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In a graduate program at the , Megan Curling’s professors aren’t sure what to make of her interest in … hurricanes? In Germany?

Not Germany, she’ll tell them. The United States. The ���ϲ����� alumna thinks often about devastating storms that have hammered communities back home. She’s keenly aware of the way Hurricane Helene ripped through the North Carolina mountains a short drive from where she grew up.

What happens when vulnerable populations survive a natural disaster only to find access cut off to social services and medical care? That’s just one of the questions Curling is weighing for a public health master’s thesis – and it’s an extension of her passion for scholarship and service inspired by her undergraduate research at ���ϲ�����.

Curling “was always the kid who ended up friends with the teacher” and stayed after class in middle and high school to talk with them. “That’s part of what attracted me to ���ϲ�����,” Curling recalls. “It was almost the standard for how students interacted with faculty.”

Megan Curling ’23, who pursued undergraduate research as a Lumen Scholar that incorporated study abroad in Thailand, with her mentor, Associate Professor Emeritus Glenn Scott, a month before graduation in 2023.

Soon after arriving on campus in 2019, Curling connected with faculty in the School of Communications where she pursued a major in journalism as a Communications Fellow. She approached faculty in ���ϲ����� College, the College of Arts & Sciences, where she declared a second major in public health studies.

She discovered mentors in the Student Professional Development Center, the Office of National & International Fellowships, and the Division of Student Life.

And her faculty mentors encouraged her pursuit of a Lumen Prize, ���ϲ�����’s highly competitive, $20,000 award for “the attainment of ambitious and serious intellectual goals.” Curling’s project?  Embed herself in villages in northern Thailand where residents there were reeling from the harmful health effects of abandoned gold-mining operations still leaking toxic chemicals into the groundwater.

She used her month in Thailand as the foundation for a presentation at ���ϲ�����’s Spring Undergraduate Research Forum. “Studying abroad anywhere, for any amount of time, makes you a better human being,” Curling says. “The experience of diving a bit deeper and staying in one area for a few weeks to conduct research made me a lot more confident in understanding culture rather than simply being aware of it.”

Curling graduated in 2023 before serving with Cone Health and Alamance Regional Medical Center through the ���ϲ����� Year of Service Fellows Program. She has maintained close ties to her alma mater in the years since as a Youth Trustee on the ���ϲ����� Board of Trustees.

And when she earns her Master of Public Health from Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, which she was able to pursue through a $30,000 Rotary Global Grant, Curling hopes to return to North Carolina to work with vulnerable populations.

“The moral of the story,” she says, “without sounding like a walking ���ϲ����� advertisement, is that without these relationships with professors and undergraduate research mentors, none of the things I’m doing would have crossed my mind.”