But by talking to the people who lived in these communities, scientists are filling in historic gaps that technology can’t fill, adding trees, cars, people, photographs and life stories to the digitized infrastructure that was an initial focus of the work.

The research team from The Ohio State University has published an update on the Ghost Neighborhoods of Columbus project in the International Journal of Digital Humanities, reporting on the technology workflow, including solutions to bottlenecks they’ve encountered, and acknowledging a slow start to community engagement that hums along nicely these days. The team aims to put both the digital work and story collection on a faster track. 

Launched in early 2021, the project has digitally reconstructed three historically Black communities that were fragmented or demolished to make way for new freeways under the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. Prompted by a Columbus Dispatch article describing the heartbreak of highways being built through neighborhoods, the researchers set out to recount the human impact of urban renewal decisions of the past, hoping that these historic insights could have a positive impact on any future development. 

“Doing this in a community-engaged way is not trivial,” said senior study author Harvey Miller, professor of geography and director of Ohio State’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA). “What we’re trying to do is show how we went about making sure that these models not only have validity, but that they actually reflect what people remember, what these neighborhoods used to look like – and also add value to the community.” 

While the project started as a purely scientific pursuit, the digital models and accompanying stories have found a future permanent home. The Poindexter Village African American Museum, set to open in 2028, will have a room dedicated to the Ghost Neighborhoods, said Shelbi Toone, project director for the museum, which will be the newest site within the Ohio History Connection system. 

Poindexter Village, an early U.S. public housing project and the only one dedicated to African American residents, is one area recaptured in 3D models by CURA researchers. Only two of the 35 original apartment buildings still stand, and those structures, connected by an atrium to be built between them, will house the new museum. 

The other communities modeled in the project are Hanford Village as it looked in 1961 and Mount Vernon Avenue in 1951. Much of Hanford Village, established in the early 1900s and expanded during World War II to house Black veterans, was razed for construction of I-70 in the 1960s. Mount Vernon Avenue was a busy commercial corridor in the mid-20th century before its connection to Downtown was severed by construction of I-71. 

Miller and colleagues reported in 2023 on using machine learning to extract data from Sanborn fire insurance maps to create digital models. Since then, the researchers have focused on efforts to automate the generation of 3D models that are historically accurate, which has been a taller order. 

Graduate student Tshui Mum (Summer) Ha has been working on ways to streamline and accelerate the 3D modeling process. This includes finding similar groups of buildings based on their shapes and semantic attributes – such as the number of stories, building use and construction materials – identifying their architectural elements, and developing templates for 3D modeling. 

“Many existing studies have been using just the exterior walls of the buildings for clustering. We realized that including semantic attributes of those building footprints is a huge improvement compared to just looking at the exterior walls. We also found that having interior lines of the buildings may hold additional value to further improve the clustering results, and this will be our next step,” Ha said.

“The better we can cluster these buildings, the better we can understand their distinctive architectural styles and the more accurately we can generate plausible 3D models at scale. We are benchmarking these methods that, hopefully, we would be able to identify the most effective approach to help us speed up the modeling process.” 

The goal to speed things up is, in part, related to making community engagement as productive as possible. 

To date, the team has been building historically accurate models and then asking for elder feedback in a variety of ways, often attending community meetings with stickers and storyboards that attendees use to add finishing touches that bring the models to life. 

“For all three neighborhoods, we’re adding more realistic backgrounds like brick streets and grass so it’s not just a map,” Miller said. “What we’d like to do is generate a first approximation of a neighborhood using accelerated techniques, engage people in the process early on, and come back later with a more polished product. Not too far in the future, we expect to be able to take a laptop with 3D models, ask people, ‘What do you think about this building?’ and make adjustments on the spot.” 

Toone, the museum project director, connected the CURA team with James Preston Poindexter Foundation historians and elders to record oral histories related to landmarks and neighborhoods in the models, which will also be featured in the museum. 

“I thought this was something that people need to see and experience. It needs to be tangible to the public,” said Toone, also a co-author of the paper. “There’s a lot of narrative to tell when you pull back to 1940 and really talk about the thriving neighborhood that used to be there. And I think it gives people a true sense of preservation and understanding of what was here through the technology since so many of these buildings have turned over, been demolished or changed.” 

Soon, the team plans to ask elders for suggestions for other lost-city themes – ideas for churches and the funk music scene have been floated so far – that should be similarly digitally re-created with accompanying stories. 

“One important thing is that we’re trying to establish a platform for people in the community to tell their stories,” Miller said. “They’re not our stories – they’re theirs.” 

This work was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Battelle Engineering, Technology and Human Affairs endowment at Ohio State. 

Additional Ohio State co-authors include Ningchuan Xiao, Matthew Lewis, Mostahidul Alam, Oliver Gwynn, Michelle Hooper, Karyn Kerdolff, Gavin Levine, Yuantai Li, Mahnoush Mostafavisabet, Joshua Sadvari, Josie Stiver, Jordan Swaim-Fox, Shubh Thakkar, Ahmad Ilderim Tokey and Di Wang.

They spend their time providing free physical therapy to the center’s patients, many of whom do not have insurance or struggle with another barrier to accessing care.

“The parameters for who we see at the clinic are intentionally loose,” said Marka Salsberry, associate professor of practice. “We say ‘a patient with a financial barrier.’ That could be someone without insurance. That could be someone with Medicare who can’t afford their 20% co-pay for physical therapy. It could be someone with 100% insurance coverage but they’ve exhausted all their allotted visits for the year and need more.”

The Ohio State University Student Physical Therapy Clinic is a nonprofit, student-run, full-service clinic. Patients see second-year doctoral students, who are guided on-site by third-year students as well as two licensed physical therapists. Between 70 and 75 students spend three hours, Mondays and Wednesdays, at the clinic each autumn and spring semester.

Many of the clinic’s patients struggle with injuries that are routine but that have plagued them for years, Salsberry said.

“A patient may come in with something presenting like frozen shoulder, which is tightening of the shoulder joint due to inflammation. It’s painful and limiting in terms of function, and all these patients continue to work,” she said. “It takes us four weeks and then they can use that arm again.”

A valuable skill that students learn, Salsberry said, is creating treatment programs that are actually usable for patients. Many physical therapy programs involve exercises at home, which may not be viable.

“These are individuals who work two or three jobs,” she said. “That’s often a 12-hour day or more. We need to give patients programs they can work into their days. We’ve try to give them something they can do if they’re working on an assembly line, like marches or squats. So, it’s a mind shift [for students]. The approach is different because of the needs of the population.”

Claire Black, a third-year doctoral student, found another consideration when working in the clinic: patients’ families.

After working with a patient who had experienced a stroke, Black was approached by the man’s daughter with complaints of back pain. Black realized that the cause of the young woman’s pain was lifting her father.

“How do we teach family members to help without hurting their own bodies?” she said. “Helping is a reality for so many of our patients and their families. We adapt things to make it feasible and safe for everyone. That’s so important.”

The clinic is run by a student board. Black is chair of the board this year. She said the experience has been valuable with graduation on the horizon.

“I serve in a manager role for the clinic,” she said. “I’m in charge of supervising the other board members and also things like making sure the clinic runs smoothly. It’s prepared me to handle things like scheduling challenges, providing exercise programs and making sure we’re teaching the second-year students.”  

Second-year students are paired with third-year mentors. This partnership helps both students. Second-years learn tips from their peers and third-years get experience as instructors.

More importantly, though, said Black, the students are providing care to people who do not have access to it.

“It continues to surprise me – the lack of access to care,” she said. “We are filling a gap.”

Community service is central to physical therapy, Salsberry said.

“I do feel that that is our responsibility, as a profession,” she said. “And I feel the university takes that responsibility seriously, too. … It’s heartbreaking when you see someone with an injury that can be easily fixed; just a couple of visits to a physical therapist would change their day-to-day life. It’s so rewarding when you can reach those people.”

“It’s important, not just as an Ohio State student, but as a person representing the profession of physical therapy [to give back to the community],” Black said. “It’s important that our care meets the needs of every single person, not just those with money, and not just those with high health care literacy. There is an access issue, and we are helping to close that gap.”

Patients can be seen at the clinic this year through Nov. 20. To schedule an appointment, call 614-859-1952.

Carter spoke before about 150 guests at the City Club of Cleveland last week. The club is one of the nation’s oldest free speech forums and has hosted sitting presidents, members of Congress and community leaders.

As he prepares for his Nov. 8 investiture, Carter said he is excited by the momentum at Ohio State. He pointed to more than 80,000 applications to join the university this year, historic enrollment for new first-year students and record-high graduate enrollment.

“There’s something special happening right now, today, at Ohio State. I couldn’t be more excited about that. But we’ve got to think about: How are we going to transform ourselves?” he said. “I’ve said this before: Even though we were founded in 1870 as a land-grant university, we’re going to have to re-imagine what it means to be a land-grant university going past 2030, all the way to 2035.”

Carter said he has engaged faculty, students, staff and alumni in a series of workshops to understand what they think the university should prioritize. He said the fruit of that labor will be launched at his investiture as the university’s new strategic plan – Education for Citizenship 2035.

“I believe our job, our mission, is not only to create the best learning and teaching environment in the country. I believe our job is to create a pathway for the next great citizens of our country, the state of Ohio, and, quite frankly, the next leaders for the state of Ohio,” he said. “In fact, my vision, … why I came to this institution, I believe The Ohio State University is uniquely poised to be the university not only for the state of Ohio, but for the United States.”

He said Ohio State would achieve that goal by emphasizing strategic areas of focus. They will include academic excellence; groundbreaking research and development; world-class clinical care; talent acquisition and retention; resource stewardship; and athletics.

Carter said the focus on these areas would also come with a commitment to affordability.

“I want to not only be the place where people want to go, but I also want people to be able to say, ‘This is the best value education you can get for the dollar,’ whether you’re in the state of Ohio or out of state.”  

Ohio State President Walter “Ted” Carter Jr. led the university’s state tour this week to stops in Cleveland, Oberlin and Medina, among others. The state tour is an opportunity for university representatives to meet with business leaders, community members and alumni outside of Columbus and highlight the shared connections in Ohio.

Carter, who was joined by Ohio State First Lady Lynda Carter, spoke at Green Circle Growers, the first stop on the tour, which is an expansive greenhouse operation that has workforce and research partnerships with the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

“Lynda and I just couldn’t be more excited to be here along with some of our faculty and, most importantly, these phenomenal students that came up to be with us here on a two-day tour visit of northeast Ohio,” Carter said. “The agricultural mission of Ohio is so important. One in eight people in the state of Ohio work in the ag and food industry. It’s an industry that has over $124 billion in economic impact. So it’s important for us to be here.”

Partnerships and impact are themes Carter mentioned often during the tour. He also visited Patterson Fruit Farm and Sandridge Crafted Foods. Both are family-owned and operated companies led by Ohio State alumni, with university research partnerships embedded in their culture.

The state tour also highlighted the university’s efforts to give back to the community. The Office of Student Life joined staff from the Cavaliers, representatives from Coca-Cola and members of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics to aid the Children’s Hunger Alliance.

Working on the court at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, they teamed up to pack 2,300 weekend meal boxes (or the equivalent of 13,800 meals) to distribute to more than 50 partners across the state. The students who participated in the project said it was among the highlights of the trip.

“Honestly, it was amazing, just being a part of a cause that was bigger than all of us,” said Anthony Koulianos, a fourth-year neuroscience major.

On day two of the tour, the university helped open the Lake County Fair. The 169th year of the county fair celebrated the agricultural roots of the region – aided by Ohio State University Extension in Lake County and university-supported 4-H programs.

Carter, students and university staff toured livestock areas, visited the poultry show and helped lead the national anthem.

The state tour also helped the university connect with the future. The Office of Strategic Enrollment Management hosted a pep rally at Mentor High School in one of the largest school districts in Lake County.

About 200 people attended the pep rally, including current Mentor students and staff as well as prospective students from area high schools. Members of the Ohio State Marching Band celebrated students from the region who will be joining Ohio State in the fall. Carter spoke to the crowd about the value of a college degree and the university’s commitment to affordability, noting that 58% of Ohio State graduates leave school without debt.

“We not only want our students to come, learn, grow, become critical thinkers. We also want them to be successful,” he said. “We also want them to know that there are great opportunities within the state of Ohio.”

Kimmara Yarbrough, a fifth-year nursing major, said the state tour helped her understand the passion people in Ohio have for the university.

“I think Ohio State has the craziest school spirit I’ve ever seen in my life,” she said. “Seeing alumni that excited to come back, and even people who didn’t come to Ohio State, they just saw us there and they wanted to say, ‘Hi.’ Their children were like, ‘I want to go there. I want to see Brutus. I want to see the drum major.’ So it just goes to show that the community we build at Ohio State and the spirit that we have here really drives what we do.”

“Any mouthguard helps prevent injuries,” she said. “But no mouthguard can prevent injuries if it isn’t worn.”

Earlier this month, students at West High School benefited from Mendel’s expertise, as well as that of her colleagues and students in the Sports Dentistry Club. Twenty-five high school football players saw dental students who made molds of their mouths that will be turned into free, custom mouthguards. 

Players are more likely to wear mouthguards that fit well, Mendel said, and a custom mouthguard will have a more comfortable fit.  In addition to being more comfortable, the mouthguards have one more alluring feature.

“The dentistry students can put logos on them, names,” she said. “You can personalize it, which makes the mouthguard a little bit cooler. Hopefully they’ll want to wear them.”

Founded last year by third-year dentistry student Ethan Leonard and his classmate Logan Shope, the Sports Dentistry Club has only hosted one mouthguard event but plans to do more based on this year’s success. Community engagement is a pillar of the club’s mission.

“We wanted it to be educational and service-led,” he said. “We want to give back because dental school is such a privilege.”

West High School, part of the Columbus City Schools, has long needed upgrades for its sports teams. Resurrected in 2023, the school’s booster program has pitched in to raise money for athletic uniforms and facilities. In its first year, Sports Dentistry Club donated toothbrushes and so-called “bite and boil” mouthguards that West High players could mold at home.

Wanting to do more this year, Leonard organized the mouthguard event, which was held at Postle Hall. Cardinal Transportation, a local charter service, volunteered to drive the students to Ohio State’s campus.

Each West High student was assigned three dental students: one who made the mold, one who assisted and one who shepherded the high schooler from the lobby to the procedure room and back again. Mendel and four other faculty members oversaw the work.

“I was blown away by the camaraderie of the College of Dentistry,” Mendel said. “Faculty volunteered; students volunteered. We had staff that helped, too. It made me feel so good that everyone pitched in – that brought the school together.” 

The West High students enjoyed the event just as much, Leonard said.

“I didn’t expect that,” he said. “But they seemed to really enjoy it. We got a lot of ‘thank yous.’ It was neat to see that as a provider after playing high school sports myself.”

Commenting on the event’s success, Carroll Ann Trotman, the college’s dean, said, “I’m proud that our staff, faculty and students are pitching in to provide care for student-athletes at Columbus area schools. These are great opportunities for our students to help meet an important need and to have a positive impact on the lives of others.”

Trotman added, “This is just one example of what can be accomplished when the college community works together. I’m grateful to the Sports Dentistry Club members, to Dr. Mendel, and everyone who helped with this worthwhile effort.”

Leonard and Mendel agree that the club will host more mouthguard events in the future, focusing on area schools that may not have easy access to dentists.

This type of community work is important, Mendel said. Dentistry students get to hone a skill they’ll be using in their careers while they help student athletes stay healthy.

“You do hope that if they do it as a College of Dentistry student, it will carry over into their practices as well,” she said. “You want students to learn that skill but also to learn the philosophy.”

“You’re working with people, making a difference in their lives while also using creativity,” Paulhardt said of her work, which includes color matching fillings and visualizing treatment options in small spaces like the mouth. “There’s a lot of artistry that people don’t think about.”

