The college just completed a comprehensive redesign of the Full-Time MBA program, which takes advantage of Fisher’s strong relationships with employers and recruiters to cultivate career competencies sought by organizations.

“Continuous innovation is a priority which is explicitly highlighted in the college’s strategic plan. This innovation guides our approach to how all of our programs are delivered,” said Anil K. Makhija, dean and John W. Berry, Sr. Chair in Business at Fisher.

The program offers students an experience designed to be more personalized, applied and integrated than ever, adding to a functional curriculum delivered by world-class faculty. The Full-Time MBA now utilizes student assessments to tailor an individualized experience that maximizes growth while addressing students’ professional needs.

Students will undergo an assessment at the beginning of their MBA experience to identify their strengths and skills gaps. Their program builds on these strengths to close the gaps so they earn an MBA that fits and distinguishes them in the marketplace.

Each student has access to a team dedicated to their success: a conventional academic adviser, career consultant, mentor and professional development coach. The comprehensive support team provides continuous feedback throughout the MBA journey.

Along with teaching by a renowned faculty and built-in enhanced experiential learning with businesses, the program’s coaching and assessment component is a major differentiator among MBA offerings.

The Full-Time MBA includes a revamped curriculum that incorporates immersive, cross-functional projects with top companies and organizations locally and globally. Program elements such as the Global Applied Projects with international experience, Business Lab Project involving top companies and Core Capstone Experience with integrated content provide MBA students with opportunities to apply insights learned in the classroom, shape business through consulting projects and maximize social impact.

“The data-driven approach to this redesign has yielded a Full-Time MBA program that is able to maximize the potential of each student,” said Roger Bailey, co-director of Fisher’s Full-Time MBA program and a senior lecturer in marketing. “We are excited about how these many changes leverage Fisher’s strengths, and the increased value it will provide to our students, our alumni and the greater business community.”

Along with the enhancements to its MBA program, Fisher continues to innovate across its other graduate degree offerings.

“Whether through the added flexibility offered to our Working Professional MBA students, or recognizing that every Full-Time MBA experience can — and should — be unique, we’re meeting students where they are and equipping them to get to where they want to go,” Makhija said.

In 2017, Fisher augmented its Working Professionals MBA program by adding to its weekday evening format the flexibility of a weekend option for busy students who simultaneously juggle responsibilities with family, work and school. Now, students can access a top-10 nationally ranked program at Ohio’s flagship university through a weekend option that provides free round-trip transportation in Wi-Fi-equipped buses for students traveling to Columbus from Cleveland, Cincinnati and Dayton.

Earlier this year, Fisher launched a Specialized Master in Business Analytics to meet marketplace demand for business professionals equipped with data and analytics skills. The 10-month program has a hybrid format that blends online instruction with weekend classes to accommodate the schedules of working and non-working professionals.

“Just as the needs of businesses and industries change, the methods by which we’re equipping the next generation of leaders are constantly evolving,” said Walter Zinn, associate dean for graduate students and programs at Fisher. “These enhancements are great first steps, and we look forward to fostering continued innovation in how we’re shaping our graduate programs and our students.”

That was the message from Ohio State University graduate Gena Lovett as the keynote speaker for the Center for Aviation Studies’ First Annual Conference on Diversity in Aviation. Lovett is the vice president of manufacturing, safety and quality for the Defense, Space & Security division at Boeing.

“I am living proof as a leader that having a diverse team, considering diverse ideas and diverse experiences really does impact the bottom line. I am a business person and it is about delivering the bottom line,” Lovett said.

Finding and developing talent was critical to Boeing’s continuing success, she said. As a result, it was a business imperative for the world’s largest aerospace company to recruit and promote talented employees – and that required commitment.

“As we’re bringing talent in and we want to hold onto key talent, we have to think differently,” she said. “What I found is there were a ton of hidden gems in plain sight in our company.”

The two-day conference at the Blackwell Inn and Pfahl Conference Center opened on Wednesday for dozens of aviation educators and industry professionals to discuss professional development around diversity and inclusion.

The conference featured panels and discussions on implicit bias, the values of recruiting a diverse workforce and ideas for creating classrooms that are more inclusive.

President Michael V. Drake addressed the conference by noting Ohio’s history as the birthplace of aviation and Ohio State’s history in diversity in aviation. Drake shared the story of Ohio State alumnus Jesse Brown, the first African American naval aviator. Brown died in the Korean War and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Drake said diversity and inclusion is a core value at Ohio State and makes the university a stronger and more creative community.

“When we look at the people coming in now, we see ourselves as a global university. People are coming from all over the country and all places around the world because this is the best place to advance their careers,” he said. “And when they join together collectively, they really have the wisdom of the world.”

Shannon Morrison, curriculum and assessment manager and diversity coordinator for the Center for Aviation Studies, came up with the idea for a diversity conference focused on the aviation industry. She said Ohio State is well positioned to lead this effort because of partnerships in the industry, alumni in leadership positions in aviation and a diverse student population looking for leadership.

“I look at all the young women, all the students of color, LGBTQ students who are going through a program and they need mentors, they need guidance and they choose Ohio State as their institution that they want to earn their degree from. So we need to step up to the plate and be the change we want to see,” Morrison said.

The conference ends Thursday and the goal is for it to become an annual event at Ohio State.

HackOHI/O 2018, the university’s sixth annual 24-hour hackathon, starts on Saturday in the Ohio Union. More than 800 students will code, build and innovate around the clock.

Hackathons are technical project marathons where student teams go from idea to prototype in a single weekend, solving a problem or meeting a need in the marketplace. HackOHI/O is the largest in the state.

“This year we’re emphasizing to the students how this short-term event can be a launching pad for long-term entrepreneurial ambitions,” said Program Director Julia Armstrong. “And we’re encouraging projects that have real-world impact.”

She added that more freshmen and majors outside of computer science have signed up this year, which she attributes partly to partnership with the Ohio State Digital Flagship initiatives.

After 24 hours of “hacking,” the teams at HackOHI/O will present their ideas to fellow students, faculty and tech company representatives. Teams will be judged on categories including technical difficulty, creativity, usefulness and presentation.

Nearly 100 industry professionals interested in the talent and technology on display also are expected to attend the final showcase on Sunday, Oct. 28, when more than $10,000 in donated prizes will be awarded to the most innovative projects. The showcase is open to the public.

HackOHI/O 2018 is sponsored by Microsoft, Honda, JPMorgan Chase, AEP and rapidly growing Columbus startup Root Insurance, among others. Sponsors have the opportunity to pitch problem statements as challenges to student teams.

Engie, Ohio State’s energy partner, is issuing a Smart Campus challenge addressing the gamification of energy awareness and usage reduction for students and staff on campus.

JP Morgan Chase, a longtime supporter, is sponsoring the Best Hack for Disaster Relief and Recovery, focusing on communication to population, resource allocation and safety.

Four university experts on health, mobility and city planning discussed what it would take to make central Ohio and the Columbus campus a more walkable or bikeable community last week at a conference at Pomerene Hall. It was part of Ohio State’s Mobility Week campaign to educate and inspire students, faculty and staff to learn more about the transportation options that go beyond the single-occupant car.

One of those experts was Harvey Miller, a cycling enthusiast and director for the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis. Miller is an avid bike rider and made sure he was able to bike to work when he joined Ohio State.

“When I moved to Ohio State in 2013, that was actually non-negotiable. I told my real estate agent to put circle a mile and a half around Ohio State and that’s where I will live,” he said.

For Miller, improving the conditions for people who walk or ride bicycles begins with devoting more space to their travel.

“We devote so little of our shared mobility space to anything but cars,” Miller said. “There’s a new concept called LIT lanes. LIT stands for low impact transport. The idea is what’s good for scooters is good for bikes.”

He also suggested that as the city continues to upgrade infrastructure to support electric vehicles, it should also build out support for electric bicycles.

Gulsah Akar, associate professor of city and regional planning at the Knowlton School of Architecture, said improving the commute for walkers or bicyclists comes down to safety.

“To make bicycling or walking more normalized, or to get people to choose those modes, it should feel safe. It should feel convenient. A person shouldn’t feel unsafe riding a bicycle,” she said.

“It comes down to normalizing the culture and encouraging student use as well,” said Tim Raderstorf, chief innovation officer for the College of Nursing. “It also means building the social infrastructure around it. The happiest cities tend to be cities that have the largest bike infrastructure.”

Building a culture goes beyond dedicating bike lanes – it also requires restaurants and shops that are accessible by bicycle and that have appropriate bike parking. Raderstorf cautioned that bicycle culture could be overtaken by the electric scooters that are so prevalent on and around campus.

John Shrader, field logistics coordinator in the Department of Transportation and Traffic Management, said teaching can play a role in improving the use of bikes. His office helps collect and recycle more than 300 abandoned bicycles each year. Many of the bikes are abandoned for reasons as simple as flat tires or broken chains.

“One of the things we thought might address that issue is having a bike shop on campus to show people how to fix their own bikes – a space where people could gather and learn things and socialize a little bit about bike culture,” Shrader said.

The university is exploring a bike shop in on campus but has not settled on a final location, he said.

Mobility Week was part of Ohio State’s ongoing effort to support the Smart Columbus campaign as the primary research partner. Columbus won the U.S. Department of Transportation’s first-ever Smart City Challenge and was awarded $50 million in grant funding to find new ways to improve mobility in central Ohio.

A portion of the Gateway at University District was turned into a showroom on Wednesday to highlight all of the ways to get around Columbus without owning a gas-powered car. It’s part of the university’s ongoing Mobility Week.

Electric cars from Honda, Nissan and Chevy were parked on the walkway along with displays highlighting options from COTA, Lime, Bird and ZipCar. Campus traffic experts and transportation researchers were on hand to talk about mobility at Ohio State.

Mobility Week is designed to educate and inspire students, faculty and staff to learn more about the transportation options that go beyond the single-occupant car. Representatives from Ohio State’s Corporate Engagement Office, the Center for Automotive Research, Transportation and Traffic Management, the Smart Campus student group and several community partners are involved in planning the week’s activities.

The week is part of the university’s ongoing effort to support the Smart Columbus campaign as the primary research partner. Columbus won the U.S. Department of Transportation’s first-ever Smart City Challenge and was awarded $50 million in grant funding to find new ways to improve mobility in central Ohio.

Go to the Mobility Week website to learn more about events this week: https://tco.osu.edu/mobility-week/

“With Ohio State being a leader in engineering, academics, research and medicine, it seems a natural fit to pull all of these together to support the esports program,” said Deborah M. Grzybowski, co-director of the game studies and esports curriculum development and associate professor of practice in The Ohio State University Department of Engineering Education.

An interdisciplinary curriculum spanning five colleges will focus on game studies and esports is being developed at the core of this program. This curriculum will be one of the first of its kind in higher education, and will include undergraduate and graduate degrees; an elective course in esports content production; online certification programs for specialized credentials; and a gaming speaker series.

Specific areas of study may include esports management, game art and production, game design, programming, the business of games, and health and rehabilitation. The university is actively seeking input from industry partners to construct the most comprehensive programs possible.  

A state-of-the-art arena is being built on campus to complement this curriculum and to give students diverse career opportunities. The arena will be home to Ohio State’s esports teams and open to all students.

“The arena will not only be a place for our teams to practice and compete, but it will also encourage open gaming, and virtual reality experiences,” Brandon Smith, director of esports in the Office of Student Life, said. “It will include over 80 seats, with computer console and virtual reality systems, as well as a broadcast booth for students interested in shoutcasting.” 

The teams will compete with other Power 5 universities in a newly formed league commissioned by the Electronic Gaming Federation. The Ohio State University will help to develop the governance body of this league. 

Researchers across the University and at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center are the first to study the brains, bodies and behaviors of elite esports athletes. Through a deeper understanding of this relationship and the combined influences of this triad on an individual’s ability to perform a given task, researchers will discover ways to unlock new levels of human performance. This new knowledge will benefit student success, elite athletes and even patients.

“Ohio State is known for high-performance athletics, and esports plays to this strength,” said James Onate, co-director of the Sports Medicine Movement Analysis and Performance Program at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. “The methods are the same as any other sport, the skills are just different. We have a lot to learn from studying esports athletes, from their exceptional reaction times and rapid decision-making abilities to their physical attributes and health behaviors.”

In order to support these efforts, researchers at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center are putting esports athletes through a variety of tests, all in an effort to figure out what skills and attributes elite esports athletes should have. The results of these studies will help individuals and teams optimize and sustain high levels of performance through assessment, analysis and augmentation.

“Ohio State is already ahead of the curve in studying the connection between machine learning and human learning,” Morley Stone, senior vice president for research at Ohio State, said. “This provides us with a springboard to delve deeper into the understanding of human performance in esports.”

Researchers found that people found new enjoyment in popcorn, videos – even water – when they consumed them in unconventional ways.

Findings suggested that using unconventional consumption methods helped people focus on what they enjoyed about the product in the first place, said Robert Smith, co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“When you eat popcorn with chopsticks, you pay more attention and you are more immersed in the experience,” Smith said.

“It’s like eating popcorn for the first time.”

This phenomenon may explain such things as the popularity of “pitch black” restaurants that serve diners in the dark.

“It may not be anything special about darkness that makes us enjoy food more. It may be the mere fact that dining in the dark is unusual,” Smith said.

Smith conducted the study with Ed O’Brien of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. The results appear online in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The researchers conducted four experiments.

In one study, 68 people came to a laboratory supposedly for an experiment about “helping people eat more slowly.” Half the people ate 10 kernels of popcorn using their hands, one at a time. The other half ate the kernels one at a time with chopsticks.

Afterward, participants rated the experience on a variety of measures, including how much they enjoyed the popcorn, how flavorful it was and how much fun it was to eat it.

