The research, published in the journal Environmental Research, expands on applications of wastewater monitoring, which became more widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings suggest the same approach could offer a practical way to understand broader health patterns across communities.

“During the pandemic, the world learned how to use wastewater to track infectious disease. We asked, what else can it tell us?” said Emma Lancaster, the study’s lead author and a former doctoral student in Ohio State’s College of Public Health.

Lancaster, now an environmental health consultant in Boston, began exploring the idea while working with wastewater samples collected for COVID-19 surveillance. She wondered whether the same samples could reveal broader patterns in public health.

For the study, researchers analyzed 27 wastewater samples from nine treatment plants serving eight Ohio cities in 2022. The communities were home to more than 1.3 million people in a mix of urban and rural areas.

The team evaluated bacteria in the wastewater — specifically those found in the human gut. Then they compared what they found with public data on chronic diseases, health behaviors, demographics and socioeconomic conditions.

The researchers saw distinct bacterial profiles across the cities, highlighting significant differences in the community-wide gut-associated microbiome. Several types of bacteria were associated with community rates of obesity, high blood pressure, asthma and other chronic conditions. They also found associations with smoking, depression, physical activity and unemployment.

One finding stood out: The amount of a bacterial group called Desulfovibrio was associated with eight health measures, including obesity, high blood pressure, stroke and several chronic diseases.

Rural communities generally had higher abundance of these bacteria, and of several chronic health conditions.

“In many cases, poor health outcomes are worse in rural areas, and to see these distinct indicators of poorer gut microbiome health in these rural areas offers us clues to some of what is driving that,” Lancaster said.

Wastewater monitoring could help policymakers and public officials better identify communities facing greater health challenges and direct resources where they are needed, she said.

That broad view is one of wastewater monitoring’s biggest advantages, said Jiyoung Lee, professor and chair of environmental health sciences at Ohio State and the study’s senior author.

“Wastewater offers a unique way to understand the health of whole communities, not just the people who show up in clinics,” Lee said.

The approach could eventually expand wastewater monitoring beyond infectious diseases to help evaluate broader public health efforts, the researchers said.

“It already helps us track viruses including those that cause COVID, flu and Mpox, and it has potential to support investigations of foodborne illness, such as the recent Cyclospora outbreak,” Lee said.

“Now, our findings suggest its value could extend beyond infectious agents — for example, tracking community gut microbiome changes could eventually help us assess whether nutrition programs are improving gut health.”

This work was partially funded by the Ohio Department of Health.

Professor Jennifer Cheavens often uses a classic 1998 “Friends” episode to explore this question with students in her positive psychology classes. In it, Phoebe tries to disprove Joey’s theory that all good deeds are selfish because they also make the giver feel good. When a donation to a cause she dislikes brings her unanticipated joy, Phoebe admits defeat: “He’s right. There are no selfless good deeds.”

Students in Cheavens’ seminar took the debate a step further, arguing that the exact words people use to describe helping others are just as important, and that “nice” and “kind” carry meaningfully different connotations.

“We were talking about doing ‘acts of kindness,’ and the students were saying, ‘That’s not kind, that’s nice,’” said Cheavens, professor of clinical psychology at The Ohio State University. The students argued that if you do a good deed out of obligation or to enhance your reputation, people will judge you for it, because the intention behind a good deed is as important as the deed itself.

She brought the question to her Ohio State colleague Laura Wagner, a developmental psychology professor and linguist who directs the Language Sciences Research Lab at the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), and they designed a study to test the theory. The research was published recently in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology.

What they discovered ran counter to their students’ assumptions: Even if good deeds aren’t entirely selfless, most people don’t discount them simply because the giver gains something in return. In practice, everyday people view “kind” and “nice” as essentially interchangeable, though they have a higher threshold for considering an act to be “caring.” In addition, acts that were warm, planned and not already expected of the giver were consistently rated as more prosocial.

Cheavens suspects the word “caring” sets a higher bar because it’s the closest of the three terms to an emotion. “People don’t say, ‘I feel kind,’” she said. “But you say, ‘I care for you.’”

The most important takeaway from the study, the authors noted, is that prosocial behavior is almost always seen as a positive thing, or, as Wagner put it, “at least kind, maybe also nice and possibly even caring.”

Back in the seminar room, Cheavens had been skeptical about students’ theory that people respond negatively to a person who does something nice or kind in public. But she did wonder if the fear of being perceived as disingenuous was preventing people from doing good deeds — and whether the language used to describe acts of kindness played a role.

“I hear that a lot, especially from people my age and a little bit younger, that being nice is not the same as being kind,” said Ally Heiland, a fifth year doctoral student in clinical psychology and the study’s lead author. “Like, being kind is really about people’s intentions and whether they mean it or not, whereas nice is more like being socially appropriate or polite.”

In the study — which the authors call the largest of its kind to date — researchers wrote 14 short vignettes, two for each of seven aspects of prosocial acts (actions performed to benefit others): anonymity, benefit, cost, expectation, planning, warmth and the relationship to the recipient. Each participant read seven vignettes and was asked to imagine being on the receiving end of scenarios like someone holding open a door for them or paying for their food in line. Participants then rated each act on how kind, nice and caring it was. Across these scenarios, the researchers found that subtle context influences how people perceive these actions.

“Participants rated scenarios as similarly kind and nice across six of the seven situational dimensions we tested. The one exception related to cost; although participants interpreted high- and low-cost prosocial behaviors as equally kind, they endorsed high-cost behaviors as nicer than low-cost behaviors,” the researchers wrote in the study.

Of the three words tested, “caring” stood out: Acts between people who knew each other were rated as more caring, but no kinder or nicer than the same acts performed by strangers. Higher-cost acts, meanwhile, were rated as both nicer and more caring, though no kinder.

“It’s a word that when we’re using it often indicates some sort of closeness or intention that might not be naturally baked into something like kind or nice,” Heiland said of “caring.”

Across all three terms, acts were judged most favorably when they were delivered warmly, planned in advance and not already expected of the giver.

For Cheavens, the results confirmed what she’d suspected from the outset: “The biggest effect was like, yep, people think that’s good when you do good things.”

That doing good also feels good might actually be the point. Wagner points to concepts from cognitive science suggesting that we are built to feel good about doing nice things for other people, because otherwise it would be very hard to motivate people to behave in prosocial ways.

“So, the idea that you do get a warm, fuzzy feeling might actually be part of how Mother Nature motivates us to be nice to other people,” Wagner said.

“Applying these results to clinical, community and educational settings could help to promote prosocial behavior more effectively by eliminating ‘mismatch’ barriers between the prosocial term and their implied expectations,” the researchers wrote in the study.

The study was funded by the Center for HumanKindness at the Columbus Foundation.

Other Ohio State co-authors of the study are Emily Walker of the Department of Psychology and Eve Saltzman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Additional co-authors are Abigail L. Arntz of the University of Notre Dame, Josephine E. Luck of the University of Georgia and Hana Nip of the University of Illinois Chicago.

The band put on a performance worthy of Jackson, featuring dazzling formations like the famous “Billie Jean freeze,” anti-gravity lean and Michael Jackson logo accompanied by some of his most iconic songs, including “Smooth Criminal,” “Thriller” and “Beat It.”

Additionally, the show included a dance break that paid homage not only to Jackson’s tunes but his choreography, as well as a percussion section feature.

Saturday’s i-dotter was Mitchell Ewaska, a business finance major from Chardon, Ohio.

• Wear a helmet.
• Maintain a three-foot minimum distance from pedestrians.
• Yield to pedestrians in crosswalks.
• Watch the road for uneven surfaces and debris.
• Be wary of puddles and leaves that may hide potholes.
• Dress to be seen; use lights and reflective clothing/gear at night.
• Share the Road and never ride against traffic.
• Eliminate distractions. Do not text while riding!

Motorists should keep an eye out for pedestrians, cyclists and scooter riders. Do not text and drive.

Earlier this year, The Ohio State University Police Division released a series of traffic safety videos on social media, including pedestrian, bicycle and scooter safety.

The resulting online Ohio Registry for Prevention and Early Intervention Programs serves as a centralized, publicly accessible resource to guide state and local decision-makers, providers and communities in selecting programs that best fit community needs and meet evidence standards. Programs and strategies in the registry have been shown to produce positive outcomes.