Paulhardt will have the chance to use her creativity to help patients in February at the College of Dentistry’s annual Give Kids A Smile Day. She serves as president of Ohio State’s student chapter of the organization, which is sponsored by the American Dental Association Foundation.

“Our student leaders are dedicated to the success of these events,” said Erin Gross, assistant professor and director of pediatric dentistry. “They plan for months and work hard to make it a great day for our patients and their families.”

On Feb. 3, from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m., children in underserved communities will have access to free dental care. With an appointment, patients can get a cleaning and receive diagnostic and preventive services – no insurance required. Complimentary parking will be provided for each patient at the 11th Avenue Garage by CampusParc.

By age 12 months, children should have a dental home, Paulhardt said. Ohio State’s pediatric dentistry clinic charges fees that are generally less than those charged in private practice, and the clinic accepts government health insurance, which is rare.

In addition to providing routine examinations, a dental home offers a level of comfort for patients. They can ask questions and flag concerns, which may lead to catching a problem sooner.   

“The earlier they [see us], the better the outcomes we see when they’re older. You can get ahead of [any issues] and instill good oral care practices from an early age,” she said. “Then you’re not playing catch up when they’re older.”

“Many families struggle to find dental care, especially for young children,” Gross said. “Through Give Kids A Smile we hope to establish a dental home for the children who need us the most. Families are encouraged to return to the College of Dentistry for any treatment they need.”

Dental and dental hygiene students will perform the procedures, but residents and faculty are present to answer questions and lend a hand.  

“There are so many people there that day,” Paulhardt said. “We have dental and dental hygiene faculty, we have pediatric dentistry residents, we have general practice dentistry residents. They advise on everything [we] do.”

Finding faculty and students willing to volunteer their time isn’t difficult, she said. Often, the event has more than it needs.

“The day feels so magical. Everyone is so happy and excited to be there,” she said. “There’s nothing but good energy. Everyone is happy to provide [the kids] with these services.”

“Our team is ecstatic,” she said. “And our [school] principal partners were just over the moon.”

Anderson-Butcher – along with co-principal investigator Samantha Bates, assistant professor in the College of Social Work, and Javier Negrete and Olivia Rozsits, staff in the College of Social Work – applied for the grant as part of their work at Ohio State’s Community and Youth Collaborative Institute (CAYCI).

Over the next five years, the U.S. Department of Education will provide $500,000 annually to the One Linden Schools Initiative, a coalition that includes Ohio State, Columbus City Schools, United Way of Central Ohio, and the City of Columbus Department of Neighborhoods. These partnerships are the key to the success Anderson-Butcher has seen at Hamilton and Windsor.

Former Columbus City Schools superintendent Dan Good, a friend, asked her to work with the team at Hamilton, which at one time had the third highest discipline referral rate in the district. Anderson-Butcher and CAYCI staff began working with Columbus principals Chris Brady and Lee DuMond to bring her Community Collaboration Model to the Linden-area schools. Results came almost immediately, due in large part to collaboration around the project.

“It ended up being the College of Social Work giving some resources. … United Way gave some resources. The city gave resources. The schools gave some resources,” she said of the effort. “In the first year, we decreased behavioral incidences by 60%.”

This initial partnership work set the stage for the new U.S. Department of Education award that starts Jan. 1, 2024. 

The Community Collaboration Model works to make a school a neighborhood core. Students are, of course, welcome, but so are their families. Along with the grant, partnerships with local organizations like the YMCA of Central Ohio, LiFEsports, and St. Stephen’s Community House further bolster the schools.

“There’s parent and family programming. There’s after-school and summer programming. There are connections to behavioral and mental health [support], to the food bank, to housing,” Anderson-Butcher said. “Families in the community will see the schools as hubs. So they will go to the schools, not just for their kids’ education in the classroom but to have a sense of community, to help other parents, to access resources, to have new opportunities for learning.”

The grant money builds from these early partnerships, and will be used to build more strategic connections, strengthen infrastructure, provide more youth development and academic programming, and solidify the One Linden efforts as part of broader city-wide planning, Anderson-Butcher said.

“We [help] by building out these partnerships so they can meet the needs of the kids,” she said. “If we can help the school become the hub where people can access resources and programs, then the barriers to learning and development can be nullified.”

Some of the obstacles can be quashed simply by bringing services to the schools.

“A lot of times, what you need is resource coordination,” Anderson-Butcher said. “[Parents] often have barriers that get in the way of accessing [what they need]. It could be working four jobs. It could be little siblings that need care. So [we] alleviate the barriers to access by co-locating programs and services at the school.”

In addition to social services, students will have increased access to limited medical and dental treatment.

“We want to be sure that every kid in school has well checks,” she said. “If they need, say, glasses, they have referrals and opportunities to get glasses that are affordable or free.”

Anderson-Butcher said that the community that comes from the schools is just as important.

“Last week we had a holiday event, a Mingle Jingle,” she said. “When we started, there were no holiday events. … Last week there were over 350 kids and their families in the gym. They walked away with a present, a new coat, fresh food and more. The new grant will further bring together parents, families and kids, to celebrate, connect with other parents and teachers/staff, and feel a sense of community.”

Community work like this is the backbone of Ohio State, Anderson-Butcher said.

“We are a land-grant institution. The whole foundation is taking the knowledge generated by a university and putting it into practice on behalf of Ohio residents. What is better than the university being in the community, with our students doing real-life application of what they’re learning in the classroom, to benefit kids and schools?” she said.  “It’s the reason why I came to Ohio State. We can’t wait to continue building upon this work and make more of a difference in the lives of kids and families in Linden.”

Ali, who is serving as the spokesperson in the 42nd annual Blood Battle between The Ohio State University and the University of Michigan, doesn’t enjoy having his blood taken, he said. But he reminds himself that the people who do that work are the best ones for it.

“Imagine who’s the best at doing it,” said Ali, medical director of University Hospital, physician and clinical professor of internal medicine. “The people that do it every day, multiple times a day. … I haven’t met a person in a blood drive who isn’t an expert at what they do.”

The battle began on Oct. 25 and will end on Nov. 22. Forty-eight blood drives are being held across the university’s campus. The winner will receive the Blood Battle trophy during halftime on Nov. 25, when the Buckeyes face the Wolverines on the football field. Ohio State topped Michigan in donations last year and is looking to do it again.

“Healthy competition is a great way [to raise awareness about the need for blood products],” Ali said. “It’s an opportunity to say, ‘Hey, let’s take something we love to rally around – our love for the university, our love for the Buckeyes and our love of sports – and visit a blood donation site around the university.’”

In addition to his work as a physician, Ali plays an administrative role in the university’s blood supply. As medical director of University Hospital, he works with an interdepartmental team to monitor blood supply levels.

“It was an easy step when I was asked to be the spokesperson for this year’s Blood Battle. I said, ‘Sign me up’ because I live it every day.”

Donations don’t take long: People are usually finished in an hour. Each donation can save as many as three lives, which are most likely in the Columbus community.

“[The donations] will most likely be used locally because it’s a resource that has to be handled carefully,” Ali said. “It’s not like a monetary donation to a national organization. You know when you’re doing it that it’s going to be used in the supply chain in your area. You really are giving back to the patients that we’re caring for here.”

Blood transfusions are routinely used for both long-term and immediate care. Around 1 in 7 people in the hospital require them, Ali said.

In emergency situations, timely access to blood can make a significant difference in a patient’s recovery.

“There’s something called ‘the golden hour’ of resuscitation in trauma injuries,” Ali said. “You have to do as much as you can within the first hour of something like a car accident. If you’re delayed because you don’t have resources like blood, the outcomes of those patients get worse with each hour lost.”

When people are hospitalized for longer periods of time, they often need blood transfusions to support their healing.

“Sometimes patients who are critically ill, their metabolism has shifted so much as they’re trying to heal that they don’t produce as much blood as they normally would,” Ali said. “Their blood counts start to drift down so we need to provide them that help.”

Helping people understand a hospital’s many needs for blood is part of his role as spokesperson, Ali said. Another is emphasizing blood donations can be part of a person’s routine. He donates several times a year. Following established guidelines, a person can donate as often as every 56 days, he said.  

“How do you communicate that to folks? You tell people how easy it is to give blood,” Ali said. “It’s quick, it’s simple. You can be done in under an hour. And it’s impactful.”

For information about where to donate, visit Versiti’s website: https://versiti.org/ways-to-give/annual-blood-drives/ohio-state-vs-michigan-blood-battle.

That young person might be experiencing homelessness, a condition that is rising among youth in our society. 

Homelessness among youth is not rare. Recent United States estimates indicate that 1 in 30 adolescents (ages 13-17) and 1 in 10 young adults (ages 18-25) experience homelessness each year.

To complicate matters, youth are disproportionately burdened by the opioid epidemic. Their reported rates of opioid use, often used to escape from the depression and trauma of homelessness, is up to 79%. The result: mental health issues, drug overdose and suicide.  

Yet research to end homelessness and prevent or intervene in drug use and mental health problems among these youth has lagged that of adults, which puts this segment of the nation’s future – our youth – in jeopardy. 

Researchers at The Ohio State University are committed to working to change these discouraging numbers. An interdisciplinary team that includes service providers in the community has begun a groundbreaking five-year, $6.9 million grant project.  

Funding comes from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Drug Abuse and its Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) initiative. 

The project will provide nurses, counselors and mental health service professionals with a tested approach to intervene in opioid use. It is titled “Building Social and Structural Connections for the Prevention of Opioid Use Disorder among Youth Experiencing Homelessness: A Randomized, Controlled Trial Examining Biopsychosocial Mechanisms.”

The two principal investigators are Jodi Ford, professor in Ohio State’s College of Nursing, assistant director of the Martha S. Pitzer Center for Women, Children, and Youth, and director of the Stress Science Lab, and Natasha Slesnick, distinguished professor and associate dean for research in Ohio State’s College of Education and Human Ecology.

“Our research, and that of others, shows that exposure to adverse childhood and life experiences is linked to irregular patterns of cortisol, a primary stress hormone, and high levels of inflammation in the body,” said Ford. “That phenomenon may contribute to depression and death by suicide, as well as substance use, often used to reduce symptoms of psychological distress.”   

Ford’s and Slesnick’s research will be conducted in collaboration with Star House, the only drop-in center in Columbus serving youth experiencing homelessness. Ford said the project will document how evidence-based interventions targeting substance use, as well as connections to community services and safe and supportive people and places, can help prevent opioid and other substance misuse in Columbus’ population and across the country. 

Slesnick founded Star House in 2006. “We needed a 24/7 drop-in center because these youth tend to avoid services such as community shelters,” she said. “They cite issues such as predation by older adult shelter clients and fear of being returned to foster care or home settings where they had negative experiences.”  

An independent nonprofit since 2017, Star House provides young people ages 14-24 with immediate access to safety and acceptance. Their basic needs, such as meals, showers and computer access, are met. And each year, 1,200 unduplicated youth are accessing those services. Crucial, stabilizing resources are offered through mental health therapy, job-search support and help transitioning to housing. 

In addition to serving the youths’ needs, the location hosts ongoing best-practice studies by Ford, Slesnick and other researchers. The researchers can interview youth, gather and analyze data to determine how best to meet their needs, and invite them to return for follow-up interviews. 

In this project, the research team will train the therapists and youth advocates at Star House to implement evidence-based interventions, which include a motivational and substance use/mental health intervention and an advocacy intervention focused on linkage to community and social supports.

“Our goal is to test the real-world effectiveness of the interventions individually and in combination to understand which is most effective in preventing opioid use disorder and other substance use and in improving mental health outcomes as well as homelessness,” Slesnick said.

“We also will conduct the first cost-benefit analysis on this approach, which has not been done before,” she said. “Knowing the cost of the interventions will help agencies plan for their adoption. Our goal is for this work to have practical benefit to those serving youth across the country.” 

The team will examine whether the interventions work, how they work and if they work for all youth or only specific groups.  

“We will be investigating the social connections of youth, their social isolation in the community and relationships to stress biology,” Ford said. “Specifically, we’ll examine how the intervention enhances social connections and a sense of belonging and reduces toxic stress associated with the significant adversity these youth experience daily.” 

Slesnick emphasized the importance of prioritizing youth well-being.

“By confronting and dismantling the barriers faced by youth, who aren’t fortunate to have caring adults in their lives, such as unstable housing and limited education, we can forge a pathway to a healthier and brighter future for generations to come,” she said. 

“We appreciate partnering with Star House to help the youth in our community, as well as to inform community intervention practices around the country,” Ford said. “Youth experiencing homelessness have many strengths, and like all youth, they need the care and support of individuals and communities to help them experience a healthy transition into adulthood.” 

Ford’s and Slesnick’s research team for the project will include Professor Xin Feng and Associate Professor Tansel Yilmaz, both with the College of Education and Human Ecology; College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Christopher Browning, Department of Sociology; and Beth Boettner, a research scientist in the Institute for Population Research, College of Arts and Sciences.  

Ann Marie Hulver, a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences, has participated in the program for more than five years. She sees it as an opportunity to broaden students’ horizons.

“Skype a Scientist has been a great way to get people interested in marine science who may not be otherwise,” she said. “If there’s a class in Ohio, they may not know much about coral reefs. It’s a good way to get students learning about something that’s not necessarily in the normal curriculum.”

Depending on the class age, Hulver will be asked questions that range from what her favorite animal is to how she became a scientist. Answering questions at different education levels has made her a stronger educator, she said.

“As scientists, especially scientists who study climate change like I do, you realize that most people don’t have the same expertise you do,” she said. “As scientists, it’s important to be good at communication with people that aren’t scientists. Skype a Scientist is helpful with that.”

Interested scientists apply each semester, listing their specialty and preferred age range, as well as how many times they’d like to meet a class. After that, teachers reach out to them to schedule the call. Sometimes scientists give presentations. They also are encouraged to speak directly with the students.

“A lot of times, I just field questions,” said Laura Pomeroy, an assistant professor in the College of Public Health. Her research is in infectious diseases, which is something she said even young kids can understand.

“They’re actually great experts because of childhood diseases. They’re getting sick all the time,” she said. “So, I approach it with questions. ‘Do you remember when you were sick?’ ‘Do you remember getting vaccinated?’”

Some of Pomeroy’s favorite questions are not about her research but about how she came to be a scientist.

“They want to know the process of doing science,” she said. “‘What did you do today?’ ‘What did you do before we talked?’ ‘Do you teach?’ ‘Do you work in a lab?’”

Answering these questions is part of her responsibility as an employee of a public institution, she said.

“I’ve always worked at public land-grant institutions,” she said. “I really buy into that idea. I think, as someone who is currently and previously funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, my training and my research is there for every person in this country. … It is my duty to participate in this system and to show people what the system is, so they can participate if they want to.”

Hulver agrees.

“Skype a Scientist has made me more interested in doing outreach wherever I end up [after graduating],” she said. “I’d like to do more outreach with local schools, especially hands-on activities, which I think are important for getting people into science.”

While students may be excited to hear about labs and experiments, they are sometimes surprised by another key part of the research world.

“I talk a lot about how much writing we have to do,” Pomeroy said. “We write grants, and we write our articles. It surprises them. And the teachers are like, ‘See! You do have to learn how to write!’”

However, not all communities are able to equally participate in this transition.

Underserved communities, in particular, often encounter barriers when shifting to newer, electrified energy and transportation systems. Many of these neighborhoods have already experienced various socioeconomic challenges and exposure to existing pollutants and potential adverse health outcomes.

Researchers at The Ohio State University are working to alleviate some of these inequities and improve the quality of life for residents in these communities.

