play will be performed Dec. 2, he is writing students on the first day of class and then After “Limbo” wraps in December,
several short theatrical scenes for the Levine asking them to respond. Hutchinson says he wants to focus on his
Museum of the New South’s upcoming “That had a big impact on me,” says students and his writing, revising “Limbo”
exhibition on immigration. Hutchinson who also says he thinks of his and then moving on to different projects.
As a 49er, he majored in history but composition classes as a conversation about “My main job is being a teacher, but the
it was retired English professor Sam writing. “We stay in touch,” he says about good thing is that these interests overlap,”
Watson who ignited his love for writing. Watson, “He is a mentor to me—especially he says.
“He encouraged us to write. He brought as a teacher.” To learn more about Dr. Hutchinson and
a passionate excitement — like we were Also while a student at UNC Charlotte, view clips from “Limbo,” visit his Web site:
doing something important — to each Hutchinson wrote and directed two http://web.mac.com/gchutchi.
class. He took a personal interest in us. That plays —“Brainwrap” and “The Dream
class probably made the most impact on Catcher,” acting in several others. “That
me. Now I’m teaching a variation of that was a very positive experience. There were Rhiannon Bowman is a freelance writer and
[class],” says Hutchinson who has continued some important moments and people at student at UNC Charlotte.

www.UNCC.edu 4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 31

UNC CHARLOTTE | title
UNC Charlotte
at a Crossroads
By Lisa A. Lambert
Americans are “joiners.” We hold
memberships in all kinds of organizations,
and we use social networking sites such
as Facebook and My Space to collect
“friends” like so many shiny baubles.
But do the organizations we belong to
actually meet? Do we know our neighbors?
Are we participating in the civic life of
our communities by signing petitions or
32 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08
going to city council meetings to harangue
our representatives?
According to Robert Putnam, author of
Bowling Alone, levels of civic engagement
have declined sharply in the last quarter
century because of changes in our work,
family structure, age, lifestyle, technology
and other factors.
A survey of 40 communities, including
Charlotte, laid the groundwork for
Putnam’s thesis. The results revealed that
the Charlotte-Mecklenburg community has
high levels of faith-based involvement and
philanthropy, but ranked 39th in levels of
social and interracial trust.
In response to this data, the Foundation
For the Carolinas convened a diverse
group of community leaders to grapple
www.UNCC.edu