“In addition to the registry being an outlet for informing the field about the evidence that exists around nationally recognized programs, a core part of this work is evaluating home-grown programs in Ohio so they can be elevated and included in the registry,” said Jessica Collura, an OERC senior research associate who is leading the project.

The registry is part of Ohio’s work to build a stronger behavioral health system through better data, stronger accountability and wider access to programs with proven outcomes. The Ohio Department of Behavioral Health (DBH) has provided OERC and the College of Social Work with over $1 million to develop and maintain the registry and offer capacity building opportunities to the broader behavioral health field.

“By helping communities identify programs that work, we can support individuals and families earlier — often preventing more serious behavioral health needs down the road,” said DBH Director Tia Marcel Moretti. “At its core, the registry is about ensuring Ohioans have access to effective prevention and early intervention services.

“The Ohio Registry provides a consistent, evidence-based way to identify prevention and early intervention programs that are proven to make a difference,” said Moretti. “By highlighting programs with strong outcomes, it strengthens our behavioral health system, supports quality improvement and encourages continued innovation across the state.”

The registry can help prevention and early intervention professionals by making it easier to identify programs that fit the needs of the communities they serve and to make informed decisions about the approaches they use, said Cindy Clouner, managing director of the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Drug Misuse Prevention and Recovery, an academic center housed within the College of Social Work.

“Having a centralized resource also helps connect practice with evidence and supports thoughtful program selection and implementation,” said Clouner, who is co-principal investigator of the project with Collura.

The registry will help bridge the gap between academic research and community practice, said Glenn College Assistant Professor Tasha Perdue, an expert in drug, criminal justice and public health policy who serves on the registry project’s advisory committee.

It provides researchers with access to evidence-supported interventions that can inform studies and grant proposals; allows them to explore existing interventions to identify gaps in evidence-based programming for specific populations, communities or service needs; and helps researchers developing interventions engage in a review process to have their work assessed for inclusion in the registry, she said.

“Understanding evidence-based programming is important because it helps us distinguish effective practice from practice that may be ineffective or even harmful,” Perdue said. “From a policy perspective, implementing evidence-based approaches is especially critical for ensuring that limited time and resources are used effectively, which is particularly important for nonprofits and other providers. The use of evidence to guide decision-making and track outcomes can also provide greater transparency and accountability while ensuring that interventions align with established guidelines and best practices.”

A new report from The Ohio State University outlines why some midsize companies grow faster than others.

“The Early Investment Advantage: How Fast Growers Drive the U.S. Middle Market” was compiled by Ohio State’s National Center for the Middle Market (NCMM), which this year marks its 15th anniversary.

Housed in the Fisher College of Business, NCMM is a clearinghouse of information and resources about midsize companies and their outsized impact on the economy, said Doug Farren, NCMM executive director.

While organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Small Business Administration provide resources for companies large and small, NCMM focuses exclusively on raising awareness of the nation’s roughly 200,000 midsize companies, Farren said.

“We’re just trying to figure out, how do we make more noise and get more attention so that people can start both understanding and then appreciating the unique opportunities and challenges that these businesses have?” he said. “In our research, we’ve proven that it’s not the same as the large and small [businesses]. It’s pretty unique, the space that they operate in, so therefore they need a little bit different focus and attention.”

The purpose of “The Early Investment Advantage” report is to provide business leaders with data to guide decisions going forward, Farren said.

“It’s always our goal for a leader or an owner to read this report and say, ‘Oh, OK, this raised some interesting questions. I’d like to ask our team, Hey, where do we stand with these things? Are we consistently investing in AI? Are we consistently thinking about how we grow our products and services to drive revenue growth?’” he said. “If nothing else, it raises these questions to the forefront, and it does it in a way that’s based on data.”

“The Early Investment Advantage” encompasses 15 years of longitudinal research, tracking the same subjects over an extended period. The report includes 44 survey cohorts and more than 41,500 responses from business executives.

One of the report’s findings is that companies that consistently invest in their business operations grow faster than those that do so sporadically or not at all. Companies that continue to reinvest amid economic downturns and other challenging circumstances tend to flourish in the long run, Farren said.

“Take the pandemic as a great example,” he said. “When everybody got impacted by that and everything shut down for close to a year, these were the companies that were still thinking about how they can invest back into their business, whether it’s in training people or building new facilities.”

The report also finds that midsize companies that focus on innovation, product development and adopting new technologies can maintain a competitive edge, Farren said.

“I think one of the big things that’s happening is that middle market companies realize that they have to use AI in some way, but many of them are still struggling to find the right place to deploy it,” he said.

“They have to rely on maybe hiring a partner to help them with that or some type of an outside consultant because they might only have two or three people in their IT department, and they’re probably busy running the operation.”

To bring awareness to the issues that the report raises and to mark NCMM’s 15th anniversary, Farren and other representatives met with policymakers, business leaders and stakeholders in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia during National Middle Market Week. Before the trip, the National Day Calendar organization issued a proclamation officially recognizing the observance in the first week of October each year.

NCMM’s meetings included a fireside chat in Philadelphia with entrepreneur David Adelman, an Ohio State alumnus. Adelman is CEO of Campus Apartments and a partner in the Philadelphia 76ers. Farren and NCMM representatives also met with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers to discuss future collaborations.

“I would say at the end of the day, we accomplished our ultimate goal, which was to raise the visibility of the middle market,” Farren said. “There are a lot of people talking about it, a lot of people seeing our LinkedIn posts and a lot of people that we haven’t necessarily worked with that now know who we are and have expressed an interest in partnering in the future.”

For more information about NCMM and “The Early Investment Advantage” report, visit the organization’s website.

Murray delivered the keynote address at the annual Rock Ceremony on the Oval. The ceremony dates to 1919 and concludes with a wreath-laying at a memorial rock in front of Bricker Hall, honoring fallen university alumni.

He spoke about the strength and support for Ohio State’s military-connected community. More than 2,400 military-connected students attend the university in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs, including over 400 ROTC participants. Additionally, Ohio State employs approximately 1,500 faculty and staff veterans.

“I continue to be amazed at the support that this university gives to its students,” he said. “We come to thank them for their service, but we know they deserve so much more.”

He also said service carries a “weight we cannot see,” which comes from the challenges of leadership and the demands of deployments.

Murray retired from the Army in 2021 after nearly 40 years of service, beginning in 1982 after earning a BS in business from Ohio State. He later received an Honorary Doctor of Public Service from the university in 2024.

Ohio State’s Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Trevor Brown said he found it inspiring to reflect on the long, proud tradition of service that continues at Ohio State today.

“As Buckeyes, we are called to pay forward and to give of ourselves to help those among us during their time of need,” he said. “Nowhere is that spirit more prominent than among the young men and women who are part of our ROTC program and the former service members who are completing their education on our campuses.”

Joshua Davis, president of the Ohio State chapter of the Student Veterans Association, said the freedoms and opportunities we enjoy today come at a cost.

“Behind every service member is a family, friends and a community. When someone makes the ultimate sacrifice, that loss is felt for generations,” he said. “That’s why ceremonies like this matter.”

SVAOSU supports and assists veterans, service members and their families in their transition to civilian life after completing service, and helps them navigate any challenges during their time on campus.

A 21-gun salute and a rendition of “Taps” closed out the ceremony following the wreath-laying.

Ohio State will observe Veterans Day on Nov. 11. There will be no classes and offices will be closed.

To overcome this challenge, researchers have developed a device that uses an artificial intelligence e-nose to detect and analyze odors. Combined with a wearable release system called Scentronic, which uses machine learning algorithms to classify data in real time, the system passed the smell test in the lab by encouraging better interactions between humans and machines.

“This work combines innovations in hardware and software to bring new solutions to societal challenges,” said Jinghua Li, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at The Ohio State University. “Our long-term goal here is to incorporate these systems into compact and personalized devices.”

Used in everything from medical research to online game entertainment, human-to-machine interfaces serve as digital conduits that connect people across incredible distances. Yet the majority of these systems focus on biophysical signals, such as haptic (touch-related), audio and visual cues, rather than smell, a sense critical for perception, flavor and emotional experiences.

However, this study establishes a framework for an accurate, hands-free controlled olfactory stimulation device. After being trained on five distinct food scents — coffee, beer, red wine, orange and chocolate cake — field testing revealed that participants could identify individual odors about 73% of the time, and paired scents about 71% of the time.

