Internal inspiration

“Research excites and empowers me.”

In the fall of her senior year, Liz Bailey ’15 had job offers in sales and consulting, but she didn’t think they’d make the best use of her psychology and chemistry majors.

“I didn’t see myself thriving in these positions,” she said.

But she couldn’t see herself in a career in psychology or research, either, because she’d never seen what those might look like.

That changed when Bailey earned a Karen M. Gil Internship working at UNC’s Neurocognition and Imaging Research Lab. The experience inspired her to become a research fellow at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and she’s applying to Ph.D. programs that focus on improving the diagnosis, understanding and treatment of mental illnesses and neurodegenerative diseases.

Read the complete Carolina Story from the Arts & Sciences Foundation…

A Carolina alumna and her husband, who wish to be anonymous, are endowing the Karen M. Gil Internship Fund in Psychology with $3.1 million in permanent funding for student stipends and program support, plus $600,000 in funding to continue the program while the endowment builds. The gift honors Gil, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2009 to 2015, and the Lee G. Pedersen Distinguished Professor of Psychology.

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