By Caroline Wagner
Professor of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University

China’s rapid rise in science has hit a milestone. The country’s investment in research and development has reached parity with – and by purchasing power measures has surpassed – that of the United States, according to a March 2026 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Both nations have crossed the US$1 trillion threshold on research spending.

By Noah Dormady
Associate Professor of Public Policy, The Ohio State University

Researchers at The Ohio State University conducted an experiment with a national sample of high-level executives and found that those with subprime credit scores tended to be “yes persons” – even when it was counterproductive.

In contrast, executives with prime credit scores critically evaluated external information, more effectively processing decisions involving risk.

“Responsible CEOs do not want executives who are going to be  ‘yes persons,’ they want someone who evaluates data objectively,” said Noah Dormady, co-author of the study and associate professor at Ohio State’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

“That’s the issue we’re picking up in this study. Executives with higher credit scores were much more likely to think thoughtfully and critically about the data and make objective decisions.”

Dormady conducted the research with Yiseon Choi, a doctoral student in the Glenn College. Their study was published recently in the International Journal of Production Economics.

Executives who participated in this study self-reported their FICO scores, which is one type of credit score. The two biggest factors in FICO scores are a person’s payment history – such as how often they are late paying bills – and how much they owe. Other factors include their credit mix, length of credit history and how much new credit they have.

These factors tend to be correlated with income; however the study focused exclusively on the top-level executives in a company, who are referred to as C-suite executives. These executives would all have similar levels of income.

Credit scores are known to be predictive of a person’s risk tolerance, Choi said.

“This is important because prior research suggests that personal financial habits may extend to professional decision making,” she said.

This study involved data from a controlled experiment previously led by Dormady, and involving 303 C-suite executives at middle-market firms (those with annual revenues between $10 million and $1 billion), in partnership with Ohio State’s National Center for the Middle Market.

In the experiment, the participants had to make an investment recommendation to a chief operations officer involving inventories. They had to decide whether to invest in inventories that could act as a buffer in case of a catastrophe, like a hurricane, that temporarily halted production at the company.

“The decision to stockpile inventories is one of opportunity cost. For a company, the cost of those inventories can take away from currently productive plant, equipment, and workforce.” “It can be a difficult decision that involves managing risk for the company,” Dormady said.

The executives in the study went through 10 decision making periods, and each period had 2 rounds. In each period, they were randomly given a unanimous recommendation from a group of advisers that, in the scenario, were appointed by their CEO. The advice in each period was either to invest in the inventory or not, and this was given between each round of decisions.

After that, the participants were told whether a catastrophe had occurred or not.  Overall, the participants had a 25% chance of having a catastrophe in each period.  In the end, some participants in the study experienced no catastrophes, and some had as many as 7 in their 10 periods.

The key finding was that executives with the best, prime credit ratings tended to take the advisers’ advice only when it matched their own experiences in the experiment. If the executives experienced more catastrophes, they were more likely to accept the advice of the advisers if they told them to invest in more inventory.

But they weren’t afraid to reject the advice if it conflicted with their own experience.

“Those with higher FICO scores were more confident to make their own decisions, possibly because the financial decisions they made in their personal lives worked out well, compared to those with lower FICO scores,” Choi said.

In fact, executives with subprime credit scores were about twice as likely to follow the advice of advisers, even when it was inaccurate, when compared to those with prime credit.

“Executives with subprime credit were more likely to simply defer to the appointed advisors, even disregarding their lived experience,” Dormady said.

“That suggests executives with lower credit scores are more likely to be the type of decision maker who follows consensus over fact.”

The researchers noted that they took into account a variety of demographic and other factors about the executives in the study, including gender, veteran status and other personal details. But it was the FICO score that was most meaningful when it came to how they responded to risk in the scenarios.

Given the strong results in this study, does that mean companies should use FICO scores to screen candidates for top executive positions? Dormady said that is a complex question that raises ethical issues.

More replication studies should be done to confirm the results, he said, and guidelines are needed to ensure that credit score data is not misused or abused.

Researchers found that 72% of the most popular type of retail electricity offers over the past decade have been significantly above the default price consumers would pay if they didn’t shop around.

The results suggest that there are persistent market failures in the deregulated market, said Noah Dormady, lead author of the study and associate professor at The Ohio State University’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

“The bulk of the offers provided to Ohio consumers are way above what those consumers would pay if they did nothing,” Dormady said.

“Historically, consumers would be better off if they just stayed with their electrical utility’s default price, rather than switching service to the median retail choice offer.”

Dormady noted that these markets have offered many Ohio households and businesses with cost-saving supply offers over the years, and those suppliers that have offered competitive pricing based on market fundamentals have delivered value to Ohio. “It’s unfortunate that cost-saving offers have been so few and far between,” he added.

The study was published recently in the Journal of Critical Infrastructure Policy.

The study was done in Ohio, but it has relevance throughout the United States and even internationally where similar retail choice marketplaces have existed for years.

“The problems we document here exist in other states and in parts of Canada and Australia, too,” he said. “We are continuing the work we did here in other states to learn more.”

Dormady and his colleagues built the largest and most detailed database of retail electricity choice offers ever in a published study.  They examined every electricity offer made to Ohio consumers by retail marketers over a nine-year period from 2014 to 2023 – more than 2 million records.

Households that cannot or choose not to shop for retail electricity generation service stay with their utility’s default service. This excludes areas where default service is provided through municipal aggregation. Customers who choose to shop can purchase service from among competing supply offers from one of about fifty different suppliers in each of the six major utility service territories in the state. All customers, whether they purchase their generation from a competing supplier or stay on the utility’s default service, continue to receive their distribution service from their local utility.

Consumers are overwhelmed with choices, Dormady said. Every day, between 90 and 150 different supply offers are filed by about 45 different suppliers with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO), which is the state agency overseeing the market.

Offers vary widely, some offering a fixed rate for a defined period and others offering variable rates. And some offer “gimmicky” deals, he said, with deceptively low initial costs combined with high monthly fees and consumption caps of how much electricity can be used before rates jump or financial penalties.

The study found that with the most commonly sought-after rate by residential customers – a 12-month fixed rate – competing electric companies offered rates above the default utility standard offer 72.1% of the time.

What’s more, the study found that competing companies historically made offers that averaged 25% to 30% above the standard offer. But when they offered cost savings, they were only 5% to 10% below the standard offer.

“The savings are considerably smaller than the price increases they offer,” Dormady said.

Dormady noted that all the competing companies buy their electricity from the same wholesale markets.  Under standard economic theory, the retail prices would be set based on the wholesale prices. Instead, it appears that companies are competing based on the standard price, which is already marked up about 73% over the price on the wholesale market.

The median retail choice offer by competing companies is 98% above the wholesale cost of electricity, the study found.

Another issue is that the best prices are not always available to consumers. The researchers found that cost-savings offers were available between 43% and 59% of the days of the year, depending on the year studied.

“Even if consumers shopped for the best prices on electricity every day – which most people are not going to do – they would only find savings about half the time,” he said.

Dormady said future studies will examine more thoroughly the issues consumers face in shopping for retail electricity.  But it appears that the markets as they are currently set up are too complex for most households and make it too difficult to identify the deals that are best for them.

