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Former college and professional basketball star Charlotte Smith was introduced June 22 as ������Ƶ's new head women's basketball coach. Smith has spent the last nine years as an assistant coach at her alma mater, UNC-Chapel Hill, where she had an All-American career topped by a last-second shot that earned UNC the national title in 1995.

Bloomberg Businessweek ranks ������Ƶ's Martha and Spencer Love School of Business among the nation's top undergraduate business programs in its 2011 rankings, which were released March 3. ������Ƶ ranks #26 in academic quality and receives an "A" grade for facilities and services.

Student leaders collected more than $28,000 this year from seniors, their parents, grandparents and friends through the Senior Class Giving Campaign, which asked students to make a gift to the area of campus that meant the most to their experience while at ������Ƶ.

Why do sports teams perform better in their own stadiums or arenas than they do on the road? New research by assistant professor L. Kimberly Epting and Kristen Riggs ’10 suggests that it may not be the overwhelming applause that gives athletes a “home field advantage,” so much as it is the taunts that can ding their opponent.

UNC-TV, North Carolina's statewide public television network, will broadcast "We Can Be Better: Courageous Voices Confront Our Greatest Challenges," at 10 p.m., Thursday, June 23. The program is an edited version of ������Ƶ's April 7 Convocation for Honors moderated by NBC Nightly News Anchor Brian Williams.

Fifteen rising juniors at ������Ƶ have been named recipients of the 2011 Lumen Prize, the university’s premier award that comes with a $15,000 scholarship to support and celebrate their academic achievements and research proposals.

The ������Ƶ Board of Trustees has elected spring 2011 graduate Greg Mader to a two-year term as youth trustee on the board. Mader is a Durham, N.C., native who received a bachelor of science degree in mathematics.

������Ƶ senior Cedric Pulliam, a political science and international studies double major with aspirations of joining the U.S. Foreign Service, will participate this summer in a highly selective national program that introduces scholars to diplomatic officials and career opportunities in international relations.

A team of four ������Ƶ business school students won first place this month in a national case competition that measured the ability to interpret, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and communicate a solution to a management accounting problem.

Nineteen ������Ƶ alumni from the Class of 2011 will return to the classroom this fall as part of Teach for America, a national nonprofit that recruits and trains new college graduates to help erase educational inequities found in many urban and rural low-income communities. It is the largest number of ������Ƶ alumni ever selected into the program for the same academic year.