The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will start a Global Research Institute, the top recommendation from a blue-ribbon task force that spent the past 18 months developing a strategic vision to enhance Carolina’s international presence.

Chancellor Holden Thorp announced the institute, which will be devoted to critical international issues, during a Board of Trustees meeting that included a presentation by William B. Harrison Jr., a 1966 UNC graduate and retired chairman and director of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Harrison chaired the University’s Global Leadership Circle and his $1 million pledge, also announced at the meeting, will support future international efforts including the new institute.

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A $4.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will strengthen graduate education in four humanities departments in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The grant will join $2.76 million in funding from the University - most to be raised in private dollars – to create the Mellon Graduate Fellowship Program. It will support graduate students in the departments of English and comparative literature, history, philosophy, and religious studies.

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The Carolina Women’s Leadership Council has honored professors Cynthia Bulik and Kathleen Rounds for being great mentors. The awards were presented during the council’s annual meeting at the Carolina Inn.

Bulik, the William R. and Jeanne H. Jordan Distinguished Professor of Eating Disorders in the Department of Psychiatry at the UNC School of Medicine, received the council’s faculty-to-faculty mentoring award. Rounds, a professor in the UNC School of Social Work, received the faculty-to-student award.

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A web-based digital history project will be the inaugural beneficiary of funding from the C. Felix Harvey Award to Advance Institutional Priorities at Carolina.

Dubbed “Main Street, Carolina,” the project will capitalize on the University Libraries’ renowned North Carolina Collection and awarding-winning digital publishing initiative, “Documenting the American South,” to enable local organizations and individuals to learn about the character and identity of North Carolina towns over the past century.

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Junior Elinor Benami has been named the first Eve Marie Carson Scholar at Carolina.

The scholarship will fund a summer experience after her junior year and financial aid for her senior year. The daughter of Mary and Moti Benami of Knoxville, Tenn., Benami graduated from Bearden High School in Knoxville in 2006.

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