with the root causes of distrust, especially
between people of different races
and ethnicities.
The group determined that levels of
trust in the community are direct outcomes
of how residents find that institutions,
systems and resources are inaccessible to
them or accessible, exclusive or inclusive,
equitable or unjust.
With a commitment to turn knowledge
into action, the group developed the
Crossroads Charlotte initiative. The
initiative is all about choice,
and intentionality.
First, four different stories — Fortress
Charlotte, The Beat Goes On, Class Act,
Eye to Eye — depicting plausible futures
for the community in the year 2015
were developed and shared with
organizations, individuals and business
leaders in the region.
Area corporations, governmental entities,
nonprofits and institutions were asked to
design a response, or initiative, within their
organizations’ program of work or mission
that would help lead the community to the
positive aspects of the Crossroads Charlotte
scenarios and away from the negative
aspects of these futures.
By reaching out to the community
through artistic performances and dialogue,
it is hoped the initiative will generate a
demand for positive change thus propelling
the Charlotte-Mecklenburg community
toward a more positive scenario by 2015.
Much like the City of Charlotte, UNC
Charlotte has experienced a tremendous
increase in growth and diversity.
“I think universities take on
characteristics of their communities,”
said Susan Harden, Crossroads Charlotte
coordinator, who recently joined the
University to spearhead the development of
a community engagement curriculum. “This
emphasis on becoming a world-class major
research institution mirrors the same push
Charlotte went through.”
UNC Charlotte Provost Joan Lorden,
who has played an integral role in the
Crossroads Charlotte initiative, hired
Harden to create new partnerships in the
community and develop a Crossroads
Charlotte program specifically for the
www.UNCC.edu
“We have 23,000
smart, thoughtful,
students who
want to contribute
[to the community].
We want to make
sure our students
are out in the
community being
a part of the
solution to some of
our fundamental
issues.”
campus, to include a freshman seminar
curriculum and visioning forums.
Approximately 79 percent of UNC
Charlotte’s students hail from Mecklenburg
and surrounding counties.
“We have 23,000 smart, thoughtful,
students who want to contribute [to the
community],” Harden said. “We want
to make sure our students are out in the
community being a part of the solution to
some of our fundamental issues.”
Harden said students often don’t know
much about the root causes of the social
problems illustrated by the Putnam survey;
the Crossroads curriculum exposes
students to the social, political, economic
and cultural forces in their community
and explores strategies to create a
positive future.
She hopes that the curriculum, which
encourages students to probe in-depth
the complex questions of the day, will
give students the tools to approach
social problems, such as poverty, with
sophistication, rather than rely on
generalities and easy solutions.
fe a t u re | UNC CHARLOTTE
“We’re saying, ‘Here’s the issue, here’s
what it looks like in our community,
and here’s what you can do about it,’”
Harden said.
In addition, Harden is working to
develop a service learning component to
the program. Through service learning
opportunities, students get credit for
working with organizations that provide
for the needs of the community.
Currently, students have been placed in
the Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools to tutor
and mentor K–12 students.
“There’s no shortage of work to be done,”
Harden said. “We have a tremendous resource
in our students, and they want to do it.”
Harden notes the scope of her charge
encompasses more than the freshman
experience. In addition to sending students
into the community, she is developing ways
to bring the community onto the university
campus. She also serves as a liaison between
UNC Charlotte’s research resources and
the community, connecting researchers
to opportunities to apply their work to
community problems.
With grant funding from the Charlotte
Mecklenburg Community Foundation, an
affiliate of Foundation For the Carolinas,
UNC Charlotte plans to hold visioning
exercises on campus. Faculty, staff, students
and alumni are invited to attend the
Crossroads Campus Forums, slated for
November and February.
“We’re going to create our own scenarios,
talk about the things that are happening
in our university community and what
kind of university we want to be,” Harden
said. “This visioning process will help
our campus talk about our diversity and
changing demographics.”
There is no cost to participate in the
workshops, but participants are encouraged
to register at http://www.crossroads.uncc.
edu/signup.
“We have the opportunity to grow
in a healthy way together. It’s all about
intentionality — do you just want to end
up somewhere or do you want to be
intentional about where you end up?”
Harden said. “It’s the question we ask our
freshmen, but we’re not always asking
ourselves the same question.”
4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 33
UNC CHARLOTTE | title
Trying Research
on for Size
By Lisa A. Lambert
As the public research university in the
Charlotte region, UNC Charlotte boasts
80 graduate degree programs, and the
talented, enthusiastic faculty and students
these programs attract. A nationally
funded program helps bridge the gap
between the potential graduate students
of tomorrow and the sometimes daunting
world of research.
34 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu
The National Science Foundation-
sponsored Research Experience for
Undergraduates (REU) program was created
to expose students to research-related
careers, as well as to inspire and excite
women and minority students.
In the last three decades, women and
minorities collectively have come to
comprise the majority of the country’s
college student population, but they earn
fewer advanced degrees in science fields.
As a host site for the REU program,
UNC Charlotte offers undergraduate
students who attend UNC Charlotte, as
well as other institutions, opportunities to
conduct hands-on research. Participants
are chosen from a pool of applicants to
work with graduate students and faculty
 fe a t u re | UNC CHARLOTTE