The team also found that even when Scentronic was used in tandem with interfaces that could generate taste, their results demonstrated the feasibility of programmable, cost-effective odor delivery systems to create engaging multisensory experiences, said Li.

“We did see that some people are more sensitive to certain odorants than others,” she said. “Despite being easy to distinguish, there was still lots of variation in intensity among individuals.”

The study was recently published in Science Advances.

Despite being a prototype, Scentronic’s design is so flexible that researchers created multiple versions to serve potential consumers. These include a wristband-type device that would allow users to carry it and lift it to the nose when they want to catch a whiff of a scent, and a necklace version where five odor channels align like pearls on a string, opening only after a signal is received.

Although initially fitted with the user’s comfort and functionality in mind, the ease with which these sensors were adapted to further demonstrations highlights the system’s seamless ability to enhance extended reality experiences beyond mere sight and sound, said Li.

Such versatility suggests Scentronic has many potential real-world applications, from supporting future assistive technologies and enhancing virtual training environments to becoming sensory aids in medical contexts, including as a way to reduce the need for frequent clinic visits, improve patient comfort and enable timely, personalized care, said Li.

“The loss of olfaction is related to many neurological diseases and infections,” she said. “As a result, it’s important that we create technologies to first decouple the secrets within our olfactory systems and then try to reconstruct them based on that information.”

Still, while it’ll be a long time before the internet is fully scratch-and-sniff capable, next steps involve advancing the work by testing other ways to incorporate the team’s devices into people’s daily accessories, including wearable electronics like watches or other smart jewelry.

“There are many potential opportunities for these technologies to shine,” she said. “The initial demonstrations are promising, so digitized smells may arrive sooner than you think.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Chunyu Yang, Qi Wang, Antonia Akoto-Yeboah, Shaoru Cheng, Billings Amoah, Yizhen Jia, Shulin Chen, Akhil Canumalla, Kai Zhao and Christopher Simons, as well as Chen Wang from Zhejiang Laboratory in China.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Center for Brain Injury Recovery & Discovery Pilot Award at Ohio State, and the Ohio State Alumni Grant for Graduate Research and Scholarship.

“Mark is always looking for cool opportunities for students,” said Cameron Beason, an undergraduate advisor in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences. “He’s particularly interested in their career trajectories.”

“Mark” is Mark Moritz, a professor in the same department.

“Cameron is my co-conspirator,” Moritz said. “Anything that’s involved in terms of preparing students for life beyond Ohio State, I reach out to Cameron.”

Student recruitment is a focus of Moritz’s. A question he’s frequently asked is what students can do with undergraduate degrees in anthropology. While some will go on to graduate school and work in academia or traditional anthropology fields, most don’t.

Sofia Giraldo Arzolay is familiar with that question. She is a third-year student, double majoring in anthropology and Spanish.

“It’s a common thing to hear, ‘You can do anything with anthropology,’” she said. “That statement isn’t useful. What is ‘anything?’”

“There’s an anxiety about what they’re going to do when they graduate,” Moritz said. “Learning about all the options students have, that it’ll work out one way or another, I think that helps with the anxiety and makes students feel more prepared.”

Giraldo Arzolay and five other students worked with Moritz and Beason, combing through LinkedIn profiles of program alumni, to see what careers their fellow anthropology majors had chosen.

Business, tech, law, medicine, trades – these fields all had anthropology majors working in them, the study found. The team began to refer to these jobs as “careers with anthropology,” instead of “careers in anthropology,” which is more common.

“It’s an inclusive term that validates the careers of all anthropologists,” Moritz said, “whether they are typical anthropology careers or not.”

A business job may not have a direct connection to anthropology, Moritz said, but the practical skills that students gain from the major are still applicable.

“One of the most important anthropological skills is cultural relativism,” he said. “The idea that people come from different cultural backgrounds; keeping that in mind is really important in the workplace.”

“Any business interaction,” Giraldo Arzolay said, “between a customer and a client, or two co-workers in the same company, it’s all people. If you have two people interacting, you can use anthropology somehow.”

In addition to seeing what career options were available to them after graduating, the students gained valuable research, writing and presenting experiences.

“This is what testing your own hypothesis feels like,” Giraldo Arzolay said. “How do you collect data ethically? How do you analyze the data you collected?

“Interviewing and report writing, too. I interviewed five alumni from the department and made a report from those interviews. I’d never interviewed anyone before. It was fun.”

“They have confidence communicating their ideas,” Beason said. “From the beginning of this project to the end, I saw a change in their abilities to communicate in a research context, to be able to speak about research and think through the questions that researchers ask.”

Moritz, who typically works with graduate students, found the younger team engaged and excited.

“They’re eager to learn,” he said. “They’re still growing as professionals. I enjoyed working with them and being a part of that.”

Giraldo Arzolay originally signed up for the study because she plans on going to graduate school and is always seeking new experiences for her resume. After the project, she feels better about her other choices.

“Now I know about human resources because I interviewed a human resources officer,” she said. “If I don’t go to grad school, what could I do? I was testing my plan B.

“Now I have plans A, B, C, D and E,” she said.

Scientists identified this limitation by converting carbon monoxide into methanol — a vital fuel source and industrial ingredient — showing that how well the reaction works depends not only on applied voltage, but also on how quickly a catalyst binds to carbon monoxide molecules.

By revealing how certain steps control the reaction’s speed, these findings could help scientists design better methods and processes for producing cleaner fuels and chemicals, said Zhihao Cui, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral student in chemistry at The Ohio State University.

“We really want to replace conventional chemical manufacturing with sustainable chemical manufacturing powered by renewable electricity,” said Cui. “But to achieve that goal, we first need to overcome the fundamental restraints that stand in the way.”

One such restriction includes the effort it takes to turn carbon monoxide into methanol, a tedious, time-intensive process. Yet this team’s results provide new insights into how to design catalysts and their surroundings more efficiently, paving the way for cleaner, more efficient chemical production.

The study was published Nov. 2 in Nature Chemistry.

The team achieved this result by attaching a metal-based catalyst to carbon nanotubes — tiny tubes of graphene that have unique electrical properties — and filling them with carbon monoxide. After driving different levels of electricity through each, the team saw that a cobalt-based catalyst could hold onto those molecules more strongly than other metal catalysts.

Through their experiments, researchers also found that both the chemical environment and the binding strength of the catalyst can affect the outcome of a chemical reaction.

“One breakthrough here is that we show that both the surrounding electrolytes and how fast the environment can reorganize to accommodate the molecule influences how quickly molecules adsorb,” said Cui. “But what determines how fast carbon monoxide absorbs onto the catalyst depends on how quickly the environment can reorganize to accommodate the molecule.”

This means that at lower voltages, the reaction may be limited by how quickly the electrons can transfer to drive the reaction. In contrast, at higher voltages, the race shifts to how quickly carbon monoxide attaches to the catalysts. Both scenarios can slow methanol production.

Further analysis suggests the work has deeper sustainability implications, as converting carbon monoxide into methanol means that the carbon dioxide it originates from can be turned into useful products rather than be released back into Earth’s atmosphere, said Anne Co, co-author of the study and a professor in chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State.

“People have been looking for new ways to use electrolysis, but they hit a ceiling,” she said. “But by improving the steps behind the process, we can better use renewable sources to significantly reduce CO2 and CO emissions.”

As such, she said, using the team’s framework in tandem with carbon utilization technologies could boost industrial interest in sustainable energy and help reduce society’s reliance on fossil fuels.

Overall, their work serves as a powerful foundation for developing next-generation catalysts and electrochemical systems critical for the creation of fuels and other important chemicals, said Co.

Next, the team plans to explore whether these findings can also improve other chemical processes, test how well the system performs over longer periods of time, and assess how well their process holds up against conventional methanol production methods.

“There are many directions to explore from this research,” said Co. “But I hope to encourage future scientists to ask critical questions and think deeply of their findings.”

This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Ohio State’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Alina Mary Varghese of Ohio State was also a co-author.

Students, scholars and business leaders from across the country recently gathered at The Ohio State University to discuss how academic institutions and companies are implementing AI.

Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business convened the AI in Business Conference at The Blackwell Inn and Pfahl Conference Center on the Columbus campus. The conference supports the university’s AI Fluency initiative. The initiative is ensuring that every Ohio State student, beginning with the class of 2029, will graduate AI fluent – fluent in their field of study and fluent in applying AI in that field.

The conference brought together academic researchers and business practitioners to discuss how AI tools can be applied across various disciplines.

“Responsible AI adoption requires more than technological expertise. It takes a multidisciplinary understanding of how AI affects organizations, people, decision-making and society. That’s why this conference was such a success,” said Aravind Chandrasekaran, Fisher dean and John W. Berry Sr. Chair in Business.

“We brought together individuals from all five of our academic departments and fostered connections with more than 200 faculty, students and industry leaders from around the world to move the conversation beyond AI’s potential to what it takes to implement this technology responsibly, effectively and at scale.”

Vanitha Zacharias, chief AI strategist for the Ohio Department of Administrative Services, encouraged students in attendance to consider AI instruction as professional development.

“As students, you are expected to learn a lot on a day-to-day basis. Don’t stop when you enter into the workforce. Continue learning. Keep up this growth mindset,” she said.

“Especially when it comes to AI, you have to learn a lot. The scene changes every day, and I have been learning nonstop ever since I took on the AI responsibilities [for the state of Ohio]. This growth mindset will help you, equip you with the right knowledge regardless of which job or which organization you enter into.”

In a panel discussion, Fisher students and alumni shared how they translate what they learned about AI at Ohio State into the workplace.

Scott DiStefano, a May 2026 graduate who is now an associate at Chase Bank, said AI tools can increase efficiency for tasks such as comparing data sets.

“It’s definitely helped me work faster, but I think the greatest impact has just been changing how I approach problems and the questions I ask and ultimately, how I make decisions,” he said. “Using AI to benchmark or sift through Excel [spreadsheet] data is really good and it does save a lot of time.”

Briana Lindemeyer, a 2025 graduate, said AI helps her streamline her work as a human resources professional with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

“If I want to pull references from medical journals or whatever we’re working on, I can do that,” she said. “It’s an easy snapshot. It’s rather quick: ‘Okay, let me just put this [prompt] in here and see what comes back.’”

Minny Poon, a 2023 graduate who is now a data scientist with the Experience Management Institute, said she uses AI as a brainstorming assistant. She said the master’s degrees she earned from Fisher in human resources management and applied economics gave her a foundation to analyze results when using AI.

“Having a background in data science and learning about machine learning and understanding the fundamentals of statistics has been really helpful and valuable in terms of the analysis and the problem solving and the decision making,” she said. “It helps me recognize not just what AI can do, but also its limitations. It definitely allows me to be more intentional about how I use these tools and how to evaluate their outputs.”

Another panel discussion featured professors from Ohio State and other universities sharing strategies for incorporating AI into curricula. Ismael Talke, a senior lecturer at Fisher in operations and business analytics, said he trained Google Gemini Gems agents to assist students in solving complex problems.

When training the AI agents, “I said, ‘Don’t give the answer, ask questions [of the students].’ That way, they get the most out of it,” he said. “This increases your critical thinking and engagement.”

In his keynote address, Jojy Mathew, founder and CEO of AI technology company DataModal Inc., said companies should constantly reevaluate their return on investment from AI tools.

“There needs to be new ways to deploy AI in enterprises. How do you put AI on an employee’s desktop [computer] so that they can do their job faster?” he said. “These are some of the opportunities that await us.”

Researchers have created a new computational tool that works from an inferred ancestral point and evolves forward to the modern-day genome to trace the insertion and deletion dynamics of these “jumping genes,” known as transposable elements. 

Scientists at The Ohio State University who study how transposable elements, also called transposons or TEs, may have altered gene functions over time were looking for the best way to trace that evolutionary history, so they created the simulator they needed to do the work. 

“In the timescale of millions or tens of millions of years, transposon activity is really dense. There are many, many transposon insertions and deletions to the genome and from the genome,” said senior study author Shujun Ou, assistant professor of molecular genetics at Ohio State. 

“We want to use the footprint of that activity to study what may have happened in the past because we’ll never know for sure, but we can infer what may be the case in terms of transposon activity.” 

Their initial findings from a case study on fungal genomes hinted at how bursts of TE insertions were followed by deletions, suggesting the fungus fought back to suppress further insertions. 

Ou and colleagues describe the PrinTE simulator today (Nov. 2, 2026) in Nature Communications. 

The corn genome is perhaps the best-known example of the transposon effect on genome expansion: Up to 85% of its genome consists of jumping genes, said first author Christopher Benson, a postdoctoral scholar in Ou’s lab.

“These are big components of a genome that maybe don’t necessarily have a noticeable impact, but they exist. They’re functioning in the background in these ways that we’re still trying to understand,” Benson said.

“But one thing that they do is impact genome size evolution heavily because they often insert as a copy-and-paste. You have the original copy and the duplicated copy. So if you do this tons of times, you get a really enormous genome.” 

This phenomenon is known as the genome size paradox: Plants with major differences in genome size function in the same way. 

“Is there any value of having a genome that’s bigger or smaller? It’s paradoxical because if genome size is important, the larger genome plants must have more actual function or a more complicated structure,” Ou said. “But in observation, they don’t.” 

Ou and Benson designed PrinTE as an enhancement of a previous tool called TEGenomeSimulator, which provides a snapshot of transposon infection of a genome at a single point in time. Ou’s lab collaborated with the New Zealand-based creators of TEGenomeSimulator, who are co-authors on the paper. 

The case study focused on the fungal subdivision that includes the species myrtle rust, whose genome has expanded to 1 billion base pairs – enormous by fungal standards – because of transposon insertions. Starting with its present-day genome, the team reconstructed a genome from a theoretical common ancestor, hypothesized the variety of ways the ancestral genome could evolve into the current genome, and ran simulations to test those predictions. 

“We’ll play the simulator forward to try to make the present-day fungus. Sometimes it takes thousands of simulations to find the one that best fits, but this allows us to test those hypotheses that we’ve typically been looking at but not addressing in full depth,” Benson said. 

Because the simulation is covering millions of generations of evolution, PrinTE built a safeguard to detect and terminate trajectories headed in the wrong direction to maximize efficiency. 

“Beginning a simulation is like walking in the dark,” Ou said, “because we only see the outcome, but we don’t know what happened in the past. There can even be times when we’re walking in the wrong direction. So we use machine learning to guide us to walk in the right direction, or closer to the right direction.” 

The simulations in myrtle rust showed that the TE insertion rate was 4 to 5 times higher than the deletion rate, causing the excessively large genome, and these bursts were then followed by a drop in insertions, which is a sign of tightened control of TE activity.

“The finding suggests inserted TEs can eventually be purged by the host to suppress their activity – sort of how the immune system takes some time to catch up with an infection,” Benson said. 

“One main conclusion in this paper is that the most effective way to control the genome size is to not have any infection in the first place,” Ou said. 

He said this work provides a gold standard for understanding transposon evolutionary history and may one day open the door for genomic rescue to slow TE activity or delete TEs in species struggling to survive. 

The publicly available tool has already been used by scientists studying other systems. 

The research was supported by Ohio State’s STEM Education Faculty Startup Award, a U.S. Department of Agriculture postdoctoral fellowship, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Bioeconomic Science Institute in New Zealand.

The new capabilities are designed to accelerate the transition of emerging semiconductor technologies from university laboratories toward defense and commercial manufacturing while supporting domestic workforce development and hands-on student training.

Operated by Ohio State’s Institute for Materials and Manufacturing Research (IMR), the Microelectronics Innovation and Technology Cluster (MITEC) connects and enhances existing facilities for semiconductor processing, device prototyping and testing.

“A defining responsibility of Ohio State’s land-grant mission is to generate new knowledge and share it with our students, giving them the opportunity to learn directly from groundbreaking discoveries,” said John M. Horack, vice president for research at Ohio State. “Just as important is our commitment to moving that knowledge beyond the laboratory, translating research into solutions that strengthen communities, improve lives and drive economic growth.”

The expansion will support small and large industry partnerships and national defense technology development through the Midwest Microelectronics Consortium (MMEC), a Department of War-designated regional innovation hub.