Despite the problems with the current market, Dormady said he and his colleagues don’t believe the answer is to move back to a regulated system. That will not create the best situation for consumers.

Instead, there is a need for more efficient markets and greater transparency. One suggestion the researchers have is creating an Office of the Independent Market Monitor to ensure that the markets operate efficiently.  While existing offices such as PUCO and the Consumers’ Counsel play key roles, they have multiple functions and can’t be considered a replacement for a dedicated independent market monitor. Independence and market expertise are key, Dormady said.

Another suggestion is to establish a “supplier scorecard” that rates the quality and competitiveness of competing electric suppliers. This scorecard would function similarly to a Better Business Bureau, Fitch or Moody’s rating, he said.

“We need to make it easier for consumers to identify the electricity offers that will save them money and that are right for them,” Dormady said. “Unfortunately, it is too easy to confuse consumers in a complex market like this.”

The study was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Other Ohio State co-authors were Yufan Ji, Stephanie Pedron and Abdollah Shafieezadeh. Additional co-authors were William Welch of Welch and Associates Consulting; Alberto Lamadrid and Samatha Fox of Lehigh University; and Matthew Hoyt of Exeter Associates.

Researchers found that lower-income residents of states with more generous benefits were significantly less likely than those living in less-generous states to take out new credit cards, personal finance loans and payday loans or other alternative financial service offerings.

The study, published recently in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, was led by Rachel Dwyer, professor of sociology at The Ohio State University, and Stephanie Moulton, professor in Ohio State’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

The findings provide evidence that programs like unemployment insurance can play a powerful role in keeping low-income Americans from falling further behind financially, said Moulton.

“Providing more generous unemployment benefits helps people avoid these really expensive types of debt that are costly not only for individuals, but eventually for society,” Moulton said.

A key strength of the study was its large sample of 2.3 million Americans, who were studied from the end of 2019 through the end of 2021.  The researchers used data from the consumer credit bureau Experian to determine if those in the study took out a credit card, personal finance loan or an alternative financial service (AFS) loan during the time of the research.

The researchers took advantage of the fact that some states were more generous in how much unemployment insurance benefits they provided to residents than others as well as differences in the timing of benefit expansion and contraction within a state. This variation allowed them to see if the level of benefit generosity had an impact on whether Americans avoided costly debt.

“Unemployment insurance is a key part of the safety net in the United States, and it affects a lot of people,” Dwyer said. “We were able to test how it affected people of various income levels during the COVID recession.”

Results showed that more generous unemployment insurance benefits did indeed result in less use of costly credit use, mostly among those in the lowest-income households.

There was a 9.7% lower probability of the lowest-income consumers taking out a new credit card when unemployment insurance benefits in a state were the most generous compared to when benefits in a state were the least generous, the study found.

The difference was even more stark when the researchers examined AFS loans.  These are loans outside the traditional banking institutions, such as payday loans, where interest rates may be significantly higher than traditional forms of borrowing.

“A lot of these are online loans, and they’re quite accessible because of that, but they are not regulated in the same way as traditional financial institutions,” Dwyer said. “And they have very high interest rates.”

The study found that the lowest-income consumers were 24% more likely to take out AFS loans when state unemployment benefits were the least generous compared to when state unemployment benefits were the most generous.

When high and middle-income households lost their jobs because of the pandemic, they were able to rely on savings, or they could use credit cards, to help them get through for a few weeks or months of unemployment, Moulton said.  But the lowest-income consumers often don’t have savings and aren’t eligible for credit cards, or have already maxed out their credit limit.

“For low-income consumers, AFS loans may be the only place they can go as their last resort, so they turn to these very expensive ways to make ends meet,” Moulton said.

“We found that more generous benefits really seemed to save at least some low-income consumers from having to make that choice.”

In addition to their main analysis, the researchers also examined alternative measures of how consumers may have been coping with the COVID recession, such as spending on existing credit cards or applying for loans regardless of whether or not they were approved, Dwyer said.

“Our results were quite consistent, with lower-income consumers faring better in states when benefits were generous,” she said.

One question that taxpayers often ask is whether government programs like unemployment insurance provide society with a good return on investment.  These findings suggest another benefit that should be considered, Moulton said.

“If we are preventing some share of this really high-cost borrowing from happening, we are preventing a cost that might ultimately be borne by society,” she said.

“There are domino effects where consumers might end up in bankruptcy if they have to use high-interest loans to make ends meet, which isn’t just bad for their own credit, it can raise the cost of credit for others as well.”

Other co-authors of the study were Lawrence Berger, J. Michael Collins and Alec Rhodes from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Meta Brown from Ohio State; Jason Houle from Dartmouth College; and Davon Norris from the University of Michigan.

Support for the study came from the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (including through a seed grant from the Ohio State Institute for Population Research), the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Social Security Administration’s Retirement and Disability Research Consortium.

“Lee is an exceptional constitutional scholar with a wealth of administrative experience, and we are excited that he will join the university to stand up and lead the new Salmon P. Chase Center,” said Karla Zadnik, interim executive vice president and provost. “Our shared goal is for the center to become a national leader in teaching, research and engagement on U.S. civics, culture and society.” 

Initiated in 2023 by the state of Ohio, the Salmon P. Chase Center will be an academic home at Ohio State for teaching and researching the foundation of the American constitutional order and its impact on society. As executive director, Strang will be responsible for organizing the center, overseeing the hiring and appointment of the center’s faculty, developing curriculum and delivering academic programming.  

“Ohio State’s land-grant mission, exemplified by its motto Education for Citizenship, arose at a time in American history when our nation turned to higher education to bring together a divided America through civic education. Today, the Salmon P. Chase Center will carry forward that historic mission through its courses, scholarship and programming, and become the national leader in civic thought and leadership. I am excited to develop the reputation of the Salmon P. Chase Center into one of national excellence,” Strang said. 

When it is fully operational, the center will have at least 15 tenure-track faculty members and provide a variety of innovative educational and collaboration opportunities for students and faculty from across the university. The center will be an independent academic center physically housed in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. 

“Professor Strang is the right leader for the Chase Center. He is a nationally recognized constitutional scholar dedicated to supporting open dialogue and diverse viewpoints about American history, culture and politics,” said Trevor Brown, dean of the Glenn College. 

Strang is a prolific scholar who has published dozens of articles in leading journals in the fields of constitutional law and interpretation, property law, religion and the First Amendment. Strang co-authored the textbook Federal Constitutional Law, and his most recent book, Originalism’s Promise: A Natural Law Account of the American Constitution, is the first book-length natural law justification for originalism.

“Professor Strang engages with some of the most important and profound matters of public concern in a serious, open-minded and rigorous way,” summarized Darrell A.H. Miller, professor at the University of Chicago Law School. “He is a perfect choice to lead the center."

Prior to teaching, Strang served as a judicial clerk for Judge Alice M. Batchelder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He was also an associate for Jenner & Block LLP in Chicago, where he practiced in general and appellate litigation. Strang has also been a visiting scholar at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution and a visiting fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. A graduate of the University of Iowa, he was articles editor of the Iowa Law Review and a member of Order of the Coif. He also holds an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School.  