on projects in disciplines including

engineering, computer science and
psychology.
Dr. Paula Goolkasian, professor of
psychology and director of cognitive science,
said it is imperative for scientific research to
represent the population. “We want to make
sure the questions scientists are pursuing are
culturally relevant,” she said.
This year, UNC Charlotte hosted
12 students, six of whom are UNC
Charlotte undergraduates. While most
REU experiences last for the duration of
the summer months, UNC Charlotte’s
Psychology Department takes a unique
approach by providing a year-long program.
All students present their work at a
professional conference.
“Students have exhibited an overwhelming
interest in our courses,” Goolkasian said,
“but the lab experience gives them a realistic
picture of the discipline.”
The program demystifies graduate
student life by putting students in direct
contact with faculty and graduate students,
helps undergraduates identify their focal
interests, gives them the confidence and
skills necessary for success in graduate The REU program was created to
school, and perhaps most importantly,
helps them make an informed decision expose students to research-related
about whether they truly want to pursue
graduate studies. careers, as well as to inspire and
excite women and minority students.
Moreover, students with research Morris LeBlanc did just that. As an REU
experience often have an edge over those participant, LeBlanc was undecided about
who do not when applying for graduate whether to pursue a degree in computer
programs. The REU program sets students science or physics. Because of his work in
ahead of the curve; trends in graduate UNC Charlotte’s Future Computing Lab
school admissions suggest it is not enough and the relationship he forged with his
to have textbook knowledge of research faculty mentor, LeBlanc chose computer
methods and design. science. A first-year doctoral student,
Not only does the program benefit LeBlanc now works side-by-side with REU
Above: REU interns study the eye movements
students, it also helps UNC Charlotte students in the laboratory.
required for reading complex sentences.
meet research needs and gives talented Students and faculty agree: research
Left: Courtney Ross, an REU intern with the potential applicants a taste of the university’s experience is one of the most worthwhile
Psychology Department, dons the device used graduate programs. ventures undergraduates can undertake
to track and study eye movements associated
According to Karen Bean, program to further their professional and personal
with reading complex sentences under the
supervision of Dr. Mary Michael. coordinator for the Diversity in Information goals. The REU program has proven a
Technology Institute, the program proves valuable link between students traditionally
Perception lab photo: Faculty mentor Dr. a valuable recruitment tool. “In computer underrepresented in the science disciplines
Paula Goolkasian advises student Courtney
science there’s a decline in enrollment, and one and the many quality research programs
Woodberry in the Psychology Department
Perception Lab. Woodberry studies the degree key purpose of this program is to encourage available through UNC Charlotte.
to which semantically related primes can undergraduates to go into computer science at “It’s a win-win situation for everyone,”
influence object perception. the graduate level,” she said. Goolkasian said.

www.UNCC.edu 4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 35

UNC CHARLOTTE | a l u m n i p ro f i l e s

Melissa Gayan
In the Midst of Conflict
By Katie Conn Suggs (With a special thanks to Allison Reid)

As most of the world watched the
opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing
Olympic Games, Russia had its eye on
South Ossetia. On August 8 Russia moved
tanks into the region; within a few days they
moved tanks deeper into Georgia. UNC
Charlotte alumna Melissa Gayan (’00,
’03) was in Tbilisi, Georgia studying the
Georgian and Russian languages. Seemingly
overnight she found herself in the midst
of conflict.
Separated from North Ossetia in Russia,
mountainous South Ossetia is in Georgia.
While South Ossetia declared independence
from Georgia in the early 1990s, this
independence has not been recognized
by the international community—which
regards South Ossetia as part of Georgia.
On August 7, South Ossetia and Georgia
engaged in conflict. Within days Russia sent
their troops to South Ossetia to remove the
Georgian forces.
“It seems that over the last century,
Georgia has been in a geographic location
that has been very important to many
people and to many countries. One thing
that makes them so important is the oil
pipeline that runs through Georgia into the
Black Sea from Central Asia. It’s a valuable
piece of real estate,” said Gayan.
Valuable indeed.
Within days there were reports of
Russian forces within 34 miles of Tbilisi,
Georgia’s capital. What began as a conflict
on the outskirts soon became a battle within
the heart of Georgia.
Melissa Gayan received her B.A. and
M.A. in history from UNC Charlotte and
is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in history
from Emory University, specializing in
Georgia-Russia relations and nationality
issues. She arrived in Tbilisi, in mid-June
and was scheduled to stay until mid-August.
Going to class five days a week, Melissa
had the afternoons open to explore the
city and even worked in the archives in
Tbilisi. “The Georgian people were very
welcoming; the stereotypical image of
Georgian hospitality rang very true for me.”
All summer Melissa had consulted
with the English and Russian language
newspapers. “You would read from time to
time of violence occurring in South Ossetia
or in Abkhazia. I had not lived there long,
and I didn’t know if that was normal.”
On August 8, a friend in class used
the Internet, through his cell phone to
read about the unfolding conflict. “We

“It seems that

over the last
century, Georgia
has been in
a geographic
location that
has been very
important to many
people and to
many countries. “
Gayan studied language
in Tbilisi, Georgia.