Results showed that people who ate the popcorn using chopsticks reported enjoying it more than those who used their hands, Smith said.

Another finding suggested why that might be.

Those who used chopsticks – compared to those who ate with their hands – reported that they felt more immersed in the experience, that it helped intensify the taste and helped them focus on the food.

But the researchers then had the participants repeat the experiment. In this second trial, everyone enjoyed the popcorn equally and felt equally immersed, regardless of how they ate it.

“This suggests chopsticks boost enjoyment because they provide an unusual first-time experience, not because they are a better way to eat popcorn,” Smith said.

A second study of 300 participants recruited online found that even drinking water was rated as more enjoyable when it was done in novel ways. In this study, participants came up with their own “fresh, new and fun” ways to drink water – everything from drinking out of a martini glass to drinking out of a shipping envelope to lapping at the water with their tongue like a cat.

Those who drank water in these novel ways enjoyed it more than those who drank it normally.

In the final two studies – one conducted in a lab and one done online – participants watched a one-minute video three times in a row. The video showed an exciting motorcycle ride filmed with a GoPro camera from the driver’s perspective.

All participants watched it twice normally, rating how much they enjoyed it after each viewing.

But the third viewing was different for some participants.

One-third were asked to watch the videos using “hand-goggles” – forming circles with their thumbs and index fingers around their eyes, and using them to track the ride by bobbing their head back and forth to follow the cyclist.

For another third of the participants, the video was flipped upside down. The final third watched the video in the conventional way.

As expected, those who watched the video in the conventional way showed less enjoyment by the third viewing. Those who watched the video upside down didn’t enjoy it very much because, even though the viewing was unconventional, it was also disruptive.

However, those who watched the video for the third time with hand-goggles enjoyed it more than the other groups.

But did participants really enjoy the video more – or did they just like the strange experience of using hand-goggles? Results suggest the unconventional way of watching really did make the video itself more enjoyable.

After the study, the researchers offered to let all participants download the video to keep – and three times more people who watched with hand-goggles asked to download the video than those in the other conditions.

“They actually thought the video was better because the hand-goggles got them to pay more attention to what they were watching than they would have otherwise,” he said. “They were more immersed in the video.”

Smith said these findings apply in a variety of ways to everyday life.

For example, when you’re eating pizza, after eating one slice normally, you could try eating one slice with a knife and fork and then folding the next slice.

And if you’re sick of your sofa, try putting it in another room rather than getting rid of it.

“It may be easier to make it feel new than you might think. It is also a lot less wasteful to find new ways to enjoy the things we have rather than buying new things,” he said.

The Keenan Family Foundation has made a $17 million commitment to The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business, strengthening the university’s expertise in the field of entrepreneurship. The Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship will focus on cultivating students’ entrepreneurial skill sets and create an enriched extracurricular experience around entrepreneurship. The students will be connected to the startup ecosystem in central Ohio and beyond.

“Kathleen and I have dedicated our philanthropic lives to the development of an entrepreneurial ecosystem to help regions of the country that need new job development,” Tim Keenan said. “Our first endeavor was in upstate and central New York and now we have focused on the Midwest. We are excited to partner with The Ohio State University and Fisher College of Business to position the university as a thought leader and focal point of action for the Midwest and the nation as a whole.

“We are confident that the talented students of Ohio State, combined with the faculty and staff, will position the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship as an impact leader across all industries, and that it will be a driving contributor to job creation in Ohio and the nation.”

“The Tim and Kathleen Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship is a remarkable resource for our students as well as Ohio’s rapidly growing start-up ecosystem,” said Ohio State President Michael V. Drake. “Their inspiring gift honors Buckeye Nation’s proud entrepreneurial legacy, while laying the educational foundation for tomorrow’s business leaders. I am truly grateful to Tim and Kathleen for their longstanding service and generosity to Ohio State.”

Pending approval by Ohio State’s Board of Trustees, The Ohio State University Tim and Kathleen Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship will provide generations of future leaders with the capabilities to turn ideas into action.

“We are honored that Tim and Kathleen have entrusted Fisher College of Business and Ohio State to equip and empower our students and thought leaders with the skills, experiences and insights to produce the next great breakthrough, technology or process,” said Anil K. Makhija, dean and John W. Berry, Sr. Chair in Business at Fisher. “We look forward to working with the Keenans to carry out our shared vision for this exciting new chapter in how we create and foster entrepreneurially spirited leaders.”

The Keenan Family Foundation was established by Tim (BS ’80) and Kathleen Keenan in 2012. Tim Keenan is currently the CEO of Keenan & Associates, a company that works with small- to mid-sized organizations to provide direction and guidance with strategic planning and development. He also serves as the vice president and treasurer of the Keenan Family Foundation. In addition to making one of the largest commitments recorded at Fisher, Tim Keenan is a longtime member of the college’s Dean’s Advisory Council, served as an adviser to The Ohio State Office of Research in advancing the Ohio Technology Consortium and is a life member of The Ohio State University Alumni Association.

About The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business

The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business provides tomorrow’s business leaders with the foundation needed to succeed in business today. Led by world-class faculty, Fisher students experience an academically rigorous learning environment that fosters the development of an entrepreneurial spirit, global awareness and principled leadership skills. Organizations from around the globe thrive under the leadership of Fisher alumni, who are positively impacting their communities and the world.

It’s called the Innovation Studio and the idea behind it is using collaboration to find solutions to health care problems. The Innovation Studio is the brainchild of Tim Raderstorf, chief innovation officer for the College of Nursing.

“We wanted to be the starting line for people. We wanted to be the go-to place where you get your ideas off the ground,” he said.

The studio looks like a portable high-school shop class: There are 3D printers, laser cutters and hand tools. Would-be inventors can also get help in product design and pitch development.

The studio can be set up in a day and it’s always on the move. Raderstorf opened the studio this week at the James and it will remain in the lobby until the end of July. Future stops include the College of Nursing and Thompson Library.

“We are excited to have the Innovation Studio back in the lobby at the James. We are continually on the lookout for innovative ideas and creative ways to improve patient care,” said Kris Kipp, executive director of patient services and chief nursing officer at The James. “Our faculty and staff are wonderful resources for these ideas, and the Innovation Studio is a great partner in helping to make ideas become realities.”

said problem solvers need three things to bring ideas into reality.

“The first is the permission to innovate and that’s what the Innovation Studio provides. It’s the physical space that allows people to come in and do work and innovate and collaborate across boundaries,” he said.

Independent validation and funding are also critical. The Innovation Studio provides both.

Project teams are eligible to enter competitions in which top performers receive funding to continue to develop their invention or idea. As the ideas progress, the Innovation Studio can provide more funding. A donation from College of Nursing alumna Connie Hahn Sharpe and her husband, Gary, supports the studio.

Melissa Driscoll, a research nurse in the College of Medicine, turned to the Innovation Studio to get an invention off the ground. Driscoll worked with research scientist Surya Gnyawali to develop a new cart to support the imaging equipment critical to their work.

“It was really awesome, just knowing that there is a team of people out there that can help you develop your ideas and help you create your ideas,” Driscoll said. “We were considered the inventors but they were helping us to better establish what we had and how to use it bedside.”

Previously successful projects have ranged from software to improve the productivity of physician assistants and nurse practitioners to adaptive rock climbing harnesses for people who are paraplegic and quadriplegic, Raderstorf said.

“It’s kind of been all across the board but as long as it improves the health and well-being of the world, then it’s something that we’re interested in.”

The Ohio State University College of Medicine has created a new center focused on advancing research and discovery in the delivery of health care services to improve care, enhance population health management and influence health policy.

CATALYST, the Center for the Advancement of Team Science, Analytics and Systems Thinking in Health Services and Implementation Science Research, will provide the critical infrastructure to support faculty and staff in their efforts to conduct transformational research.

A pillar of Ohio State’s strategic plan is to pioneer life-altering biomedical discoveries and their translation into breakthrough health care solutions. Health services research involves the study of health systems with the goal of discovering how hospitals and doctors might function more optimally and provide better care for patients.

CATALYST will use a team science approach in conducting this research, increasing Ohio State’s capacity to succeed in these research areas and enhancing Ohio State’s national reputation.

Health services and implementation science research will help the Wexner Medical Center achieve the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s quadruple aim in health care – enhancing patient experience, improving population health, reducing costs and improving the work life of health care providers.

“We currently have many well-funded and talented health services researchers and we have developed this new center to accelerate our growth. Our health system has more than 60,000 admissions and 1.8 million outpatient visits each year. This provides a significant opportunity where we can conduct health services research,” said Dr. K. Craig Kent, dean of The Ohio State University College of Medicine. “Existing talent and new recruits will have a framework that supports high-quality scholarship and increases translational discoveries.”

Ann Scheck McAlearney, professor of Family Medicine, is the inaugural director of CATALYST. She leads a team of faculty, research and project managers, postdoctoral researchers, data analysts, scientific editors and research assistants in a dedicated command center.

“Ann McAlearney brings great depth of experience in health services and implementation science research,” said Peter Mohler, vice dean for research in the College of Medicine. “She’s a funded researcher with a robust body of work in the areas of health information technology implementation in health care organizations, high-performing health care organizations, population health management, quality and systems improvement, reducing health care disparities and organizational change.”

McAlearney said, “I’m excited to have the opportunity to build one of the most prominent health services research programs in the nation, enabling Ohio State to advance discoveries in these areas that will save lives and improve the care of millions of patients.”

An Ohio State faculty member for 20 years, McAlearney holds joint appointments in the departments of Biomedical Informatics and Pediatrics in the College of Medicine and the Division of Health Services Management and Policy in the College of Public Health. She has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed publications, authored or edited 10 books and published 80 book chapters.

McAlearney serves as a subject matter expert for a number of organizations, including the World Health Organization, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) and the Health Research and Education Trust of the American Hospital Association. She’s a member of numerous editorial boards and has served on a number of review panels and study sections for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and PCORI.

McAlearney received a master of science degree in biological sciences from Stanford University and a doctor of science degree in health policy and management from Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Drake is joined by a group of fellow travelers including students, faculty and staff. His itinerary in northwest Ohio includes stops at some classic locations like the Wilson Football Factory in Ada and Lima’s Kewpee Hamburgers.

A visit to the university’s Marion campus will include a discussion on the new Alliance for the American Dream project. Drake will join Bowling Green State University President Rodney Rogers in Bowling Green to discuss the issues of access and affordability in higher education.

Drake and members of the Ohio State community will also go on the Roads Scholars tour in July to meet with alumni and local leaders in northeast Ohio.

The summer state tours are part of Drake’s mission to take the university’s values on the road as the flagship land-grant institution in Ohio.

Conditions on Earth make it extremely difficult to detect this mysterious particle, which is why discovering it took the world’s single largest machine — the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) — and thousands of scientists from more than 100 countries.

Eager for more answers about the deep hidden structure of nature, physicists at CERN have been searching nonstop for further clues about the Higgs boson and how it interacts with other particles.

Years of data and trillions of high-energy particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) later, victory was reached once again this month with a discovery that links the Higgs boson and the top quark — an interaction that Brian Winer, professor and chair of the Department of Physics, has been searching for since before the Higgs was proven to exist.

Winer and several other Ohio State researchers played a principal role in the search for this remarkably rare event through their collaboration on the CMS experiment at the LHC, which published the new results on June 4 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“The top quark is the heaviest of all the quarks, and because the Higgs boson gives mass to other fundamental particles, the theory predicts it should interact quite strongly with the top quark,” Winer explained.

To test this connection, scientists looked for evidence of a unique case in which the Higgs boson is produced along with a top quark and an antitop quark in the same collision (called ttH production).

“Of all the Higgs bosons that are produced, only 1 percent are produced in this way,” said Tony Lefeld, a PhD candidate in the Department of Physics who was part of Winer’s CMS research group. “We have to collide things billions or trillions of times just to get a few collisions that generate this combination.”

And the rapidly decaying nature of these particles means that ttH production can’t actually be observed — it must be measured by working backward through a complicated chain reaction. On top of that, many other kinds of collisions produce similar end results.

“There are many other types of processes that can occur that might fool us into thinking that they’re ttH,” said Winer, adding that he and his team used machine learning techniques to help them sift through the colossal data sets.

Their results — supplemented by CERN’s ATLAS experiment and the work of thousands of physicists across the globe — provide enough evidence to verify the interaction between the Higgs and the top quark.

To determine how strong the interaction is — and if it fits into the overarching theory of fundamental particles called the Standard Model — “we have to measure a lot more of these and get a better idea of how frequently they happen,” Lefeld said.

“If we make a detailed measurement and it doesn’t come out quite right, that could be an indication of some new particle that’s coming into play that we didn’t anticipate,” Winer said.

Both the CMS and ATLAS experiments will continue collecting data until the end of the year, when they shut down for upgrades. Regardless of whether new findings are made in that time, this latest advance is a great step forward in decoding the behavior of the elusive Higgs boson.

“There are a lot of questions that the Standard Model can’t answer, like dark matter and dark energy,” Lefeld said. “There is new physics out there just waiting to be discovered.”

Ohio State professors Stan Durkin, Chris Hill and Richard Hughes; postdocs Wuming Luo and Darren Puigh; and graduate students Sean Flowers and Geoff Smith also contributed to this research and the CMS experiment. Ohio State’s Antonio Boveia; K.K. Gan; and Harris Kagan contributed to the ATLAS experiment. 

But new research found one common situation in which people would rather not discuss what they just bought: when they’re feeling like money is a little tight.

In a series of studies, researchers found that consumers who felt financially constrained didn’t want to talk about their purchases, large or small, with friends or strangers, face-to-face or online.