The Chase Center academic council led the nationwide search for the executive director. The academic council members are scholars with national reputations for academic excellence and come from Ohio and universities across the nation.

“Through his prodigious scholarship, pedagogy of civility and experience at similar centers, Strang has shown a deep commitment to and understanding of the American civic tradition,” said Jean Yarbrough, a member of the academic council and professor at Bowdoin University. “Under his leadership, the Chase Center is poised to become one of our country’s leading centers for civic education and leadership.”

By Caroline Wagner,

Professor of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University

Chinese universities are prodigious producers of scientific papers, which will help garner them more prestige. CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images

University leaders pay close attention to comparative rankings such as those offered by Times Higher Education, ShanghaiRanking Consultancy and others. Rankings influence student matriculation numbers, attract talented faculty and justify donations from wealthy donors. University leaders rail against them, and some schools “withdraw” from them, but rankings are influential.

A radical shift in the data underlying rankings is about to upend the rankings world – largely in favor of China’s position.

For instance, in early 2024, the Leiden University Center for Science and Technology Studies CWTS group issued new university rankings that add open-data sources to the traditional curated list of elite journals that has been the standard. The results show a world turned upside down for university rankings.

Where once the list of universities with the highest scientific impact would have been dominated by U.S. and U.K. schools including Cambridge, Stanford, Harvard and MIT, the new top 10 list of universities with high scientific impact includes six universities from China.

What does this transformation mean for understanding scholarly excellence? I study the global research system and its contribution to social welfare. China’s swift progress in science and technology, propelled by investments in research and university strength, has alarmed the United States and other nations. Concerns are mounting that the U.S. may be losing its competitive advantage to an assertive rival, with potential implications for national security, economic standing and global influence. These new rankings will likely raise even more alarm.

Broader range of more sources

The rankings programs draw heavily upon quantitative assessments called “indicators.” A glance at the influential ShanghaiRanking criteria shows the inputs to its assessment include “papers indexed in major citation indices.” The popular indices draw from a highly curated set of scholarly journals such as Cell, The Lancet and Chemical Reviews. The most reputed index collecting information on these and other journals is the Web of Science’s Science Citation Index, or SCI, a product of careful standardization and data enrichment by Clarivate.

SCI represents only a fraction of the work published worldwide, though. Among other critiques, many people decry the SCI’s exclusivity and its perceived Western bias.

But careful curation makes it the gold standard of academic indexing and one that journals and authors aspire to join. Its value is in its replicability: It is possible to dip into it multiple times using different search strategies and produce comparable results.

Reliance on curated databases is about to end with the introduction of rankings based on open data like that collected by OpenAlex. OpenAlex claims to include over 100,000 journals – of highly varying quality and editorial practices – compared with SCI’s 9,200. All data in OpenAlex has been released into the public domain with the laudable goal of making research freely available to all. The downside is that this wider net sweeps in predatory journals that exploit researchers and undermine the quality and integrity of scholarly communication.

Reflecting China’s research productivity

The volume of scholarly articles represented in the open databases has a mighty influence on China’s position in the open-source rankings. Chinese scholars produce a vast body of written work, some in English, some in Chinese; estimates of percentage shares for language range widely, but hover around 50-50. As China has invested in education and grown its science and engineering capacity, many more people turn out scholarly articles.

From a very small number in the 1980s, China had 2.2 million scientists and engineers by 2023, based on UNESCO data. China’s scholarly output of scientific and engineering articles shows a very rapid rise since the 1990s, with growth outpacing all other nations. Quality has lagged quantity, but China is outproducing the United States in the total number of scientific publications in the Web of Science, by my count – a shift in leadership not seen since the U.S. overtook the U.K. in 1948.

Although the numbers are dated, when I counted China’s scholarly publishing in 2010, my colleague and I estimated that between 2000 and 2009, China published around 1 million scientific papers that were not captured by the Web of Science. That means they didn’t “count” toward traditional rankings. These publications are counted in the new open databases. Many of the papers included in open-source or open-access journals will not be considered of high quality; nonetheless, they become part of the written record.

Open-access publishing services have grown rapidly and offer fast publication times, but there are questions about the quality of their journals. Open publishing services such as MDPI and Frontiers have an outsized number of Chinese contributors compared to those from other countries.

The open-access services often include content from potential paper mills, businesses manufacturing what look like scholarly manuscripts for sale. Despite concerns about the reputation and editorial practices of these publishers and editors, there’s little oversight. These services are flooding the publishing world with vast numbers of lower-quality articles.

Chinese researchers and their sponsoring institutions put a huge premium on publishing in international journals, even those hosted by questionable publishers. Citation stacking practices – when authors cite the works of co-nationals to raise their citation profiles – skew counts to enhance China’s performance.

China is attempting to address malign practices. To its credit, China’s government recently announced the retraction of 17,000 articles with a Chinese author or co-author. Efforts are underway to enhance quality. Governmental payments to researchers for articles in ranked journals are being sunsetted.

Despite the quality questions, the numbers alone will push China up the rankings lists. This rapid shift will enhance China’s position relative to the rest of the world. In itself, the rise does not reflect a change in quality, status or output, but it will continue to stoke the fires of those alarmed by the rise of China in world science, technology and innovation circles, and perhaps put rankings further into question.

The Conversation has updated the headline and the table to correctly report the CWTS Leiden Ranking Open Edition 2023 numbers.

Caroline Wagner, Professor of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Congressional Conversations is an initiative of Moritz College of Law and the John Glenn College of Public Affairs that brings prominent federal legislators to Ohio State on a regular basis. The event is co-sponsored by the Moritz Program on Law and Leadership, the Office of Government Affairs and the Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability (IDEA). 

Conversations focus not on the day’s partisan talking points but rather on improving the legislative process, public policy and leadership. Trevor Brown, dean of the Glenn College, and law student Aditya Medicherla moderated the discussion.

“One of the important roles of a public university and the Congressional Conversation series is to create an environment where we can have conversations about difficult and contentious issues in a civil and respectful manner that contributes to our understanding and welcomes and fosters a diversity of viewpoints,” Brown said.

Last year, Carey and Beatty relaunched the Congressional Civility and Respect Caucus. Originally established by Beatty and former U.S. Rep. Steve Stivers, the goal of the bipartisan caucus is to encourage all members of Congress to act with civility and respect in their political discourse.

Beatty and Carey have preached the message to businesses and civic organizations across central Ohio to help promote respectful dialogue on challenging issues. 

“It was to hopefully demonstrate that we don’t have to agree, but we don’t have to not be civil. We don’t have to say things about people’s families or disparaging things about individuals that are really not true,” Beatty said.

Carey said it has been a privilege to share the message with fellow representatives in central Ohio and around the country. He said he would be participating in a civility event in suburban Chicago later this year with Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider.

“It really all started because of what Joyce and Steve decided to do. This is our 18th event. I actually went to a Republican fundraiser, and I said … I feel very strange being in a room with all of you people in central Ohio and Joyce Beatty’s not on stage with me. That’s how many times you’ll find us working together,” he said.

Beatty and Carey both expressed hope that Congress will be able to find a solution to looming funding deadlines in early March. They also expressed frustration with the challenges of changing leadership in the House and razor-thin voting margins.