36 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu

 a l u m n i p ro f i l e s | UNC CHARLOTTE

immediately jumped on the Internet to see

what was going on.”
Scheduled to fly back to the United
States on August 11, Melissa was
disappointed to find out that her flight was
cancelled, leading her to another adventure.
“We were supposed to fly out on
Lufthansa from Tbilisi. I’m not sure why
the flight was cancelled, but one of the
bombing targets outside the city was at
an airplane manufacturer adjacent to the
airport. The American Embassy scheduled
a series of busses for people that wanted to
get out.”
Routed through Armenia, Melissa began
an 11 hour journey home. “There were
over 150 of us, so it did take a considerable
amount of time.”
Finally home, Melissa admits that she
never felt physical danger, but she does
worry about the friends she left behind.
“I left some good friends over there, and I
don’t know what I left them to.”

Katie Conn Suggs is director of communications

for UNC Charlotte’s Division of
Development and Alumni Affairs.
Allison Reid is director of communications
for UNC Charlotte’s College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences The ancient church at Gelati.

www.UNCC.edu 4Q08 | UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 37

UNC CHARLOTTE | fe a t u re
One Giant Leap:
Creating Healthy Communities and NC-CATCH
By Lisa A. Lambert
The United States invests more resources
than any other nation in the world for
health, yet we are far from the healthiest
country. In fact, the United States languishes
in the lower half of industrialized nations for
a range of indicators used to measure health
status and even trails nations considered to
be economically underdeveloped for selected
health indicators.
“In the developed
world, you would be
hard-pressed to find a
nation that pays less
attention to population
health than we do in
the United States,” said
Dr. James Studnicki, James Studnicki
Irwin Belk Endowed
Chair of Health Services Research
and professor, College of Health and
Human Services.
Several factors contribute to this
disconnect between cost of care, quality
of care, and the overall health of the
population. Our reimbursement system
is oriented to specialty and hospital care,
rather than to preventive care; unlike
other developed countries, executive pay
is not linked to the health status of the
population; and ultimately, no single
organization is responsible for the health
of the public.
“Health departments are charged with
taking care of the most vulnerable among
us, and hospitals take care of sick people,”
Studnicki said. Most of us occupy the
space between.
The challenges posed by the current
health care system are daunting, but one
thing is clear: You have to know where
you’ve been to know where you’re going.
Assessment of a given population’s
health requires access to a wide range of
data sources. Bringing together data from
multiple sources, linking and integrating
38 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu
them, and continually updating and
maintaining them for useful analysis is
essential to effectively monitoring and
assessing the public’s health, as well as for
designing interventions and education
campaigns to address health issues. For the
typical local community organization, these
tasks are often beyond their financial and
technical capabilities — until now.
A new monitoring and assessment
system, dubbed NC-CATCH (North
Carolina Comprehensive Assessment for
Tracking Community Health), has been
developed by UNC Charlotte faculty in
the College of Computing and Informatics
and the College of Health and Human
Services under a contract funded by the
North Carolina Division of Public Health
and the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust.
The Internet-based system will help health
care workers and community leaders take
a major step in the direction toward
healthier communities.
While some states have recognized the
potential of the Internet as a means to
disseminate data for health assessment,
in most cases, the state systems are limited
to a static interface that provides
pre-structured statistics, such as death
“Health
departments are
charged with
taking care of the
most vulnerable
among us, and
hospitals take care
of sick people.”
counts or rates organized into preformatted
reports.
“What’s really remarkable about what
we’ve created is it’s not just a matter of
providing data. There’s a difference between
simply providing data and having the ability
to analyze it effectively,” Studnicki said.
“NC-CATCH will be the first system in
the nation with online analytic processing.
Once people are trained, they can go in
and use all of the power of the data sources
in the data warehouse to manipulate
event-level data so they can answer
questions quickly.”
For example, with NC-CATCH you can
actually look at data taken from individual
death certificates to find out about rates of
infant mortality, the cause of death, the race
of the mother, and payment status of the
mother. Never before has this level of detail
been available, according to Studnicki.
Currently, most state-level Internet systems
will give you an infant mortality average
for the county — not very helpful if you’re
attempting to get at the root causes of
infant mortality in your county.
NC-CATCH provides detailed “drill-
down” access to data on births, deaths,
pregnancies, hospital discharges, emergency
room visits, and cancer cases along with
user-specified reports. It also is unique in
that it allows the user to portray many of
the data for sub-county geographic areas,
such as census tracts, zip codes, and user-
defined communities.
Patient confidentiality is assured because
all data in the portal is de-identified,
meaning names, social security numbers
and other identifiers are not entered into
the system.
Colleen Bridger, director of the Gaston
County Health Department and a doctoral
candidate at UNC Charlotte, said the
system will support better decision making.
“I’m in a big county, with a population of