The Facilitating Local Electrified Energy and Transportation Services for All (FLEETS for All) project will engage citizens in 15 underserved central Ohio communities to address specific challenges these neighborhoods face during this energy transition. The project will seek to understand needs and opportunities for electrified energy and mobility options to improve health, environmental and social conditions within these populations.

Jeffrey Bielicki, associate professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering and the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, serves as principal investigator for the project. He emphasized FLEETS for All’s intention to improve outcomes for those at the margins regarding electrified mobility and home appliances.

“These communities’ ability to participate in the energy transition is unequal,” said Bielicki.

The FLEETS for All project is part of an $11 million grant awarded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Bielicki and his collaborators at Ohio State received $1.1 million to conduct their research, joining 10 other institutions to investigate drivers and environmental impacts of energy transitions in underserved and tribal communities nationwide.

Bielicki stated that underserved neighborhoods often have increased exposure to potential toxins and other contamination due to factors such as polluting infrastructure located nearby and a heavier reliance on public transportation than more affluent communities.

“For example, while waiting for a bus, someone who stands on the side of the road inhales exhaust from all the cars, trucks and buses that pass by,” he said. 

Having more electric vehicles (EVs) on the road would eliminate emissions from many dispersed sources. The ensuing emissions from a single static power plant are more easily captured than those from many small mobile sources of pollution.

Electric vehicles are surging in popularity nationwide. But can citizens in these communities equally benefit from EVs?

Recent data provided on bumper.com showed that the overwhelming majority of charging infrastructure in the United States is located in predominantly white neighborhoods. The study also illustrated disparities in the availability of EV chargers based on individual incomes.

“Not only are we trying to transition away from certain ways of moving ourselves by touting electric mobility, we want to do it in a way that doesn’t further marginalize people,” said Bielicki, noting the need for increased deployment of EV infrastructure in underserved neighborhoods.

The Ohio State research team will employ surveys and focus groups to measure residents’ attitudes toward making a household change such as replacing a natural gas-burning stove, which often emits unvented carbon dioxide and methane, with a new electric one.

“We need to learn where people are coming from,” offered Bielicki, referring to various elements like budgetary considerations, cultural perceptions and structural constraints, such as renting versus owning a home, that influence consumers’ decisions to adopt or not to adopt a new technology.

This community-centered approach to energy transition also includes collaborators from Franklin County Public Health, the City of Columbus - Sustainable Columbus, the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission and the Electrification Coalition.

Bielicki’s team intends to help policymakers assess the effectiveness of current efforts to bring more resilient services and products to communities. Project data can be utilized to develop sound investment and deployment strategies for new electric infrastructure and services that reduce adverse environmental effects and potential health risks.

“If you’re transitioning to electrified options, you’re going to have a higher input demand for electricity,” he said. “So we need to think about what the regional electricity grid might look like. So, that as we build up a grid, we’re doing it in ways that improve health, environmental and social conditions.”

Bielicki noted that many of the communities selected for this project exhibit hallmark effects of being marginalized, including having higher incidences of asthma, higher infant mortality rates and lower life expectancy than Franklin County as a whole.

“Furthermore, the consequences of climate change have not been evenly distributed,” he added.

He emphasized that FLEETS for All’s objective is to ensure that benefits these new technologies may yield are more evenly shared among communities.

The interdisciplinary team of collaborators at Ohio State includes expertise in air quality, transportation, energy, sociology and public health: Assistant Professor Daniel Gingerich (Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering [CEGE]), Professor Darryl Hood (Environmental Health Sciences), Associate Professor Jeffrey Jacquet (Environment and Natural Resources), Assistant Professor Huyen Le (Geography), Associate Professor Andy May (CEGE) and Martina Leveni (College of Engineering Legacy Postdoctoral Scholar, CEGE).

Bielicki sees potential for the investigation of other topics, like institutional and policy analysis and resilience and greening infrastructure, that may evolve from studies like this one.

He and his collaborators look forward to engaging community members in this grassroots effort.

“We’re seeking to build capacity in the communities,” he said. “And it’s not just us saying that the community should do it. It’s us working with people, sharing the leadership of the project.”

To remedy this, specialized dental care is needed. It can be extensive, said Ana Mercado, a clinical associate professor at The Ohio State University College of Dentistry and craniofacial orthodontist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. The treatment is not just cosmetic, though.

“For the patients we treat, there’s a medical necessity,” she said. “And it impacts their pockets, too, because treatment can be so expensive. Then it’s a financial issue for these families.”

Mercado and her colleague Lisa Knobloch, professor and vice chair of the Division of Restorative and Prosthetic Dentistry at Ohio State, traveled to Washington, D.C., last month to advocate on behalf of families facing these medical and financial hurdles.

As written, ELSA, or the Ensuring Lasting Smiles Act, “would require all private insurance group and individual health care plans to cover medically necessary services resulting from congenital abnormalities. That coverage would include services and procedures for any missing or abnormal body part necessary to achieve normal body function, including teeth.”

This was the first advocacy trip for both women, who work together at the Ohio State-based Ohio dental treatment center for the National Foundation for Ectodermal Dysplasia, one of just 23 in the country.

“I felt proud to be advocating for our patients,” Knobloch said. “It made me feel like I was doing something for the patients that we know and love, something that will hopefully provide them some financial relief down the road.”

There was an unexpected benefit for the advocacy work: a greater understanding of the legislative process.

“I feel that if you’re involved in advocacy, you know what to answer [when families ask questions]. You know how to explain,” Mercado said. “You’re not aloof. I can tell them what’s happening in Ohio, I can tell them about the federal bill. I can be a source of information.”

ELSA was passed by the House of Representatives last year by a bipartisan majority. It was not voted on by the Senate before a new session was seated this year, so a new vote is needed. Still, Knobloch and Mercado are hopeful that the act will be signed into law.

“You owe it to the patients [to advocate for ELSA],” Mercado said. In Washington, she met a father and daughter who both suffer from ectodermal dysplasias. The condition often runs in families, she said.

“He’s paid a lot of money for his dentures and he has to keep paying because they’re broken,” she said. “But he’s there for his daughter, who is missing teeth. So, we keep trying [to get the act passed]. We may miss the boat now but we’re doing it for their daughter, their grandchildren, future generations.”

Patients cannot afford not to advocate for themselves, Mercado said. And clinicians have powerful stories to tell in support of their patients.

 “A full set of dental implants can cost as much as $56,000,” Knobloch said. Patients are often young when they begin treatment and there is routine maintenance that needs to be performed throughout their lives. In addition, it is not unusual for the teeth to need repairs or to even be replaced regularly. While the dental treatment center at Ohio State can lower some costs, increased insurance coverage would make a difference in many lives.

“We sometimes get patients who choose dentures over implants because of the cost,” Knobloch said. “To live your whole life with dentures because of the cost? I would not consider that to be the standard of care that we want someone to have.”

ELSA has until January 2025 to be passed by this Congress. Mercado and Knobloch plan on going back to Washington if they’re asked.

“There are currently 6,000 bills in front of the House and 4,000 in front of the Senate,” Knobloch said. “We’re one of those bills. … So as an advocate, you’re hoping to get their attention and make them understand the importance of what you’re doing. When these things come up to a vote, we want them to remember us.”

For more information about ELSA, visit the NFED website: https://www.nfed.org/get-involved/advocate/ensuring-lasting-smiles-act/   

“I said, ‘You know, I’d like to see the Newark Earthworks,’” said Weiser, a distinguished professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the Newark campus. “I’d heard about it for decades.”

At the time, that was a rare request for an English professor, but almost 20 years after her first visit to Newark, Weiser could celebrate these same earthworks earning World Heritage status from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). 

In September, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks sites, which includes the Newark Earthworks, became Ohio’s first UNESCO site and just the 25th in the United States. Other World Heritage Sites include the Taj Mahal, the Great Barrier Reef and Stonehenge.

The effort to earn that title was over a quarter century in the making, Weiser said, and involved support from organizations all over the state. While it was the U.S. Department of the Interior that applied in March of 2022, many Newark colleagues, like Weiser, contributed time and talent behind the scenes.

Ohio State’s Newark Earthworks Center has played an integral role in uniting diverse supporters to promote the significance of the Hopewell efforts. The center was founded by Richard Shiels, emeritus associate professor in the Department of History, and Marti Chaatsmith (Comanche/Choctaw), associate director of the center, and is now directed by John Low (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi), associate professor in the Department of American Indian Studies.

“I’m the smallest cog in this,” Weiser said. This summer she, Shiels, and local historian Timothy Jordan published a book gathering together the reflections, teachings, and photos of 25 of those key supporters. “In addition to Ohio State faculty, we had staff from the Ohio History Connection, local and state people who’ve been involved for decades, Native Americans with ancestral ties to the site, even Ohio’s former First Lady Hope Taft.”

Hopewell refers to an Indigenous movement that took hold in eastern North America around 2,000 years ago. Sites like the Newark Earthworks served as cultural and spiritual gathering points for Hopewell participants from across the country.

“This site was clearly attracting visitors, pilgrims, tourists, in the same way that a medieval cathedral would,” Weiser said. “You’re bringing people from all over.”

At one time, there were as many as 600 sites in Ohio that had earthworks, but with the removals of Indigenous people as European settlers moved farther west, many sites were damaged or destroyed. This makes the preservation of the Hopewell Ceremonial sites that much more important.

The UNESCO title doesn’t come with any money, Weiser said, but the designation does generate tourism dollars, which can go toward new facilities and learning aids.

“People come to World Heritage Sites,” she said. “But our site needs interpretation for people to understand it. Our local museum is much too small. The book is one step, but we need a more comprehensive approach.”

Weiser, who studies rhetoric, believes that Americans can be divorced from the history of our country and that the earthworks are a key piece to re-narrating that story.

“One of the things I’ve studied is the way national museums around the world tell people their own histories,” she said. “When do other countries think of their history starting? The fact that we are so separated from the story of this continent, especially before Europeans arrived, says a lot.”

And it’s not just the history we need to appreciate, she said. Like students at the Newark campus today, people were using the earthworks to study the world around them.

“The earthworks are aligned to a lunar cycle that is a generation-long,” she said. “People have been looking at the sky in this area for thousands of years and they weren’t just saying, ‘Wow.’ They were doing science; they were interacting with the cosmos.”

Elizabeth Weiser was one of three editors of The Fertile Earth and the Ordered Cosmos: Reflections on the Newark Earthworks and World Heritage, available through The Ohio State University Press at its website: https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814258705.html. 

“We brought it specifically because it’s a cool car,” said Ian Campbell, graduate research assistant for the EcoCAR Challenge Team at Ohio State. “One of our big things is youth outreach. We want to get youth, as well as underrepresented groups, involved in STEM. By bringing a cool car, we hope to get kids more interested in these activities.”

The activities Campbell mentions include the EcoCAR Challenge, which, through a partnership between General Motors, the United States Department of Energy and MathWorks, asks a handful of North American universities to take a stock car and work to improve the overall efficiency of the vehicle, while maintaining, if not increasing, the vehicle’s performance.

According to Campbell, in recent years, teams have sought to integrate autonomous capabilities – like self-driving and self-parking – as well.

The car currently on display at the fair is the EcoCAR 3, a 2015 Camaro. The vehicle was converted from a V8 stock engine to a four-cylinder engine with a high-voltage battery. By showing fairgoers the Camaro, the EcoCAR team hopes to educate the public about the automotive research happening at the university.

“It’s a good way to see what students are working on right now,” said Daniel Kerscher, a spring 2023 mechanical engineering graduate who is spending his summer working as an EcoCAR intern.

Touch-A-Truck isn’t the only place visitors can have Buckeye fun at the fair. A 20-foot-tall inflatable Brutus greets guests at the fair’s south entrance. The College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES) supports the annual Dean’s Charity Steer Show on August 1.

The Land and Living exhibit uses interactive experiences to educate fairgoers about agriculture. And, as always, there are a variety of 4H competitions and events, many of which are supported by CFAES.

Events like the fair allow Buckeyes to share their hard work with the greater Ohio community.

“It’s a huge honor to represent the university,” Campbell said. “We try to get more people involved with programs like this.”

Having a car like the Camaro makes that easier, he added.

“It’s like my dad always told me: You can sell a young man’s car to an old man, but you can’t sell an old man’s car to a young man.”

For more information about the Ohio State Fair, please visit the fair website: https://www.ohiostatefair.com/.

Launched by Ohio State Marion in 2010, the Warren G. Harding Symposium is an academic, social and cultural exploration of the life and times of America’s 29th president. The symposium presents in-depth analysis and research by authors, historians, researchers and experts on the Harding era and related areas of interest.

The theme this year was “Through the Photographer’s Lens: Exploring the United States Presidency.” The weekend-long event explored the unique history of presidential photography in the U.S. from the perspective of two best-selling authors: famed Reagan- and Obama-era presidential photographer Pete Souza, and University of Illinois communications professor Cara Finnegan.

Ohio State Marion Dean and Director Gregory S. Rose, who attended the workshop sessions, felt the featured speakers each contributed something special to the symposium.

“This year’s Harding Symposium was a great way to spend a muggy and rainy Saturday. The combination of Cara Finnegan’s research tracing the evolution of presidential photography, Pete Souza’s captivating insights about the process of documenting a president’s activities and especially the stories behind many of the photographs, and Sherry Hall’s presentation about David Edmonston, who photographed President Harding’s campaign, made for a highly educating and entertaining day,” said Rose.

The event kicked off with tours of the Warren G. Harding Presidential Library and Museum, as well as the Harding home. Later that evening, attendees were welcomed at the presidential library and museum for an opening reception and a meet-and-greet with the weekend’s featured presenters, including a book signing.

On behalf of the White House, the Unites States Army conducted the annual wreath-laying ceremony Saturday morning at the memorial in Marion honoring Harding. Saturday afternoon workshop sessions were held on campus featuring the perspectives of two of the country’s foremost authorities on presidential photography. The event concluded Saturday evening with a dinner and presentation by author, researcher and Harding Presidential Sites Manager Sherry Hall, who gave a talk entitled “Candid Camera: David B. Edmonston and the Harding Campaign.”

According to Hall, Souza’s whole perspective on documenting history was unique. 

“He was working for the future. He wasn’t doing promotion. He was documenting history for the future,” said Hall. “I thought that most of the participants really enjoyed both Pete Souza and Cara Finnegan. It was a different perspective on the presidency. It was really a lot of depth on how the presidency really works. We rarely see that perspective of the presidency and learn about a job that we don’t hear that much about.”

Cathy Gerber, Ohio State Marion director of development and community relations, was extremely pleased with the turn out for the event and the insights Souza and Finnegan provided those in attendance. 

“Through the lens of creativity, two best-selling authors captured the essence of evolution, reflecting the changing photographic landscapes of the United States across the presidencies,” said Gerber.

The 2023 Warren G. Harding Symposium was a collaboration between Ohio State Marion, the Harding Presidential Sites and the Ohio History Connection. The next symposium will be held July 19-20, 2024.

Movement, she said, is a good way to communicate across cultures. “When you’re a dancer, it’s nice to explore how you can connect with someone who doesn’t speak the same language. It opens doors for connection.”

McCarthy-Brown was named the university’s first-ever Artist Laureate earlier this year. In the position, she will elevate the university’s impact by bringing arts programming to underserved communities across the state. Focusing on creating shared experiences that enrich and inform, she will engage with diverse audiences in urban, rural, suburban and metropolitan areas.

“For Nya, engagement is not an afterthought, not something separate or isolated from her work as a researcher and scholar, but, rather, is integrally bound up with it,” said Lisa Florman, vice provost for the arts. “In creating and performing, she calls on those around her to allow their ideas and identities to help shape the work. To my mind, she is the ideal inaugural Ohio State Artist Laureate, in that her practice embodies the transformative power of art to build inclusive communities and give visibility to the overlooked or marginalized. I couldn’t be more excited to see what she, her students and her community partners will produce.”