Audience members asked the representatives their views on student protests, and both said they agreed with the right to protest when the issues were important.

The final question for the representatives was about the advice they would offer to students who want to advocate for themselves or others. Both representatives noted there are opportunities to serve outside of elected office. Beatty said some of the most important laws begin at the smallest level.

“For those in Glenn College, I think you should help us with public policy. And I recommend that if you have thoughts on public policy issues, most pieces of legislation come from the district, an idea, a family or a name, like the Amber Alert,” Beatty said. “If you think about all the [laws] that get named, it’s because some nurse, some students, some public policy person weighed in.”

Carey encouraged students to “get in the arena.”

“Whether you run for office yourself, whether you go into a congressional office or state representative office, city council, county commissioner, I just think it really gives you the opportunity to be part of what we need in this country, which is change.”

 

By Caroline Wagner, 

Professor of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University

A decades-old science and technology cooperative agreement between the United States and China expires on Aug. 27, 2023. On the surface, an expiring diplomatic agreement may not seem significant. But unless it’s renewed, the quiet end to a cooperative era may have consequences for scientific research and technological innovation.

The possible lapse comes after U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., led a congressional group warning the U.S. State Department in July 2023 to beware of cooperation with China. This group recommended to let the agreement expire without renewal, claiming China has gained a military advantage through its scientific and technological ties with the U.S.

The State Department has dragged its feet on renewing the agreement, only requesting an extension at the last moment to “amend and strengthen” the agreement.

The U.S. is an active international research collaborator, and since 2011 China has been its top scientific partner, displacing the United Kingdom, which had been the U.S.’s most frequent collaborator for decades. China’s domestic research and development spending is closing in on parity with that of the United States. Its scholastic output is growing in both number and quality. According to recent studies, China’s science is becoming increasingly creative, breaking new ground.

As a policy analyst and public affairs professor, I research international collaboration in science and technology and its implications for public policy. Relations between countries are often enhanced by negotiating and signing agreements, and this agreement is no different. The U.S.’s science and technology agreement with China successfully built joint research projects and shared research centers between the two nations.

U.S. scientists can typically work with foreign counterparts without a political agreement. Most aren’t even aware of diplomatic agreements, which are signed long after researchers have worked together. But this is not the case with China, where the 1979 agreement became a prerequisite for and the initiator of cooperation.

A 40-year diplomatic investment

The U.S.-China science and technology agreement was part of a historic opening of relations between the two countries, following decades of antagonism and estrangement. U.S. President Richard Nixon set in motion the process of normalizing relations with China in the early 1970s. President Jimmy Carter continued to seek an improved relationship with China.

China had announced reforms, modernizations and a global opening after an intense period of isolation from the time of the Cultural Revolution from the late 1950s until the early 1970s. Among its “four modernizations” was science and technology, in addition to agriculture, defense and industry.

While China is historically known for inventing gunpowder, paper and the compass, China was not a scientific power in the 1970s. American and Chinese diplomats viewed science as a low-conflict activity, comparable to cultural exchange. They figured starting with a nonthreatening scientific agreement could pave the way for later discussions on more politically sensitive issues.

On July 28, 1979, Carter and Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping signed an “umbrella agreement” that contained a general statement of intent to cooperate in science and technology, with specifics to be worked out later.

In the years that followed, China’s economy flourished, as did its scientific output. As China’s economy expanded, so did its investment in domestic research and development. This all boosted China’s ability to collaborate in science – aiding their own economy.

Early collaboration under the 1979 umbrella agreement was mostly symbolic and based upon information exchange, but substantive collaborations grew over time.

A major early achievement came when the two countries published research showing mothers could ingest folic acid to prevent birth defects like spina bifida in developing embryos. Other successful partnerships developed renewable energy, rapid diagnostic tests for the SARS virus and a solar-driven method for producing hydrogen fuel.

Joint projects then began to emerge independent of government agreements or aid. Researchers linked up around common interests – this is how nation-to-nation scientific collaboration thrives.

Many of these projects were initiated by Chinese Americans or Chinese nationals working in the United States who cooperated with researchers back home. In the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, these strong ties led to rapid, increased Chinese-U.S. cooperation in response to the crisis.

Time of conflict

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, scientific collaboration between the two countries increased dramatically – joint research projects expanded, visiting students in science and engineering skyrocketed in number and collaborative publications received more recognition.

As China’s economy and technological success grew, however, U.S. government agencies and Congress began to scrutinize the agreement and its output. Chinese know-how began to build military strength and, with China’s military and political influence growing, they worried about intellectual property theft, trade secret violations and national security vulnerabilities coming from connections with the U.S.

Recent U.S. legislation, such as the CHIPS and Science Act, is a direct response to China’s stunning expansion. Through the CHIPS and Science Act, the U.S. will boost its semiconductor industry, seen as the platform for building future industries, while seeking to limit China’s access to advances in AI and electronics.

A victim of success?

Some politicians believe this bilateral science and technology agreement, negotiated in the 1970s as the least contentious form of cooperation – and one renewed many times – may now threaten the United States’ dominance in science and technology. As political and military tensions grow, both countries are wary of renewal of the agreement, even as China has signed similar agreements with over 100 nations.

The United States is stuck in a world that no longer exists – one where it dominates science and technology. China now leads the world in research publications recognized as high quality work, and it produces many more engineers than the U.S. By all measures, China’s research spending is soaring.

Even if the recent extension results in a renegotiated agreement, the U.S. has signaled to China a reluctance to cooperate. Since 2018, joint publications have dropped in number. Chinese researchers are less willing to come to the U.S. Meanwhile, Chinese researchers who are in the U.S. are increasingly likely to return home, taking valuable knowledge with them.

The U.S. risks being cut off from top know-how as China forges ahead. Perhaps looking at science as a globally shared resource could help both parties craft a truly “win-win” agreement.

Caroline Wagner, Professor of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By Caroline Wagner

Milton & Roslyn Wolf Chair in International Affairs

John Glenn College of Public Affairs

The Ohio State University

In 2022, Chinese researchers published more scientific papers on artificial intelligence than any other nation. Mf3D/E+ via Getty Images

By at least one measure, China now leads the world in producing high-quality science. My research shows that Chinese scholars now publish a larger fraction of the top 1% most cited scientific papers globally than scientists from any other country.

I am a policy expert and analyst who studies how governmental investment in science, technology and innovation improves social welfare. While a country’s scientific prowess is somewhat difficult to quantify, I’d argue that the amount of money spent on scientific research, the number of scholarly papers published and the quality of those papers are good stand-in measures.

China is not the only nation to drastically improve its science capacity in recent years, but China’s rise has been particularly dramatic. This has left U.S. policy experts and government officials worried about how China’s scientific supremacy will shift the global balance of power. China’s recent ascendancy results from years of governmental policy aiming to be tops in science and technology. The country has taken explicit steps to get where it is today, and the U.S. now has a choice to make about how to respond to a scientifically competitive China.

Growth across decades

In 1977, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping introduced the Four Modernizations, one of which was strengthening China’s science sector and technological progress. As recently as 2000, the U.S. produced many times the number of scientific papers as China annually. However, over the past three decades or so, China has invested funds to grow domestic research capabilities, to send students and researchers abroad to study, and to encourage Chinese businesses to shift to manufacturing high-tech products.