200,000. If the health department wanted
to do something about teen pregnancy, all
we could do [before NC-CATCH] was
blanket the entire county with information
that addressed the problem,” she said. But
NC-CATCH will allow Bridger and her
staff to figure out who is most at risk and
target that population with information —
good news for a health department with
limited resources.
Key elements of NC-CATCH include
multiple indicators organized into categories
(i.e., infectious disease, maternal and
child); comparisons with peer counties;
state values; Healthy People 2010 values
and other benchmarking standards; trend
analysis for the most recent 3-5 year time
period; an objectively derived rank ordered
list of community health challenges; and a
concise assessment of racial/ethnic health
status disparities.
Gaston County Health Department
served as a test site, using the system to
help conduct a more targeted community
health assessment. Bridger says the data has
allowed the health department to be more
responsive to the community.
“Using the technology we came up
with 10 census tracks in Gaston with high
www.UNCC.edu 4Q08
poverty and high chronic disease rates,” she
said. “Now we’re going door to door and
asking residents in those areas what they
want from their health department. After
all, the point of doing a community health
assessment is to engage the community
and then design programs that address the
health issues affecting the community.”
North Carolina has been one of the
most active states nationally in promoting
community health status assessments, and
counties are required to produce a formal
report at least every four years.
“I believe we will
have this kind
of analytic
capability in every
community within
a decade and
I believe this
technology
will lead.”
fe a t u re | UNC CHARLOTTE
Studnicki and colleague John Fisher of the
college of Health and Human Services.
NC-CATCH, born of the N.C. Division
of Public Health’s desire to move beyond
merely producing data to actually
enhancing the capability to analyze the data
more effectively, could become a national
model. A number of state health agencies
from across the United States, as well as the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
have expressed interest in the system.
“Whenever we present this to health
officers nationally who’ve tried through
the years to pull together data, they’re
astounded at the power of the system
and always express the belief that it’s a
national disgrace that every community
in this country doesn’t have access to this
kind of capability,” Studnicki said.
A series of County Health Profiles have
been constructed as part of the first phase
of the NC-CATCH data reporting system,
available at www.schs.state.nc.us/SCHS. The
drill-down portion will be released several
months later.
“I believe we will have this kind
of analytic capability in every
community within a decade,” Studnicki
said, “and I believe this technology will lead.”
| UNC CHARLOTTE magazine 39
UNC CHARLOTTE | a l u m n i n o te s
1970s
Mary Jean Houlahan, ‘74, was named
the 2005 Palm Beach County registered
nurse of the Year.
Don Stewart, ‘73, graduated from the
nine-day North Carolina Rural Economic
Development Institute in May 2008
at the North Carolina Rural Economic
Development Center in Raleigh, N.C.
Dr. Ken Townsend, ‘73 & ‘75, Chair of
the Department of History at Coastal
Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, is
publishing a university-level textbook
on Native American History and is
completing a book on the American
home front during World War II. He
was embedded with U.S. Army units in
Kandahar and Kabul, Afghanistan, in
2006 where he interviewed American
troops and Afghan military and political
leaders.
Dr. Nancy Street, ‘73, recently
published a book entitled “American
Businesses in China.” She is working
on a new book on Chinese higher
education. Dr. Street is employed
as a professor at Bridgewater State
College, teaching and writing on
the Chinese educational system from
modernization to globalization.  Aaron Locklear, ‘98, earned his
Garry “Buddy” Wrenn, ‘72, retired
from a career in manufacturing in
2001. He currently owns the consulting
business Maintenance/Reliability
Management Solutions, Inc.
1980s
Carolyn Steele Agosta, ‘87, has her
short story “Oral Tradition” being
published by Cambridge University
Press as part of an anthology to
be studied by high school students
throughout Great Britain. Carolyn has
been writing since 1998. Her son, Daniel,
is currently a UNC Charlotte student.  the National Education Association in
William “Bill” Bromer, ‘81, has been
named Interim Dean for the College of
Arts and Sciences at the University of
St. Francis in Joliet, Ill., for the 2008-
2009 academic year. He will return
to teaching biology and studying the
effects of siltation and water quality
on macro invertebrates, crayfish and
mussels.
 