“Ohio State is an important strategic partner and is aligned in MMEC’s mission to strengthen America’s microelectronics capabilities and supply chain,” said MMEC CEO Matt Casto. “MITEC represents more than an investment in infrastructure; it brings together world-class expertise, advanced facilities and industry partnerships to accelerate the development and transition of critical semiconductor technologies. By expanding access to these capabilities, we’re helping bridge the gap between research and real-world applications while strengthening the domestic microelectronics ecosystem.”

The initiative is supported by approximately $16 million in funding secured through MMEC, along with a roughly $4.5 million collaborative infrastructure investment from Ohio State and the Ohio Department of Higher Education.

These investments have funded major equipment additions and facility upgrades, expanding Ohio State’s ability to support university researchers and industry partners as they develop, evaluate and prepare state-of-the-art semiconductor technologies for manufacturing.

MITEC is led by Steven Ringel, a Distinguished University Professor and senior associate vice president for research at Ohio State.

“The new MITEC capabilities will have a significant impact on Ohio State’s semiconductor ecosystem and infrastructure, with the goal to support device development and prototyping for defense and commercial technology transitions working with the consortium,” Ringel said. “We are excited about our partnership with the MMEC as the Midwest’s leading innovation hub for compound semiconductor technologies.”

By bringing together these resources across Ohio State’s Nanotech West Lab and the Semiconductor Epitaxy and Analysis Laboratory, MITEC provides an integrated, flexible environment for collaborative technology development and rapid prototyping.

“It’s one thing to demonstrate something in a lab,” Horack said. “It’s another thing to do it at scale.”

MITEC supports semiconductor development using wafer sizes and processes compatible with industrial manufacturing beyond the expected scale of academic research. This allows researchers and industry partners to develop materials and prototype devices at a scale closer to commercial production, helping reduce the time needed to move new technologies from the laboratory into manufacturing and commercialization.

Workforce development and experiential learning initiatives are already underway, with MMEC-sponsored fellowships providing undergraduate and graduate students with hands-on research and prototyping experience in Nanotech West Lab’s cleanroom. Students work with wide bandgap semiconductors, materials used in high-power and high-speed electronics, as well as narrow bandgap semiconductors required for infrared sensing, while receiving training from experienced staff and helping accelerate the development of new technologies.

BuildX is an initiative designed to help students interested in entrepreneurship move through every stage of the startup process, from idea exploration to building a company and investor readiness. The initiative aims to launch 100 investable student startups annually by 2030, increase investment in Ohio and grow the startup ecosystem.

BuildX will be based in a 7,000-square-foot space in Pomerene Hall, creating an active environment for student startups. The space will bring teams together to collaborate, test ideas, meet with mentors and build alongside a community of peers.

“This is a dedicated space for our student builders to be able to work, learn and connect with each other,” said Associate Vice President for Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Shereen Agrawal.

Ohio State’s Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Trevor Brown agreed, calling the location “magical.” He pointed out that neuroscience research shows that an open, airy space can open the mind to innovation and new creative possibilities.

“Some people think entrepreneurship is something you just simply learn by doing, and doing is an incredibly important part of it, but there are bodies of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t,” Brown said. “When you combine that with experimentation and hands-on activity, people working together, often with mentors and their instructors, you can get acceleration of ideas from concept into proof of concept and into implementation, in a much faster way because you have a place where that can occur.”

In addition to the new space, the launch event also explained the new BuildX curriculum. Beginning in spring 2027, students will have access to two new three-credit-hour BuildX startup labs in addition to an already-available Intro to Software Startups course. 

One lab will be open to all students who are validating a problem and developing an initial solution. A second lab will support student teams that have demonstrated that they are ready to build and launch their ventures.

Students participating in BuildX will collaborate with current entrepreneurs, Ohio State alumni and local business leaders. Tim Keenan, an Ohio State alum and founder of the university’s Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship, said BuildX will connect them with like-minded students and open doors for collaboration across academic disciplines.

“You’ll also find people in the room that think like you. They want to start a business. They don't know how,” he said. “So, we’ll train you on how. Business students that can do the revenue model, technologists that can write the code, engineers that can structure it.”

Those student teams collaborating through the initiative will have an opportunity to join the BuildX Accelerator. Selected teams will receive $15,000 in funding along with embedded founder coaching and access to investors. It culminates in Demo Day, where founders present their business ideas to investors and supporters.

“The last thing I want to tell you is that you’ve been given the greatest opportunity that you’ll probably ever face,” Keenan said. “All these resources are here to help you, and frankly, the only thing an opportunity needs is for you to take action.”

Predmore has served as interim director of the Wexner Center while concurrently managing her duties as head of marketing and communications.

“During her interim tenure, Cat has offered exceptionally clear and steady guidance, establishing the center’s strategic direction and fostering creative autonomy across the institution,” said Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Trevor Brown. “Her leadership has empowered staff members to advance the center’s core mission and maintained the Wexner Center’s standing as an international destination for contemporary art at The Ohio State University and Columbus.”

A transformational leader and effective communicator with more than three decades of executive experience, Predmore is exceptionally equipped to lead the Wexner Center into its next chapter. She brings deep expertise in strategic planning, operational management and financial stewardship, alongside a stellar track record of designing high-impact fundraising strategies and community engagement initiatives for major national and international nonprofits.

Predmore will empower and elevate the center’s deep bench of renowned curatorial talent, while ensuring the Wex has the stable financial foundation that is critical to the success of any arts organization.

“A resource for the culturally curious, the Wexner Center holds a distinctive position both within Ohio State and across the Columbus arts community. Leading this center and working alongside a passionate, talented team devoted to advancing contemporary art is a profound honor,” Predmore said. “Looking ahead, I am excited to capitalize on our recent momentum – a year in which we maintained our cutting-edge programming, fortified our foundation and recommitted to our core mission, continuing our legacy as a local and global hub for contemporary artists.”

Before joining the Wexner Center, Predmore served as senior vice president at national communications agency Fahlgren Mortine, where she spearheaded strategic planning and integrated marketing and communications programs for U.S.-based museums, arts and science institutions, and universities. She consistently excels at building strong brands, growing a membership base, boosting attendance and exceeding revenue goals.

Her large-scale economic development work in states including Ohio, home of the Wex, underscores her understanding of the vital connections between higher education, community partners and the arts.

Predmore has earned numerous national recognitions, including awards for best charitable giving campaigns and corporate partnerships, national and central Ohio PRism Awards, MarCom Awards, Communicator Awards, the PRWeek Award and Best Brand Awards. She has also served on boards for the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center and CATCO (now The Contemporary Theatre of Ohio).

The Wexner Center is an important part of the university and a vital resource to the broader cultural community. The center is a multidisciplinary laboratory for the exploration of contemporary art.
 
Through exhibitions, performances, screenings, artist residencies and learning programs, the Wexner Center serves as a forum where established and emerging artists from around the world can test ideas and where audiences can participate in cultural experiences that enhance their understanding of the art of our time.
 
The Wexner Center presents and commissions innovative artistic work and enriches the community by promoting curiosity, understanding and civic discourse.

In mice, refeeding a strain of bacteria that was depleted after spinal cord injury (SCI) lowered inflammation and stabilized weight loss. A second study identified 19 microbial species in the mouse gut with the strongest links to the body’s loss of nitrogen after SCI, which is associated with muscle wasting in humans.

Beyond these preliminary findings, the extensive genome-based mapping of microbial communities positions the research team from The Ohio State University to broaden understanding of the gut’s role in injury complications – as well as possible protective activities – when the central nervous system is disrupted.

“We tend to think of spinal cord injury as a problem that begins and ends in the spinal cord, but our work suggests that we need to think much more broadly,” said co-senior author Phillip Popovich, professor and chair of neuroscience in Ohio State’s College of Medicine. “The spinal cord is a major communication pathway between the brain and the rest of the body, including the gut, where trillions of microbes interact with the body’s largest collection of immune cells. When spinal cord function is disrupted, that relationship can change in ways that affect inflammation, infection, nutrition and even the production of molecules needed for normal brain and spinal cord health.”

The research was reported in recent articles appearing in NPJ Biofilms and Microbiomes and Communications Biology.

Popovich’s lab focuses on spinal cord injury’s damage to the autonomic nervous system, the subsystem of neurons that controls things like breathing and digestion, and resulting immune system problems such as infections, slow healing and gastrointestinal dysfunction.