“It wasn’t about what other people might think or what they bought. Consumers who feel poor at the moment don’t want to talk about their purchases because it reinforces negative feelings about their unpleasant financial state,” said Anna Paley, lead author of the study and a visiting scholar in marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

One reason that the results are so interesting, Paley said, was because they could have gone in the other direction.

“One plausible theory was that consumers who felt poor would chat more about their purchases as a way to show their spending ability and validate their decision to spend the money,” she said. “But that’s not what we found.”

Paley emphasized that this study wasn’t about whether people were rich or poor. This was about the feeling that they didn’t have as much money as they wanted. “Millionaires can feel financially constrained too,” she said.

Paley conducted the study with Stephanie Tully of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California and Eesha Sharma of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Their results appear online in the Journal of Consumer Research.

The researchers conducted seven studies.

In one study, the researchers found that participants who reported feeling financially constrained also were less likely to talk about products they bought with friends, family members and colleagues.

The results held even after taking into account the income of participants.

“This suggests that our results can’t be explained by differences in objective wealth,” Paley said.

A second study recruited online participants. They were told the study was about “what people talk about.” All of them answered questions probing how financially constrained they felt.

Participants had the choice of posting in one of two chat rooms – one called “recent purchases” and the other called “local/state parks.” The researchers chose this topic because in a previous study, a separate group of people had rated parks to be a less interesting topic than recent purchases.

Nearly two-thirds of participants chose to discuss recent purchases rather than parks. But participants who felt financially constrained were significantly more likely to post in the parks chat room.

“Consumers who felt poorer would rather talk about a less interesting topic than discuss what they bought recently,” Paley said.

The results held up in another study in which the researchers induced some participants to feel poorer by writing about aspects of their financial situation that made them feel like they didn’t have enough money.

These participants were less likely to say they would talk about an upcoming purchase than participants who wrote about another subject.

In this study, the researchers also asked participants to report on how talking about a purchase would make them feel about their financial situation.

“We found that financially constrained consumers expected less enjoyment from talking about their purchases because it would bring up negative feelings about their money situation,” she said.

The researchers found a few exceptions in other studies. When people thought about their purchases as expenditures of their time rather than expenditures of their money, even those who felt money was tight would talk about them. The same went for gifts and tickets to a free event.

The findings are important for marketers because consumers consistently rate word-of-mouth as one of the most trustworthy and credible sources of information about products and services, Paley said.

Their findings suggest some things marketers can do to encourage word-of-mouth.

“Word-of-mouth campaigns will be more effective if marketers can separate the cost of the item from the experience of sharing the purchase,” she said.

For example, many online retailers send people a receipt after a purchase with a request that they share about what they bought with friends on social media.

“If the money you spent is right there in front of you on your receipt and you’re feeling a little poor at the moment, you’re not going to want to share,” she said. “Marketers should consider separating receipts and sharing requests.”

A study by the Inter-University Council of Ohio finds Ohio public universities added $42 billion in income to the Ohio economy. That’s about equal to 6.7 percent of the state’s total economy.

The Ohio State University President Michael V. Drake joined university presidents from across the state at the Ohio Statehouse Tuesday at a press conference to highlight the report.

“We know higher education is a great investment for individuals,” Drake said.

The report captured economic data from the 2016-2017 academic year and asserts that higher education supported 558,841 jobs – or one out of every 12 jobs – in Ohio. Labor market analysis firm Emsi, developed the report for the council. The firm serves clients in higher education from around the world.

Some of the other economic findings in the report included: For every $1 students invest in public universities, they receive a cumulative return of $4.60 in higher future earnings. For every $1 of public money invested in public universities, taxpayers receive a cumulative return of $4.10 in benefits.

“By the year 2026, most of the in-demand jobs will require baccalaureate degrees,” Ohio State Sen. Randy Gardner said. “Higher education is of real value in the state of Ohio.”

The report is part of a statewide campaign designed to raise awareness of the value of public higher education and spur efforts to close the state’s increasing higher education attainment gap. The effort, called Forward Ohio, seeks to mobilize public support for greater investment in public higher education.

“Today we have an economic impact statement that demonstrates the way to move Ohio forward is through an investment in higher education and our students,” said Bruce Johnson, president of the Inter-University Council of Ohio.

Economics are not the only consideration. Drake said research into the benefits of higher education suggests that college graduates lead healthier and happier lives and live longer.

“From the founding of our first universities to the life-changing ideas emerging daily on today’s campuses, higher education has helped to make America the strongest country in the world,” he said.

In a series of eight studies, both in the lab and real life, researchers found that free time seems shorter to people when it comes before a task or appointment on their calendar.

“We seem to take a mental tax out of our time right before an appointment,” said Selin Malkoc, co-author of the study and associate professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business

“We figure something might come up, we might need some extra time, even when there’s no need to do that. As a result, we do less with the available time.”

The study appears online in the Journal of Consumer Research.

In an online study of 198 people, Malkoc and her colleagues asked some participants to imagine they had a friend coming over to visit in one hour and “you are all ready for your friend to come by.” The others were told that they had no plans for the evening.

All participants were asked how many minutes “objectively” they could spend reading during the next hour and how many minutes they “subjectively” felt like they could spend reading during that same hour.

“Regardless of whether they had a friend coming by or not, participants said that they objectively had about 50 minutes available to read,” Malkoc said.

“That’s an amazing finding right there. Most people didn’t think even objectively they had a full hour to read. People are putting a little ‘just-in-case’ time into their schedules when there is no real reason to do that.”

When they were asked how much time they felt they had to read – the subjective measurement – those with a friend coming by felt that they had 10 more minutes missing in their hour – about 40 minutes.

The results held up in real-life studies as well.

The researchers asked participants recruited online to provide their actual schedules for the next day. Participants indicated when each scheduled task on their calendar would begin and how much time they would need before each task to prepare.

Participants were then offered the opportunity to take part in either a 30-minute or a 45-minute study on that day. The 30-minute study paid $2.50 and the 45-minute study paid twice as much: $5.

For some participants, the study was scheduled in the one hour before they said they had to start getting ready for their next appointment. The others were not scheduled up against another of their appointments.

Even though they had plenty of time to finish the 45-minute study, participants who had an appointment in an hour were significantly more likely than the others to choose the 30-minute study instead of the 45-minute version.

“It was clear they would have plenty of time to finish and have extra time before their next appointment, but they still were more likely to choose the 30-minute study – even when they had a clear financial incentive to choose the longer study,” Malkoc said.

People also seem to get more done when they don’t have a scheduled task hanging over their heads, the researchers found.

In a study of 158 college students, a researcher told participants when they arrived at the lab that study sessions were running faster than expected so she wanted to wait to see if more participants arrived.

Some participants were reminded that they had a task coming up soon: They were told “they had about five minutes before we could get started. You can do whatever you want before we will get started.”

Others weren’t reminded about their upcoming task and were simply told “they had about five minutes to do whatever you want.”

After the time had passed, all participants wrote down what they did during the five-minute interval. The students indicated they did things like sending a text message, checking email and visiting social media sites.

But those who weren’t reminded they had an upcoming task performed more activities (an average of 2.38) than those who were told they had a task soon (an average of 1.86).

“You don’t feel like you can get as much done when you have a task coming up soon. The time seems shorter,” Malkoc said.

These findings suggest that looming tasks on our calendar make us less productive, according to Malkoc.

“We feel that if we have a meeting in two hours, we shouldn’t work on any big projects. So we may spend time just answering emails or doing things that aren’t as productive,” she said.

That may explain why, on days when we have meetings spread throughout, we feel like we have accomplished little. The problem is that we aren’t maximizing the time in between those meetings, she said.

One solution, she said, is to try to stack all your meetings together. That way, you have longer, uninterrupted times when you feel you can tackle the bigger projects on your agenda.

It is also good to remind yourself of how much time you really do have available.

“We seem to overestimate the things that might happen to take up our time, so we don’t get things done,” she said.

Malkoc conducted the study with Gabriella Tonietto, assistant professor of marketing at Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick, and Stephen Nowlis, professor of marketing at Washington University’s Olin Business School.

As part of a larger commitment toward promoting shared prosperity, Schmidt Futures has awarded Ohio State a $1.5 million grant to kick-start a vibrant and inclusive idea development process. This conversation will engage the university community alongside business, government and community partners in a robust brainstorming process.

“As a modern land-grant university, Ohio State is committed to expanding opportunity, unlocking talent and increasing economic vitality,” said Ohio State President Michael V. Drake. “We are absolutely thrilled to join the Alliance and to partner with individuals and communities on this important and timely endeavor. It’s ‘The Columbus Way’ in action.”

The Alliance will focus on developing ideas to strengthen the middle class and help move people out of poverty. It seeks to inspire investment in research and development across public, private and nonprofit sectors, and to build effective partnerships between academic communities and engineers, scientists, policymakers, investors and community advocates.

Schmidt Futures was founded by Eric Schmidt, technical advisor to Alphabet, a member of its board of directors, and former executive chairman.

“We are delighted to announce that Ohio State will act as an inaugural partner in the Alliance for the American Dream,” said Eric Schmidt. “When I was in Columbus last December, I saw firsthand the energy and vibrancy of the campus and region. Columbus is a perfect place to find great, fresh ideas. We are delighted to support them as they fuel an innovation engine to help distressed communities and expand the middle class."

A launch of the Alliance for the American Dream at Ohio State will take place in May.

About Schmidt Futures
Schmidt Futures works to advance society through technology, inspire breakthroughs in scientific knowledge, and promote shared prosperity. As a venture facility for public benefit, Schmidt Futures drives discovery through investment in people, platforms, and partnerships. Schmidt Futures aims to nurture the best ideas and most promising leaders from across disciplines. Founded by Eric Schmidt, Schmidt Futures is committed to serving society in new ways with working methods that are modern, fast, lean, and professional.
 

“Ohio State should be the trusted source of salary information for internal users, job applicants, the media and researchers who are interested in payroll data,” said Susan Basso, senior vice president for talent, culture and human resources.

“The university is an attractive workplace, and the demand for jobs is high,” Basso said. “As a major Ohio employer and one of the nation’s largest universities, it makes good sense for Ohio State to give the public easy access to some of its most sought-after data.”

In calendar year 2017, 42,670 faculty and staff received $2.5 billion in total earnings – representing a one-year employee headcount increase of 1,855 (4.5 percent) and a 6.4 percent increase over the 2016 $2.35 billion payroll budget. The 2017 median annual base salary stood at $48,173, compared to $47,661 in 2016 – a 1.1 percent increase.

Two types of data are available on the Human Resources website: Users may enter a name, department, title or salary range to search for base salary information in the web-based application. A second option is available to download Excel spreadsheets of total employee earnings for calendar year 2017, which includes bonuses, overtime, deferred compensation, and vacation and sick leave payouts in addition to base salary. The data will be updated throughout the calendar year.

The effort to find students opportunities after college was on display Tuesday as The Ohio State University’s Office of Student Life marked Ohio Internship and Co-op Appreciation Day.

The event at the Ohio Union was part of the effort to highlight the value of internships and co-ops for students and to encourage employers across the state to offer more of those opportunities.

“It’s basically celebrating the value of internships and really encouraging students to participate in internships or experiential learning so that they’re able to be more prepared after their college career,” said Julia Beckner, internship director for Buckeye Careers at Ohio State .

The Buckeye Careers program offers career development assistance, support and resources for all Ohio State students.

Beckner worked with volunteers to hand out information and give away T-shirts and other items. With her was Betsy Whiteman, a third-year Environment, Economy, Development and Sustainability major.

Whiteman put her classroom knowledge into service working at a family-owned market and grocery as part of the Second-year Transformational Experience Program.

“I was in an intermediate leadership position – I was leading seasonal staff, younger employees. I was shadowing every level of management from the farmers over in Marietta to the CEO of the company,” she said. “I definitely focused a lot on customer satisfaction, customer service, people skills, communicating effectively and giving guided directions. I learned a lot.”

Beckner said Ohio State has over 15 college career services offices on campus as well as Buckeye Careers in the Office of Student Life. While her team is out bringing attention to the program on this particular day, Beckner said it’s a year-round effort to prepare students for the workforce.

“The value is to help the student link the academic curriculum to practical real-life experience. So they’re getting the theory in the classroom, and internships then help the students understand what they want to do or what they might not want to do,” Beckner said. “It also helps them develop some of those core skills that they need in the workplace such as teamwork, communication and problem solving.”

Abigail Ormsby is a second-year Higher Education and Student Affairs graduate student. As part of her program she worked for Buckeye Careers. She said the connections she made as part of her practicum experience helped her find a job.

“It was a really great experience because I got to meet professionals who really mentored me through the job application process for a professional job,” Ormsby said. “So having leaders investing in me as I’m creating my own resume, really developing my personal interview skills was so crucial. I think it is what pushed me over the edge to landing a professional job.”

Ormsby is now the Dunn Sport and Wellness Scholars coordinator in the Office of Student Life. She said she knows firsthand how the opportunities at Ohio State are unlike anything else.

“If you are looking for resources or you’re looking for opportunities, Ohio State is the best school for whatever you’re interested in,” she said. “We have resources, we have the organizations, we have the professionals who also share those passions. There’s always somebody willing to connect you to those people. I think that’s something that only Ohio State offers.”

Trustees approved an $11.1 million master lease agreement with Apple, Inc, to obtain the learning technology needed for students, including distribution of an iPad Pro learning technology suite to new first-year students at the Columbus and regional campuses in fall 2018. The university has already been working on other parts of the initiative since it was announced in October 2017, including developing pilot courses, training educators and developing an iOS design laboratory. Seeadditional details.

Athletic ticket prices approved
The board approved reducing the individual student ticket price for men’s basketball to $9 for both conference and non-conference games from past pricing of $13 and $12, respectively.
Single game ticket prices would remain the same for the general public, ranging from $7 to $29 for most non-conference games, $10 to $46 for most conference games and $14 to $57 for premier games. Season ticket prices will remain the same, reflecting discounts off the combined total price of individual game tickets of 12 percent for the public and 20 percent for faculty and staff. See additional details.