Mike Carscaddon, ‘82, graduated
with an MBA from the University
of Michigan. Mike is executive vice
president of Habitat for Humanity
International in Atlanta.
40 UNC CHARLOTTE magazine | 4Q08 www.UNCC.edu
Kimberly S. Ricketts, ‘89, has been
appointed to lead New Jersey’s child
welfare effort as Commissioner of the
Department of Children and Families by
Governor Jon S. Corzine.   NC. Laurel is stationed at the Air Force
Darin Spease, ‘89, recently completed
a term as President of the College
Athletic Business Management
Association (CABMA), a 600-plus
member association of collegiate
business officers. He was recently
named Chair of the NCAA Division I
Men’s Golf Committee.
1990s
Kandas (Burnett) Branson, ‘98,
married Jason W. Branson on April 26,
2008, in Cary, NC. The couple will reside
in Raleigh, N.C. Jason is currently
deployed to the Middle East with the
U.S. Navy Reserve.  Jamison, welcomed their second child,
Amanda (Brooks) Graves, ‘96, was
recently named Executive Sales Director
for Thirty-One Gifts, a direct sales
company.
David Jandrew, ‘96, is the Director
of Basketball Operations for UNC
Wilmington.
master’s degree in School Counseling
at the University of North Carolina at
Pembroke in December 2007. He is
enjoying his tenth year as a seventh
grade mathematics teacher. Aaron
and his wife, Stephaine, are now proud
parents of two sons, Avry Cole and Seth
Cameron.
Amanda (Robinson) Long, ‘98, and
her husband Michael welcomed their
daughter, Alyssa Marina, in June 2008.  
Christine Zehender Mosley, ‘95, and
her husband Matt welcomed their first
child, Benjamin Matthew, on July 1.
Christine is a special event planner with
Washington, DC.
Stefani (LeVan) Roma, ‘97, and Frank
Roma welcomed their first child, a
What are you doing?
It is time to share what you’ve been up to lately and let other Alumns help
you toot your horn or spread the word on small or large achievements. We
want to hear from you.
Visit Alumni Affairs Web site at www.unccharlottealumni.org
and tell us what you’ve been doing.
Or write Alumni Affairs, UNC Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd.
Charlotte, NC 28223-0001
daughter, Isabella Roma born January 5.
Laurel (Smith) Stocks, ‘95, has
been promoted to Colonel in the USAFR
Surgeon General’s Office, Bolling AFB,
Washingto D.C., as a reserve member of
the AF Nurse Corps and was deployed
to Bagram, Afghanistan in 2007. She
is a member of the ASPAN Standards
of Care Committee, AACN, Chesapeake
Chapter AACN, and a reviewer for DCCM.
2000s 
Stephen Clayton, ‘08, is pursuing his
master’s degree in Physical Education
with a concentration in Interscholastic
Athletic Administration at Winthrop
University.
Stephanie Eige, ‘01, and her husband,
Marin Rose, on July 17, 2008. Marin
joins big brother Emerson Jacob.
Sarah Fite, ‘01, married Craig White
Kornegay on February 23, 2008. The
couple resides in Fuquay Varina, N.C.
Jacqueline (Boger) Gafrarar, ‘06, and
her husband, Chuck, welcomed their
first child, Caleb Jon, on June 12, 2008.
Jacqueline recently earned a Certified
Special Event Professional (CSEP)
designation from the International
Special Events Society.
Lisa Shanklin, ‘05, recently graduated
with a Doctorate in Psychology from
International University for Graduate
Studies in St. Kitts, West Indies. She
currently works with developmentally
delayed adults who have co-occurring
mental health issues.
Robert Shields, ‘00, and his wife
Jessika welcomed their son, Brian
Cameron, on March 5, 2008. Brian joins
siblings Robert Jr. (5) and Jasmine (2).
Shanna Wiley, ‘07, has been selected
as a new staff member at The University
of Maryland Law Journal of Race,
Religion, Gender and Class for the
2008-2009 academic year.
 perspective | UNC CHARLOTTE