Ten years ago, a study led by Kristina Kigerl, a co-author of both papers and a research scientist in Popovich’s lab, showed in mice that spinal cord injury disrupted the gut microbiome and that feeding probiotics had a protective effect.

In this new work, the neuroscience team joined forces with Ohio State microbiologists to create a “gut catalog” of microbial species present in the mouse gut at various time points before and after SCI that provides extensive information about not just what communities are there, but also how they interact.

“The tricky part is looking at a really complex ecosystem like the gut microbiome to figure out which microbes, or microbe-to-microbe interactions, are important for the health of the host – the person with a spinal cord injury,” Kigerl said.

Kigerl co-led the work with Ahmed Zayed, a research scientist in microbiology, and recent Ohio State biophysics PhD graduate Mohamed Mohssen, both members of the lab led by co-senior author Matthew Sullivan, professor of microbiology and director of the Center of Microbiome Science at Ohio State. The team’s research focuses primarily on how viruses impact microbiomes in complex ocean, soil and human systems, powering their investigations with time-resolved machine learning and artificial intelligence analytics.

Single gene markers in gut microbes are often used to predict bacterial functions. But this work adapted techniques from the Sullivan group’s microbiome toolkit, piecing together metagenomes – the collection of genetic material from a community of microorganisms – to assemble draft genomes for 80% of the gut microbiome in one of the most common mouse strains used in nervous system research. An analysis of 333 fecal samples collected from mice resulted in 6,635 microbial draft genomes that constitute the gut catalog. The dataset also includes viruses present in the gut ecosystem, whose roles and potential influence over bacterial dynamics are part of ongoing studies.

Microbiomes were compared in three groups of male and female animals over six months: mice with an injury lesion in either the low or high thoracic spinal cord and mice with an undamaged spinal cord. The high thoracic injury completely abolishes brain-related control over sympathetic neurons that control the gut, and the lower injury reduces that control, but only partially.

Beyond identifying specific bacterial populations, the analysis enabled a look at how microbes behave as a group – some are “altruists” that share their nutrients with hungry bacteria and others are “selfish” bugs denying others access to nutrients.

“It’s not just a single bug making everything for the host. It’s this intricate interplay between microbes and each other, and microbes and the host. That’s the message of these two papers,” Zayed said.

Understanding the microbial crosstalk is crucial to coming up with interventions: If the goal is restoration of normal gut activity, simply adding back bacteria without knowing their relationship with other microbes won’t solve all the issues, Mohssen said.

For example, the Communications Biology study showed that significant changes in gut bacteria composition differed by level of SCI, sex and the passage of time after the injury. But one species, Lactobacillus johnsonii, was consistently depleted, leading to the experiment of refeeding this species to injured mice to see if its replenishment affected their outcomes. While refeeding L. johnsonii alone improved some symptoms in injured mice, a combination therapy may be needed to keep those bacteria properly fed once they’re reintroduced to the gut, the researchers said.

The nitrogen imbalance finding in the NPJ Biofilms and Microbiomes study was evident only in injured male mice. Gut changes involved depletion of bacteria that convert a specific compound into a usable form of nitrogen, upsetting chemical signaling related to muscle function. Narrowing the number of populations linked to most of the changes in nitrogen levels to 19 species “makes things a lot more clear about how we should progress,” Kigerl said.

While the spinal cord is the area of emphasis in this work, it is a proxy for other diseases that affect the cross-communication between the gut and central nervous system. Previous research has shown evidence of spinal cord damage in several neurological diseases.

“Although these studies used selective spinal cord injuries to model traumatic injury, the implications extend beyond trauma. Many neurological diseases, including stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and ALS, can disrupt the neural pathways that allow the brain, spinal cord and internal organs to communicate,” said Popovich, also executive director of the Belford Center for Spinal Cord Injury and director of the Center for Brain and Spinal Cord Repair. “Understanding how those changes affect the gut may therefore reveal mechanisms relevant to a much broader range of neurological conditions. And unlike the brain or spinal cord, the gut is relatively easy to access and modify, creating an exciting opportunity for practical, well-tolerated treatments that could improve health and recovery.”

This work was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the Belford Center for Spinal Cord Injury, the Ray W. Poppleton Research designated endowment, a Craig H. Nielsen Foundation Senior Research award, the U.S. National Science Foundation and Ohio State’s Center of Microbiome Science.

Additional co-authors, all from Ohio State, were Jingjie Du, Garrett Smith and Jan Schwab.

Even before liftoff, space missions require extraordinary amounts of scientific preparation and data analysis to succeed, which can take years to complete. However, as space agencies race to establish a permanent presence on the moon, using artificial intelligence to combine such information into a single system could make mission planning much more efficient.

One such system, developed by Gokce Inal, a PhD candidate in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University, is an AI framework designed to help scientists evaluate potential lunar landing sites, identify dangerous hazards future crews might face, and scour new regions for scientifically valuable geologic features.

“AI systems are going to become critical tools for space exploration that will help humans analyze the millions of images and datasets that future missions will require,” she said. “This work is meant to serve as a bridge between those two worlds, AI and planetary science.”

Landing on the moon is more difficult today than it ever was, but preliminary results from Inal’s model, dubbed “LUMINA,” show a strong ability to make complex lunar observations as well as generate scientifically meaningful mission commentary for candidate landing sites. Such capabilities could help mission planners locate areas abundant with water ice and other resources.

Built on a previously developed lunar vision-language foundation model called LLaVA-LE that could describe lunar terrain and answer scientific questions, LUMINA extends the team’s research by using a framework that can plan and carry out multistep analyses, evaluate potential lunar landing sites and explain the evidence behind its recommendations, said Inal.

While she created LUMINA to advance lunar mission objectives, Inal envisions the AI model not as a semi-autonomous machine, but as a decision-support system designed to work in tandem with mission planners to make final judgments. “Most AI tools are passive tools,” she said. “You ask a question and get an answer, but we’re moving toward an active scientific assistant that can work through a problem alongside the experts.”

Inal presented her findings this month at The 58th Annual Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS 58) of the American Astronomical Society.

One of this work’s main goals is to establish a pathway for agentic systems to be used in support of future space exploration, but LUMINA’s capabilities extend beyond only data interpretation for the lunar surface. Instead, the model could have research and exploration applications for mapping the surface of many other planetary bodies, including Earth, said Alper Yilmaz, co-author of the research and a professor in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at Ohio State.

“There aren’t many GPT-like map models being developed for space exploration, so our effort is aimed at making one generalizable to other surfaces, like Mars or some asteroids,” he said.

As new datasets become more advanced, more efficient tools like this model will be needed to help mission planners search them – otherwise trying to discern the best places for future crews to land or investigate would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, said Yilmaz.

“People are going to be landing in an extremely harsh environment, so it’s worth having another set of eyes that can verify and question things and help us communicate better,” he said.

As the system continues to develop, the team plans to test it on new high-quality lunar data and further evaluate how well it supports mission planning.

“NASA’s Artemis program creates important opportunities for our research,” she said. “As new lunar data becomes available, their results can improve systems like ours and better support future mission planning.”

Kate Hallihan, senior assistant dean of students at the Glenn College, and Erica Wicks, a Fisher College alumna who is now a community manager at Chase Bank, conducted the workshop at Page Hall on the Columbus campus.

Students should beware of fake employment and internship postings that ask applicants to pay money or provide bank account information to secure a position, receive compensation, purchase supplies or other fraudulent claims, Hallihan said.

“It comes across as a legit job, and it’s very exciting, and they try to move quickly, and then they ask you for money up front or a bank account up front in order to deposit your first paycheck or advance,” she said. “If it sounds too good to be true and if they’re asking for money up front, those are two big red flags.”

Hallihan and Wicks discussed several other types of scams that target students, including fake scholarships seeking students’ personal information, phony apartment rental offers that require nonrefundable deposits, debit and credit card fraud, investment and crypto schemes, and various types of identity theft.

Wicks also cautioned students to protect their identities on social media and to scrutinize or ignore messages from strangers. She cited a recent incident in which a stranger messaged her through a social media app. The unknown party claimed to be an Ohio State student asking to connect with Wicks to discuss her experience as an alum.

Wicks said she became suspicious when the unknown party suggested meeting over Zoom and invited a third party to join the meeting.