Spring commencement degrees and certificates approved
Trustees approved the degrees and certificates to be conferred at spring commencement ceremonies on May 6, 2018, to students who have completed the requirements for their respective degrees and certificates.
The board also approved awarding two degrees posthumously: Caroline “Grace” Cotter, bachelor of science in agriculture, with the Latin honor of Cum Laude; and Nicolas Petrykowski, bachelor of science in agriculture.

Honorary degrees approved
The board approved the awarding of the honorary doctor of humane letters degree to Joan Baez, an American folk singer, songwriter and musician; the honorary doctor of science degree to Susan Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who will deliver the university’s spring commencement address; the honorary doctor of public service degree to Colin Powell, a retired four-star general in the United States Army and the first African American appointed as the U.S. Secretary of State; and the honorary doctor of humane letters degree to Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk and the French translator of his Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Degree revocation approved
The board approved the revocation of the presidential honorary doctor of education degree granted to William H. Cosby Jr. in 2001.

New degrees approved
Trustees approved the establishment of a doctor of philosophy in engineering education degree in the College of Engineering, which will build on the Department of Engineering Education’s work in engineering education research, emphasizing teaching as a way of knowing.

The board also approved the establishment of a master of applied neueroscience degree in the College of Medicine, which will prepare students for advanced job placement in a number of biomedical fields.

Construction contracts approved
The board authorized the university to enter into professional service and construction contracts for the following projects:

• Airport hangar. The project will construct an additional corporate exclusive-use hangar, including site utilities, taxiways, aircraft ramp, approximately 30,000 square feet of hangar space, an attached office/workshop and associated parking. Trustees approved a $200,000 professional services contract. Total project budget is $10.6 million, to be paid by university funds.
• Wexner Medical Center regional ambulatory facilities. The project will design an approximately 200,000-square-foot ambulatory building that will include ambulatory surgery, endoscopy, primary care, specialty medical and surgical clinics, and related support that could be deployed to additional future sites. Trustees approved $4 million in professional services contracts. Total project budget is to be determined and will be paid with health system funds.
• Campus Wi-Fi system. The project will install wireless access points across the Columbus campus, including Ohio Stadium and the Schottenstein Center. Trustees approved professional services and construction contracts totaling $18.6 million, to be paid with university and auxiliary funds.
• Postle partial replacement. The project will renovate existing classrooms and replace a portion of Postle Hall, and build an addition. Trustees approved construction contracts totaling $79.7 million, to be paid with development, university and state funds.

Utility system improvements approved
The board authorized Ohio State Energy Partners LLC to make capital improvements to university utility systems. Ohio State Energy Partners is the university’s energy concessionaire, created when Ohio State selected Engie and Axium Infrastructure to manage the university’s utility system.

• South Neil Steam Capacity Upgrade – design only. This project will upgrade 360 feet of steam piping in the South Neil tunnel to support the Postle Hall Expansion, renovate tunnel walls to accommodate new pipe anchors and abatement, and remove 800 feet of abandoned heating hot water pipe. The upgrade will enable steam supply to new buildings and renovations contemplated in the Health Sciences District. Estimated cost: $87,000.
• Postle Hall expansion utilities. The project will combine the scope of a chilled water extension project to include electricity, natural gas and steam utilities work to support the Postle Hall project. Estimated cost: $3.3 million.

Personnel actions approved
The board approved the following personnel appointments and reappointments:

• Alicia L. Bertone has been appointed dean of the graduate school and vice provost for graduate studies in the Office of Academic Affairs effective April 16, 2018 through June 30, 2021.
• Bradley J. Needleman has been appointed professor-clinical and holder of the Edwin H. and E. Christopher Ellison Professorship in the College of Medicine effective April 5, 2018 through April 4, 2022.
• Anil V. Parwani has been appointed professor-clinical and holder of the Donald A. Senhauser, MD, Chair in Pathology in the College of Medicine effective Jan. 1, 2018 through Dec. 31, 2021.
• Benjamin K. Poulose has been named professor and holder of the Robert M. Zollinger LeCrone-Baxter Memorial Endowed Chair in Surgery in the College of Medicine effective Aug. 1, 2018 through July 31, 2022.
• Mark Larmore has been reappointed vice president and chief financial officer in the Wexner Medical Center effective April 1, 2018 through March 31, 2021.
• Urban Meyer’s contract as head football coach in the Department of Athletics has been extended effective Feb. 1, 2018 through Jan. 31, 2023.

Foundation Report approved
Trustees approved the University Foundation Report as of Feb. 28, 2018, which includes the establishment of The Saul and Sonia Schottenstein Chair in Israel Studies; the Edwin H. and E. Christopher Ellison Professorship; The Dr. H. Lee “Buck” Mathews Designated Professorship in Marketing; The Dr. H. Lee “Buck” Mathews Professorship Fund in Marketing; two scholarships as part of the Joseph A. Alutto Global Leadership Initiative: the David C. Rader International Scholarship Fund and the Phillip and Suzanne Faulkner International Scholarship Fund; and 32 additional named endowed funds totaling $5.6 million in private support to the university.

Distinguished Service Awards approved
Trustees approved the university’s 2018 Distinguished Service Award recipients, who will receive their award at a time suitable to the university and the recipient. They are:

• Bobby Moser
• David Schuller
• Iris Wolstein

Heart center named
The board approved naming of the new Bob and Corrine Frick Center for Heart Failure and Arrhythmia at the Wexner Medical Center Heart and Vascular Center in recognition of a transformational gift from Bob and Corrine Frick.

Garden named
Trustees approved naming the Browning Ampitheater Garden at Mirror Lake the Albert van Fossen, M.D. & Bonnie van Fossen Garden in recognition of the van Fossens’ significant contributions to support the renovation and restoration of the Mirror Lake district.

Laboratories relocated
Trustees approved relocating the David E. Schuller, MD, Laboratories from their current location inside the Tzagournis Medical Research Building to the Biomedical Research Tower, located at 460 W. 12th Ave.

Property acquisition approved
The board authorized the purchase of 31.6 acres of unimproved property located at the southeast corner of State Route 161 and Hamilton Road in Columbus, priced at $11 million. The property will be used for construction of an ambulatory care facility for the Wexner Medical Center, which will fund the acquisition.

Joint use agreement approved
The board authorized the university to enter into a 20-year joint use agreement with Tech Town New Market Inc. in order to expand the university’s partnerships and activities in the Dayton area. The university was allocated $250,000 in the 2017 state capital bill that is specifically designated for use by Tech Town New Market to design and build out space in the Tech Town Technology Park in Dayton. The Ohio Department of Higher Education requires a joint use agreement between the university and Tech Town New Markets Inc. before the state funding can be released.

Board officers elected
Trustees elected Michael J. Gasser as chair, and Timothy P. Smucker and Abigail S. Wexner as vice chairs. Blake Thompson was reappointed as secretary. The board also took a moment to recognize the service of trustees Janet Ried, Jerry Jurgensen and Lydia Lancaster, whose terms end next month.

Charter trustee reappointed
Trustees approved the reappointment of James D. Klingbeil as a charter trustee to the board for a second three-year term, beginning on June 6, 2018.

Board of Trustees committee appointments approved

The board approved the appointment of members to the following committees for 2018-19:

Academic Affairs and Student Life Committee:
Clark C. Kellogg, Chair
Cheryl L. Krueger, Vice Chair
Janet B. Reid
Timothy P. Smucker
Erin P. Hoeflinger
Abigail S. Wexner
Hiroyuki Fujita
Alan A. Stockmeister
H. Jordan Moseley
James D. Klingbeil
Janet Porter
Richard K. Herrmann (faculty member)
Alex Shumate (ex officio)

Finance Committee:
Michael J. Gasser, Chair
Brent R. Porteus, Vice Chair
W. G. “Jerry” Jurgensen
Jeffrey Wadsworth
Alexander R. Fischer
John W. Zeiger
Lydia A. Lancaster
Alan VanderMolen
Alex Shumate (ex officio)

Advancement Committee
Erin P. Hoeflinger, Chair
Alan VanderMolen, Vice Chair
Clark C. Kellogg
Cheryl L. Krueger
Brent R. Porteus
Alexander R. Fischer
Abigail S. Wexner
Alan A. Stockmeister
Lydia A. Lancaster
Janet Porter
Nancy J. Kramer
Craig S. Bahner
Kristin L. Watt (Alumni Association member)
Georganne M. Shockey (Alumni Association member)
James F. Dietz (Foundation Board member)
Gifford Weary (Foundation Board member)
Alex Shumate (ex officio)

Audit and Compliance Committee:
Timothy P. Smucker, Chair
W. G. “Jerry” Jurgensen, Vice Chair
Michael J. Gasser
Jeffrey Wadsworth
Hiroyuki Fujita
John W. Zeiger
H. Jordan Moseley
James D. Klingbeil
Lawrence A. Hilsheimer
Amy Chronis
Craig S. Morford
Alex Shumate (ex officio)

Governance Committee:
Janet B. Reid, Chair
Timothy P. Smucker, Vice Chair
Erin P. Hoeflinger
Hiroyuki Fujita
Lydia A. Lancaster
Alan VanderMolen
Alex Shumate (ex officio)

Talent and Compensation Committee:
W. G. “Jerry” Jurgensen, Chair
Janet B. Reid, Vice Chair
Michael J. Gasser
Erin P. Hoeflinger
Hiroyuki Fujita
John W. Zeiger
Lydia A. Lancaster
Janet Porter
Alex Shumate (ex officio)

Master Planning and Facilities:
Alexander R. Fischer, Chair
James D. Klingbeil, Vice Chair
Brent R. Porteus
Alan A. Stockmeister
H. Jordan Moseley
Robert H. Schottenstein
Alex Shumate (ex officio)

Wexner Medical Center Committee:
Leslie H. Wexner, Chair
Janet B. Reid
W. G. Jurgensen
Cheryl L. Krueger
Abigail S. Wexner
Janet Porter
David B. Fischer
Stephen D. Steinour
Robert H. Schottenstein
Alex Shumate (ex officio, voting)
Michael V. Drake (ex officio, voting)
Bruce A. McPheron (ex officio, voting)
Michael Papadakis (ex officio, voting)
K. Craig Kent (ex officio, non-voting)
L. Arick Forrest (ex officio, non-votIng)
David P. McQuaid (ex officio, non-voting)
Mark E. Larmore (ex officio, non-voting)
Elizabeth O. Seely (ex officio, non-voting)
Susan D. Moffatt-Bruce (ex officio, non-voting)
Mary A. Howard (ex officio, non-voting)
William B. Farrar (ex officio, non-voting)
Martha C. Taylor (ex officio, non-voting)
Amanda N. Lucas (ex officio, non-voting)

Policy renamed
Trustees approved renaming the university’s patents and copyrights policy as the intellectual property policy to better reflect the current intellectual property landscape.

Faculty rules amended
Trustees approved amendments to the Rules of the University Faculty regarding time needed to send agendas to University Senate members, duplication of keys or other devices, and control of dogs and other animals.

Amendments approved
Trustees approved amendments to the Bylaws and Rules and Regulations of the Medical Staff of University Hospitals and amendments to the Bylaws and Rules and Regulations of the Medical Staff of The Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute.

Resolutions in memoriam adopted
The board adopted resolutions in memoriam for the following persons:

• Bernard Ulysses Bowman Jr., professor emeritus of medical microbiology and immunology, who died on Jan. 8, 2018
• Marjorie Murfin, professor emerita and former reference librarian in University Libraries, who died on Feb. 26, 2018
• David Honor Stansbery, professor emeritus in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, who died on Aug. 24, 2017

Male applicants with high grade point averages were twice as likely to be contacted by employers as women with the same grades and comparable experience and educational background in a study from The Ohio State University.

The picture was even worse for women who majored in math. Male math majors who excelled in school were called back by employers three times as often as their women counterparts.

Natasha Quadlin

Furthermore, a survey of 261 hiring managers found that while employers value competence and commitment among men applicants, they are prone to gravitate toward women applicants who are perceived as likable – those who did fine, but did not excel, academically. This helps women who are moderate achievers and are often described as sociable and outgoing, but hurts high-achieving women, who are met with more skepticism, the study found.

“We like to think that we’ve progressed past gender inequality, but it’s still there. The study suggests that women who didn’t spend a lot of time on academics but are ‘intelligent enough’ have an advantage over women who excel in school,” said researcher Natasha Quadlin, an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State. Her study will appear in the April edition of the journal American Sociological Review.

“There’s a particularly strong bias against female math majors—women who flourish in male-dominated fields—perhaps because they’re violating gender norms in terms of what they’re supposed to be good at.”

The 2,106 job seekers in the study weren’t actual people – they were invented for purposes of the research, but the employers advertising for entry-level positions didn’t know that. Each “applicant” had a corresponding email address and phone number.

Quadlin created resumes for freshly graduated job seekers of both genders, using names common to the regions where she sent their applications. Some majored in math, an area traditionally thought of as male dominated; some in English, which skews female; and some in business, which is considered gender-neutral according to a survey she conducted prior to distributing the applications.

Quadlin used an online employment database to find entry-level jobs that weren’t specific to the applicants’ majors. For each job posting she selected, she sent two applications – one from a man and one from a woman. Both applications included similar cover letters, academic history and participation in gender-neutral extracurricular activities.

When she looked at callbacks based on gender alone, Quadlin didn’t find a significant difference. But disparities emerged when she compared men and women with GPAs in the A/A-minus range. Men were called back at approximately the same rate regardless of their GPA, but the callback rate dropped for women with higher GPAs.