Since 2000, China has sent an estimated 5.2 million students and scholars to study abroad. The majority of them studied science or engineering. Many of these students remained where they studied, but an increasing number return to China to work in well-resourced laboratories and high-tech companies.

Today, China is second only to the U.S. in how much it spends on science and technology. Chinese universities now produce the largest number of engineering Ph.D.s in the world, and the quality of Chinese universities has dramatically improved in recent years.

Producing more and better science

Thanks to all this investment and a growing, capable workforce, China’s scientific output – as measured by the number of total published papers – has increased steadily over the years. In 2017, Chinese scholars published more scientific papers than U.S. researchers for the first time.

Quantity does not necessarily mean quality though. For many years, researchers in the West wrote off Chinese research as low quality and often as simply imitating research from the U.S. and Europe. During the 2000s and 2010s, much of the work coming from China did not receive significant attention from the global scientific community.

But as China has continued to invest in science, I began to wonder whether the explosion in the quantity of research was accompanied by improving quality.

To quantify China’s scientific strength, my colleagues and I looked at citations. A citation is when an academic paper is referenced – or cited – by another paper. We considered that the more times a paper has been cited, the higher quality and more influential the work. Given that logic, the top 1% most cited papers should represent the upper echelon of high-quality science.

My colleagues and I counted how many papers published by a country were in the top 1% of science as measured by the number of citations in various disciplines. Going year by year from 2015 to 2019, we then compared different countries. We were surprised to find that in 2019, Chinese authors published a greater percentage of the most influential papers, with China claiming 8,422 articles in the top category, while the U.S had 7,959 and the European Union had 6,074. In just one recent example, we found that in 2022, Chinese researchers published three times as many papers on artificial intelligence as U.S. researchers; in the top 1% most cited AI research, Chinese papers outnumbered U.S. papers by a 2-to-1 ratio. Similar patterns can be seen with China leading in the top 1% most cited papers in nanoscience, chemistry and transportation.

Our research also found that Chinese research was surprisingly novel and creative – and not simply copying western researchers. To measure this, we looked at the mix of disciplines referenced in scientific papers. The more diverse and varied the referenced research was in a single paper, the more interdisciplinary and novel we considered the work. We found Chinese research to be as innovative as other top performing countries.

Taken together, these measures suggest that China is now no longer an imitator nor producer of only low-quality science. China is now a scientific power on par with the U.S. and Europe, both in quantity and in quality.

On August 9, 2022, President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law to support the growth of U.S. research and technology firms as a way to counter China’s scientific growth. The White House/Flickr

Fear or collaboration?

Scientific capability is intricately tied to both military and economic power. Because of this relationship, many in the U.S. – from politicians to policy experts – have expressed concern that China’s scientific rise is a threat to the U.S., and the government has taken steps to slow China’s growth. The recent Chips and Science Act of 2022 explicitly limits cooperation with China in some areas of research and manufacturing. In October 2022, the Biden administration put restrictions in place to limit China’s access to key technologies with military applications.

A number of scholars, including me, see these fears and policy responses as rooted in a nationalistic view that doesn’t wholly map onto the global endeavor of science.

Academic research in the modern world is in large part driven by the exchange of ideas and information. The results are published in publicly available journals that anyone can read. Science is also becoming ever more international and collaborative, with researchers around the world depending on each other to push their fields forward. Recent collaborative research on cancer, COVID-19 and agriculture are just a few of many examples. My own work has also shown that when researchers from China and the U.S. collaborate, they produce higher quality science than either one alone.

China has joined the ranks of top scientific and technological nations, and some of the concerns over shifts of power are reasonable in my view. But the U.S. can also benefit from China’s scientific rise. With many global issues facing the planet – like climate change, to name just one – there may be wisdom in looking at this new situation as not only a threat, but also an opportunity.

Caroline Wagner, Milton & Roslyn Wolf Chair in International Affairs, The Ohio State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

New research suggests that emergency management officials often do not have the numeracy skills needed to make the best decisions based on data they receive about which residents to evacuate during a hurricane and when to make the decision.

The study, published online Aug. 30 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, showed that the most numerate officials were almost twice as likely as less numerate ones to provide additional evacuation times to their coastal communities. Less numerate ones, on the other hand, gave their communities less advance warning, and when they finally did issue evacuations, over-evacuated tens of thousands more people.

And, the study found, federal agencies need to supply emergency management officials with the most complete information available in order for them to make the best choices for people who live in a disaster’s path.

This is not to say emergency management officials are not good at math, said Noah Dormady, lead author of the study and an associate professor of public policy at The Ohio State University.

“It’s more they haven’t received the right training in probability and risk to effectively understand scientific forecasts that contain probability information,” Dormady said.

The study was based on a pair of experiments designed to study and evaluate officials’ decision-making during a natural disaster. The study is among the first to evaluate evacuation decision-making by emergency management officials, rather than by individuals deciding whether or not to leave an area because of a storm.

The study involved 81 emergency managers and other public safety officials predominantly from coastal states that are affected by hurricanes, as well as 227 Ohio State graduate and upper-division students from related fields of study. The researchers began their experiments by testing each subject’s ability to make decisions using probability and statistics – a sort of baseline math test that allowed them to evaluate each participant’s numeracy. In other words, how well they understood the ways probability and statistics might play out in the real world.

Researchers then provided the study participants with a scenario based on a real storm – Hurricane Rita in 2005. Rita was among the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico, hitting land near the Louisiana-Texas border, killing 120 people and causing an estimated $18.5 billion in damages. Participants were not told the scenario was based on Rita, so they could not use any knowledge of the storm to guide their decisions.

Participants were randomly assigned to treatments with varying amounts of information about the approaching storm. Some subjects received a great deal of information, including the forecasted track and potential alternative tracks; others received limited information.

The researchers asked study participants to determine whether to evacuate, when to evacuate and whom to evacuate. Decisions were structured to coincide with the release of advisories from the National Hurricane Center (NHC).

Basing the experiments on a real disaster allowed researchers to determine which choices were “good.” Because the outcome was known to the researchers, they could evaluate the areas affected – those that either under-evacuated or over-evacuated regions.

The researchers found that people who scored well on the baseline math test made better choices on behalf of the community. People with higher numeracy issued evacuation orders that gave people more time to leave the storm’s path. People who have the practical ability to evaluate and understand risk ordered evacuations in the simulated disaster about nine hours earlier than people who did not have that skillset, the study found.

“This tells us that public trust in evacuation orders, which has been waning for years, could be improved if the population had greater confidence in their emergency management leaders’ ability to make sound decisions when they are given probabilistic forecasts,” Dormady said. “People need to trust that their neighborhood is not being over-evacuated out of an abundance of caution simply because public officials didn’t understand the risk.”

The study also found that officials who had the most complete set of forecast data were more likely to issue evacuation orders earlier, giving people in the hurricane’s path more time to get out of town than they would have had otherwise. That additional time was significant, the study found, adding between 16.6 and 22.8 hours to a community’s evacuation time.