“That was a red flag. Why would a student want to invite … somebody else to the conversation? It wasn’t making sense,” Wicks said. “When I knew it was really a scam and they were trying to get me is when I said, ‘Hey, when you come to campus next week, reach out.’ I never heard from them.”

Wicks also offered tips on avoiding phishing scams. These online scams target consumers by emailing them from what appears to be a well-known source such as a bank or property management company and asking them to provide personal information, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Telltale signs of phishing scams include emails with typos, misspellings or unusual spellings in the text or email address and invitations to click on a link to make a payment or to receive a free gift or refund, Wicks said.

“It just seems off in the formatting,” Wicks said of phishing emails. “Delete it, block it, report it, so you don’t accidentally click on any of these types of links.”

Other tips provided at the workshop to avoid fraud include:

· Not sharing personal or financial information in response to unsolicited contact

· Resisting the urge to act immediately on a solicitation

· Using strong passwords on all accounts

· Not answering and blocking unwanted calls and texts

· Placing yourself on the National Do Not Call Registry by visiting Donotcall.gov

Kayah Israel, a business and finance major, and Samiyah Lewis, a business information systems major, said they plan to implement the advice they received at the workshop.

Israel said she learned how to safeguard her debit and credit cards when making purchases and to avoid racking up charges.

“I’m interested in learning more credit card information for young people,” Israel said. “[Financial institutions] are trying to reel us in to get the credit card.”

Lewis said she appreciated the information about how to avoid scholarship scams, such as not providing your Social Security number or bank account number if someone claiming to offer scholarships requests it.

“It definitely is information that you need to keep in mind,” Lewis said. “We’re young, so it’s a part of learning. I feel like this workshop helped you realize some things while you’re young.”

“I’m very bullish on higher ed,” he said. “There are very few institutions in the country whose whole job is to investigate things we don’t yet know, whether it’s the human condition, whether it’s our mental and physical well-being, or how we're organized as a society.”

Bellamkonda said students develop skills in college that will serve them their whole lives.

“What I’m saying is in a dynamically changing world, you need a meta skill set: Critical thinking, the ability to work in a team when you didn’t pick your own team, analytical skills, communication skills, an entrepreneurial mindset, some grounding in ethics and purpose and being centered. This is what college does. This is what general education does. And layered onto that are skills that are employable.”

Bellamkonda answered questions on a range of issues from Columbus Dispatch higher-education reporter Sheridan Hendrix at an event hosted by the Columbus Metropolitan Club at the National Veterans Memorial and Museum this week.

Hendrix asked Bellamkonda about the university’s AI Fluency initiative as headlines about artificial intelligence often paint a bleak future for the technology.

“We have spoken a lot about AI fluency over the last year. But since we last spoke about it, there's also been a lot of news about safety concerns, including a former Anthropic researcher warning that the technology could end humanity within a decade,” Hendrix said. “I’m curious, how do those concerns inform Ohio State’s messaging and its curriculum around AI?”

Bellamkonda said that, as a scientist, he was naturally skeptical of some of the hype surrounding AI. But he recognizes it is a transformative technology and cannot be ignored.

“So the question we have to ask ourselves as a society is: Because we are worried about the dangers of this technology, do we lock it up in some box and keep it until we have more faith in humanity to handle the technology?” he asked. “Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way, right? The way we grow as a society is by confronting and dealing with the challenges while at the same time, you know, using the technology for all the good that it can do. And there’s a lot of good that AI can do, and we're just scratching the surface of that.”

Bellamkonda said Ohio State would continue to work with faculty and students to develop a curriculum that includes thoughtful use of AI, when appropriate.

“If people are going to figure this out, I’d rather Ohio State be the place that figures this out,” he said.

One of the final questions at the luncheon was what Bellamkonda would do if he could wave a magic wand for the university's future.

“I hope we are able to realize the potential the university has to transform the state and create opportunities for our citizens to thrive in the full sense of the word — economically, through the innovative things we’re doing, as well as educationally in terms of the opportunities we create, and also well-being,” he said.

“That we rise higher, and we leverage the highly business-friendly climate we have to really build a dynamic, thriving state that’s a model to the country. To me, that’s the aspiration, and any divine intervention I can get to go on that journey, we will take.”

Last year, the university launched its AI Fluency initiative. The initiative is ensuring that every undergraduate Ohio State student, beginning with the class of 2029, will graduate AI fluent – fluent in their field of study and fluent in applying AI in that field.

“We received roadmaps from all of the colleges that offer undergraduate programs,” outlining how the AI Fluency initiative will be implemented, said Shereen Agrawal, associate vice president for Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship and executive director of the Center for Software Innovation. “These represented well over 50 new courses in development as well as hundreds of courses being in some way adapted or edited to think through how AI is impacting some of the existing learning outcomes or some of the existing objectives.”

During the forum, faculty shared strategies on how they’re incorporating AI into their disciplines and courses.

“As educators, we are at a critical moment in time where we can support students as they learn within this age of AI and we can design our assessments, our learning environments and our learning experiences that foster our students’ development of AI fluency,” said Anika Anthony, associate vice provost and director of the Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning.

“I am stressing here the importance of human intelligence. And by that, I mean human knowledge, human experience and our wisdom in framing AI fluency within our disciplines, within our curricula, and within our courses and our co-curricular experiences.”

Professor Rebecca Andridge said the College of Public Health’s new course, Technology, Innovation and Public Health, is designed to prepare students to become proficient in AI and other technologies they will encounter in the workplace. The college has also determined that engaging with the business community is key to ensuring that the curriculum aligns with workforce needs, she said.

“We should always be doing this to learn what are the skills that our employers want,” Andridge said. “In the age of AI, it’s especially important to find out from those employers what they want the students to be able to do when they graduate.”

The College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CFAES) is teaching students how modern farming uses AI to save money, time and resources, said Professor John Fulton.

“We’re taking cameras -- it could be your smartphone or a camera on a drone taking pictures -- and interpreting things like [crop] disease, insects, things of that nature from a stressor,” he said. By including this technology in courses, CFAES is introducing students “to what they might be a part of out in the professional world as far as implementation.”

Assistant Professor Molly Downing shared how the College of Pharmacy is integrating AI into its general education cosmetics science course.

Downing said she used a framework designed by colleague Steven Nagel, lead of Emerging Technology Programs in the Center for Software Innovation. The framework offers guidelines for instructors on designing assignments that account for students’ use of AI. Downing cited an example of an assignment in which students used AI to assist them in evaluating the environmental tradeoffs of a personal cosmetic product.

Using the framework, Downing designed AI prompts for students, encouraging them to demonstrate critical thinking through synthesis of their decision-making process via a submitted video presentation.

“It’s really about helping them make that thinking visible and guiding them along this decision-making process, filled with reasoning, judgment, supporting their responses with evidence and ultimately coming to a decision about their cosmetic product,” she said.

In surveys completed after the assignment, Downing said most students agreed that AI should be used as a partner, rather than a substitute for their own problem-solving skills.

“They said, ‘Instead of asking AI to simply complete an assignment, I can use it to challenge my ideas, ask follow-up questions, identify gaps in my understanding and explore a topic more deeply,’” she said. “They go on to say, ‘This helped me understand that AI can support my learning and really help me think more critically,’ versus AI just doing the assessments for them.”

Chandrasekaran has served as interim dean of the college since June 2025, building on more than 15 years as a faculty member, scholar and academic leader at the college. He will also continue to hold the John W. Berry, Sr. Chair in Business.

“AC has demonstrated a deep commitment to Fisher and a clear understanding of the role a great business college in Ohio can play,” said Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Trevor Brown. “During his time as interim dean, he has generated incredible excitement and momentum around a number of priorities that are positioning business students for personal and professional success.”

Since joining Ohio State in 2009, Chandrasekaran has earned widespread respect as an award-winning scholar, author of two books, and expert in healthcare operations, AI and process innovation. He brings extensive administrative experience from prior leadership roles across the college’s graduate and executive programs, and his leadership has strengthened areas central to Fisher’s continued advancement and is vital to the university’s broader ambitions.