Upon learning the news of the appointment, McCarthy-Brown said she was excited.

“It can be hard to make time for your research. So I felt like, ‘Now I have this gift. I get to go make something I couldn’t have made otherwise.’”

McCarthy-Brown is looking forward to traveling the state and interacting with local communities. She has been asked to bring the program to all four regional campuses and at least two of the 88 Extension offices.

While not everyone is a trained dancer, she said, movement is a part of the human experience.

“All people dance. All people move their bodies. All people have rhythm. … Why not talk about the movement you’re already doing in your life?” she said. “We might have a different aesthetic or accent, but it all points back to the same thing: people’s way of engaging with the world.”

To help audience members who might still have some trepidation about participating, McCarthy-Brown is enlisting the help of her students.

“I’ve gathered a group of dance students who are going to be my hype team,” she said. “A lot of times, if somebody takes your hand, takes your arm, dances with you, these overtures can really support people through an experience.”

McCarthy-Brown thinks Ohio State’s development of the Artist Laureate role says much about how the university views the arts.

“This says there’s more than one way to engage people. This really is just an expansion of bringing people together around a mission,” she said.

The arts have this in common with something else: sports, McCarthy-Brown said. At a school like Ohio State, where sports play a large role in students’ lives, either as players or spectators, the arts can serve a similar purpose.

“Sports do a great job of getting people enthusiastic, but so can the arts,” she said. “Oftentimes, students who are engaged in sports or the arts are more likely to stay involved in other parts of their community.”

It is easy for the arts to be sidelined, however, McCarthy-Brown said, especially during times of stress. That benefits no one.

“Art is an expression of our humanity,” she said. “When we explore that, we are engaging our full humanity and our full potential to be creative beings. We need to really experience what life has for us, beyond the daily grind. We need to live our richest, fullest life.”

The event featured three speakers: Tina Pierce, chief of strategy and belonging for the alumni association; Danny Glassman, the Office of Student Life’s dean of students and associate vice president for student engagement and support; and Alina Taylor, assistant director of development at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

“Pride is defined as a feeling of honor or self-respect, a sense of personal worth and self-esteem,” Glassman said. “As we celebrate Pride as an LGBTQ community, we do so because we are honoring and uplifting our history, our struggles and our triumphs.”

Pierce said it is important to keep working toward a better future, one where everyone has the same opportunities.

“All of us want a chance to be who we are, to love who we love and to make a successful life for ourselves and for our families,” she said. “And we all deserve that.”

Ari Grubaugh, coordinator in the Center for Belonging and Social Change in the Office of Student Life, emceed the event. Taking the time to educate the assembled crowd on the history of Pride, Grubaugh also encouraged allies in the audience to support their friends, family members and co-workers.

There is real value to a university the size of Ohio State celebrating Pride, said Taylor.

“This is a well-known university, both in the nation and in Ohio,” Taylor said. “It is important to raise the voices of all who make Ohio State what it is: a wonderful university that serves its student population as well as Ohio. There are individuals doing great work here who are proud members of the LGBTQ community. We need to showcase that.”

“In spaces of incarceration, there’s very little that nourishes the brain and the heart and the soul,” she said.

Thomas, along with Tiyi Morris, associate professor in the Department of African American and African Studies, directs the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project, or OPEEP. The program brings Ohio State classes and students to prisons in Ohio – currently, OPEEP is teaching at facilities in Lima, Mansfield, Lancaster, London and Marysville – allowing incarcerated individuals to take college classes.

“What Tiyi and I work on is always driven by a mission to create high-quality higher education in prison facilities,” Thomas said. “As higher educators, we wanted to build something that is challenging and rigorous, something that is focused on social change rather than just keeping people busy.”

“Committing a crime doesn’t erase a person’s humanity,” Morris said. “Our carceral system is designed to do that, so providing an education can be a way to help a person maintain their humanity in the face of a system that day-to-day tries to strip them of it.”

There is always interest at the prisons, both agree.

“We’ve never had a warden say no to the program,” Thomas said.

The challenge usually stems from the low enrollment of campus students. The issue is not a lack of interest, Thomas said. Students today are busier than ever. Driving to a facility for a class they could take on campus may not work with their schedules. Still, the campus students who participate find the experience transformative.

Muheeb Hijazeen, a third-year engineering student, took a class about the Civil Rights Movement with Morris. It was the relationships with his fellow students that he found most impactful.

“I loved my time in OPEEP. The connections, lessons and conversations we had were so worth it. The classes were smaller in size and were discussion-based. This allowed us not only to bond but also to build deeper relations that were meaningful.”

Thomas echoed this sentiment.

“If you talked to an incarcerated student and a campus student from the same class, they will both tell you how amazing the other is and how much each group brings to the classroom in terms of intellectual heft and talent.”

One thing Thomas and Morris are clear about is that OPEEP does not other-ize the incarcerated students.

“We don’t want this to be about prison topics,” Thomas said. “Prisons are not there to serve as tourist locations for campus students. We want this to be a full educational project.”

Over the years, class topics have included drawing, philosophy, earth sciences, creative writing and literature. The only real limitation is what supplies can be brought into the prison. Incarcerated students do not have access to the internet or university libraries. Many must handwrite assignments, which can be onerous, Thomas said. So classes must be configured in an equitable way.

“The course content, the learning objectives, the goals, the expectations are all the same – to the extent they can be,” Morris said.

In addition to campus and incarcerated students having the same opportunities, all Ohio State students can participate in OPEEP: There are courses available at the main Ohio State campus as well as in Lima, Mansfield and Newark. More campuses mean more prison locations have access to the program and more people can participate.

“We’re the flagship university of the state. Being a Buckeye is something that brings honor and respect to people’s lives, to their families,” Thomas said. “To be able to say, ‘I’m a student at Ohio State’ is a point of pride for the incarcerated learners.”

What benefits incarcerated students often benefits campus students as well. Changes that are made to courses to make them suitable for prisons often lead to tweaks in the classroom.

“It’s not just about offering classes,” Morris said. “It’s about changing how we teach and learn.”

“This farmer was looking for therapy, but farmers want to go to someone who is also a farmer, or who at least knows farming,” Britton said. “I called area agencies and would ask if they had counselors that farm on their staff. Everyone said no. I didn’t know what to do.”

This challenge led to the creation of the Farm Stress Certification program. The program educates mental health care providers about farming topics, ranging from basics, like how large an acre is, what crops are grown in Ohio and how weather can impact farming, to more complex issues like why telling a farmer to quit a stressful job will just turn them away.

“They don’t want to quit their jobs,” Britton said. “They want to be able to manage their stress. They want counseling so they don’t have to quit their jobs.”

The certification, which is part of a collaboration with the College of Social Work, counts as continuing education credits for the practitioners. In addition to farming, the three-module course covers stressors unique to rural communities.

“There is a stigma,” Britton said. “Everyone knows your name. Everyone knows where you are going if you go to therapy. So, we have expanded the program to cover not just agricultural issues but rural ones, too.”

The farming community struggles with mental health issues. According to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, agriculture is one of the most dangerous fields for work. Additionally, white men have some of the highest suicide rates in the United States. Ensuring that farmers have the support they need is key, Britton said.

“Many of these farms are multigenerational. They’re not going to be ones to give up the farm,” she said. 
“We talk about suicide warning signs, which can look different in the agricultural community.”

More than 1,000 providers have been trained since the program’s launch in 2022. The popularity of the initial certification has led Britton and her team to create a second, which focuses on topics like urban agriculture, new and beginning farmers, and stressors faced by farmers in the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities. All the topics come from provider requests, Britton said.

“I think providers didn’t realize this was an underserved population,” she said. “They didn’t realize the lack of understanding they had for the rural and agricultural communities. They didn’t realize there’s almost a language barrier.”

Even providers in urban areas like Columbus and Toledo have taken part in the certification.

“They do telehealth appointments,” Britton said. “They say, ‘We want people to know we offer telehealth. We can serve you. We can be relevant.’”

Britton’s office keeps a running list of providers who are licensed by the state of Ohio and have completed the training and want to be added to the database. Each extension office has a copy of the list.

“People trust their extension office,” Britton said. “Our farmers may go into the office for one thing but now they have access to that list.”

When one farmer goes to counseling, that means another may follow, she said.

“They’re telling their friends, ‘It’s okay to go. Even though we live in a small town, I’m going. It’s okay for you to go.’”

Do you need immediate help? Please call the Ohio CareLine at 1-800-720-9616 The Ohio CareLine, staffed by behavioral health professionals, is a toll-free emotional support call service created by the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services and administered in community settings.

For the National Suicide & Crisis Prevention Lifeline – call or text 988. The Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention and crisis resources for you or your loved ones, and best practices for professionals.

Ohio’s new Career Resource Navigator, created with expertise and work from researchers at the Ohio Education Research Center at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, provides job seekers, students, career counselors and others with answers to questions such as these related to the state’s post-secondary education and career training programs. 

The Career Resource Navigator helps Ohioans explore the education and training resources available to help them navigate their career journey. For example:

• Job seekers can identify education and training programs that have the highest employment and earning outcomes for people like them.
• Current and future students can use the tool to identify how their earnings may change over time.
• People in jobs that help others overcome barriers to employment can add the navigator to their toolbox as a resource to easily provide their clients with education and career guidance.

Users of the Career Resource Navigator start by answering customized questions to learn about available education and career training resources and find links to connect with them. Then they can explore facets of those programs, including the resulting hiring success, earnings and top industries.

For example, someone age 25 or older who does not need to improve basic skills to find employment and does not have a disability could explore the employment outcomes for participants of the Dislocated Workers Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act program, which provides services to improve skills and credentials to secure and advance employment for workers who have lost their job through no fault of their own.

Someone who is younger than 25, needs basic skills to find employment and has a disability that is a barrier to employment can learn ways programs such as Vocational Rehabilitation and the Comprehensive Case Management and Employment Program could benefit their job search.

The site also includes links to other dashboards and websites where users can access more resources for career, training and education pathways. The resources include additional data dashboards created and maintained by the Ohio Education Research Center, including the:

• Ohio Employment Projections tool, where users can explore the employment outlook for various industries.
• Ohio Workforce Supply tool, where users can find education and training programs and providers related to the type of job that suits their interests.
• Ohio Higher Education Outcomes Dashboard, where users can view employment and earnings by institution and degree program for college graduates in Ohio.

A team of researchers from the Ohio Education Research Center and the CHRR (founded in 1965 as the Center for Human Resource Research) worked to design the Career Resource Navigator with OhioAnalytics, a partnership of the Governor’s Office of Workforce Transformation, Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, Ohio Department of Higher Education, Ohio Department of Education, Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities and Ohio Housing Finance Agency. The agencies contribute data to the Ohio Longitudinal Data Archive, a powerful resource comprising de-identified administrative records that have been optimized for state agency-approved research and analytic projects. It offers researchers a unique opportunity to analyze the education, work and training experiences of Ohioans over time.

“We bring the expertise in terms of creating dashboards, linking up data and developing metrics and measurements,” said Erin Joyce, associate director of the Ohio Education Research Center. “Our staff members have been working with the Ohio Longitudinal Data Archive data sets for more than 10 years.

“We have tremendous expertise and knowledge of the data sets, how they work together and what you can do with them,” Joyce said. “We bring in state administrative records and turn them into a data archive. We can look longitudinally over time and across different programs administered by different agencies. We break down a lot of those silos and create insights for policy leaders, program administrators and residents of our state.”

Steve David, the college’s advocacy director, coordinates the trip.

“There’s this thing that I see happen when students go in and touch the legislative process directly,” he said. “That really gives them this sense of efficacy, and also this sense that they belong in these spaces.”

Rochelle Sparks is currently pursuing her master’s degree in social work, focusing on mental health and substance abuse. Her focus on mental health was inspired by her daughter’s struggles, and so she chose to go on the trip to learn more about her options.

“She’s the first one in my family that has been diagnosed [with a mental health condition],” Sparks said of her daughter. “I had no clue of what that looked like, or how I was going to proceed with helping her and supporting her.”

A goal of the program is for individuals to see themselves in new professional spheres. To do this, David said, students choose the issues they want to explore on the trip.

“We ask them, ‘What issues do you care about?’ And then I place them in advocacy groups based on the things they want to talk about,” David said. “It’s us having a plan to give them the structure and the scaffolding to be able to do that work effectively. Their interests drive the issues we pick.”

Once the groups arrive in Washington, they meet with the offices of at least three Ohio elected officials. Altogether, this year’s D.C. Fly-In was able to meet with both Ohio senators and 14 out of the 15 Ohio representatives.

In addition to time with the legislators, the program also focuses on professional development. The College hosts a reception for the students to meet and interact with other university alumni in the area and a DC careers panel to expose students to careers in government and advocacy. 

“One of the coolest things for me was that this was the first year that folks that had been on the trip with us before, are now working in some of these legislative offices,” David said.

For Sparks, the trip has helped her better realize what she wants to do with her education. She’s gained a greater understanding of how the legislative process works and the options she has going forward.  

“As I took this trip and I learned, I was excited about this space and what I see myself doing at the federal level,” she said.

The program is impactful and continues to inspire students to do what they are passionate about. Sparks encourages any interested social work student to participate.

“With the guidance of this team, we are put in spaces that I don’t think a lot of people are very knowledgeable about, but that they can make a difference in,” Sparks said.  

David said this program is what Ohio State is all about.

“This [is] ‘Education for Citizenship.’ This is how we teach students, by giving them the opportunity to actually touch these systems,” he said. “This is how education happens: letting students take things they care about and talk about them directly.”

“It all started with a contemplation of our land-grant mission and the possibility of actively engaging with communities across the state,” said school director Michael Ibrahim. In addition to the number of piano keys matching the number of Ohio counties, the word “opus” begins with the letter “O.”

“This term typically refers to a large-scale work or collection of many pieces,” Ibrahim said. “It seemed like a perfect fit for our initiative.”

Opus 88 allows people in every county to experience the school’s offerings in some form. Beginning in October of last year, county visits have included informational sessions for students interested in learning more about Ohio State’s music school as well as concerts with Ohio State students and faculty.

Performances have involved the university’s chorale groups and glee clubs as well as instrumental ensembles like the undergraduate saxophone quartet. Clinics at area schools with professors have also been offered.

“It’s the right thing to do, to serve our state in this way,” said Tanya Sparks, recruitment and admissions coordinator for the School of Music. “We are the School of Music and we are Ohio State. We are for everyone. Students and communities in all corners of our state deserve to have musical experiences.”

Ibrahim echoed this sentiment.

“Let me emphasize that music is simply what we happen to do,” he said. “Whether we were dancers, poets, engineers, healthcare professionals or from any college or department, the benefits of connecting with the wider Ohio community will always be present.”

At the end of February, a group of students from the percussion studio traveled to Gallia County to perform at South Gallia Middle-High School. In between pieces, the musicians spoke to the audience of middle school students about topics like productivity, reading and art. The event concluded with a Q&A.

Ben Kerger, a third-year music major, participated in the Gallia trip and was surprised by his favorite part of the experience.

“Though I’m tempted to say as a performer that I enjoyed performing the most, I have to admit that I actually enjoyed the questions more,” he said. “Each class had a different personality and different questions to ask. Getting to answer them and interact with the students in that way was the most rewarding and fulfilling part of the experience for me.”

In addition to serving the larger Ohio community, these visits benefit Ohio State students, Ibrahim said.

“These visits present a wonderful opportunity to place students in a leadership setting, to bring out the best of our students.”

Since many Ohio State students are Ohio residents, some have had the chance to return to and play at their old schools, Sparks said.

“It’s a highlight for them, to go back and be the student performing,” she said. “To be able to play for their former band director in say, a really great saxophone quartet, that sort of thing is lovely.”

