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Zena Cardman is a biology major and poetry minor from Williamsburg, Virginia. An aspiring astronaut and astrobiologist, she is interested in studying Earth's most unusual environments, with the hopes of gaining insight into how life might have originated and survived elsewhere in the solar system.
With her Burch Fellowship, she first traveled to Pavilion Lake, in British Columbia, with NASA's Darlene Lim as her mentor. Strange carbonate formations called microbialites exist in Pavilion Lake. These microbialites are analogs for Precambrian reefs on Earth. Zena aided in the deployment of Nuytco DeepWorker submersibles in the lake as part of a massive exploratory effort by the Pavilion Lake Research Project.
From there, Zena journeyed with NASA scientist Chris McKay to Axel Heiberg, a remote island just ten degrees of latitude from the North Pole. Camping under the perpetual daylight of the chilly Arctic summer, she and seven others conducted astrobiological field research. They studied the northernmost known springs in the world, which flow year-round despite an annual average temperature of --15C. In addition, the team collected samples in order to analyze the microbial communities living in the permafrost. While on Axel Heiberg, Zena also filmed for the PBS television series, NOVA.
You can see pictures and read live updates from her adventures here.
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Will Halicks is a senior English major from Peachtree City, Georgia with an interest in folklore, creative writing and journalism. He used his Burch Fellowship to travel to England to study the folk legend of the Black Dog, an apparition that is said to haunt churchyards and lonely roads and is often seen as an omen of death. Storytellers throughout the ages, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to J.K. Rowling, have drawn on tales of the phantom for inspiration. To gain an understanding of how the story has influenced England’s culture, he visited areas where Black Dog lore has made a rich contribution to local life and tradition. He spoke to experts who study and collect stories from all corners of England, including a professor who has spent his life studying the tale. He consulted an extensive collection of Black Dog papers at Exeter’s university library and interviewed several people who claim to have seen the Black Dog up close. He studied the economic face of the legend by talking to the owners of establishments across England that use the Black Dog as an icon. During the remainder of the summer, he compiled his notes and laid the foundations for a documentary about the Black Dog’s impact on English society, which he will complete as an independent study this semester and air on campus in the spring. His journey gave him new insights into the way a country’s stories shape its social consciousness, and he hopes his experiences will help him to pursue future studies on the role of folklore in everyday life.
Visit the live blog detailing his experience here.
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Kaitlin Houlditch-Fair is a senior majoring in Cultural Studies from Shelby, North Carolina. Kaitlin used her Burch Fellowship to travel to Moshi, Tanzania to work as an assistant acrobatics and yoga instructor at the TunaHAKI Centre for Street Children. Her goal was to study the way TunaHAKI, known for its focus on acrobatics and drama, promotes the physical and social development of the resident children, and to explore the host culture’s venues for narratives and practices to bring back to Chapel Hill. During her stay she also worked at a secondary school for children who failed to excel in national exams by teaching sex education and worked with the teachers to find sustainable sources of funding for food and teacher wages. She also took lessons in traditional East African dance and upon her return to UNC will continue volunteering at the Franklin Porter Graham Childcare Institute by incorporating a new African dance program, crediting the artists she learns from in Tanzania. She hopes to use this experience as a foundation for future international work with children, arts, and education.
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Lauren Teegarden is a junior Latin American Studies and Spanish major from Lake Oswego, Oregon. With her Burch Fellowship, Lauren spent the summer studying international migration and the transnational preservation of indigenous culture in Mexico. Living in the Yucatán capital of Mérida, she traveled extensively in the peninsula to research the recent and increasing Maya migration from the Yucatán to the Western United States, especially San Francisco and Portland. Additionally, Lauren completed a course in the indigenous language, Yucatec Maya, at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, and experienced traditional Maya cultural through collaboration with INDEMAYA, a government organization that supports indigenous communities in Mexico. Lauren conducted interviews with migrants and their families to explore both the use of international social networks as well as consider the distinctions between indigenous and Latino migrant communities in the U.S. Back at UNC, she will use the oral histories, describing the experiences of the Mayan migrant community, in the trilingual oral history project “U tsikbalil yucatan/Cuentos de Yucatán/Stories from Yucatan,” in conjunction with UNC PhD candidate Paul Worley and Maya storyteller Mariano Bonilla Caamal.
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Jonathan Toledo is a senior Physics major from Sylva, North Carolina. His Burch Fellowship took him to Spain, where he studied special cases of graphene systems under Professor Maria Vozmediano of the Institute for Materials Science in Madrid. Graphene is the 2-dimentional form of graphite in the sense that graphite is formed when several layers of graphene are stacked upon one another in a specific way. Graphene has recently become an object of intense theoretical interest due to the relations between its exotic properties and phenomena familiar to seemingly estranged areas of physics (i.e. ultra-relativistic quantum mechanics, field theories, and even quantum gravity), as well as its promise for use in nanoscale electronic devices. While at the Institute, Jonathan studied quantum field theory and then began applying the techniques of this field to graphene systems in which random curvature is introduced to the lattice structure. Toward the conclusion of his project, he traveled to Camerino, Italy to attend the International Conference on Strongly Coupled Coulomb Systems, where graphene was a centerpiece of discussion. In his future studies of condensed matter physics, Jonathan hopes to use his study of simple condensed matter systems such as graphene as a means to intuitively understand fundamental processes in nature.
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Sam Wurzelmann, from Chapel Hill, NC, spent the summer after his sophomore year in Bolivia along the Beni River working with the Tacana Indian community of San Miguel. After spending a week at a language immersion school in the capital of La Paz, he spent the next 11 weeks at the community-owned and operated San Miguel del Bala eco-lodge in the Bolivian rainforest. Deciphering the idea of ‘green globalization’ through ecotourism, his community service-based research helped him gauge the transparency between the lodge operations and the community running it, while also serving as a snapshot of a community in a very dynamic state. Meanwhile, the service-based endeavors Sam designed and completed with the San Migueleños aimed at improving the marketability and ecological sustainability of the lodge. They included everything from serving as a translator on guided jungle tours to installing solar panels at the lodge.
Visit the blog detailing his experience here.
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