A Strong Commitment to values

By Joseph mazzola

I joined UNC Charlotte in July as the new dean of the Belk College of Business. As a candidate for the
position, I was drawn to the idea of being part of an institution “on the move.” UNC Charlotte is uniquely
positioned as North Carolina’s urban research university, and the Belk College is likewise uniquely positioned
to capitalize on the talents of its faculty, staff and students and to engage in substantive, meaningful
partnership with the Charlotte region’s rich and diverse business community — thus forming the basis for a
new model for the 21st Century business school.
More importantly, however, I was drawn to the Belk College because of the values the college articulates
as part of its mission statement: integrity; intellectual curiosity and innovation; excellence; globalization; and
diversity and inclusion. Each of these values is important to me as an individual, as a teacher and as a leader.
Knowing this strong commitment to values was already in place at the Belk College made my decision to
come here an easy one.
Although I am a newcomer to Charlotte, I am acutely aware of the impact of the current
economic downturn and the turmoil in the financial markets on this region and its citizens.
I think of our alumni who find their careers in limbo at best, or derailed at worst; I think
of families who are forced to reevaluate plans for their children’s college educations; and I
think of civic, cultural and charitable organizations that find themselves struggling to fulfill
their mission in the wake of a decrease in funding.
In each of these cases, the Belk College is prepared to respond by providing access to
our expertise and assets. The College is partnering with the university’s Office of Alumni
Affairs to sponsor an ongoing series of programs for alumni in career transition, and we are
exploring ways to make more scholarship funds available for our current and prospective
students who are in need. Additionally, we are eager to increase the involvement of our
faculty members and student groups in the nonprofit community through consulting and
community service projects.
Our hope is that through all of these efforts, we can secure and promote enduring growth
in our region while reinforcing the college’s and university’s roles as active, dedicated partners
and rich sources of human and intellectual capital.
For today’s students, the current economic turmoil may turn out to be the defining moment
of their generation. For those of us who teach and mentor these students, these challenging
times provide an opportunity to redouble our efforts to instill the Belk College’s values through
our teaching — especially the value of integrity, whether it is personal, institutional or
societal. By challenging students to focus on ethics, on the long-term and on people
rather than the acquisition of power and wealth as ends in and of themselves,
it is our hope that these future business leaders will become responsible and
able stewards of our nation’s recovery and future expansion.
When I first arrived on campus, I was taken with the statue that resides
in the quad behind Cato Hall. Titled “Self-Made Man,” the piece appeals
to me because it embodies the spirit that built this nation, and built
institutions of learning like UNC Charlotte. I am honored and humbled
to be part of building the future of the Belk College of Business and the
students who choose to learn here.

Additionally, we are eager to

increase the involvement of our
faculty members and student
groups in the nonprofit
community through consulting
and community service projects.

www.UNCC.edu UNC CHARLOTTE magazine

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