Sharing their gifts with these communities has been meaningful, Kerger agreed.

“I believe that there is music in each one of us, and everyone should have the chance to take that sound and show it to the world,” he said. “By going to Gallia County and performing, I got to share mine, and it was an experience I won't soon forget.”

To request an Opus 88 visit, please go to the program website: https://music.osu.edu/outreach/opus-88/request-visit

The event included a reception with the artist before the screening, featuring fry bread and vegetable soup from the Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio, and a Q&A with Obomsawin following the film. 

John N. Low, associate professor in the Department of Comparative Studies and an enrolled citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, offered a land acknowledgment before the film, and Provost Melissa L. Gilliam welcomed Obomsawin to the university. Colin Bird, consul general of Canada in Detroit, introduced the film. Obomsawin is a filmmaker at the National Film Board of Canada.

Obomsawin is 90 years old and has created over 50 films during her decades-long career, many of which focus on Indigenous stories.

“She has devoted her life to being a visible advocate for First Nations issues, for Indigenous struggle,” said Layla Muchnik-Benali, film/video curatorial assistant at the Wexner Center. Muchnik-Benali met Obomsawin in June at the Flaherty Film Seminar. A long-time fan, Muchnik-Benali invited the artist to the Wexner Center.

“She is a powerhouse, a force of nature filmmaker,” Muchnik-Benali said. “She has gone largely unrecognized in the United States but is quite well-known in Canada. They’re our neighbors to the north; we should know more about what happens there.”

Obomsawin’s film tells the story of the Oka Crisis, which captured the nation’s attention in 1990. For 78 days, members of the Mohawk tribe in Oka, a small town in Quebec, protested a government decision to turn burial grounds into a private golf course. The documentary unpacks the centuries of abuse the Mohawk suffered at the hands of numerous world governments, demonstrating that this incident was one of many.

The film “is about truth and it is about reconciliation,” said Bird. “I’m using those words with a sense of the importance of those words because the story you’re about to see is not a happy story from Canada.”

After the film concluded, Muchnik-Benali interviewed Obomsawin, who said that despite the many injustices she has witnessed over her lifetime, she sees a new awareness of First Nations peoples in Canada.

“I don’t want you to leave thinking only about the bad stuff, because where we are now, we’re going someplace I know we’ve never been before,” she said. “Our people, our words, they’re heard, and they’re respected.”

Obomsawin shared stories about her childhood and the prejudice that she faced in school. The prevailing narrative in much of Canada was that Indigenous people were “savages,” she said. This view led to her being physically attacked many times.

“I began to understand that if children hear a different story, they wouldn’t beat me so much,” she said. “I knew our history and I thought, ‘they have to hear this story, not the story from the book.’ And that’s how I started.”

The Oka Crisis was a watershed moment for the Indigenous peoples of Canada, Obomsawin said. The Mohawk tribe, especially in Quebec, faced a tremendous amount of hate from the local white community for its actions. But the same actions brought the larger First Nations community together.

“In our communities across the country, it gave them the courage to stand for the land they have left, for the people,” she said.

In the end, the Canadian government spent more than $155 million attempting to defeat the protesters. While the episode is a dark one, Obomsawin chooses now to work with the government to tell stories like this.

“I want to say that there’s a lot of good people around in government, in places like this,” she said, gesturing to the audience in the auditorium. “I refuse to say it’s all dark. … We have a lot of things that we don’t like happening, but there’s an awful lot of good happening. It’s possible. And every one of you is important. You all have something to give. That’s the way I believe.”

In addition to the staff at CMA, Paulsen has some additional help: graduate students from her autumn 2022 class, “Exhibition Making at the CMA.”

“I hope this is a refreshing experience, to get to work on something that isn’t just between you and your professor,” Paulsen said of the collaboration between Ohio State and CMA. “This class and this project have different stakes. The work isn’t just for me to grade. It’s for the public, it’s going to have a lifespan.”

To support the artwork featured in an exhibition, wall labels and exhibition catalogs are used by curators to explain the themes of the show. These must be easily understood by the public, Paulsen said.

“There is a different kind of engagement with the work required, and a different kind of writing,” she said.

While the catalogue will feature essays from anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli and geologist Kathryn Yusoff, the majority of the entries will be written by graduate students, who worked together to edit and polish their writings until they reached a suitable standard. These writing workshops have already proved valuable, said April Riddle, one of Paulsen’s students.

“The major takeaway for me is a stronger comfort level with giving and receiving edits,” she said.

Another benefit of the class was working with a living artist.

“We often think about artworks in museums, living forever on the same wall, or in pages of a book,” Paulsen said. Being able to speak with the artist is a “professional experience you don’t typically get in art history.”

“The conversation with Sarah [Rosalena] was really rewarding,” said Mia Kivel, another student of Paulsen’s. “Most art historians don’t get to talk with actual artists that frequently. We spent an hour and a half talking with Sarah; it was very productive.”

Both Riddle and Kivel will continue their work with Paulsen through the opening of the exhibition, despite the course lasting only a semester.

“It was exciting to take a class with [Paulsen],” Riddle said. “I didn’t have any major curatorial experience so I thought this would be a great opportunity.”

In addition to working with Rosalena, Paulsen and her students spoke often with Nicole Rome, chief registrar at CMA. This is the third Ohio State-curated exhibition at CMA. Rome thinks the partnership between the two institutions is of great benefit to both.

“If you’re an art historian, to be able to see real works of art in front of you is so different from seeing it on a screen or in a textbook,” she said. “A huge priority for the museum is to be a teaching space. To be able to work with such great faculty and students from Ohio State, who are engaged and excited, that’s exactly the kind of work we want to be doing.”

One of the key lessons Rome tried to impart: understanding an exhibit space. Students had the chance to model how they would arrange the exhibition, which will be held at the Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art in the Short North area of Columbus. A visit to the galleries allowed for greater understanding of the logistics behind an exhibition.

“We wanted them to think about the space and what works are going to be in the show,” Rome said.  “How will those works connect to each other physically and creatively?”

This type of work, the planning and modeling, the brainstorming, the writing, are all valuable for graduate students who wish to work in museums. But the writing gives students something just as valuable for budding educators: publishing credits.

“We’ll come away with something tangible, something that we can show potential employers,” Kivel said.

“The main project is the writing,” Paulsen said. “Students have produced all the cataloged entries; they’ll be published in the catalog. It will be the first writing credit that some of the students get, which is very important for aspiring academics to have. And not just for their resumes, but to go through the formal editing process: getting feedback, going through layers of copy, seeing through a final project.”

“It’s helpful,” Riddle said. “It leads to more opportunities.”

This collaborative exhibition has been made possible by a Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme Community Engagement Grant from The Ohio State University, a Craft Research Fund Exhibition Grant from the Center for Craft, a Ronald & Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award, and an Arts and Humanities Community Engagement Grant from The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences.

A key factor in the team’s success? The fans. The thousands that attend each game give the Buckeyes a boost every single time.

“They’re family,” said senior guard Hevynne Bristow.

This year, the players have made a concerted effort to reach more fans. Last year’s team made it to the Sweet 16 in the NCAA tournament, despite low expectations. Those players wanted to thank the fans who had rooted for them all year, said assistant coach Jalen Powell.

“We had a core group of players returning this year, so we wanted to focus on getting people to the games to see how well our team plays,” she said. “We also want the fans to see not only how good they are as players but how great they are as people.”

This led to a community outreach push. Local middle and high school teams were invited to games, clinics are offered with players, area teams are given the chance to play on the Schottenstein Center court during halftime and players sign autographs so they can meet fans one-on-one.

“It’s awesome, getting to know our fans,” Bristow said. “We meet new people, but we see a lot of the same faces now, too. It’s really special. I met twins at a clinic, and I still talk to them. We can talk about anything.”

“At a recent game, a little girl with Down syndrome came up to me during warm-up,” said senior guard Jacy Sheldon. “My sister has Down syndrome, too, so that was awesome. She talked to my sister a little bit, too, and we got to know her and her mom. That’s one of my favorite memories this year.”

“I remember one team, from my hometown,” said freshman forward and Centerville native Cotie McMahon. “I came out to sign autographs and I just hear them screaming my name. They made me feel so loved.”

In addition to meeting fans, players are excited to serve as role models for athletes, especially young women.

“If you see someone doing it, you know you can do it,” Powell said. “If you see someone achieving a goal, it becomes more of a reality for a young player. Why should they have self-doubt when they see someone else do it and be successful?”

“Having women athletes to look up to is huge,” Sheldon said. “It was huge for us, too. Having the opportunity to do that for other kids is cool and special. That’s something we think about a lot and take pride in.”

Returning the support given to them is just as important for the team. In addition to the clinics, the team performs service projects in Columbus in the off-season.

“I’m not from Columbus,” said Bristow. “Growing up in New York, the Knicks and the Liberty [basketball] programs did a lot of community stuff. That made me want to be like them more, so us reaching out to our community in Columbus might inspire others to do the same.”

Fan support can help buoy spirits, too – during wins and losses.

“I want them to know that we’re going to keep going out there, every night, playing as hard as we can and trying to get a win,” Sheldon said. “That’s for each other but it’s also for them. They’re part of our journey.”

“We have 14 players on the team. It’s like having 15,” Powell said. “They’re our 15th player.”

“Whenever we get the chance, we tell them ‘thank you,’” she added. “Every time they sign an autograph, they say ‘thank you for coming.’ If they take a picture or talk to a child, they say ‘thank you for coming,’ because it means that much. It makes a difference. It shows in the way we play. It shows in the way we carry ourselves. It shows when we show up every day. We’re not just playing to win, we’re playing for our fans.”

“I come from a family where my parents thought that a good education required that you did some art,” said the new executive director of the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. “So, everybody played a musical instrument. I did ballet. I did some theater. There was a notion that a well-rounded education included the arts.”

This early exposure to the arts world would lead to a lifelong career as a champion of creativity.

Verna began her work at the Wexner Center in November. Before moving to Columbus, she lived in Toronto, spending 10 years as director and artistic director of the city’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Verna was also executive director and chief curator of the Musée d’art de Joliette, one of the largest art museums in Quebec, from 2006 to 2012. Previously, she was curator of the Foreman Art Gallery at Bishop’s University in Quebec, another university art center.

Working on a university campus, Verna said, is “the dream.” A research institution like Ohio State allows for a different kind of experience for artists.

“A center like the Wexner Center for the Arts, like many other [university-affiliated art institutions], has played a role galvanizing people, in being thought-provoking institutions. They are places of experimentation, places that nurture our future artists. It’s learning, it’s teaching, it’s experimenting.”

In addition, the size of Ohio State creates opportunities for the Wexner Center, Verna said.

“The reputation of Ohio State,” she said, “the fact that the Wexner Center is based in a university of 60,000 students – to me, that’s 60,000 minds that you can speak to, open their minds to the world of artists and entice to be lifelong learners through the work of artists.”

In 2022, the Wexner Center announced free gallery admission to better provide community access to its exhibitions. Verna believes accessibility to the arts is crucial.

“We want everyone to feel that artists are speaking to them, regardless of who they are,” she said. “We provide an opportunity for someone to walk in, see something, and then their heart stops.”

Verna is the fourth person to lead the institution. Being part of Ohio State and its robust arts and culture scene is something that excites Verna.

“The thing that’s beautiful is that we’re really at the center of it,” she said. “We can build bridges with each of these departments and that’s what the university wants to do.

“I think it’s very bold and smart of the university to focus on art as a catalyst for community, city building and as a real touchpoint that can ground people,” she added.

The Ohio State community continues to impress Verna. The passion she finds in her colleagues, both in and outside the Wexner Center, is remarkable, she said.

“It feels that everyone is at their top of their game and really invested in the job at hand,” she said. “They are interested in being at The Ohio State University. This is the feeling that I get from my new colleagues. Everybody has their eyes twinkling and being really excited about being here. That’s really encouraging.  

“There are people even on my team that have been here for 28 years and they’re still really passionate about the work they do. For me, that is an important factor: the passion that people can have for a place, a city, work that they do.”

As for another Ohio State passion, Verna looks forward to attending a Buckeye football game. She admits to not being as familiar with the American version of the sport as she is with soccer, hockey and volleyball. But recognizing what matters to a community is important, she said.

“If this university, if this city, their heart beats hard for their football team, then I need to pay attention to this because that’s part of building this community in the same way that I want the arts to be something important,” she said. “I’ll cheer. I’ll learn.”

“A win for CRS is you never heard we were there.” That was the central message from CRS Director Paul Monteiro, who spoke to the Divided Community Project (DCP) earlier this month.

The project, run through the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, offers resources, classes and direct assistance to local and university leaders to address polarizing issues in the community. Monteiro’s remarks closed a two-day national training held by the DCP in Columbus. Topics included advancing equity initiatives, engaging youth and de-escalation of conflicts at a local level.

CRS was created by Title X of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It assists state and local governments, private and public organizations, educational institutions, and community groups to resolve community-based conflicts stemming from issues related to race, color and national origin.

In 2009, with the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA), CRS’s jurisdiction expanded to the prevention of and response to violent hate crimes committed based on actual or perceived race, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion or disability. CRS’s voluntary, confidential and impartial conflict resolution services aim to assist all parties involved in a conflict to improve communication, promote problem-solving, improve collaboration and restore positive community relations.

Since its founding, CRS has worked with communities during historical moments like the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965, the riots following the beating of Rodney King in 1992, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016.

During a two-plus hour conversation with former Ohio Attorney General (and Ohio State emeritus professor and Moritz College dean) Nancy Rogers, Monteiro spoke about the importance of community relations during times of community crisis.

While the CRS provides facilitated dialogue, mediation, training and consultations, Monteiro said it is the people in the community who are the most valuable resource.

“You want a mechanism where you have actionable relationships, where you have some reservoir of trust with people,” he said. These local leaders can provide insights about a volatile situation and, just as importantly, vouch for CRS workers.

“Who does this person work with that I may know, someone who can vouch for me and for CRS, with people who’ve never heard of it? The Justice Department may be scary to them. So I work through that,” he said.

Monteiro answered questions from the audience about protests, the rise of misinformation and social media and the intersectional nature of many community crises. The most important thing a CRS facilitator can do, he said, is be authentic.

“The coin of the realm is authenticity,” he said. “The minute you think I’m talking to you because I need something from you, we’re done. We want to build in ways for a community we’re trying to work with to know that there’s no other agenda here. I’m being as transparent with you as I can be.”

It is authentic relationships with people on the ground to which Monteiro attributes any CRS successes – people like members of the DCP who are invested in their own neighborhoods and their own institutions. And so, at the end of his keynote, he gave out his cellphone number to the assembled crowd.

“You all are doing this work at a local level. I want best practices, people to know, organizations to be aware of, fault lines,” he said. “I want to steal ideas from you.”

Hill visited campus as the 2022 Joseph J. Kruzel Lecture speaker for the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. The series honors Joseph Kruzel, a Mershon associate who taught political science at Ohio State during an interval between Air Force, Defense Department, and diplomatic postings. In 1995, Kruzel died in an accident in Sarajevo, Bosnia, while heading the US team in the negotiations to end the Yugoslav wars. 

Executive Vice President and Provost Melissa L. Gilliam introduced Hill, officially naming her a Buckeye and sharing that the university was honored to host her. Kruzel represented the importance and power of education, Gilliam said, and Hill reflects that in her career.

Earlier in the day, Hill spoke to a Mershon-only audience about how scholarships and study-abroad opportunities enabled her to become one of the few children of her English mining community to attend university, and ultimately to get a PhD in history from Harvard and become a leading authority on Russian politics.

“We’re excited to hear from you,” Gilliam said. “You represent the best of what we try to do here at Ohio State, which is to change the lives of individuals. When we educate individuals, we change the life of a family, we change society.”

