Catalyze Morehead-Cain

Catalyze invited Nicholas Byrne ’19 of Arts + Crafts back to the series to talk about his latest music projects, and because we thought you might want to learn more about the artist behind the music that’s featured on the show.

Nicholas spoke with us from Smithonia, an unincorporated community about 20 minutes outside Athens, Georgia. He shared about his collaborations with Sam (whose music project is called Sacra Monet) and singer-songwriter and guitarist Audrey Walsh (UNC-Chapel Hill Class of 2023), a DJ at Carolina’s student-run radio station, WXYC 89.3 FM.

Nicholas also talked about how AI-powered tools will advance digital music production, how a “shake-up” in the creative landscape of social media platforms could shift dollars back into the hands of content creators, takeaways about manipulating sound and light from Berlin’s music scene, and a new opportunity on the horizon in New York City.

For this special segment of Catalyze, Emile Charles ’24 shares the most impactful aspects of his international gap year, pandemic disruptions included. The scholar interned at a children’s hospital in Cape Town, South Africa; visited his father’s Caribbean home in St. George’s, Grenada; worked on a global public health collaboration between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Malawi Ministry of Health; and organized Black Lives Matter protests in Chapel Hill.

Gap year scholars Taylor Shinal ’25, Mark Finamore ’25, Asher Wexler ’25, and Noah Gottlieb ’25 also sent in audio diaries from their current corners of the world. You’ll be taken to a Tanzanian safari, a Slovenian market, an ancient Egyptian tomb, a Scottish seacoast, and a ski slope in Utah.

The road that brought Chris Bradford to Chapel Hill began in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and included stops in New Haven, Connecticut; Palo Alto, California; Oundle, England; and Johannesburg, South Africa.

Chris spoke with Morehead-Cain from his home in Johannesburg to share his story of founding African Leadership Academy (ALA), his personal mission (which he says is to “build platforms that enable individuals to reimagine what’s possible for themselves and their societies”), and his vision for Morehead-Cain as the incoming president.

Amber Koonce ’12 is a civil rights attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Amber shares how her Morehead-Cain summers working at a women’s correctional center in Ghana and at a young boys’ correctional center in Scotland helped inform her vocation to defend human rights and civil rights in representing incarcerated people, particularly people who’ve been incarcerated as children.

When reporters and public relations professionals come calling, Karen Stevenson ’79 knows what to expect: They are going to ask her about being “the first.”

As a high school senior, Karen became the first African American woman to receive the Morehead-Cain Scholarship as part of the inaugural group of female Morehead-Cain Scholars. In 1979, the alumna made national headlines as the first woman from the University and the first African American woman from the United States to receive the Rhodes Scholarship.

Karen shares about: her thoughts on the renown she's received for being "the first" of so many accomplishments; how she approaches her work as a U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Central District of California; and how she's maintaining a sense of equilibrium during the pandemic.

Alan Murray ’77 is CEO of Fortune Media.

Prior to joining the media organization in 2015, Alan served as president of the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. For nearly two decades, he held a number of roles at The Wall Street Journal, including deputy managing editor, executive editor online, and the Washington bureau chief. Alan also served as the Washington bureau chief at CNBC and as a cohost of the nightly show Capital Report.

Alan will headline Morehead-Cain’s spring Virtual Alumni Speaker Series on Wednesday, January 27, at 4:00 p.m. (Eastern Time). The alumnus will talk about restoring trust in America.