On July 1, Aswani Volety starts as the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s seventh chancellor.   After a national search and input from local committee members and university trustees, UNC System officials went with a familiar name to replace retiring Jose Sartarelli.   Volety comes back to UNCW after formerly serving as the dean of the school&rsq ...

Last year, I became the first person at the Business Journal to join AARP. I wore the card as a badge of honor. In the multigenerational makeup that is our office, at 44, I fall pretty much in the middle of the bell curve. The elders, whose names I’ll keep from throwing under the bus, poked fun while being secretly jealous of my newfound travel discounts and member t ...

In a shot from the documentary Journey to a New Earth, a surfer rides through the barrel of a wave carrying ocean-polluting rubbish. The eight-episode series, which aligns with the initiative A New Earth Project, aired on Earth Day on Outside TV and FUEL TV. The documentary and project are part of an effort to help eliminate plastic pollution from the world’s w ...

Pharmaceutical giant Thermo Fisher Scientific announced in April that it plans to explore opportunities to sell Wilmington’s tallest building.   The 380,000-square-foot, 12-story structure at 929 N. Front St. overlooking the Cape Fear and Northern Cape Fear rivers had served as PPD’s corporate headquarters since it opened in 2007. Thermo Fisher purchased ...

Pandemics, social upheaval, supply chain disruptions, natural disasters, elections, worker shortages, inflation and a Johnny Depp-Amber Heard lawsuit: all stories that have captivated our attention over the past few years. And while one of the stories was an entertaining sideshow, the others have had real economic effects – positive effects for those who could turn t ...

COVID is surging in our community. All of us are tired of COVID. We are sick of masks. We are tired of all the constraints that COVID has placed on our lives over the past two-and-a-half years. So, what does the future hold? Are we ever going to really get past COVID? Is this our “new normal”?   Let’s first take stock of where the virus is at prese ...

Coastal Carolina’s sea level is rising. River flooding has become more problematic. And hurricanes are here to stay.   The facts behind these threats to the region’s neighborhoods, economy and lifestyle are incontrovertible. The question is whether the response by property owners, business leaders, environmentalists and elected officials will prove suffi ...

A nearly half-billion-dollar tranche of private capital investments in cold storage is being planned in the Wilmington region.   The infusion of funds into an otherwise sparse local cold storage marketplace is expected to result in the addition of nearly 2 million square feet of cold storage warehouse space within the next few years. Several participants in the cold ...

William Buster, New Hanover Community Endowment’s first president and CEO, has some good news for the county’s 225,000 residents: the first grants from the independent charitable foundation will be announced by the end of this year.   Until recently, it appeared that the nonprofit’s first grants might not be made until 2023 as its 13 directors awai ...

Health care is a vital component of our everyday lives, and we rely on it in the best and worst of times to always be there – a lesson driven home during the past few years.   Then, there are providers like Khadijia Tribié Reid, who wears more hats than most on a daily basis to take care of those around her.   “I am a community health pedia ...