Hill is the Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that conducts research on local-, national- and global-level issues. From 2017 to 2019, she served under President Donald Trump as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian Affairs on the National Security Council. She memorably testified at the former president’s impeachment hearing in 2019. Prior to that, she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council from 2006-2009.

Hill was delighted to earn her honorary Buckeye title, saying that she had wanted to visit the university for a long time.

“I’ve been in the United States since 1989,” Hill said, “so this has been a long time getting here. And I hope that, now that I’m a Buckeye, I’ll come back again.”

Hill spent 90 minutes answering questions from the event’s moderator, Dorothy Noyes, director of the Mershon Center, and from the audience. The conversation focused on what is happening in Russia during the conflict in Ukraine: What is Russian President Vladimir Putin thinking? What do the Russian people think? How is this impacting the Russian economy?

Hill spoke of Putin’s adaptability, something that has allowed him to remain the central figure in his country’s political arena since the 1990s. However, she said, Putin has failed to account for what she called the “knock-on effects” of the war: the ripples that sanctions, military drafts and protests are having inside Russia.

“I don’t think Putin himself, or the people in the Kremlin, have a full picture of what’s happening,” she said.

Again and again, Hill returned to the danger of having one person so inextricably tied to a country’s decision making.

“What do you get out of too much fealty to one guy?” Hill asked the audience. “You get a horrific war, the largest military conflict in Europe since World War II. You get essentially a world war. All because one guy made a decision based on his own misconceptions.”

The United States can learn from this, what Hill called “the fetishization of the presidential executive power.”

“The preamble to the Constitution isn’t ‘I, the president.’ It’s ‘We, the people,’” Hill said. Instead of looking for a single leader who can solve the problems of a nation, we need to look to ourselves.

“How, in the United States, do you create a country that works for everyone? It won’t be one person, in the presidency,” Hill said. “We look too much to the presidency to be the be-all, the end-all, the champion. That’s how you get autocratic, authoritarian systems.”

The rules of the competition are simple: whichever university collects the most donations through official blood drives by Nov. 23 wins the Blood Battle trophy, which is presented to the winning school during the Ohio State versus Michigan game. This year’s competition is close – as of writing, Ohio State is leading by just six units.

“We have lost the past four years,” said Olivia Strickland, president of the Buckeye Blood Club, “but we have been putting in a lot of hard work this year. I’m excited to see it pay off.”

The demand for blood donations remains high. Every two seconds, a patient needs blood, Strickland said. One donation can save up to three lives. A typical blood donation appointment has far reaching impact and only lasts an hour. Strickland hopes Ohio State can beat its goal of 1,500 donations this year.

“As a medical oncologist caring for patients with rare blood cancers, I witness the impact of blood donation on the lives of my patients on a daily basis,” said Dr. Sumithira Vasu, an associate professor of medicine and medical director of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center Stem Cell Therapy Lab. 

Through a partnership with Versiti Blood Center of Ohio, donations made at Ohio State go directly to the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. Since 2019, Versiti has provided Ohio State with blood, blood products and specialty laboratory services, allowing the university to maintain the care it provides as a Level I trauma center and as an NCI-designated cancer center. Patients in need of cancer treatments, organ transplants and other procedures all benefit from blood donations.  

“Blood cannot be artificially manufactured and is dependent on the generosity of those in our community,” said Vasu. “With the holidays coming up, your donation could make the difference between a patient feeling well enough to join a family celebration or not; being well enough to hold their grandchild for the first time or not. Your decision to donate blood has a ripple effect – and improves not just the life of the person who receives the blood, but all those they love and care for.” 

Todd Burnworth received what he calls “life-saving” care at the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center in 2017. After a blood clot led to an acute myeloid leukemia diagnosis, Burnworth underwent transfusions that supplied him with both red blood cells and platelets.

“I don’t know how anyone can be prepared for something like that,” he said of his cancer diagnosis. “But thankfully, there were people that do the planning for just that, which includes maintaining a blood bank. And those blood products directly contributed to me being alive right now.”

After a bone marrow transplant, Burnworth learned that he also had stage 3 colorectal cancer. He said he underwent blood transfusions during treatment for that as well. Happily, he is now in remission for both diseases. Once is he cleared by his doctor for blood donations, he hopes to repay the life-saving gift he was given.

“If you would give a person CPR, or perform the Heimlich maneuver, donating blood is the same,” Burnworth said. “It’s the obvious thing to do, to help when someone is in need. It just so happens that with blood, you’re doing it before the event occurs.”

“I hope to strengthen our community by working together to reach this goal,” Strickland said. “The blood donated goes directly to patients at the Wexner Medical Center. We are truly impacting people around us.”

More scheduling information is available on the Versiti website.

“We are pleased and proud to host the Give Veterans a Smile event,” said Carroll Ann Trotman, dean of the college. “As a college that is dedicated to training dental professionals and providing oral health care, we are glad to offer dental services to communities and people in need, including veterans throughout Ohio.”

“In Ohio, dental care is one of the biggest health care needs for veterans,” said Paul Georgin, a fourth-year dental student and the event’s coordinator. Georgin is attending Ohio State through an Air Force scholarship. After graduating, he will serve his active-duty years as a military dentist.

The college treated 22 veterans at last year’s event and hopes to have 25 this fall. The Ohio State name carries a lot of weight with veterans, Georgin said. They are often excited to be getting care from the school that is home to their favorite football team.  

“Ohio State is a pillar of hope. It’s something to believe in,” he said. “The university is so big and there are so many opportunities here. We’d be remiss not to share that with veterans.”

Dental care is often overlooked, Georgin said. And that can lead to discomfort and pain.

“A friend of mine coined the phrase ‘teeth are not luxury bones,’” Georgin said. “Your mouth goes through a tremendous amount of trauma throughout your life. Often, people don’t realize what problems they have.”

Having access to quality dental care can make a huge difference in a person’s life, he added.

“Knowledge of your oral health status is power,” he said. “You don’t have to make a decision about treatment today. But allowing people to understand what’s happening in their mouths, and to be able to do that for free, that’s awesome.”

For Georgin, it is an opportunity to give something tangible to a community that means so much to him.

“For the first time in my life, I feel like I have the skills to help someone,” he said. “What gets me going every day is helping people and being hands-on.”  

This excitement isn’t unique to Georgin. Shifts to staff the event fill up quickly, he said. Participation in the event isn’t limited to dental providers, meaning anyone in the college can help.

“The students get really excited,” he said. “We need people greeting vets at the door or showing them to their appointment. It’s a big building! Having someone help you navigate can relieve some stress.”

For students and patients, Georgin sees Ohio State as a “common rallying point.”

“People in Ohio like Ohio State,” he said. “The university putting together a program like this and getting involved with the veteran community, that’s important.”

For more information, visit the college’s website.

To recognize the significance of One Health Day and the experts working on a global scale to prevent the next pandemic, the Ohio State Global One Health initiative (GOHi) has organized a panel discussion, “What’s Next: Reimagining One Health Beyond the Pandemic,” which will be held virtually and in person at the Veterinary Medical Center Auditorium on Nov. 3 from 8:30 – 10:30 a.m. EDT. Ohio State experts participating include: Michael Bisesi, College of Public Health; Sharon Santoso Clark, Ohio State Wexner Medical Center; Rebecca Garabed, College of Veterinary Medicine; Dónal O'Mathúna, College of Nursing; and Rafael Felipe da Costa Vieira, College of Veterinary Medicine, Federal University of Paraná.

For more than a decade, GOHi has been at the forefront of One Health implementation, mobilizing faculty, staff and students from 13 colleges to improve health, build capacity, address the spread of disease and emphasize the connection among humans, animals and the environment in Ohio and around the world.  

“The Global One Health paradigm is a proactive approach that builds institutional capacity to preemptively prepare and prevent the emergence and occurrence of biological and chemical hazards. Such a proactive approach is known to be cost-effective and will save a large number of human lives and improve livelihoods each year,” said Wondwossen Gebreyes, GOHi executive director. “Our priority is to strengthen and accelerate its high-impact, integrated capacity building approach through training, applied research, implementation, outreach and community engagement. This has mutually beneficial impact as solving our planet’s complex challenges necessitate it.”

As a result of GOHi’s many initiatives and advancements in the area of One Health and the growing interest and acknowledgment of the importance of One Health worldwide, Gebreyes regularly serves on international committees and advisory groups, and presents at universities. His involvement in One Health spans the globe and he currently serves as chair of the USAID One Health Workforce External Advisory Board, is a member of the Countering Zoonotic Spillover Committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, and later this month will participate in the World One Health Congress in Singapore.

GOHi’s 2022 accomplishments include:

• Expanded advanced molecular diagnostic laboratory capabilities in Ethiopia. Using funding from U.S. federal sources, GOHi and partners established these labs located in five regions across Ethiopia. This will strengthen the national disease surveillance and response system by enabling the detection of infectious diseases such as influenza, COVID-19 and other pathogens of public health significance. Not only is GOHi putting laboratories in place, but the team is also training laboratory staff and surveillance officers at the health center level to identify samples and test potential pathogens to prevent future pandemics. These new labs enable Ethiopia’s health system to be resilient and better monitor, detect, identify, report and respond to epidemics and pandemics.
• Trained current and future One Health practitioners, including laboratory workers, doctors and epidemiologists through the Global One Health Summer Institute. Over the last 10 years, GOHi and Ohio State faculty have trained more than 4,100 One Health practitioners from diverse disciplines including public health, veterinary medicine, medicine, agriculture, social science, data science and others. This year the Summer Institute, held from July 11 – Sept. 30, involved more than 70 trainers from five countries including the United States (50), Ethiopia (11), United Kingdom (6), Kenya (20) and Chile (2). These experts presented training modules and workshops to a wide variety of audiences across the world including the U.S., Africa, Asia and Latin America.
• Worked with faculty at the University of Nairobi to establish a master’s degree program in bioethics. This project, funded through the National Institutes of Health, will train future One Health practitioners and prepare them to consider ethical, social and legal issues in health care decision-making.
• GOHi and the Ohio State community hosted 27 Ethiopian university presidents and vice presidents for a Leadership, Management and Governance project sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. This cross-cutting activity is critical for strengthening leadership capabilities and facilitating partnerships that are crucial in effective implementation of complex One Health capacity building activities in Ethiopia.

Ohio State experts joined food and agriculture system leaders from around the nation, including the nonprofit think tank Food Tank and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, as well as state and local researchers and community organizations, to examine ways to transform agrifood systems to foster inclusive economic growth, address inequalities, increase resilience and achieve sustainable development. 

“World Food Day was a time to celebrate, and a time to have uncomfortable conversations that challenge our narratives about the condition of farmers and laborers, food service workers, marketers and eaters, and about the solutions to really complex problems,” said Jill Clark, associate professor in Ohio State’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs and co-founder of the Ohio Food Policy Network, who helped organize the event. “An exciting aspect of challenging narratives is that bridging the space between different ideas can strengthen our democracy at a critical moment when democratic processes are being challenged.”

President Kristina M. Johnson addressed the event in a recorded welcome message.

“Ohio State takes its role in the global movement to end hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity seriously,” Johnson said. “Due to several factors in recent years – most notably the COVID-19 pandemic – the world’s momentum here has gone off track. It’s time to course correct.”

Jocelyn Brown Hall, director of the FAO Liaison Office for North America, explained some of the challenges: Nearly 830 million people around the world are food insecure, meaning they are not getting enough calories and might not survive because of it. Three billion people don’t have access to healthy diets and/or clean water.

“The global agriculture system is a contributor to and casualty of climate change. In the U.S. alone, according to the U.S. EPA, agriculture contributes to about 11% of the greenhouse gases. We have a lot of challenges ahead,” Brown Hall said, adding that national and local governments have a role in finding solutions.

“I think food security and agriculture policy and nutrition security are national security, and therefore part of every government’s responsibility toward its citizenry,” she said.

Discussions at the celebration, hosted by WOSU-NPR, looked at challenges and existing solutions. In addition to addressing international concerns, the event featured panel discussions about food security issues and successful efforts in Ohio.

Jennifer Garner, assistant professor, College of Medicine and John Glenn College of Public Affairs, said that while food security often looks at individuals and households consistently getting sufficient access to food, community food security is a broader vision. It encompasses nutritional adequacy as well as food safety and whether it’s culturally appropriate and maximizes community self-reliance. In her research studying rural Appalachian Ohio during the pandemic, she consistently heard frustration from residents.

“We talk about the Farm Bill and how 75% of it is food assistance programming. What we hear is, yes there is need for those programs, but these communities, our neighbors, don’t want to need these programs,” Garner said, explaining that the residents want to get to a place of communal self-reliance.

Bart Elmore, associate professor of history, is the author of “Seed Money,” a book examining how Monsanto Co., an agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation best known for the Roundup herbicide, came to have outsized influence over our food system. He agreed that meeting a World Food Day theme of “Leave no one behind” requires listening to food system consumers and suppliers. As he traveled the nation to write books, he said, spending time with people and hearing their stories changed him as a person and as a scholar.

“To leave no one behind means having conversations, getting to know your farmers, getting to know the people that produce your food and caring about them and finding ways we can create those connections through the great organizations that are all represented here,” Elmore said.

National speakers at the event included Danielle Nierenberg, president, Food Tank; Dan Glickman, former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and co-chair of the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health task force; and Baldemar Velasquez, president, Farm Labor Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO.

“Whether we are talking about climate, biodiversity, food loss and waste, poverty, education, gender or economic policy,” Nierenberg said, “the food system is really the throughline of all of these issues, and it should be time for those in power to realize it.”

Rattan Lal, Ohio State Distinguished University Professor of Soil Science and 2020 World Food Prize winner, said social-political human dimension issues such as food waste, poverty, civil strife and political instability require attention to meet food and agriculture challenges.

He holds optimism, he said, through proper education about agricultural and natural resources and about respect for the farming profession even as early as the kindergarten level. 

“That is where we have to cast the attention of the brightest and the best, right at that age, primary school – to make sure they understand where the food comes from,” he said. “Will it happen? Yes, I’m sure it will.”

The summit was presented in partnership with Food Tank, Ohio State, Ohio Food Policy Network, the FAO and the UN Environment Programme.

“Historically, food pantries have been wonderful for getting food into the hands of people who need it,” said Nick Fowler, coordinator of the Buckeye Food Alliance. “There’s a large area of growth for teaching folks what to do with food. Sometimes we’ll see beautiful produce come through and a student will say, ‘I don’t know what to do with this once I get home.’”

The goal of the classes, Fowler said, is to equip students with skills they’ll need to prepare meals for themselves.

“That level of independence goes a long way toward closing the food insecurity gap.”

Each class will have 15 seats and focus on a different subject like kitchen safety, knife skills and using spices and condiments. The classes are led by Cameron Carothers and Michael Carnahan, senior culinary educators at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute.

Usually, the educators lead cooking workshops that focus on plant-based diets and the cancer-fighting nutrients they offer, and it can’t hurt to help students become more familiar with vegetables and non-meat sources of protein, Carothers said.

“We want to set them up for success,” she said. “That way, they can learn these foundations and then in the future, they can continue them and hopefully pass them along. We want to create a better culture of wellness.”

For Carnahan, the classes are an opportunity to ensure another generation understands kitchen fundamentals like cutting onions or making soup.

“My philosophy is teaching basic cooking methods so that the students can use them in a lot of different applications,” he said. “For example, showing them how to make a vinaigrette. After that, they can make other vinaigrettes from one basic recipe.”

The first class was filled with volunteer students who were willing to test the program before it officially starts later this year. Fourth-year health science major Mia Mowatt-Larssen was excited to learn new skills. She volunteers with the BFA because food insecurity is common in her hometown of Warren, Ohio.

“A lot of students at my high school would go home and not have a meal,” she said. “We had free breakfast and free lunch days at my school. A lot of my friends used food pantries. I volunteered there, too.”