On the high-achievement end, discrepancies were seen for math majors, but not for business or English majors.

In the second part of her study, the survey of hiring managers, Quadlin found clear evidence of discrepancies in how they perceived male applicants and female applicants when gender was the only thing that set them apart from each other.

The employers gave feedback on how likely they would be to hire an individual based on a resume alone. They also shared perceptions about individuals’ personal traits based on the contents of the resumes, including GPAs.

“Men were more likely to get a call back if they were seen as having more competence and commitment, but only ‘likability’ seemed to benefit women,” Quadlin said. And likability, she added, is associated with moderate academic achievement.

The study didn’t target high-paying, more-prestigious jobs, and that could change the outcomes, Quadlin said.

Employers should consider biases they may not even realize they have when sorting through applications, Quadlin said.

“Most people probably aren’t aware that they’re making these kinds of gender-based decisions,” she said.

As for women in college or just beyond, Quadlin doesn’t advise aiming for mediocrity in the interest of employment. Instead, she said, high-achieving women should value the types of employers who value them.

“These are the people who will be advocates for you throughout your career – those who support you early on and appreciate your intelligence and hard work.”

Smart Campus, a student organization partnering with the university’s Center for Automotive Research, hosted leaders from the city of Columbus, Smart Columbus, CAR, the university’s Technology Commercialization Office and the Transportation Research Center this month in Scott Laboratory.

“We have a campus that rivals in size some of the smaller cities in the nation. With that, we have the unique opportunity to operate in a microcosm where we can test and find solutions that can then be extended to cities around the nation,” said Cameron Luther, co-founder of Smart Campus.

The Smart Campus organization is working to help students from across the university find ways to collaborate with the Smart Columbus initiative and engage in campus projects tied to a connected campus.

In 2016, Columbus won the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, beating out 77 cities. The win secured $40 million in grants from the federal government and another $10 million from Vulcan Inc. Ohio State is the lead researcher on the project.

While the initiative, and the grant money tied to it, lasts for only a limited time, research at Ohio State will continue to make Columbus a smarter city.

“The reality is, here at Ohio State, because of the awesome faculty, staff and students, we’ve been really engaging in smart cities research the entire time depending on which definition we use,” said Courtney Falato, Smart Cites relationship director at Ohio State.

Falato said automotive research and connected devices are only part of what it means to be a smart city. She referred to a quote that put the research in context.

“So even though smart seems to be synonymous with technology, certainly it goes way beyond technology. What does it accomplish and how does it improve the lives of citizens?” Falato said.

Currently, Smart Columbus projects are focused on using technology to improve the Columbus community. One effort includes developing a common payment system for transportation so people across the economic spectrum can take advantage of public transportation, ride sharing or other services. Another is working to develop a way to provide more flexible and reliable transportation to expectant mothers using Medicaid-based services.

“(Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther) believes that transportation and mobility is the great equalizer of the 21st century,” said Brandi Braun, deputy innovation officer for Columbus. “We want to ensure that we approach smart mobility and smart city technologies in a way where we are not widening the gap between Columbus’ haves and have-nots.”

Jordan Davis, director of Smart Columbus at the Columbus Partnership, told students that future advances in technology should lead to reduced congestion and a cleaner environment. It will also simplify mundane tasks like shopping for groceries or picking up dry cleaning.

“I think of mobility as a service in its simplest form. How can we use the sharing economy and how can we use technology to make mobility work for them,” Davis said.

Luther encouraged his peers to become active in the opportunities offered by the Smart Campus program.

“We’re right in the center of an amazing moment,” he said. “I really encourage all of you in the room that are here to take that opportunity by the horns.”

Posters detailing the results of the Second-Year Transformational Experience program filled a ballroom in the Ohio Union Tuesday. The annual STEP Expo highlighted work from more than 150 students.

Dean Klimczyk, a fourth-year finance major, spent 14 weeks in an internship program for Key Bank for his STEP project. The internship helped Klimczyk better understand the bank’s operations as he spent time with investment bankers and branch managers and worked as a teller.

“I saw the day-to-day tasks that I would be doing if I went into that field,” Klimczyk said. “I was able to network and meet Key Bank employees, get their experience and see what they liked about the industry.”

He said the experience was invaluable and helped prepare him for his career.

“Don’t be afraid to ask questions,” Klimczyk said. “Once I got more comfortable with being uncomfortable, I was able to go up to my managers and learned they just wanted me to succeed.”

As part of the university’s STEP program, students work with a faculty mentor to develop projects that can include internships, research experiences or overseas travel. Students can earn a fellowship of up to $2,000 to fund their effort and come away with leadership skills and a deeper understanding of their place in the world.

Klimczyk finished his experience at Key Bank with a job offer. He’ll work there this summer after graduation.

Danielle Culpepper, a third-year psychology major, worked as a volunteer research assistant at the university’s Nisonger Center. Her STEP project poster described her work aiding the treatment of children with autism and ADHD.

Culpepper said the experience helped her visualize the next step in her career.

“I thought it was cool that I could see how to do research, how they follow protocols and as a whole, what research means,” she said.

“The most important letter in the word STEP is T, for transformational,” said STEP program manager Vicki Pitstick. “We really try to work with the faculty and the students to realize what that means.”

Pitstick said the STEP Expo celebrates the real-world experience for these students.

“Having this event and having people come to the expo just really reinforces the culture of the program: that experiential education is important at Ohio State and that it’s being supported,” she said.

Emily Daugherty, a third-year social work major, said her transformational experience came as a camp counselor for One Heartland camp in Minnesota.

“The camp that I worked at was designed for youth that were experiencing social isolation, discrimination and health challenges,” she said. “It was a camp for youth who were infected or affected by HIV/AIDS, kids who were experiencing homelessness and kids who identified as LGBTQ.”

As a student working toward a career in social work, the camp experience prepared Daugherty for some of the challenges she might face in the future.

“It was a really great experience and I learned a lot about what I can handle, because I didn’t think that I could handle that. But I could.”

Ohio State helped kick off the national 2018 Give Kids A Smile program. The student-led initiative is part of the national Give Kids A Smile program sponsored by the American Dental Association Foundation.

“We really try to increase the access to care in the underserved communities of Central Ohio. We try to provide a dental home for those kids and then we also try to increase the awareness of the underserved communities,” said Haella Holmes, a third-year dental student and current president of the College of Dentistry student organization for Give Kids A Smile. 

Holmes said the program is an emotional experience.

“Learning about it in classes is one thing but really seeing it happen is incredible,” she said.

Nina Lane, a Columbus mother, brought her 3-year-old son Kevin for treatment. She found the experience comfortable and efficient.

“I thought it was great. I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take given that it’s such a popular event but we got in and out pretty quickly. Everyone was very friendly. It was a good day,” Lane said.

The Give Kids A Smile program also offers a teaching opportunity throughout the College of Dentistry.

“This day in particular gives all of our students … a really deep exposure to the needs of children,” said Patrick Lloyd, dean of the College of Dentistry. “So it’s a great opportunity for us to not only provide care but to create an educational moment where our faculty can work more closely with large numbers of students dedicated to a day exclusively for kids.”

Although the program has been around only since 2003, the impact has been remarkable. More than 5.5 million children around the country have received free oral health services since the program’s inception. In Ohio, dental volunteers have provided more than $13.5 million in dental care to more than 250,000 underserved children.

Supporters of Give Kids A Smile hope it removes any fear over dental care and helps start a lifetime of good habits.

“Dental disease is a preventable disease but you have to be able to take care of yourself to do that,” Joseph Crowley, president of the American Dental Association and an alum of Ohio State, said. “So programs like this that are reaching children and educating them … is just amazing.”

Lloyd said providing care to people in need is one of the core missions of Ohio State.

“This is a place they can call their dental home. This is the place where we can take care of the most incidental and minor dental concerns to the most complicated ones you can imagine. We like to think of ourselves as a true resource,” he said. “I always say when it comes to dentistry, what is good for Ohio State is good for the state of Ohio.”

The next generation of dentists or hygienists may have been served this day.

“Our hope is that some of these small children might consider a dentistry career years from now after they’ve had this wonderful first experience.”

Researchers from The Ohio State University surveyed more than 650 households near a major – and economically and racially diverse – city corridor in Columbus, Ohio, to learn more about their access to food and particularly to healthful foods. They made an effort to identify representative households in terms of race, age, gender and household income.

Michelle Kaiser

“Almost a third of the households were food insecure, and more than 16 percent had very low food security, meaning they were skipping meals, at risk for experiencing hunger and probably missing work and school and suffering health problems as a result,” said study lead author Michelle Kaiser, an assistant professor of social work at Ohio State.

“Previous estimates based on county-level census data would have suggested about half as many households didn’t have enough food or adequate access to food,” she said.

Households that experience food insecurity have insufficient access to quality food, periodically don’t have the means to adequately and healthfully feed themselves and often rely on foodbanks and other sources for food.

Of 663 households surveyed by the Ohio State researchers, 26 percent were not at all satisfied with their ability to easily access food and 27 percent said it wasn’t easy to find fresh fruits and vegetables, even though most of those surveyed – 86 percent – said nutritional value was “important” or “very important” to them when shopping. Overall, 32 percent of the households had low or very low food security. The survey included about 1 percent of the households in the neighborhoods included in the study area.

In addition to the survey, the researchers audited 90 stores where people from those households shopped. They looked at prices and compared the items on the stores’ shelves and in their coolers and freezers to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Thrifty Food Plan and MyPlate recommendations. The food plan specifies low-cost foods to provide adequate nutrition and is the basis for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. MyPlate provides nutritional guidance and stresses the importance of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and healthy proteins.

Most people surveyed in the study shopped at a supermarket, but most also shopped at other stores close to their home regularly. For those with food insecurity, that mostly meant carry-outs, corner stores and businesses such as drug stores that house partial markets.

Those stores may have some fruits and vegetables and other wholesome foods, but the offerings are quite limited, Kaiser said.

“In a lot of cases, this is where people are going to buy their food on a regular basis because that’s the store they can get to,” she said.

Traditional full-service grocery stores are increasingly pulling out of low-income areas and it’s rare for a company to choose to locate a new grocery inside the city, particularly near areas with the highest poverty, Kaiser said.

“This study exposed the vastly different experiences of people who all live in the same city,” Kaiser said. “My suspicion is that most people don’t recognize that there are such discrepancies and can’t imagine living where they couldn’t easily go to a grocery store.”

Previous research has shown increases in depression, social isolation and anxiety among food-insecure residents, she said.

The good news is that there are initiatives that are showing promise, including efforts to give incentives to corner store owners for providing more produce and other nutritious foods, Kaiser said. Other policy options including looking for ways to entice grocery stores to locate in low-income, low-access neighborhoods and assuring that SNAP benefits align with nutrition recommendations, she said.

The next step in the research will include other neighborhoods in Columbus in an effort to better understand the experiences of households in neighborhoods where more immigrants and Latinos live.

Though the study looked exclusively at Columbus, Kaiser said she suspects similar disparities would be found in other metropolitan areas.

Researchers Jake Carr and Shaun Fontanella also worked on the study.

For starters, it’s important to recognize that cooperation between humans makes no sense, said David Melamed, an assistant professor of sociology at The Ohio State University and lead author of the study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

David Melamed

“From an evolutionary perspective, cooperation shouldn’t exist between people – you always do better by not cooperating because then people can’t rip you off or take advantage of you,” Melamed said.

“Especially in a one-time interaction, it’s essentially paying a cost for someone else to benefit, and researchers have been working for a long time to understand why people evolved to work together.”

In this study, Melamed and his co-authors aimed to uncover what conditions led people to collaborate most willingly.

To answer their questions, they found participants through the Amazon Mechanical Turk website – a service that allows researchers and others to hire or recruit people from around the world for a variety of purposes. For this study, all participants were from the United States.

Those who agreed to participate played online games in which each player started out with 1,000 monetary units that translated to $1 in real money that they could pocket. If one player agreed to pay another player 50 monetary units, that second person would actually acquire 100 units.

“So, if you essentially agreed to give up five cents, someone else gained 10 cents,” Melamed said.

Each of the 16-round games examined in the study included about 25 participants, some of whom participated in multiple games with different scenarios. In all, 810 people participated in the research.

Some of the games generated random networks, where certain people could interact. Others included clustered networks, in which a small group had multiple connections – an arrangement that was designed to mimic real life, where humans often run in packs socially and at work.

And the networks were either static or dynamic. In static networks, a player could interact only with the assigned partners for the duration. In the dynamic networks, participants could cut ties with another player and form new connections.

Furthermore, some of the games included reputation information. Participants were labeled based on their history of willingness to share money. The idea was to test whether those known to collaborate were favored by other players based on reputation – a factor shown in previous research to play a significant role in whether a person is likely to partner with another.

Melamed and his research partners were surprised to find that reputation played no role in collaboration in this study. The findings might have departed from prior studies because of the difference in size and study design, he said, explaining that much of the previous work in this area has been conducted in groups of 100 or fewer and mostly involved student subjects. The Turk network used for the new study has been shown to be representative of the U.S. population in terms of age, race and other factors, Melamed said, and introduced players who had no previous connections.

Collaboration rates overall were high – and highest when the participants were operating in clusters and had the ability to drop a partner in favor of another.

“What really seems to matter is the ability to alter the structure of a network,” Melamed said. “And the pattern of relationships also made a difference. Those in a known cluster with multiple connections collaborated more, which seems intuitive if you think about how we interact in the real world.”

The findings from this study could have important implications in a variety of settings, including the workplace and the battlefield, Melamed said.

“Applying what we learned could help encourage cooperation,” he said.

The U.S. Army, which supported the study, could use this type of information to better develop strong, cooperative teams in the field, Melamed said, adding that the armed forces could also use the science to seek ways to undermine enemy forces.