Those hours, Dormady said, could be the difference between life and death for people in a storm’s path, and could also make evacuations, which are often a safety risk themselves, more safe. In fact, in some major disasters, more people die from poorly administered evacuations than from the catastrophic event itself.

“Extra hours are crucial – they give people more time to pack and prepare, they give emergency management officials more time to communicate the importance of evacuating, and they make evacuations, overall, more safe,” said Dormady, “And what we saw is that more complete forecast information gave emergency management officials the tools they needed to make better choices for their communities.”

Co-authors of this study include Anthony Fasano, Drew Flanagan and William Welch at Ohio State, Alfredo Roa-Henriquez at Johns Hopkins University, and Dylan Wood at the University of Notre Dame.

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

A pilot, astronaut, businessman and U.S. senator, Glenn would have turned 100 years old on July 18. This year, the John Glenn College of Public Affairs will recognize his birthday with a series of events and exhibits.

Glenn, who died Dec. 8, 2016, was considered by many to be a national hero. Selected by NASA as one of the first seven astronauts in the U.S. space program, he was the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962. He flew on a space shuttle mission at the age of 77 in 1998, making him the oldest person to go into space. Glenn also served 24 years in the U.S. Senate.

“John Glenn remains an American icon. His courage and commitment to discovery, education and public service were unwavering,” said Trevor Brown, dean of the Glenn College. “We are excited to be a part of the celebration of Glenn’s life and legacy.” 

The Glenn College will be participating in a centennial celebration planned for July 16-18 in the towns of Cambridge, Glenn’s birthplace, and New Concord, where he and his wife, Annie, grew up.

On July 17, a special Friendship 7-Mile Parade from Cambridge to New Concord is scheduled for 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. with pre- and post-parade remarks by Glenn’s daughter, Lyn Glenn, Trevor Brown, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown and others.

University Libraries’ Ohio Public Policy Archives has created a new John Glenn exhibit on the ground floor of Page Hall. Students, faculty, staff and the public are invited to view the exhibit from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

The exhibit includes memorabilia from:

• Glenn’s relationship with Ohio State
• His life and childhood
• His relationship with his wife, Annie
• His military, space and public service careers

A series of videos exploring the exhibit and can be viewed at https://go.osu.edu/jgc-exhibit-tour.

The Glenn College is developing plans to hold a series of events during the 2021-2022 academic year that will celebrate Glenn’s life of service. The college expects to announce events this fall.

Seven colleges have top 10 graduate and professional programs in the latest rankings: the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business (Fisher), Education and Human Ecology, Engineering, Law (Moritz), Nursing, and Public Affairs (John Glenn). U.S. News’ rankings of graduate and professional programs cover just a small portion of the programs offered at Ohio State, and not all programs are ranked each year.

“The excellence displayed across the university reflects Ohio State’s focus on developing the next generation of leaders throughout society,” said Executive Vice President and Provost Bruce A. McPheron. “Our comprehensive scope and focus on collaboration across disciplines acts as a force multiplier, preparing our graduate and professional students for leadership roles.”

Ohio State enrolls more than 14,000 graduate and professional students in 90 doctoral and 110 master's programs.

The Top 10 graduate and professional programs include dispute resolution (2), pediatric primary care nurse practitioner (3), business supply chain/logistics (4), psychiatric/mental health nurse practitioner (5), student counseling and personnel (5), doctor of nursing practice: administration (6), higher education administration (8), public management and leadership (8), education administration and supervision (9), business production/operations (9), nursing master’s (9), adult/gerontological primary care nurse practitioner (10), biological/agricultural engineering (10), part-time MBA (10), social stratification (10) and sociology of population (10).

Below are some highlights from U.S. News’ 2022 rankings of Ohio State graduate programs, by college.

The College of Arts and Sciences has five of its social sciences and humanities programs newly ranked this year. Political science is ranked 17th, sociology is ranked 18th, and economics, English and history are each ranked 30th among programs in the United States. Additionally, political science, which ranks sixth among programs at public universities, houses top specialties in American politics (11), international politics (12), political methodology (13) and comparative politics (20). Sociology, ranking eighth among programs at public universities, boasts two specialties ranked 10th in the nation: social stratification and sociology of population. Finally, English’s specialty in American literature after 1865 is ranked 13th.

Led by its MBA for Working Professionals Program (WPMBA), Fisher College of Business is home to two graduate programs highly ranked in the 2022 list. The WPMBA program was 10th among all U.S. programs (rising three spots), and fifth among U.S. publics — up two spots. Its full-time MBA program was 14th among U.S. publics. In addition, several specialty areas were highly ranked: supply chain management (4) and productions/operations (9).

The College of Education and Human Ecology ranks 28 out of 277 graduate education programs nationwide, putting it in the top 10% of similar programs. Three of its specialty graduate education programs were ranked in the top 10 nationally, and four additional programs made the top 20 list.

The College of Engineering’s graduate program is ranked first in Ohio and 16th among all public universities. Several departments within the college also placed among the top programs in the nation. The Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering ranked 10th among its peers within American universities. The Department of Materials Science and Engineering retained its rank of 12th overall. Other top 25 engineering disciplines at Ohio State include nuclear engineering (15), industrial/manufacturing engineering (16), aerospace engineering (19) and computer engineering (22). Overall, 216 engineering schools that grant doctoral degrees were surveyed. Ohio State Engineering is ranked 30th overall.

Moritz College of Law ranked best in Ohio and 40th in the nation out of 193 accredited law schools. The specialty program in dispute resolution is ranked second in the nation and five programs rank in the top 25 in the country: dispute resolution, criminal law, contract law, health law, and legal writing.

The College of Medicine ranked 28th in the ranking of Best Medical Schools–Primary Care, moving up 10 spots versus last year, and ranked 33rd among Best Medical Schools–Research, moving up one spot. In addition, Ohio State ranked seventh for Most Diverse Medical Schools, a new category this year. Specialty programs in surgery ranked 17th, anesthesiology ranked 18th and pediatrics ranked 21st. This recognizes the College of Medicine as one of the most diverse institutions in the country, providing top-tier medical and graduate education programs.

The College of Nursing’s master of science in nursing and doctor of nursing practice (DNP) programs were recognized for excellence in academic rigor and outcomes, with several specialization tracks singled out as top-five programs among public institutions. The rankings included ninth overall and third among public colleges for the master of science in nursing and 18th overall and eighth among public colleges for the DNP programs. This is the third consecutive year that the College of Nursing’s master’s program ranks in the nation’s top 10 and that its DNP program ranks in the nation’s top 20.

The John Glenn College of Public Affairs is ranked 13th in the country out of 285 ranked schools, placing it among the top 5% of public affairs graduate professional degree programs. No other public affairs program in Ohio is ranked in the top 50 schools. The college is also rated in eight out of 12 specialties ranked by U.S. News.

The College of Public Health is ranked first in Ohio and in the top 25 in the nation among 188 public health schools and programs accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health. The college’s specialty program in health care management — the Master of Health Administration — was also ranked first in the state and seventh overall in the most recent analysis of those programs.

A number of Ohio State programs earned high marks in previous years and the magazine reprints rankings from previous years in some fields.