After COVID-19 pandemic restrictions eased, Mowatt-Larssen searched for a way to get back into campus life and became involved with the BFA. Fowler said he hopes the classes will encourage a similar type of community-building for other students.

“We’re coming through the pandemic, when you haven’t had a lot of face-to-face interaction,” he said. “One of the best ways I’ve found to meet somebody is to have a meal with them and share that space. So we’re building a sense of community within the pantry.”

In addition to strengthening bonds between students, Fowler hopes the classes will combat the stigma associated with using a food pantry.

“We want to build out our programming so students know we’re not just a pantry. We’re here as a resource to help with all aspects related to food.”

The first, said Suchland, also an associate professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University, is a legal interpretation. It refers to the lawyers, the judges and the parole boards, all of whom need to see beyond an individual’s guilt to ensure excessive punishment – which includes over-sentencing and over-punishment – does not occur.

The second refers to the individuals themselves, she said.

“This blew me away,” Suchland said. “Through their stories, I learned that folks also wrestled with how to see themselves beyond their guilty charge. And they have to reckon with a criminal legal system that has over-sentenced or over-punished them.”

In 2019, the Ohio Justice & Policy Center (OJPC) launched Beyond Guilt, a statewide program that advocates for the over-sentenced and over-punished. It seeks early release for individuals who have served significant portions of their sentences and can demonstrate rehabilitation. It also elevates the stories of those impacted by excessive punishment to educate the public about this problem.

This fall, thanks to a partnership between OJPC, Ohio State, the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, Beyond Guilt is able to share the stories of six storytellers, the first released through the program, at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

The “Beyond Guilt” exhibition, on display through Nov. 27, features photographs taken by Cincinnati-based artist and activist Harriet Kaufman. Each photo is accompanied by quotations from the photographed individual taken from hours of dialogues performed by Suchland’s graduate assistant Jessica Tjiu, who said the experience was a remarkable one.

“Part of the experience was just to listen. I tried to really savor the moment, this intimate moment with someone I had met just that day,” she said. “I was very honored that these individuals were willing to share their stories with me.”

It was important to Tjiu and Suchland that the vignettes feature the full lives of the storytellers and not just the incarceration experience.”  “We don’t want to put their experiences as formerly incarcerated up on a pedestal,” Tjiu said. “I talked to them about how they see themselves, how they are making and remaking their own identity.”

Both women described the sense of intimacy they felt with the project collaborators. Suchland in particular worried about the ethical questions this raised for her work.

“You have to listen for what they want to share,” she said. “I can’t let my own sentimentality dictate what we choose to include. I strove for a balance of opening myself up and listening to what’s being said, not what I thought was most important.”

Letting those impacted by excessive punishment speak for themselves is key to the exhibition, Suchland said.

“Excessive punishment is a problem, and we are trying to communicate that to the public,” Suchland said. “But, it’s not just a problem. It is a lived experience, and that personal experience should be the voice leading social change.” 

“Stories matter, multiple perspectives on an issue matter,” Tjiu said. “Does this exhibit dispel misconceptions people may have? For me, it’s all about listening and seeing people beyond their criminal record.”

Suchland and Tjiu are adamant that this exhibition could not have happened without relationships across multiple institutions.

“Mariame Kaba, she’s a famous activist, organizer, educator – her father told her once that everything worthwhile is done with other people. My engagement with this project is a materialization of that,” Suchland said.

Beyond that, it is through relationships that we can right the wrongs of over-sentencing, she said.

“If we’re not building relationships within and across communities, then the profound structural change we need is likely not going to happen.” 

“What Is the State of the Opioid Crisis in Our Community?” was part of the Columbus Dispatch Columbus Conversation series. The event brought together medical professionals, community health advocates and public safety officials to share information and best practices to help people experiencing addiction and their families in achieving sustained recovery.

Providing effective treatment for patients who present symptoms related to substance use disorder will require a coordinated effort from health care professionals, said Dr. Emily Kauffman, an Ohio State Wexner Medical Center emergency medicine physician.

“We are trying to convince other providers – nurses, techs, aides, patient registration – that they need to care about this disorder. This is a disease just like heart disease,” Kauffman said. “This is a disease that we can intervene in. There are evidence-based treatments. We can put them on the path to recovery.”

One strategy to prevent overdoses is to distribute the overdose-recovery medicine Naloxone to potentially at-risk individuals, which Columbus police and fire personnel have done through a pilot project in recent years, said Columbus Division of Fire Capt. Matt Parrish.

“Over that period, law enforcement has saved thousands of lives and given folks thousands of chances at their recovery,” he said.

Law enforcement officers are working with hospitals and public health administrators to reduce addiction and prevent overdoses, Parrish said.  

“Where public safety fits in is in that continuum of getting folks to that next right step,” he said. “By building these partnerships, we’ve been able to get the right information to folks to do outreach and harm reduction.”

To have a lasting effect, treatment must involve a holistic approach encompassing multiple aspects of a patient’s life, from housing to education, said Dr. Erin McKnight, medical director of Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s Medication Assisted Treatment for Addiction Program for adolescents.

“Just not using drugs or abstaining from something doesn’t necessarily mean someone’s truly in recovery,” she said. “They really need to be able to live their life to their fullest, have a job they love, have a family that they feel that they’re supported by, have relationships that they’re fulfilled by. And that is something that when you start using (drugs) as an adolescent, you lose the ability to navigate those things, and our team helps people do that.”

At the discussion’s conclusion, each panelist shared indicators that offer hope that the community is making progress in combating the opioid epidemic. The decline in opioid-related deaths in Columbus from 804 in 2020 to 788 in 2021 – the first decline in seven years – is an encouraging sign, said Andrea Boxill, administrator, Columbus Public Health’s Alcohol and Drug Services division.

More deaths can be prevented if health care providers and community organizations conduct ongoing outreach to people in need of treatment, she said.  

“The organizations are critical. I am very hopeful because of these events … going to corner stores, going to the middle of the spot and saying, ‘Hey, we’re giving it out for free. We’re going to give you some hand sanitizer, some masks,’ maybe a free lunch,” Boxill said. “Whatever it takes to bring them in, if it saves their life, it’s worth it.”

The panel was moderated by Columbus Dispatch Opinion and Community Page Editor Amelia Robinson and also featured Erika Clark Jones, ADAMH Franklin County CEO; Juliet Dorris-Williams, executive director, The P.E.E.R. Center recovery program; Dr. Krisanna Deppen, program director, OhioHealth Grant Addiction Medicine Fellowship; and Brian Pierson, vice president, community health and well-being, Mount Carmel Health System.

For more information and to access resources that can aid in treatment and recovery for opioid-related use disorder, visit The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s website, Ohio State’s Student Health Services, or Ohio State’s Student Wellness Center’s Recovery Month website that lists programs and services that will be available throughout September and beyond.

Ohio 5-OSU SURE, or Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, allows students from the College of Wooster, Denison University, Kenyon College, Oberlin College and Ohio Wesleyan University to participate in summer-long research projects at Ohio State. The colleges collaborate through an organization known as the Five Colleges of Ohio, or Ohio 5 for short.

The program benefits the student participants and Ohio State, said Thomas J. Magliery, faculty program co-director and associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

“We see things like the ability to give great oral presentations, strong writing, because of the liberal arts core at those places,” he said of Ohio 5 students. Meanwhile, the students can experience lab work at a top-tier research institution thanks to “the breadth of what you can have at a place like this.”

“Basically, if you can think of an experiment in those areas we’ve covering here, probably Ohio State has facilities to do it,” he said. “They get to see an R1 institution, they get a preview of what graduate school looks like and what the research process looks like.”

Started in 2018 by Magliery and Amy Ferketich, faculty program co-director and professor of epidemiology in the College of Public Health, OSU SURE began with a handful of students. Since then, it has grown, with 26 students enrolled this year. More than 30 Ohio State professors from six fields participate as well. Students have the chance to work closely with these professors for ten weeks.

Some, like Justice Clark, an Ohio Wesleyan student, continue their work after the program concludes.  

“I got a lot of research experience,” said Clark, who completed his second OSU SURE program this year and worked remotely on his research between summers. “I expanded my communication skills: interviewing patients and future participants.”

Like Clark, Daniel Ortiz Sifonte, a Denison University student, plans on continuing his research. He originally wanted to study cancer but instead joined a project that focused on food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I will pursue this long term,” he said. “There’s stuff we didn’t get to, such as looking at how Medicaid has mitigated food insecurity in Ohio. I have personal experience with food insecurity, so this is a topic that’s very close to my heart.”

In addition to research experience, OSU SURE participants also learn about graduate school options and potential career paths. Danaye Nixon, a 2018 participant who is now a data scientist at the University of California San Francisco, remembers meeting with graduate students as one of her favorite program experiences.

“They would give presentations on their research, or we would read papers with them. I appreciated being in touch with someone who’s at that next step,” she said. “You can glean firsthand experience from them.”

These presentations helped Nixon and her cohort understand the diverse options available to them after they earn their undergraduate degrees.

“Five of us are doing different things,” she said, looking at a photo of her program cohort. “Three of them are in graduate school for PhDs.”

Magliery noted that the program’s participants are also diverse.

“All of those schools share Ohio State’s values in terms of diversity and inclusion,” he said. “As a result, we’ve seen a really diverse group, different racial and ethnic backgrounds.”

Ferketich added that because OSU SURE does not have citizenship requirements, like other research programs, there is a large number of international students.

“We have students from European countries but also a lot from low- and middle-income countries,” she said. “For example, we’ve had students from Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam complete the program in the past.”

This type of research experience is invaluable for undergraduate students, both program administrators stressed. The more students who have access to it, the better.

“Even if these students don’t end up at Ohio State, it really is about bridge building and getting to know people at these schools, and then they get to know us,” Ferketich said.

“I want faculty at [Ohio 5 schools] to say to their students, ‘Is Ohio State on your [graduate school] list?’” Magliery said. “I want them to be aware of the opportunities.”

Upward Bound encourages all five, he said.

“This program is a gem,” Moore said. “This is the kind of work that the Office of Diversity and Inclusion does and has done for over 50 years. It gives us a chance to have lasting impact – when you educate a generation of students, they influence the next generation.”

Upward Bound was born out of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 as a result of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty agenda. Through allocated grant funds from the U.S. Department of Education, high school students receive academic support, develop socialization and communication skills, and begin planning futures that may have seemed otherwise impossible. 

This year, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion was awarded three grants – totaling nearly $4.7 million over five years – from the U.S. Department of Education to reach high school students in different schools in Columbus, Wooster and Mansfield. “It is advantageous for institutions like Ohio State, with this storied land-grant mission to reach out to individuals who may not have had the same opportunities,” Moore said.

Citing economic struggles faced by communities in Columbus, Wooster and Mansfield, he went on: “One of the hallmarks of Ohio State is working with working-class and low-income communities in urban and rural settings. I know that is one of the main thrusts of the land-grant university. [Upward Bound] gives us a chance to bridge gaps for young people.”

The grants cover tutoring, weekend coursework and seminars that help high school students prepare for the rigors of college-level academics. Follow-up tracking allows Upward Bound program administrators to ensure that student successes can be replicated.

In addition to academic enrichment, participants develop what Moore calls “power skills,” social competencies that help them navigate social situations. Throughout the year, Upward Bound students are exposed to cultural events, community service opportunities and recreational activities to round out their experience. These kinds of experiences have positive effects on students’ confidence and commitment to the program, Moore said, which is crucial to a student’s success.

“Competence produces confidence,” Moore said. Some students have the skill but they don’t have the will, and vice versa. Building skill and will are two major facets of Upward Bound.”

To ensure student success, Upward Bound works closely with students’ families as well. In some of the communities within Columbus, Wooster and Mansfield, higher education is not seen as a next step among students and families because of the cost of college or the need to make money to assist with family living expenses. Moore notes that many students in the targeted schools come from dire economic household situations and will, in most cases, be the first in their families to obtain a college degree.

Upward Bound is, in part, about exposing students to mentors and role models from the area who have similar backgrounds or who can relate to them by sharing the different possibilities available through a college education. As Moore points out, many people in the targeted areas come from families that have done the same work for generations. Upward Bound highlights options that students may not have considered, not because of a lack of interest, but a lack of awareness.

“There are over 12,000 jobs according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” Moore said. “Most people are not familiar with all of them, and young people foreclose on education and career opportunities when they’ve never been exposed to them.”

Upward Bound is a foundational program at Ohio State, Moore said, and one he has proudly worked on as the principal investigator for nearly 15 years. Receiving an Upward Bound grant is highly coveted and never guaranteed, which makes each award that much more meaningful.

“It’s some of the most honorable work that I am part of,” Moore said. “It’s work that I would do for free.”

The Ohio State University sent five student-athletes: Jaydan Wood (women’s track & field), Donovan Hewitt (men’s gymnastics), Brooke Shields (cheer), Nina LeFlore (women’s soccer) and Zed Key (men’s basketball).

Student-athletes heard from Sheyann Webb-Christburg, author and eyewitness to the Bloody Sunday attack in 1965, as well as Bryan Stevenson, a prominent author and social justice lawyer. They also toured the Civil Rights Memorial Center, the Alabama Department of Archives and History and the Equal Justice Initiative Legacy Museum, which Stevenson founded.

In addition, the trip included a visit to the First Baptist Church in Selma and a walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of Bloody Sunday.

Knowing the trip’s purpose, LeFlore expected an emotional weekend. She was still surprised by just how emotional she was. Although the speakers shared painful stories, she felt inspired by their messages of hope.

“They were really joyful,” she said. “Even when they spoke about their past, and they were emotional, they were joyful, almost hopeful. You can tell that their spirit wasn’t defeated.”

For Key, the most meaningful moment of the trip was the Pettus Bridge walk.  

“Walking across the bridge, just knowing what [the protesters] went through with them being beat on the bridge by the police, dogs, tear gas,” said Key. “It was such a surreal moment.”

LeFlore agreed.

“That was probably the most impactful,” she said. “Being there, living the history, reliving the history. It’s not really an experience you can put into words. It’s more of a feeling. I wish everyone had the opportunity to experience it.”

Key was proud to represent Ohio State and proud to represent basketball players – there were few on the trip. He feels that, as student-athletes, he and his peers have a unique opportunity to amplify the messages they received during the trip.

“As athletes, we have a platform,” he said. “We’re all on the same page about using our platform to create change because people look up to us and they listen to us. We can use our platform to push in the right direction to create equality.”

A short film will chronicle the trip and the participating student-athletes’ reactions.

“Every student-athlete will be able to see it and then we’re going to talk to the entire student-athlete staff,” she said. “We’re going to go in-depth about what we learned and how we can implement changes in the Ohio State athletics program.”

Both agreed that the trip was an honor and one in which they were proud to participate.

“This really opened my eyes,” Key said. “I learned stuff that I didn’t even know about. Listening to people, it really gave me goosebumps, some of what they were saying. I’m really glad the Big Ten invited me to go.”

For LeFlore, who has attended other Big Ten events, it was a chance to experience something different with her peers.

“I saw a more intimate side to some of the people I had met at the other events during this trip,” she said.

All five of the Ohio State student-athletes are Black, LeFlore mentioned. Bonding over their experiences as Black student-athletes made the trip that much more meaningful.

“I think it was cool coming into community like that,” she said. “I think that was really special.”

The sense of community, of shared history, has stuck with LeFlore.

“Anytime anybody shares a story, it’s impactful and empowering.”

Those were some of the themes that emerged over the course of two days as students, leaders and staff from The Ohio State University boarded buses to visit the state’s Miami Valley region. The annual State Tour returned to the road for the first time since the COVID pandemic and included stops in Dayton, Springfield and Yellow Springs.