Other researchers involved in the study were Ashley Harrell of the University of Michigan and Brent Simpson of the University of South Carolina.

The Columbus-based brewer is aiming to become the most sustainable brewery in Central Ohio, and a graduate of The Ohio State University is helping them lead the way.

“We’ve successfully made a case for why sustainable beer sells and how it can be sourced locally,” said Vincent Valentino, sustainability manager for Land-Grant.

Valentino graduated in Ohio State’s second class of Environment, Economy, Development and Sustainability majors. The Centerville, Ohio, native spoke at a breakfast hosted by the School of Environment and Natural Resources’ Environmental Professionals Network on Tuesday.

As the craft beer boom continues, many of these small businesses are dealing with issues that have a big environmental impact. Valentino said his job at Land-Grand is to improve energy efficiency, water stewardship and waste diversion.

Breweries use resources like electricity, natural gas and water to create beer, and managing those resources as efficiently as possible helps maker for a greener operation. Valentino said improving the lighting at the plant saved the company a bundle in electricity costs.

“We reduced the outdoor energy consumption for lighting by 80 percent and indoor energy consumption by 50 percent,” he said.

Breweries also create byproducts from their beer creation. And disposing of them can prove to be a challenge.

Land-Grant is working with Hoffman Farms in Hilliard to use spent grains as feed. Valentino also arranged a partnership with Ohio State to use yeast as fertilizer for the Garden of Hope at Waterman Farm and St. Stephen’s Community Center in Linden.

The deals are mutually beneficial: Land-Grant uses mint grown at St. Stephen’s and pumpkins from Waterman Farms to flavor its beers.

Valentino is applying in the real world the tools he learned at Ohio State. For members of the Environmental Professionals Network, his message demonstrates the impact of that education.

“It’s really humbling when we have our students come back, people we’ve helped mentor, and watch how articulate they’ve become and how professional and engaging they are with the community,” said Mark Giese, advancement and alumni engagement officer in the School of Environment and Natural Resources.

CHRR at The Ohio State University is developing the American Population Panel as a powerful new research tool to reach people in an era where getting real answers is more difficult than ever. Setting up of the American Population Panel is being funded in part by The Ohio State University and GateHouse Media – who own and operate The Dispatch Media Group in Columbus, Ohio in addition to daily and weekly news operations across the United States - to enhance their respective areas of study and research.

“People throw much of their mail into the trash or recycling bin. Landlines are less common today in households than they were in the past and rarely answered. Cell phone users are also increasingly unlikely to answer calls from unknown sources,” said Elizabeth Cooksey, professor of sociology and director of CHRR. “All of these trends make recruiting survey respondents difficult.”

Cooksey and her team are now building the panel using a variety of new techniques including social media. They are using Facebook and other social media platforms to recruit participants to join the panel and comparing this method to responses they get from telephone solicitations, email messages and postcards.

“Our ultimate goal is to create a panel of possible participants that we can contact for future research surveys,” Cooksey said.

Volunteers who agree to participate in social science and health-related studies make up the panel. Anyone 18 or older who lives in the U.S. can participate. The information is confidential and won’t be shared or sold.

Volunteers fill out a simple online form to join the panel and will be contacted at a future date to take part in the survey. The American Population Panel has a website with information about signing up and details on how the surveys are conducted.

While the approach to building the panel is new, the organization behind the effort has plenty of experience. CHRR has been involved in managing complex social research projects since 1965. Its staffers develop survey software, design survey instruments and process the data.

The center already has organizations lined up to work with the panel when it’s ready. The Dispatch Media Group and Ohio State’s Office of University Communications plan to survey American Population Panel members about media consumption patterns in the 21st century.

Cooksey said researchers with the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences and The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center are also interested in using the panel.

“This will provide a new resource for researchers because it’s so hard and so expensive to get people to do social science or health-related research because people won’t answer their phones and they’re inundated with marketing requests.”

To learn more about the panel, visit the American Population Panel website.

The study found that more than half of nurses who took part in a national survey reported sub-optimal physical and mental health. Nurses in poorer health had a 26 to 71 percent higher likelihood of reporting medical errors than did their healthier peers. Depression stood out as a major concern among the 1,790 U.S. nurses who responded to the survey, and as the key predictor of medical errors.

Bernadette Melnyk

“When you’re not in optimal health, you’re not going to be on top of your game,” said lead author Bernadette Melnyk, dean of The Ohio State University’s College of Nursing and chief wellness officer for the university.

“Hospital administrators should build a culture of well-being and implement strategies to better support good physical and mental health in their employees. It’s good for nurses, and it’s good for their patients.”

The study, which appears online in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, also found that nurses who perceived their workplace as conducive to wellness were more likely to report good health.

The National Academy of Medicine has prioritized clinician well-being in its recently launched action collaborative, acknowledging that burnout, compassion fatigue, depression and poor work-life balance affect a large percentage of doctors, nurses and other health professionals.

The new research is the first large-scale national study to link nurses’ well-being to self-reported medical errors, Melnyk said.

“Nurses do a great job of caring for other people, but they often don’t prioritize their own self-care,” she said. “And their work lives are increasingly stressful – patients are sicker, hospitals are crunched financially and nurses are having to find ways to juggle patient care with all of their other assigned tasks, such as tending to the electronic medical record.”

Limiting long shifts and providing easy-to-access, evidence-based resources for physical and mental health, including depression screenings, could go a long way toward improving nurses’ wellness and decreasing the chances that mistakes will be made, Melnyk said.

The data came from a survey conducted by the American Academy of Nursing’s million hearts sub-committee of the health behavior expert panel. The survey included 53 questions and was offered through nursing organizations and 20 U.S. hospitals. Only responses from nurses who were in clinical practice were included in the study. The majority of participants were white women and the average age of participants was 44, which closely resembles the demographics of the nursing workforce nationwide.

More than half (54 percent) of the nurses reported poor physical and mental health. About a third said they had some degree of depression, anxiety or stress. Less than half said they had a good professional quality of life.

And self-reported medical errors were common. About half the nurses reported medical errors in the past five years.

When researchers compared the wellness data to the medical error data, they saw a significant link between poor health – particularly depression – and medical errors.

While a survey that depends on self-reported perceptions has its limitations, the evidence should prompt efforts to improve the mental and physical health of nurses, physicians and other clinicians, Melnyk said.

“Health care systems and hospitals have to do a better job of creating wellness cultures for their clinicians,” she said. “The National Academy of Medicine has identified this as a public health problem and has made clinician well-being a high priority for health care quality and safety.”

Other Ohio State researchers who worked on the study were Kate Gawlik and Alai Tan.

On July 6, the university transferred management of the central systems that heat, cool and power the Columbus campus to ENGIE Services, which will operate these systems on behalf of Ohio State Energy Partners (OSEP).

OSEP is made up of ENGIE North America and Axium Infrastructure, companies that are world leaders in energy services and sustainability.

“This innovative public-private partnership will help us reach our long-term sustainability goals for energy and represents the largest single investment in Ohio State’s academic mission in our history,” said President Michael V. Drake.

The 50-year partnership has a total value of $1.165 billion, including a $1.015 upfront payment to the university and a $150 million commitment to support academics in specific areas requested by students, faculty and staff during the bidding process.

“Through academic collaborations with our new partner, we will create sustainable energy solutions from discoveries made here at Ohio State. Our new partner will also increase student financial aid, endow new faculty positions and invest in sustainability and staff development,” said Executive Vice President and Provost Bruce A. McPheron.

The Office of Academic Affairs will engage faculty, staff and students in discussions about academic collaboration — including next steps for an endowment to advance sustainability in areas outside the scope of comprehensive energy management; sustainability curriculum and teaching and learning initiatives; and more.

These are part of a $150 million academic collaboration plan in the partnership.

The university will invest the other $1.015 billion alongside the endowment to support student financial aid; compensation enhancements for faculty and staff; investments in classrooms, labs and arts spaces; strategic initiatives; and a utility sustainability fund.

The transfer of operations will be largely unnoticeable. As was the case before the transition, any customer service requests for campus buildings will be handled by the university’s Service2Facilities group. All individual building operations will continue to be the responsibility of campus maintenance teams.

Consistent with the university’s commitment to empower employees to make the best choice for their families, ENGIE Services offered employment to all eligible Ohio State utility workers. The majority of utility employees accepted employment offers from ENGIE. Those who preferred to remain employees of the university accepted alternative positions at Ohio State at their current compensation levels.

OSEP will begin installing smart meters this year to gather building-specific data about energy use. The information will help guide the proposals for energy conservation measures throughout campus to meet Ohio State’s energy sustainability goal. An Energy Advisory Committee of students, faculty and staff representatives will be formed to review proposals for energy conservation measures, among other responsibilities.

“The smooth transition of operations sets the stage for the truly transformational benefits for our university community,” said McPheron. “Ohio State will invest in our academic core, make our campus a model of sustainability and bolster ground-breaking research that benefits our university, our community and our world.”

More information about the Comprehensive Energy Management Project is available at go.osu.edu/cemp.

Below is information about Ohio State researchers and the projects they are working on as part of the Harmful Algal Bloom Research Initiative (HABRI), a statewide response to harmful algal blooms established by the Ohio Department of Higher Education (ODHE) in 2014. Ohio Sea Grant, on behalf of Ohio State, the University of Toledo and ODHE, released the annual report today for the second year of HABRI funding. Eight additional colleges and universities across Ohio participate in this initiative.

Ohio State University projects in progress

A new weapon in the fight against microcystin. Environmental health scientists are searching for a more environmentally friendly way to reduce microcystins in both lake water and water treatment plants. Microcystins are a toxin produced by the cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, that cause harmful algal blooms. The possible solution: viruses prevalent in water that infect cyanobacteria. One virus type, called Cyanophage LEP, is known to interfere with the blue-green algae structure, destroying its toxic effects. Researchers hope to find a way to use these viruses to limit cyanobacteria near water intakes and possibly in the water treatment process itself.

Expert: Jiyoung Lee, associate professor of environmental health sciences and food science and technology
Additional expertise: Water quality; water testing; HAB-affected water; risks for human and animal consumption/recreation
lee.3598@osu.edu; 614-292-5546

Guidance for water treatment operators in the new world of algal toxins. Harmful algal blooms in drinking water sources bring a whole set of unknowns for water treatment plants—from algal toxins to extra organic matter clogging up intake mechanisms. Researchers across the state are testing water treatment techniques to guide operators on the most cost-effective options.

Expert: Allison MacKay, professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering, mackay.49@osu.edu; 614-247-7652

What do we know about HAB effects on fish? Scientists are developing methods to help state agencies like the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and Ohio Department of Natural Resources-Division of Wildlife better measure microcystins (algal toxins) in fish caught during the HAB season in Lake Erie and Ohio reservoirs such as Grand Lake Saint Marys. Their analyses have revealed that six of 73 fish examined in 2015 showed detectable levels of microcystin in muscle tissue (fillets), with all six being captured in Lake Erie (two walleye, yellow perch and white perch). During 2016, microcystins were found in 16 of 65 fish, with 14 of those fish being captured in Lake Erie (mostly in walleye and white bass). However, the levels detected were generally very low. Thus, if the current Ohio Department of Health fish consumption guidelines are followed, eating fish during the HAB season would not pose a risk to human health.

Expert: Stuart Ludsin, associate professor of evolution, ecology, and organismal biology/Aquatic Ecology Laboratory, ludsin.1@osu.edu; 614-795-7044

Farmer Sampling Network. Ohio State is working with 56 farmers in the western Lake Erie basin to collect data about the effects of crop selection, irrigation and soil management on phosphorus/nutrient runoff. Anecdotal evidence suggests there are ways to prevent runoff from the farms: One farmer has seen that cover crops have reduced runoff from his fields and confirmed his intention to use cover crops for water conservation and phosphorus runoff prevention in the future.

Expert: Greg LaBarge, field specialist – agronomic systems, OSU Extension, labarge.1@osu.edu; 740-852-0975

Additional experts

Marty Kress, executive director, Global Water Institute
Ohio State approach to challenges: combining technical solutions, stakeholder engagement, research and advocacy
kress.83@osu.edu; 614-688-1906

Justin Chaffin, research scientist, Ohio Sea Grant and Stone Laboratory
Oversees water testing for Lake Erie islands at Stone Lab water quality lab; monitors HAB-affected water
chaffin.46@osu.edu; 419-285-1845

The same parents who already were buckling up kids appear most likely to switch to safety seats, leaving the same number of kids unrestrained, found a study published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Lauren Jones

“These laws can be very appealing for legislators to pass, but our research calls into question their value,” said Lauren Jones, lead researcher and assistant professor of consumer sciences at The Ohio State University.

“Our study suggests that safety-conscious parents are likely to do what makes their child the safest but these laws don’t have much effect on other parents.”

Furthermore, higher fines (which reached as much as $500 as of 2016) didn’t appear to make much difference in raising the likelihood parents and other drivers complied with the laws, the study found.

In the last four decades, laws throughout the United States have steadily increased mandatory safety seat restraint ages. In the 1980s and 1990s, safety seat laws were the norm for kids up to age 2 or – at most – 3. By 2012, the average upper age requirement was 6 years old.

About 17 percent of children 7 years old and younger were in car safety seats before new laws expanded age requirements. That percentage jumped from 27 percent to almost half after stricter laws took effect, the researchers found.

But the percentage of unrestrained children – those with neither a seatbelt on nor strapped into a car seat – barely moved.

The new study found evidence that the laws saved lives, but that data was limited, Jones said. A best-case estimate showed that between one and 39 children may have survived annually because of safety seats.

“I think the laws have probably reduced fatalities, but probably not as much as most parents would assume,” Jones said. “Thank goodness childhood car crash deaths are something that happens relatively infrequently, but that also makes it harder to evaluate.”

