Michael Seth Flynn (UNC Charlotte Levine Scholars Program, Class of 2019) is the current campus representative for the UNC Charlotte Chapter of Clinton Global Initiative University. After seeing information about CGI U in the weekly UNCC Honors College email, he began mulling over ideas for sustainable projects to improve his home community and address an unmet need in his rural Western North Carolina hometown, Burnsville, NC. In rural Appalachian communities, opioids are an ever-present threat, capturing increasingly younger addiction victims each year. Ease of access is the primary culprit, and grandparents taking these medications for chronic pain are a commonly cited source. Current efforts to reclaim unused pain medications report low turnouts in Burnsville: for these reasons, Seth proposed his commitment to action, Meds to Music. The closure of Young’s Mountain Music, a music hall that once attracted large crowds every Saturday night, was a blow to the local community. The implementation of a monthly music night at Burnsville’s Town Hall, charging expired or unnecessary medications for admission, would bring together the community to dance against this crisis. Performers from Young’s Mountain Music, the Sheriff’s Department, and a local physician’s office would work together to limit access to opioids. Partnering with Mountain Medical Arts would integrate health education as part of Meds to Music’s mission. The office’s healthcare staff could offer pamphlets about the dangers of opioid abuse and relay valuable information about seeking treatment, managing withdrawal symptoms, and finding mental health services. Seth is grateful for the opportunity to meet with other students from across the nation at CGI U to gain advice about implementing and sustaining the project in his home community.
Adriano Schneider has been involved in the research of the evolution and spread of mosquito-transmitted viruses such as Dengue, Yellow Fever, Chikungunya, and Zika. Currently, he is conducting postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Diego. Initially, Adriano got involved with CGI U as a follow up from winning an innovation award at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston by building a larvicide dispenser to fight mosquitoes that transmit diseases such as Zika and Dengue. That award led him and his group to apply for the CGI U Innovation Fund. They were awarded and then attended the CGI U meeting in 2017. Inspired by the CGI U in 2017, Adriano became a CGI U Campus Representative at UNC Charlotte in 2018, helping UNC Charlotte to join the University Network. For his last year as a student, he applied with a different commitment which entails building a database that integrates genomic and epidemiological data to assist public health officials on how to make efficient diseases to prevent or contain outbreaks, a spin off of his graduate work at UNC Charlotte. Adriano was also selected in 2018 to become a CGI U Commitment Mentor on Infectious Diseases.
Greg Linchangco, (MS in Bioinformatics UNC Charlotte 2013) is a Ph.D. candidate at UNC Charlotte, studying Bioinformatics and Computational Biology with focus on phylogenetics and evolutionary biology. Greg began his entrepreneurial career during the 2016 Zika Hack-a-thon at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston where he and his team were awarded the most implementable solution award. That same project was awarded the Grand Challenges Canada Stars in Global Health grant, the International Development Innovation Network from the MIT, the CGI U Innovation Fund and was one of the finalists for the startup accelerator MassChallenge. In 2018, along with two other UNC Charlotte students, he was selected to attend the CGI U Annual meeting. His commitment to action entails building a database that integrates genomic and epidemiological information that will enable public health officials to make informed decisions that will prevent or contain infections disease outbreaks.
Lambodhar Damodaran is a recent graduate of UNC Charlotte and is currently a Ph.D. student in the ILS program at the University of Georgia. He earned a B.S. in Biology and was a member of the University Honors Program at UNC Charlotte. He developed a strong interest in infectious disease and tracking its spread while performing undergraduate research in the Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics. While in the lab he studied various human pathogens including Zika virus, Dengue virus, and malaria. His growing interest in and desire to fight these diseases led him to work on a commitment to action that tackles infectious disease head-on using data science with Adriano Schneider and Greg Linchangco. This commitment to action involves the development of a database integrating genomic and epidemiological data for real-time use in infection containment and prevention. Through the Clinton Global Initiative University, Lambodhar hopes to develop his epidemiological skills and professional network to create an effective program that can be used to help people around the globe.