Researchers in The Ohio State University Ohio Education Research Center (OERC) partnered with Smart Columbus, the Workforce Development Board of Central Ohio and United Way of Central Ohio on a study examining the effects of “disruptive” technologies on the regional workforce.

The study, “Fast Forward: The Future of Smart Work in Central Ohio,” found that technology disruptions inspired by the smart city movement – such as automation – will likely accelerate even more quickly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need to close skill gaps and deliver education and credentials for central Ohio workers will take on a new urgency.

Based on the research, the study sponsors are advising the central Ohio community to pursue the following recommendations:

1. Respond in real time: Use education, workforce and employment data to analyze in close-to-real-time what is happening in the economy so that the workforce system can quickly and proactively help job seekers understand what skills are needed, and help businesses know what skill sets are available in the region.
2. Train for the future: Establish a continuous learning system that educates and trains for future career opportunities.
3. Intervene early: Incorporate work and career exploration in curriculum as early as middle school and continuing through high school in all school districts in Franklin County. Provide exposure to high-demand occupations and key business sectors in central Ohio through required work experience and internships. Partner with employers to provide guidance and assistance in making the work experiences and internships meaningful.
4. Accelerate access to in-demand occupations: Improve access to employer-identified short-term certifications and credentials that more quickly get job seekers into in-demand occupations. In addition, re-engineer credentials and postsecondary degrees to be competency-based, meaning that learning is not based on a prescribed number of hours for a course, but rather a demonstrated knowledge of skills.
5. Establish “earn as you learn” opportunities and connect workers to them: Prioritize learning and skill acquisition with work for the entry- to mid-level workforce through the establishment of apprenticeships and other earn-as-you-learn opportunities by partnering with career technical education and the community college.
6. Support workers through to successful, quality jobs: Further solidify the workforce system to better coordinate job seekers through preparation for work and wrap-around services necessary to support job seekers through training and education.

“The Future of Smart Work is underway in central Ohio, where the network of education, workforce and business professionals are working hard to broaden participation in the economy of tomorrow. Our systematic review of the workforce trends highlights new opportunities and challenges for this growing and dynamic region,” said Josh Hawley, professor and director of the Ohio Education Research Center, which is housed in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

The center was founded in 2012 by a group of researchers from Ohio universities and independent research organizations. Its initial charge from the Ohio Department of Education’s Race to the Top program called for OERC to develop and implement a coherent P-20 education research agenda in collaboration with the Ohio Department of Education and Ohio Department of Higher Education.

The “Future of Smart Work” study was commissioned in 2019, when officials were aware that emerging technology had the potential to cause disruption to the regional workforce but were not anticipating a global pandemic that would create an even greater workforce challenge, said Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has inspired opportunities for innovation and advancement through automated goods delivery, remote learning, and more, but it has also laid bare inequities in access to connectivity and education,” Ginther said. “We must act now and engage residents in every stage of their careers in order to emerge from this crisis stronger and more prepared for continued change.”

Lisa Patt-McDaniel, president and CEO of the Workforce Development Board of Central Ohio, noted that nearly three-quarters of the workforce was deemed “critical” during the early days of the pandemic, but over 1.3 million Ohio workers still lost their jobs between March and May 2020.

“This study and the resulting recommendations show how we can do more protect and prepare the central Ohio workforce by grappling with difficult issues central to K-12 education and complexities that arise when adults lack basic skills or have significant barriers to education,” she said.

Added Lisa Courtice, president and CEO of United Way of Central Ohio, “If we don’t make student success a priority, then we will feel the ripple effects of the pandemic for years to come.”

The study was funded through the Smart Cities Challenge grant awarded to the City of Columbus by the Paul G. Allen Philanthropies, the United Way of Central Ohio and the Workforce Development Board of Central Ohio.

The team has created a hotline and website to collect information from people who participated in the protests or were directly affected by the protests. Individuals who want to share their protest experience are asked to call 1-800-678-6552 or visit http://www.columbusaar2020.org/ to express interest in participating in the study. A study team member will contact those individuals to schedule an interview.

“Following The Ohio State University’s research protocols, we will take extensive steps to protect the confidentiality of people who agree to participate in the research study,” said Trevor Brown, dean of Ohio State’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs, who is directing the research project. “Our goal is to gather as much information as possible about the protests of this summer and use this information to undertake an objective assessment that leads to constructive recommendations.”

Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein, Mayor Andrew J. Ginther, Council President Shannon G. Hardin and Police Chief Thomas Quinlan announced the independent, outside after-action review of the city’s response to recent protests in July. This appraisal, which will culminate with a written report presented to City Council, will be a holistic, policy review of the city’s response and is separate from the recent investigations into individual officers’ actions during the protests.

“We will include information from involved government agencies and officers, police training policies and protocols, incident reports from the police as well as other relevant data in our review,” said Carter M. Stewart, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio and special investigative researcher for the project. “We want to hear from participants about their experiences in the protests, which will be vital to the outcome of the research.”

The research team also includes nationally known experts in the fields of civil rights, law enforcement, organizational behavior, First Amendment rights, social media and public policy. Investigators and researchers will review information collected and interview people who were involved.

The team will use the information to produce a report analyzing the city’s effectiveness in preparing for and handling the protests, including an evaluation of the balance struck between public safety and freedom of speech. The report also will include research-informed recommendations for how the city can improve its response to future protests.

Completion of the report is expected by early 2021.

A part of the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative, the RADx Underserved Populations (RADx-UP) program will support research that aims to better understand COVID-19 testing patterns among minority and vulnerable populations; strengthen the data on disparities in infection rates, disease progression and outcomes; and develop strategies to reduce the disparities in COVID-19 testing, treatment and contact tracing.

“We decided to pursue this opportunity to benefit the residents of Ohio, especially minority and vulnerable populations who bear the brunt of COVID and its impacts in all facets of life,” said multiple-principal investigator Electra Paskett, director of the Division of Cancer Prevention and Control in the Department of Internal Medicine at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.

As of Aug. 1, Ohio had reported 91,159 COVID-19 cases and 3,489 deaths, and the burden of COVID-19 had disproportionally impacted Ohio’s Black and Latinos/Latinas communities. Although only 13.1% and 4% of Ohio’s population is Black and/or Hispanic/Latino respectively, 26% of Ohio’s cases are among African-American residents and 7% are among Hispanic/Latino populations, researchers wrote in their proposal.

“We plan to go to the populations within communities with the highest rates of health disparities to understand and develop ways to help increase education, testing and contact tracing in concert with the communities. We’ll also facilitate access to testing to those populations,” said Paskett, director of the Diversity Enhancement Program at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Center.

The research team includes more than a dozen investigators at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center; Ohio State’s Colleges of Arts and Sciences, Medicine, Public Health and the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity; Nationwide Children’s Hospital; and the State of Ohio. The award is linked to Ohio State’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards grant.

“This project reflects our ongoing commitment to apply rigorous scientific methods embedded in community-engaged research to improve health equity and address the most pressing health issues for Ohioans. If successful, RADx-UP Ohio can be disseminated throughout Ohio and across the United States to scale-up COVID-19 testing and, later, vaccination in minority, underserved and vulnerable populations,” said multiple-principal investigator Rebecca Jackson, director of The Ohio State University Center for Clinical and Translational Science and associate dean for clinical translational research.