Importantly, this study did not examine injuries or severity of injuries before and after passage of stricter laws. It’s possible that children’s injuries have declined because of more widespread use of safety seats, Jones said.

Jones and Nicolas Ziebarth of Cornell University used a national database of fatal crashes from 1975 to 2011 to examine “before” and “after” restraint use and fatalities.

To improve the quality of their evaluation, they analyzed law-mandated child safety seat use against use in three other groups: children in different states in the same year, children in the same state in different years and older children in the same state during the same year.

Regardless of the analysis, there was no evidence that safety seat laws significantly changed the percentage of children who go unrestrained, prompting Jones to conclude that resources might be better spent elsewhere.

The research estimates the net annual cost of the safety seat laws at $377 million. The researchers factored in 39 saved lives at an estimated value of $390 million per year and a cost of $200 per safety seat, or $767 million a year. Their rough estimate does not include other potential safety benefits, including reduced injury rates.

“It’s not a costless piece of legislation, especially for low-income families,” Jones said. “Education, particularly of young parents, and resources to help them afford seats could be more impactful policy tools.”

Ohio State, via Fisher, was one of just three universities represented among the 32 winners at an award ceremony in Washington, D.C., on May 22. United States Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross presented the awards at the Department of Commerce Headquarters, located in the Herbert C. Hoover Building.

The award recognizes the creation and efforts of Fisher’s Global Trade Network, a collaboration among state and federal agencies, university partners, economic development entities, and small- to medium-sized businesses in Ohio that are focused on expanding their global footprint. The network was made possible, in part, by Fisher’s decades-long partnership with the Title VI federally funded Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER).

“The entire Fisher College of Business community and our many partners within the Global Trade Network are honored to receive the President’s ‘E’ Award,” said Anil K. Makhija, dean and John W. Berry, Sr. Chair in Business at Fisher. “As part of a modern land-grant institution, Fisher strives to address our society’s most compelling needs, build Ohio’s future, and connect the state, its business, our partners and students with valuable opportunities – including those beyond the nation’s borders. The Global Trade Network demonstrates our continued commitment to this foundational tenet and our dedication to building leaders who are globally aware.”

A key component of Fisher’s Global Trade Network is the Global Trade Consulting Group, composed of students who have successfully completed the Ohio Export Internship Program (OEIP) and an export-focused internship. The OEIP began as a collaboration between Fisher, the Ohio Development Services Agency, other Ohio universities and small- to medium-sized businesses across the state that has increased Ohio’s expected export sales by an estimated $25.5 million.

Students in the Global Trade Consulting Group engage with real clients to provide higher-level, strategic global trade consultation. The group worked with the City of Dublin (Ohio) Economic Development Team on a strategy to increase global opportunities for companies considering expanding or enhancing their export capabilities. Davenport Aviation, located in central Ohio and the only other “E” Award winner from the state, also plans to host another OEIP intern this summer.

Additionally, the Global Trade Network has partnered with Columbus 2020 and Ohio’s Small Business Development Centers on a number of programs, including the Global Trade Speaker Series and a Global Summit that explored international expansion in the Americas. This past year, the speaker series connected students, faculty, staff and business partners with trade leaders including the Ambassador of Japan and the Consul General of Korea.

“The futures of so many businesses lie in global trade and export, and Fisher’s Global Trade Network is building bridges to connect our students, faculty, business partners and export professionals across the U.S. in this strategic frontier,” said Joyce Steffan, director of Fisher’s Office of Global Business. “We’re proud to be recognized among select organizations that are advancing U.S. exports.”

The President’s “E” Award is the highest recognition any U.S. entity can receive for making a significant contribution to the expansion of U.S. exports. In 1961, President Kennedy signed an executive order reviving the World War II “E” symbol of excellence to honor and provide recognition to America's exporters. Fewer than five universities have received the award in the last five years. The other two 2017 university recipients are University of Colorado Boulder and Western New England University.

“The ‘E’ Awards Committee was very impressed with Fisher College of Business’ work to train and develop the next generation of international business leaders while providing valuable support to Ohio companies,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross stated in the initial award letter to the college. “Fisher College of Business’ achievements have undoubtedly contributed to national export expansion efforts that support the U.S. economy and create American jobs.”

About The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business

The Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business provides tomorrow’s business leaders with the foundation needed to succeed in business today. Led by world-class faculty, Fisher students experience an academically rigorous learning environment that fosters the development of an entrepreneurial spirit, global awareness and principled leadership skills. Organizations from around the globe thrive under the leadership of Fisher alumni, who are positively impacting their communities and the world.

The Translational Data Analytics program that spun off the institute has been and remains a foundational component of the university’s Discovery Themes initiative, which represents an investment over 10 years of $500 million in teaching, research and engagement to solve global issues related to energy and the environment, food security and production, health and wellness, and the humanities and arts.

“The Translational Data Analytics Institute represents a long-term commitment by Ohio State to data science and analytics to solve real-world challenges globally,” said Bruce McPheron, executive vice president and provost. “It will be a source of great value for our entire university and community, both the public and the private sectors, spurring science and scholarship and contributing to workforce development.”

TDAI is dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive community of innovators. Together, its 105 faculty affiliates from throughout the university, including 41 new hires, bring expertise and know-how unparalleled in scope across foundational data science disciplines and applied domains. Recent milestones include awarding seed grants to faculty; spearheading interdisciplinary research projects and grant proposals with private sector partners; and hosting and sponsoring events for students, faculty, and industry and community partners. This summer, TDAI will launch a faculty exchange program with Nagoya University in Japan, and co-host a National Science Foundation workshop on Translational Data Science with the University of Chicago.

In addition to research and scholarship, TDAI is advancing data science and analytics education to ensure Ohio State students are prepared to take on the countless opportunities in one of the job market’s fastest-growing fields — and one in which the need for talent far exceeds supply. TDAI is creating a new professional science master’s degree in translational data analytics that will complement the university’s undergraduate data analytics major. Just last month, Ohio State’s commitment to fill the workforce talent gap was recognized by the Business and Higher Education Forum and PricewaterhouseCoopers in their report Investing in America’s data science talent: The case for action. A key part of that commitment is accelerating the inclusion of underrepresented groups in data science and analytics education.

In April 2018, TDAI will move to its new home in the renovated Pomerene Hall, where it will offer 21,000 square feet of research, teaching and innovation space for faculty, industry partners and the community to collaborate. The new facility will include hardware, software and data visualization labs; multiple types of work areas; and event space. It will launch with a series of open-house events next spring.

Find out more at these links:

• Video: TDAI faculty use big data to protect cassava crops, and Ohio State Alumni magazine story on TDAI (PDF)

Juhas, an associate vice president in the Office of Research, just finished leading her latest REACH for Commercialization workshop series. The goal of the series: arming nearly two dozen women faculty with new ideas and information to make the most of their research.

“Awareness plus knowledge equals power,” Juhas said to her students.

Juhas oversees Ohio State ADVANCE, which fosters institutional change through support, increased representation and advancement of women faculty in academic science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers. The program is an extension of the university’s pursuit of gender equity through Project CEOS (Comprehensive Equity at Ohio State), launched in 2008 with National Science Foundation funding. Targeted entrepreneurship training was an early focus of the initiative.

The REACH series is designed to help women faculty find ways to better market and fund their research. Juhas also wants to close a gender gap that exists in scientific research.

“More than 81 percent of patents filed have no women inventors,” she said.

The most recent cohort to graduate from the workshops crosses disciplines and includes faculty in medicine, nursing, engineering, and arts and sciences.

REACH workshop sessions focus on issues such as fundraising, team building and leadership. Guest speakers include venture capital investors and fellow researchers.

Shannon Gillespie, assistant professor in the College of Nursing and a member of the most recent cohort, said the workshops are practical and helpful.

“It’s not something we are trained to think about as a scientist,” she said.

One of the final sessions included advice from the Ohio State Technology Commercialization Office. The office helps university researchers bring their inventions or ideas to market.

“The biggest thing I learned is how many resources are available at OSU and how many people are around to help you in the process,” Gillespie said.

Amanda Quisenberry, postdoctoral researcher in the College of Public Health, said the workshops helped her better understand how to communicate to the public about her research.

“I learned so much because I’ve never been in a business department or taken a business class,” she said.

Quisenberry said the workshops opened her eyes to other avenues of funding.

“You don’t always have to go through National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, the big funding agencies we learn about,” she said. “There are other avenues for starting a business and there are other avenues for public health research.”

Juhas hopes the knowledge gained in REACH goes beyond the classes, and makes a point of emphasizing the importance of networking. Juhas worries that women do not promote themselves enough and do not seek out peers to help support them. She hopes these classes change that.

“This isn’t just four workshops and done. Now we’re your network,” Juhas said.

Quisenberry said the time spent with her peers in the REACH workshops has accomplished that mission.

“I feel like I’m more comfortable now about reaching out, asking questions and maybe even collaborating with some of the women I’ve met here.”

When composting enters the picture, educated diners waste just as much as those who haven’t learned about shrinking landfill space, dangerous greenhouse gas emissions and water and soil pollution, a new study found.

This presents a tricky situation for policymakers figuring out how to manage food waste, because the top tactics are prevention (through education) and diversion (through composting), said lead researcher Danyi Qi, a graduate student in agricultural economics at The Ohio State University.

Danyi Qi

“When you do both, they cancel each other out – they work at cross purposes,” said Qi, who is presenting the findings this week at the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations in Chicago.

The discovery could help shape decisions by government, businesses and others looking to chip away at the vast amount of food that lands in trashcans instead of on the tables of those in need, said Qi and co-author Brian Roe, a professor of agricultural, environmental and developmental economics and a member of Ohio State’s Food Waste Collaborative, which is exploring ways to reduce waste and create a more sustainable food system.

Brian Roe

Qi and Roe recruited 266 students, staff, faculty and Columbus residents to participate in the study, which took place over two months in the summer of 2016. The participants were monitored during a meal provided by the researchers. The diners didn’t know what the study was about, specifically, just that the research team was examining eating behavior.

Participants were given information cards with either education on food waste harms or on financial literacy. About half of both of those groups were told that leftovers would be composted, and that it would reduce methane emissions and provide nourishment for plants. The other half were told that their uneaten food was destined for a landfill.

The participants could take as much food as they wanted, in a single trip. They chose from sandwiches, chips and apple slices. Neither sharing nor doggy bags were permitted. The researchers weighed the diners’ trays after the meal to determine how much food the study subjects left behind.

Education in the absence of composting had a marked effect. The diners who’d read about the harm related to waste left behind almost 77 percent less as a group than those who’d received the financial literacy material. The educated diners were 39 percent more likely to clean their plates.

But the benefits of food-waste awareness vanished when the study participants knew their uneaten food was going to a “good” place.

“We were very curious if these common policies work in harmony or in conflict,” Qi said.

“It seems that if they feel that the social and environmental cost is lower, they may feel less guilty and that may cause them to waste more.”

The trouble is that composting comes at a financial and societal cost and policymakers are striving to find ways to limit waste regardless of where it will end up, Qi said.

Roe said this work is likely to be most useful to food service institutions seeking ways to address waste.

“There are many new and innovative approaches being proposed to reduce food waste and to minimize its environmental impact. However, there exists little thought about whether various approaches are complementary or competitive,” he said. “This study is one of the few to consider how various approaches might interact.”

For individuals looking to be good environmental stewards, the study highlights the importance of first attempting to limit waste. Composting or donating unused food is great, but buying and preparing only what you’ll eat is better, Roe said.

“And if someone else says they will do something positive with food scraps, it shouldn’t diminish your own good intentions and efforts to reduce food waste,” he said.

The study was supported by Ohio State’s McCormick Program in Agricultural Policy and Marketing.

“We are proud of this honor, which reflects our commitment to support teaching, learning and research through innovative financial strategies,” said Geoff Chatas, senior vice president for business and finance and CFO. “By employing a tactic that is novel within the municipal bond market, we were able to borrow funds on the best possible terms for the university.”

The award recognizes the university’s use of a “shelf”-like registration process to gain enhanced flexibility over the timing and structure of future bond issuance. While this structure is fairly common in the corporate world, it is rarely seen in the municipal bond market.

In a video announcing the award, Bond Buyer said Ohio State’s “innovative initiative” allows the university to move quickly “to take advantage of favorable conditions.”

A “shelf”-like process involves obtaining upfront approvals from all relevant parties and issuing a base offering statement that streamlines the steps to issue a series of bonds over time.

In Ohio State’s case, the university established the ability to issue up to $1 billion in bonds over a 16-month period. The first issues from this innovative approach occurred in March, when Ohio State issued $600 million in new taxable bonds and another $30 million in tax-exempt bonds to refinance a 2005 series.

“This process made us more nimble in accessing the market,” said Chatas. “I applaud Mike Papadakis and his team at the university treasurer’s office for this historic achievement.”

By winning the Midwest Deal of the Year, Ohio State will be in the running for Bond Buyer’s national Deal of the Year award, to be awarded Dec. 1 in New York.

Ohio State last won recognition from Bond Buyer in 2012 for a 50-year lease of the university’s parking operations, which was honored in the nontraditional financing category. In that transaction, the university received an upfront $483 million payment that was invested in the university’s Long Term Investment Pool to generate ongoing support for university priorities.

To date, the parking endowment has produced more than $105 million for student scholarships, faculty support, the Arts District and a sustainable campus transportation system.

High levels of anxiety a week after a kidney transplant patient went home more than doubled the chances he or she would be readmitted within 30 days of release, researchers found.

And anxiety was higher for patients who received inconsistent directions related to post-discharge care while in the hospital and who reported less-than-optimal empathy on the part of nurses, doctors and other caregivers, researchers from The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business and Wexner Medical Center report in September's Journal of Surgical Research.