“I’m honored to have the opportunity to lead Fisher into its next chapter, and I couldn’t be more optimistic about what’s ahead. We’ve built strong momentum in enhancing the student experience, deepening industry engagement, and investing in our faculty, staff, research and innovation. This progress belongs to the many talented and dedicated people at Fisher who have helped bring our vision to life,” Chandrasekaran said. “I’m grateful to President Bellamkonda and Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Brown for their trust and support, and I look forward to working alongside our university colleagues, students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners to build on what we’ve accomplished. Fisher has big plans and tremendous opportunities ahead, and I’m energized by what we can achieve together.”

Under Chandrasekaran’s leadership, the college is creatively redefining the student experience to better equip Business Buckeyes with the skills to shape what’s next as emerging business leaders. The reimagined undergraduate experience introduces students to business learning earlier in their college journeys while also creating stronger connections between classroom education and real-world application. The approach emphasizes key skills designed to transform students into business-technology integrators who can blend the digital agility and critical thinking required by today’s marketplace.

The emphasis on experiential learning, coupled with a refreshed curriculum, will yield graduates equipped to excel in four key areas, regardless of industry. This matrix ― the Fisher Advantage ― is the college’s unified framework for developing future-ready graduates.

The Fisher Advantage focuses on developing graduates who are: 

• Business experts
• Analytical and innovative problem-solvers
• Effective communicators
• Resilient and growth-oriented leaders

The college is also strengthening valuable talent and workforce development partnerships with companies and industries locally, nationally and globally.

Underpinning this work is Chandrasekaran’s ongoing effort to create a multifaceted culture for faculty and staff focused on teaching, research, service, collaboration and innovation. 

“Fisher connects academic excellence with the needs of business, prepares students for a changing economy and translates faculty and student research into impact,” Brown said. “Under AC’s leadership, the college has an opportunity to build substantially on its reputation and to increase its influence across Ohio State, throughout the state and in the business community.”

In a study published recently in Laboratory Phonology, 136 American English speakers listened to recordings of an Australian speaker and were instructed to either imitate her, avoid imitating her, or simply repeat the words they’d just heard. The researchers found that participants had a high degree of control over accent imitation. They also found that participants’ level of awareness of certain distinct accent features, like vowel pronunciation in words like bath and trap, played a strong role in which sounds were imitated.

“People are pretty good at controlling whether they sound like somebody, if you ask them to, but accent features that they find socially meaningful and notable will interfere with that,” said lead author Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State. “Basically, if we don’t tell you whether or not to imitate somebody, you’re going to sound like them on the bits that you notice or think are interesting.”

The recorded audio used in the study featured the voice of a college-educated white Australian woman in her 20s from Perth. When asked by the researchers to imitate the Australian speaker’s accent, the participants easily did so, and when they were told not to imitate the accent, they maintained their normal speech patterns. Without explicit instructions, participants tended to imitate only a single feature, such as dropping the “r” sound in near. According to the study, this could be due to an automatic reflex, language play or a combination of the two.

The study also revealed a clash between what our brains expect to hear and what our ears hear in real time. While participants initially copied the Australian vowel sound in words like trap, they gradually stopped when the speaker also used broad, distinct Australian vowels in words like bath. They had already built-up expectations of what the speaker’s accent should sound like, and when the recording they heard strayed from those expectations, the participants stopped imitating that particular sound.

“We got this kind of overarching effect: What you think she usually sounds like ends up clobbering the token that you just heard,” explained Campbell-Kibler, who co-authored the study with Cynthia Clopper, a professor of linguistics at Ohio State.

Campbell-Kibler’s goal going into the study, which was conducted in Ohio State’s Language Sciences Research lab at the Columbus Center of Science and Industry (COSI), was to learn more about how our minds process language. She was particularly interested in how the perception side — when you’ve just heard somebody speak — influences what speech you produce.

The process of accent acquisition has long fascinated — and confounded — linguists. “How come we don’t always pick up everybody’s accent? This is actually a huge question mark,” Campbell-Kibler said. Your spouse, for example, could have a completely different accent than you, and while you might pick up some features of how they sound, you probably won’t end up sounding exactly like each other, even over the course of decades. Or maybe the Southern drawl you had as a child is most pronounced only when you talk to your family.

“People who move to a new area often end up with an accent that’s somewhere in the middle between where they came from and where they live now,” Campbell-Kibler added.

Interestingly, the researchers didn’t note any hesitation among participants when it came to imitating the Australian speaker’s accent. In the paper, the authors write, “the model talker spoke a dialect that was likely to be in high regard for the participants, allowing us to examine the imitation of different dialect features in a prestigious variety.” In other words, the speaker was considered to be a member of “a positively valued group for most Americans,” according to Campbell-Kibler, and “you don’t feel like you’re making fun of somebody in the same way that you might if it was a stigmatized group.”

In future research, Campbell-Kibler hopes to further explore the mechanics of automatic imitation and deliberate language play, which she believes can lead to a clearer understanding of how the mind processes speech.

Several of the research assistants on this project were supported by grants from the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates.

The tower is a long-term investment that will lead to new technologies, new companies and new jobs in Ohio. Ohio State is a place where ideas become impact, and many of those ideas require collaboration across sectors – the new tower will be a visible expression of that partnership model. This project is expected to attract more companies and startups to co-locate on campus and spur economic development.

“It’s going to be a beautiful building … both the outside and the inside are going to be very special,” said Ohio State President Ravi V. Bellamkonda. “And the program that the building enables is also very special. It will be a mix of startups, large companies, the Center for Software Innovation, students, researchers and employees intermingling. An incredible vision of creating collisions for innovation of all different kinds.”

The building is a visible expression of how the Timashev Family Foundation’s philanthropy, the university, the state, the city and JobsOhio are building an innovation ecosystem that connects talent, technology, entrepreneurship and life sciences.

The new building will give the Center for Software Innovation a dedicated home for startups emerging from BuildX, a university initiative designed to help student founders move through every stage of the startup process, and other ventures across central Ohio and the state. The tower will offer flexible co-working space, dedicated offices and opportunities to connect with other technology companies.

Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel said his conversations with Bellamkonda often invoked the tradition of Ohio State, and the new tower represented the university’s and the state’s innovative spirit.

“One thing we talked constantly about, as we represented the university, was that with tradition comes the responsibility to make it even greater, and that’s what we have in mind with this building,” he said. “The only way you uphold that tradition of greatness is to work together as a team.”

The new tower will create an environment designed to move promising ideas beyond the lab and classroom toward real-world application, whether that means a new therapy, technology, software platform or startup company.

Ratmir Timashev, an Ohio State graduate and software entrepreneur, made a transformative donation with his wife, Angela, through their family foundation to develop the tower and the Center for Software Innovation’s educational programming.

“We want to create something special for our students so that they are prepared for this fast-changing world of AI and innovation and life sciences. This is how I give back to them,” he said. “Ohio State and Angela and I, we share the same vision. We want Columbus and Ohio State and central Ohio to become the next Silicon Valley, the next technology hub where people and innovation come together.”

The location brings together life science entrepreneurs and researchers, software innovators and students, alongside startups like Koloma, an Ohio State-founded clean-energy firm, Ohio Life Sciences and Pelotonia, which have established headquarters in the district at the Energy Advancement and Innovation Center and the Pelotonia Research Center.

“The Timashev Technology Tower will give startups and established companies a place to grow alongside one of the nation’s leading medical and research universities, adding to the momentum that makes Ohio a top destination for life sciences and technology investment,” said JobsOhio President and CEO J.P. Nauseef. “Today’s groundbreaking reflects years of intentional work to build an innovation network within the Ohio Discovery Corridor where cutting-edge research doesn’t stay in the lab.”

The Innovation District is already attracting significant technology partnerships, including a major new partnership with Google to accelerate AI-enabled discovery. This collaboration will bring Google Cloud engineers and Google DeepMind research capabilities closer to Ohio State faculty and students and provide researchers with access to advanced AI models and computing resources.

For students, the vision of central Ohio as an innovation-centered community is already underway. Abigail Theobald, a fourth-year student majoring in biomedical engineering and a member of the inaugural cohort of the Integrated Business and Engineering Program, said she has not had to limit herself to one discipline.

“At Ohio State, I haven’t had to choose among business, engineering, medicine or software. The drive to innovate has been fostered, and I believe that the future and my own future lives where these disciplines collide,” she said. “But that’s what we’re ultimately here celebrating today, it’s the beating heart of the Timashev Technology Tower, and I cannot wait to see it come to life.”