Triple Tar Heel and science communicator Mejs Hasan will deliver the keynote address at the 2026 Royster Global Conference, which is also the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Royster Society of Fellows.

Today’s challenges, like environmental degradation, migration, and social division, don’t fit neatly within the confines of a single discipline. In order to really address them, we have to cross diverse boundaries, pulling together wisdom from different times, geographies, and subject matters. For 30 years, the Royster Society of Fellows has embodied this spirit of crossing boundaries. It has encouraged and supported collaborations between the science and the humanities, despite their perceived differences.
 

Being a Royster Fellow gave Mejs Hasan the courage and permission to move between literacy, science, art, and computing; to create science storytelling projects that can bring communities together; to be bold in bringing them to people. It helped Hasan explore how science doesn’t only exist in isolation as lab experiments and data analysis but becomes richer when it’s threaded into the bigger stories of our communities, history, and culture.
 

This work is rarely easy. There are many roadblocks, and despite our best efforts, we may fall short of the difference we’d really like to make. We may not know how the last page will be written, but the strength of the Royster program lies in how it prepares us to dive in and embroider something for the future regardless.