Aravind Chandrasekaran

“The more patient-centric the care, the more trust the patient had in the information provided, the lower the anxiety level after discharge,” said Aravind Chandrasekaran, study co-author and an associate professor of operations and associate director of Fisher’s Center for Operational Excellence.

“If you’re anxious, you’re going to come back."

Readmissions can happen for true medical reasons – such as a patient taking the wrong medications or not adhering to post-transplant safety measures.

Susan Moffatt-Bruce

They can also arise when the worried well return unnecessarily, said Susan Moffatt-Bruce, study co-author, cardiothoracic surgeon and chief quality and patient safety officer at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center.

“Sometimes we can make ourselves unwell because we’ve been so anxious,” she said.

Standardizing post-transplant care and training caregivers to convey more empathy during their educational interactions could go a long way toward keeping new kidney recipients well and out of the hospital, the study concluded.

“It comes down to understanding the whole patient,” Moffatt-Bruce said. “With some simple interventions, including being kind and being present, we can make a difference.”

About 17,000 people receive kidney transplants each year in the United States and more than 100,000 are on the waiting list, according to 2014 data from the Health Resources and Services Administration. More than 30 percent of them are readmitted within 30 days of their release, previous research has found.

When patients head home, good self-care – including taking medications properly and avoiding infection risks – is critical for maintaining good health.

But the list of instructions for transplant patients is long and it can be confusing, Chandrasekaran said. On top of that, patients sometimes hear conflicting advice from different members of their care team.

Prior to beginning the study, he and his collaborators reasoned that anxiety after discharge could be a significant player in the high rate of readmissions.

Ohio State’s research team first interviewed 20 patients who received a transplant at the Wexner Medical Center to get a handle on the quality of care delivered during hospitalization. In general, the interviews suggested that information conveyed to patients varied depending on the caregiver and was delivered “in a somewhat rushed manner.”

Researchers also shadowed the care team to listen first-hand to the instructions they gave transplant patients after their surgeries.

One example of inconsistent advice they witnessed: One nurse recommended “a lot of fluids,” another said to drink two liters a day and another told the patient to consume 100 ounces.

“There must have been 16 different ways to tell them to drink a lot of water,” Chandrasekaran said, adding that this wasn’t because the nurses weren’t following protocol. Rather, they were passing along various guidelines they’d been told over the years.

The researchers then used information from those shadowing experiences and the initial 20 interviews to develop surveys given to another 77 kidney recipients, 24 of whom were readmitted within 30 days.

“We wanted to see what was it that caused them to have anxiety and what could we do to alleviate that,” Moffatt-Bruce said.

“We asked patients, ‘What went right, what went wrong?’ ”

The researchers assessed the consistency of patient education using a five-item test that measured the ease of getting information and the level of understanding of symptoms and procedures. To evaluate empathy, they used a three-item scale that asked patients about their comfort level when they interacted with caregivers.

The researchers worked closely with the entire transplant team at Ohio State’s medical center, including 24 nurses and several physicians.

They found a strong association between anxiety levels a week after discharge and readmission within a month. They also found that the odds of getting readmitted increase by 110 percent for a one-unit increase in anxiety levels.

They did not find a direct link between consistency and empathy measured in the surveys and readmissions. But they did find that those elements appeared to play a clear role in raising anxiety, which was linked to readmissions.

The researchers took into account factors that could skew their findings – including age, ethnicity, preexisting health conditions and the function of the transplanted organ upon discharge.

Since conducting this work, the researchers and transplant staff designed interventions to improve pre-discharge care and attempt to reduce preventable readmissions. 

The discharge nurses, in particular, played a key role in the changes, which have cut the number of individual instructions given to patients from about 80 to 25, Moffatt-Bruce said.

“When you go home you’re going to be more confident, you’re going to be safer and you’re going to be less likely to come back to the hospital,” she said.

The researchers plan to publish results from the follow-up study soon.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Women who put in long hours for the bulk of their careers may pay a steep price: life-threatening illnesses, including heart disease and cancer.

Work weeks that averaged 60 hours per week or more over three decades appear to triple the risk of diabetes, cancer, heart trouble and arthritis for women, according to new research from The Ohio State University.

The risk begins to climb when women put in more than 40 hours and takes a decidedly bad turn above 50 hours, researchers found.

Allard Dembe

“Women – especially women who have to juggle multiple roles – feel the effects of intensive work experiences and that can set the table for a variety of illnesses and disability,” said Allard Dembe, professor of health services management and policy and lead author of the study, published online this week in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

“People don’t think that much about how their early work experiences affect them down the road,” he said. “Women in their 20s, 30s and 40s are setting themselves up for problems later in life.”

Men with tough work schedules appeared to fare much better, found the researchers, who analyzed data from interviews with almost 7,500 people who were part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Women tend to take on the lion’s share of family responsibility and may face more pressure and stress than men when they work long hours, previous research shows. On top of that, work for women may be less satisfying because of the need to balance work demands with family obligations, Dembe said.

Employers and government regulators should be aware of the risks, especially to women who are required to regularly toil beyond a 40-hour work week, he said. Companies benefit in terms of quality of work and medical costs when their workers are healthier, Dembe said.

More scheduling flexibility and on-the-job health coaching, screening and support could go a long way toward reducing the chances employees become sick or die as a result of chronic conditions, he said.

The researchers analyzed the relationship between serious disease and hours worked over a 32-year period.

Previous research has shown that workers who put in long hours face more stress, have more sleep and digestive trouble and are more fatigued. Their work performance suffers and they have more injuries on the job.

But prior to this study, efforts to examine a connection between long hours and chronic illness have had mixed results, in large part because it’s difficult to obtain long-term data on work patterns and health, Dembe said.

This study used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, administered by Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research and sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which includes interviews with more than 12,000 Americans born between 1957 and 1964.

Dembe and his collaborator, Mayo Clinic researcher and former Ohio State doctoral student Xiaoxi Yao, examined data for survey participants who were at least 40 in 1998, when interview questions began to include questions about health status and chronic conditions.

They averaged the self-reported hours worked each week over 32 years and compared the hours worked to the incidence of eight chronic diseases: heart disease, cancer (except skin cancer), arthritis or rheumatism, diabetes or high blood sugar, chronic lung disease including bronchitis or emphysema, asthma, depression and high blood pressure. They also examined the results by gender.

A minority of the full-time workers in the study put in 40 hours or fewer per week. Fifty-six percent worked an average of 41 to 50 hours; 13 percent worked an average of 51-60 hours; and 3 percent averaged more than 60 hours.

The results among female workers were striking, Dembe said. The analysis found a clear and strong relationship between long hours and heart disease, cancer, arthritis and diabetes.

Men who worked long hours had a higher incidence of arthritis, but none of the other chronic diseases. And those men who worked moderately long hours (41 to 50 hours weekly) had lower risk of heart disease, lung disease and depression than those who worked 40 hours or fewer.

Because the data addresses chronic diseases reported by age 40 or 50, this study speaks only to early-onset disease and doesn’t shed light on the possible associations between long hours and lifetime risks, which could prove even more profound, Dembe said.

“The early onset and identification of chronic diseases may not only reduce individuals’ life expectancy and quality of life, but also increase health care costs in the long term,” Dembe and Yao wrote in the paper.

One limitation of the study is that it relies on average hours per week and doesn’t provide answers about the differences between those who consistently worked long hours and those whose careers were full of long hours at first but who found themselves with more free time later on, the researchers said.

It also does not address the potential differences between mandatory overtime and discretionary overtime.

“It could make a difference,” Dembe said. “You might still be working hard, but the fact that it’s your choice might help you stay healthier.”

The study was supported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.

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Stores likely to sell fresh produce aren’t open as long in areas with more socioeconomic struggles, and that problem is more pronounced in neighborhoods where many African Americans live, new research from The Ohio State University has found.

In affluent neighborhoods, 24-7 access to a wide array of foods is far more common.

Jill Clark

"Let's say you're stringing together a few jobs and you get off work at 10 and your market closes at 8. It's a big problem," said researcher Jill Clark, an assistant professor in Ohio State's John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

"It's just another burden that we are placing on families that already have so many burdens."

Advocates and policymakers have invested extensively in working to eliminate food deserts - areas with limited or no large grocery stores or supercenters.

But they fall short when they look only at proximity, density and diversity of food retail stores and ignore the little-discussed problem of operating hours, Clark said.

Future policy changes – including those that pertain to the nation’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – should include opportunities to help meet consumers’ needs, such as extending store hours or ensuring transportation is available to get consumers to stores that are open, Clark said.

She and Xiang Chen, now of Arkansas Tech University, found that time-related obstacles were greatest in lower-income African-American neighborhoods where people also are more likely to face challenges including single parenthood and work schedules that make it difficult to shop. Their work appeared this month in the journal The Professional Geographer.

“It’s not just people getting to stores. It’s whether or not there are lights on when you get to the store,” Clark said. “Time is a resource that we should not discount.”

The researchers looked at store hours in Franklin County, Ohio, home of Columbus, the state’s capital. Federal estimates of supermarket access put Franklin County near the national average. An estimated 23.7 percent of the county’s 1.2 million residents have low access, defined as living more than one mile from a supermarket in urban areas and more than 10 miles in rural areas.

The researchers created a three-dimensional mathematical model to better understand the locations and hours of 118 stores.

Overall, they found access lowest from 12:30 to 5:30 a.m. The peak of access was at around 11 a.m. and stores started to close around 7:30 p.m.

The researchers found that in neighborhoods that did have stores, an average of just 23 percent of people had good access based on both store location and hours.

Calculations of access that took time into account climbed alongside measures of socioeconomic well-being. Store hours were longer where incomes were higher, unemployment was lower, more people had cars, a greater percentage of the population had graduated high school and where the population was mostly white.

Those with poor access may turn to fast food and other unhealthful options, such as gas station offerings, the researchers wrote.

On a broader scale, this research contributes to a better understanding of the fact that food access isn’t just about proximity or cost or any single factor, Clark said.

“Access is complex. Can you get there when it’s open? When you get there can you afford it? If you get there and you can afford it, is it healthy?”

That presents policymakers, from community activists to the federal government, with opportunities to tailor their efforts to the needs of the neighborhoods they’re trying to help, Clark said.

The study was supported in part by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

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A new study suggests that may be the wrong question to ask. Researchers found that workers are most likely to help colleagues who are moderately distant from themselves in status – both above and below them.

The results offer a new way to think about how status affects workplace relationships, said Robert Lount, co-author of the study and an associate professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“A lot of attention has been focused on the direction of the relationship – which employee is above or below the other in the hierarchy and how that affects their work together. But status distance may be more important in some circumstances than whether your colleague is above or below you,” he said.

Robert Lount

“The sweet spot for helping seems to be those who are moderately distant from you in status.”

The study was led by Sarah Doyle, a doctoral student at the Fisher College of Business. It appears online in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries and will be published in a future print edition.

The study didn’t examine why colleagues who were moderately distant in status were most likely to help each other. But Doyle said it may be related to how workers perceive their own status within the company.

“Someone near you in status poses more of a threat. The help you provide could help them pass you in status, or make it more difficult for you to pass them,” Doyle said.

Those who are far above or below you in status could require a lot more time and effort to help, which could hurt your own job performance.

Those colleagues who are moderately distant don’t pose much of a threat and offer the best opportunity for workers to demonstrate their willingness to cooperate with their teammates.

The researchers conducted two separate studies – one in a real workplace – and both reached similar conclusions.

In the first study, 267 undergraduate students read a work scenario in which they imagined they were part of a 15-person workgroup in a large sales organization.

Participants were told that one of their group members was close to securing a large account, but was running short on time. The participants were asked if they would be willing to provide help, knowing that helping was optional.

The crucial point was that participants were told that the person asking for help was either similar to them in status (small status distance), very dissimilar (large status distance) or neither similar nor dissimilar (moderate social distance).

Results showed that participants were most likely to say they would help a team member who was moderately different from them in status.

The real-world study was conducted in a large Midwestern customer call center. Employees were asked to try to make sales during their calls with customers. A list of how employees ranked in terms of sales was emailed to workers each month. That means employees always knew how their status compared to the other members of their team.

While they each worked separately in cubicles, they were encouraged to help each other. Often, they would put customers on hold and ask their teammates for help with answering a question.

“There were plenty of opportunities for collaboration and to give each other assistance,” Lount said.

For the study, 170 employees completed an online survey asking a variety of questions. Included was a question asking each employee to list co-workers who regularly came to them for help and co-workers whom they regularly went to seeking help.

A helping relationship was included in the study if two employees both agreed that the assistance did occur.

In this real-world office, the finding of the first study was confirmed: Workers were most helpful to teammates who were just the right distance away as far as status goes – not too close and not too far.

Lount said the results don’t mean that most people regularly refuse requests for assistance from their co-workers.

“We found that people are generally willing to lend a hand. It is not a story of withholding assistance. It is more about who are you most likely to go out of your way to help.”

There are certainly situations in the office where who is above the other in status will matter when it comes to offering assistance, he said. But especially when it comes to informal helping, status difference will be key.

What can managers do with these results? Lount suggests that the findings might be useful when assigning people to train new employees.

“You might want to avoid assigning the most recently hired employee to train the newcomer,” he said. “If that relative newcomer is worried about his or her status in the organization, they may be less than helpful with this new person who could surpass them,” he said.

“Someone who is moderately successful, but not the top performer on the team, might be the most willing to help.”

Doyle noted that while many organizations consider whether to flatten or expand hierarchies at their firms, this study suggests the question may often be more complex than assumed.

“Managers have to consider how status distance plays a role in how well their corporate hierarchies work,” she said.

Other co-authors on the study were Steffanie Wilk, associate professor of management and human resources at Ohio State; and Nathan Pettit of New York University.