Using data from an Ohio State and Ohio Department of Health study, researchers have chosen 12 at-risk counties in Ohio that contain multiple census tracks with disproportionately high concentrations of minority and vulnerable populations and few or no COVID-19 testing sites. The six urban counties in this project are Butler, Cuyahoga, Franklin, Jefferson, Lucas and Trumbull, while the six rural counties are Hardin, Meigs, Muskingum, Ross, Scioto and Washington.

“It is critical that all Americans have access to rapid, accurate diagnostics for COVID-19, especially underserved and vulnerable populations who are bearing the brunt of this disease,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins. “The RADx-UP program will help us better understand and alleviate the barriers to testing for those most vulnerable and reduce the burden of this disease.”

Glenn was a former adjunct professor of speech-language pathology in the Ohio State University Department of Speech and Hearing Science, which awards the Annie Glenn Leadership Award annually for innovative and inspirational work in the field. She is also the recipient of an honorary Doctor of Public Service from Ohio State in recognition of her humanitarian efforts for adults and children who stutter, sharing the same disorder Glenn contended with for more than five decades.

Ohio State renamed a stretch of 17th Avenue in the heart of the campus’s academic core “Annie & John Glenn Avenue” in November 2015 in recognition of their service and commitment to the university.

“Our Ohio State community joins the entire nation in mourning the loss of Annie Glenn, a wonderful person, courageous spirit and deeply devoted citizen, mother, grandmother and loving friend,” said Ohio State President Michael V. Drake.

“In just a moment spent with Annie and John Glenn, it was immediately evident that they were a team. They had known each other since childhood, and their close partnership throughout life uplifted countless Americans. Together, they helped shape the very fabric of our country. Their legacy of extraordinary public service will live on at Ohio State and across the nation.

“Annie will be greatly missed, and we extend our deepest condolences to the Glenn family.”

Annie and John Glenn, who both grew up in New Concord, Ohio, and attended Muskingum University, had strong connections to Ohio State, home to the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, established by the Board of Trustees in 2015. The college began as the John Glenn School of Public Policy in 2006 when the John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy merged with the School of Public Policy and Management.

The institute was founded in 1999, after John Glenn donated his papers and memorabilia to Ohio State. The materials document his career as a military aviator, NASA astronaut and businessman, as well as his service as a U.S. senator from 1975 to 1999.

“Annie Glenn was introduced to the world by Senator John Glenn after his orbit of the Earth, but we really came to know her years later when she found her voice after conquering a profound stutter,” said Trevor Brown, dean of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. “The world is better for it. Annie was kind at heart, determined in spirit, and generous to everyone she met. She was both a devoted partner and a singular individual, a person of great strength and love.”

A virtual memorial service will be conducted at 11 a.m. (Eastern) Saturday, June 6, at the Broad Street Presbyterian Church. No parishioners or guests will be present due to current COVID-19 restrictions prohibiting large public gatherings. The service will be livestreamed at glenn.osu.edu.

Annie Glenn will be buried with John Glenn in Arlington National Cemetery. John Glenn died Dec. 8, 2016, at the age of 95. The couple are survived by daughter Lyn and their son, David.

Home ownership on a middle-income budget is a step closer to being realized for 10,000 central Ohioans, after a proposal by a team of Ohio State University faculty and community partners was selected for investment in the Alliance for the American Dream competition.

The project, Power of Home, is an innovative digital service platform and suite of resources that leverages the purchase of a first home as a springboard for increasing income, reducing expenses and maximizing the economic potential of the home.

Power of Home equips 10,000 new homeowners on the edge of the middle class with customized information, advice and financial capital to maximize the economic value of the home and buffer financial shocks.

The platform’s first elements are expected to be rolled out in August. The team has identified 40,000 homeowners to recruit to the program, with a goal to have the first person enrolled by October and 10,000 enrolled by the end of 2020.The project is a collaboration of Ohio State, the Ohio Housing Finance Agency, the social enterprise Framework Homeownership and other partners.

Schmidt Futures awarded Ohio State a $1.5 million grant to generate ideas to raise the net income of 10,000 middle-class families in central Ohio by 10 percent by 2020. Overall, Ohio is on track to receive up to $2.3 million from Schmidt Futures in support of the Alliance for the American Dream work.

Power of Home provisionally received an additional $300,000 earlier this month following its final presentation to Schmidt Futures, which founded the Alliance for the American Dream in New York City. The team earned a second-place finish among four land-grant and public research universities in the contest (Arizona State and the universities of Utah and Wisconsin also participated).

The Alliance was created by Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that bets early on people who will make our world better – helping people to achieve more for others by applying advanced science and technology thoughtfully and by working together across fields.

“Partnerships are at the core of Ohio State’s incredible impact,” said President Michael V. Drake. “These projects leverage those meaningful connections, and the expertise on our campuses and in our communities, to develop scalable solutions to advance prosperity and well-being broadly across our state and nation.”

“We are a city known for its collaborative nature,” said Columbus Mayor Andrew J. Ginther. “This partnership will help create the vibrant and diverse neighborhoods that are vital to becoming America’s Equal Opportunity City.” 

Power of Home was one of six Ohio projects designed in collaboration with the Alliance for the American Dream.

Several of the other Alliance-inspired Ohio projects are moving forward with support from other investors.

• The Ohio Microfarm Project is food system project that increases access to fresh produce while providing training and supplies to farmers in the Mansfield area, as well as assistance with cultivating their products to increase sales. A collaboration between Ohio State, community-based improvement organizations, economic development organizations and chambers of commerce, the project plans to seed a local sustainable economic engine in the heart of the six cities and neighborhoods that host Ohio State. The Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research awarded a $2 million matching grant to Ohio State at Mansfield that will go toward development of an urban sustainable food system there.
   
• The Prosperity Promise helps Columbus State Community College students navigate resources for jobs, education and community services such as a food pantry, rental assistance, near-campus flexible child care services, ride-sharing vehicles and health care screenings. It is a collaboration between Ohio State (through its Ohio Education Research Center), Columbus State Community College, United Way of Central Ohio and other community partners. Recently, Columbus State partnered with Franklin County Job and Family Services to open a campus office to serve students eligible for assistance programs and has partnered with the Community Shelter Board and the Mid-Ohio Foodbank to support students in need.

Ohio State Executive Vice President and Provost Bruce A. McPheron says these collaborations have great potential.

“The Ohio State University has come together with the central Ohio community in a new and exciting way with the goal of helping Ohioans to flourish. We are excited to support teams that are keeping homeowners in their homes, growing fresh produce on urban micro-farms, and helping area students succeed,” said McPheron.

Power of Home grew out of a pilot study led by Stephanie Moulton, associate professor and director of doctoral studies within Ohio State’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs, and Cäzilia Loibl, associate professor of consumer sciences in the College of Education and Human Ecology.

The pilot program provided 500 new homeowners with one year of free financial coaching and reduced the default rate on those mortgages by 20 percent – demonstrating how effective counseling can be in the first year of home ownership.

The second round of the Alliance for the American Dream to search for the best ideas to help middle-class families will begin in August.