“It’s been incredible. We started out at Huffman Prairie Flying Field, looked at where the Wright brothers flew, and then some of us went to go see the Paul Laurence Dunbar House. Others of us went to visit Wright Patterson [Air Force Base],” President Kristina M. Johnson said to 4-H members and Master Gardener volunteers on the second day of the tour. “You don’t ever get to make the connections until you get out and see people.”

Johnson and members of the tour made connections with history, leaders in higher education, public officials, community leaders, future Buckeyes and dozens of residents of the Miami Valley community. It was a chance to get out beyond the Columbus campus and see the broad impact of Ohio State. For some of the members of the tour, it was a learning experience.

First in flight

It’s almost impossible to visit the Dayton area without noticing the monuments to the city’s favorite sons: Orville and Wilbur Wright. The aviation pioneers developed and tested the world’s first practical airplane at Huffman Prairie Flying Field. The site of more than 100 test flights and countless hours of trial and error was an appropriate place for the tour to begin.

President Johnson joined university leaders and about 20 students at the national landmark early Monday morning. Park Ranger Ryan Qualls explained the important role of partnerships and community involvement.

“Volunteerism, I think, is what made the Wright Brothers’ story happen. It wasn’t like Wilbur and Orville were just these extreme geniuses and they just did everything by themselves,” Qualls said. “Seventeen businesses helped to build the engine on that plane. It wasn’t a one-person deal.”

A celebration of history and an investment in strategic research

Following the history lesson at Huffman Prairie, Johnson, Grace Wang, Ohio State’s executive vice president for research, innovation and knowledge, and other university leaders went to Wright Patterson Air Force Base for a tour and a discussion about the connected strategic research and workforce development partnerships between the two institutions – and the future they could grow together.

Ohio State has a longstanding research connection with the Air Force Research Laboratory. University researchers support the Air Force 711th Human Performance Wing as well as innovations in materials and manufacturing, sensors and aerospace systems.

While the conversation continued at Wright Patterson, students, staff and Brutus Buckeye boarded the Buckeye Bus for a tour of Dayton culture and history. Stops included the Paul Laurence Dunbar House, Carillon Historical Park and the Dayton Art Institute.

Dunbar, a prolific poet and author, was the first African American to support himself financially through his writing. Students visited his home, a national historic landmark, on the sesquicentennial anniversary of Dunbar’s birth. They joined national park staff to celebrate with cupcakes and an enthusiastic rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

The Buckeye Bus also stopped at Carillon Historical Park, a 65-acre open-air history museum
that serves as the main campus for Dayton history and innovation. The park is home to the 1905 Wright Flyer III, a collection of antique NCR cash registers and the original Deeds Barn, the building where Ohio State alumnus Charles Kettering and his team built the automobile self-starter.

After lunch, students toured the Dayton Art Institute to view a Paul Laurence Dunbar tribute and two Van Goghs currently on loan as part of Art for the Ages, an exhibition that takes a close look at how conservation protects art for future generations.

“We were intentional about the learning outcomes for the students who joined us on the tour, and made sure we connected their experiences to President Johnson’s focus on innovation and diversity,” said Tracy Stuck, one of the lead tour organizers with the Office of Student Life. “Hearing about Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Wright brothers and other dynamic innovators on the tour really helped the students understand our land-grant mission. I hope it inspired them to dream big, just like the people did whose stories they encountered on the trip.”

Future Buckeyes

President Johnson rejoined the Buckeye Bus at Bellbrook High School to celebrate future Buckeyes. A pop-up tailgate party helped surprise recent high school graduates who will be entering Ohio State in the fall.

Dakota Davis, a Land Grant Opportunity Scholar, and Ally Lewis, an Eminence Fellow, were honored at the event. Both scholarships are two of Ohio State’s premier merit awards. 

Davis, who plans to major in English and French, said the visit was really special for the Bellbrook community. He said it shows the university cares about the students who will attend in the fall.

Lewis, who plans to major in chemical engineering, said she was excited to meet Johnson at the event. She said her parents are life-long Ohio State fans and it meant a lot to her to get to shake the president’s hand.

“I really didn’t expect to have that much recognition, especially from the president,” she said. “It was really surprising to me.”

A whirlwind first day ended with a reception at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. Eugene Brown, a third-year sports industry major, said it was a favorite moment on the tour and connected the past with the present.

“Just seeing all the planes [in the museum] after seeing the Wright brothers, how they created one plane and then ... years later, they got planes that are in World War II,” Brown said. “The innovation is just so amazing.”

Connections in higher education

Day two of the state tour included visits to Wilberforce University, the nation’s oldest, private historically Black university owned and operated by African Americans, and to Central State University, a fellow land-grant institution and a Historically Black College and University.

Johnson joined Wilberforce President Elfred Anthony Pinkard to formalize a partnership in turfgrass education for Wilberforce students. Ohio State’s College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences will begin offering online non-credit certificates to Wilberforce students in advanced golf course management, history of golf courses and sports turf management. It’s part of a broader commitment to help bring diversity into these industries.

At Central State, President Jack Thomas helped lead a tour of the McLin Water Resource Management Center. Ohio State collaborates with Central State on research and innovation in water quality and resource management, artificial intelligence, and materials and manufacturing.

Students from Ohio State and Central State participated in a roundtable with Johnson and Thomas to discuss the future of land-grant universities in the modern era.

Industry and community support

The last stops on the state tour featured a visit to a fourth-generation family business and the birthplace of 4-H.

Students and staff joined Johnson on a tour of the Woeber Mustard Company factory floor. The company has been a Springfield institution since it was founded in 1905 and has multi-generational Buckeye connections. The tour included a look at how the company processes mustard and horseradish and how its factory lines package and label the product, and a chance to taste test some of their popular spreads.

The tour also stopped at Snyder Park Gardens and Arboretum to celebrate the birthplace of 4-H and the partnership with Ohio State University Extension and the National Trail Parks and Recreation District. Johnson acknowledged the legacy of 4-H founder A.B. Graham and noted the important early beginnings of what was first known as the “Boys and Girls Agriculture Club.”

“When you think about it, A.B. Graham was ahead of his time because it was for boys and girls, everybody,” she said. “And that’s a little bit like the history of The Ohio State University. You only had to be 14 years or older in order to get in.”

Students from the Buckeye Bus met with 4-H exhibitors to learn more about their experiences.

The state tour came to a satisfying end at Young’s Jersey Dairy for an ice cream social. Fifth-year senior Anna Valerius, a political science major, worked with Student Life to support the tour. She said it was important for Ohio State to continue to interact with communities across Ohio, and the state tour was a way to do just that.

“I think looking at what our relationship is with the space we occupy and how are we interacting with the community in ways that it wants to be interacted with, that’s something that I’m very passionate about personally,” she said. “That’s how can we use the information and the knowledge that we have in Columbus and bring it to the entire state.”

AFIC’s mission is to innovate with older adults through research, education and engagement to ensure inclusion and build resiliency to make communities more age-friendly.

Ohio State’s role as a research institution means that AFIC has the opportunity to work with highly skilled researchers, said Marisa Sheldon, who was named the center’s director earlier this year.

“I think one of the areas for growth within the age-friendly framework is that there’s not a lot of evidence around what folks are doing and how to best do this work,” Sheldon said. “Transitioning to a center really gave us the ability to start building on that evidence in a deeper way.”  

A social worker by trade, Sheldon finds data to be immensely helpful in her new role.

“We recently released our new findings from the 2021 Central Ohio Regional Assessment on Aging through an interactive data dashboard. As a center, we decided we wanted to do a regional assessment instead of just looking at our county,” she said. “I’m really excited to dig into that data and see where that leads us.”

Often, work done on behalf of the older adults is done without their input, she said. AFIC relies heavily on feedback from older community members.

“We see our residents as the experience experts,” she said. “They get to tell us about what would work better and how we can improve things. We rely on them to share that with us.”

This input has been critical to AFIC’s work. In the next 30 years, central Ohio’s aging population is expected to double. In its initial stages, AFIC identified eight focus areas for the community: communication and information; community support and health services; employment and civic participation; housing; outdoor spaces and buildings; safety and emergency preparedness; social participation, respect and inclusion; and transportation. This final focus area is not an immediately obvious one, Sheldon said, but may be the most crucial.

“I think one of the reasons that we’ve focused so much on transportation is that it impacts nearly every part of an older adult’s life and really can make or break the ability to age where you want to age,” Sheldon said, adding that inadequate transportation can be a barrier to everything from participating in one’s community and seeing family to having food and going to medical appointments.

AFIC has built partnerships with the Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) to encourage ridership amongst aging residents and developed a program that helps older adults use rideshare apps like Lyft. But this transportation focus also refers to things like walk audits, where obstacles in pedestrian walkways are identified and eventually corrected.

“Often what makes a community better for an older adult makes things better for all of us,” Sheldon said. “Good sidewalks make my life easier, too.”

There can be challenges to building change targeted at older adults, she said, despite the benefits to the community as a whole. This can be caused by ageism, which affects the old and the young.

“Research shows that internalized ageism can take years off your life, upwards of seven years,” Sheldon adds. “We’ve done a lot of work to promote positive aging. There have been billboards around town with local older adults to show how strong and wonderful it is to grow old. We want to push back on the narrative that aging is a bad thing. We should all be so lucky to age and do it in a good way.”

AFIC has worked with Metro Early College Middle School students through a course called Change AGEnts. In one section of the course, students found examples of positive and negative portrayals of aging in print media. It is much easier to find negative ones, Sheldon said, and these examples lead to unfavorable impressions of aging and older community members.

“We need more stories to show our community that it is great to grow old.”

This year’s bloom is expected to measure 3.5, with a potential range of 2-4 on the severity index — whereas last year’s bloom was measured at a 6.

The index is based on the bloom’s biomass — the amount of algae — during the peak 30 days of the bloom. An index above 5 indicates more severe blooms. Blooms over 7 are particularly severe, with extensive scum formation and coverage affecting the lake. The largest blooms occurred in 2011, with a severity index of 10, and 2015, with a severity index of 10.5.

“Toxic algae affect not only the health of people and marine ecosystems, but also the health and vibrancy of local and regional economies,” said Nicole LeBoeuf, assistant administrator for NOAA’s National Ocean Service. “Like with the weather, environmental forecasts are an important tool that can empower communities to more effectively prepare for these events, and are a huge part of NOAA’s service to the nation.”

Lake Erie blooms consisting of cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, are capable of producing microcystin, a known liver toxin which poses a risk to human and wildlife health. Such blooms may force cities and local governments to treat drinking water and close beaches, and can harm vital local economies by preventing people from fishing, swimming, boating and visiting the shoreline.

The size of a bloom isn’t necessarily an indication of how toxic it is. For example, the toxins in a large bloom may not be as concentrated as in a smaller bloom. Each algal bloom is unique in terms of size, toxicity and ultimately its impact on local communities.

“With 10 years of experience with forecasts we understand more about the blooms, including evidence that big river discharge events in mid-summer may matter more than we thought,” said Richard Stumpf, NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science’s (NCCOS’s) lead scientist for the seasonal Lake Erie bloom forecast. “They create more uncertainty, but our models are improving as a result. We will also have to watch to see if these events become more common in the future.”

NCCOS’s Lake Erie Harmful Algal Bloom Forecast website provides predictions and visualizations of the bloom’s location and movement on the lake’s surface as well as where the bloom is located within the water column. This information is especially helpful to water treatment plant operators, because intake structures are usually located below the surface, so the risk of toxins in their source water may be greater when these cells sink.

“The NOAA HABs forecast is a great example of how our partners, like Heidelberg University, Ohio Sea Grant and Ohio State’s Stone Laboratory, can work together with NOAA to bring critical research and expertise to our local coastal communities,” said Christopher Winslow, director of Ohio Sea Grant and Stone Laboratory.

Forecast details

NOAA expects a start of the visible bloom in mid- to late July. The duration of the bloom depends on the frequency of wind events in September, which cannot be predicted this far in advance. The bloom will remain mostly in areas of the Western basin. The Central and Eastern basins of the lake are usually unaffected, although localized blooms may occur around some of the rivers after summer rainstorms. July is expected to have average rainfall, but there is still large uncertainty. Larger rain events could result in increased river flow, and a higher severity index.

NOAA will issue a seasonal forecast update in late July based on observed rainfall in the basin. Recent research has found that a long-term increase in the frequency of heavy rainfall events due to climate change may be causing more runoff during spring and summer months because the soil has less time to absorb the rain. Combined with the increase in bioavailable phosphorus concentration in the early 2000s (as a result of changes in agricultural practices), this rainfall trend may explain the higher-than-average phosphorus loads each spring over the last 14 years.

The Lake Erie forecast is part of a NOAA Ecological Forecasting initiative that aims to deliver accurate, relevant, timely and reliable ecological forecasts directly to coastal resource managers, public health officials and the public. In addition to the early season projections from NOAA and its partners, NOAA also issues HAB forecasts during the bloom season. These forecasts provide the current extent and five-day outlooks of where the bloom will travel and what concentrations are likely to be seen, allowing local decision-makers to make informed management decisions. NOAA is actively developing tools to detect and predict how toxic blooms will be.

Nutrient load data for the forecasts came from Heidelberg University in Ohio, and the various forecast models are run by NCCOS, the University of Michigan, North Carolina State University, LimnoTech, Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science. Field observations used for monitoring and modeling are done in partnership with a number of NOAA services, including its Ohio River Forecast Center, NCCOS, Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services, Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, and Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research, as well as Ohio Sea Grant and Stone Laboratory at The Ohio State University, The University of Toledo and Ohio EPA.

“I think it’s important to demonstrate to the Ohio State community and beyond that engineers, architects and planners all support diversity and inclusivity,” said Yates, chief advancement and economic development officer for the college. “We may be techies, but we care deeply about our community and believe that our ability to make the world a better place for all is enhanced by greater diversity in our ranks along with strong support for a more just and equitable society.”

Among those joining the College of Engineering were the Student Life Multicultural Center, the College of Social Work, the College of Medicine and the Wexner Medical Center. There were also representatives from the Alumni Association and the Alumni Marching Band, as well as the offices of Student Life and Undergraduate Admissions. Rustin Moore, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine, said 50 people from the college were participating.

“If you look around, you can see the smiles on their faces,” Moore said. “We have members from the LGBTQ community and also allies. I think people are happy to be here.”

Education and Human Ecology student Chen Qu was attending the parade for the first time.

“I’m excited to be here. This is my first time to join this kind of event,” she said. “Although in China we support the LGBTQ community, we don’t have such events. So I came here to enjoy and experience the event.”

Attending his second Pride parade was Vincent Zack, a nurse at the Wexner Medical Center.

“I’ve been looking forward to this for two years now,” Zack said. “I was very excited to march in the parade with Ohio State. I really can’t believe this is happening. It’s a great feeling. This is a nice way to be out and see people again.”

Brutus joined the Ohio State group, delighting adults and children alike. He led the university’s participants along with the Alumni Marching Band. Megan Wistinghausen, a 2016 alum of the marching band, was marching in the parade for the first time. She joined the Alumni Band with her mellophone, which was decorated with a colorful lei.

“Within the last year, I realized I was bisexual. I was like, ‘I should join my people,’” she said. “So when we got the call, I thought, ‘this seems cool!’ I’d never gone before, and I know Columbus is a nice city for events like this.”

The importance of Ohio State’s participation in the parade was a theme for the day. Yates feels great pride at working in such a supportive and inclusive environment.

“The Ohio State University is a highly respected institution in Ohio with a very important role educating students and expanding knowledge,” he said. “By participating in the Pride parade, the university is demonstrating in a very visible way its commitment to the LGBTQ community and to that community’s ongoing efforts to achieve social and self-acceptance, legal rights, and equality.”

Editor’s note: A video of Ohio State parade participants is available on YouTube. 

The organization of retired Ohio State faculty and staff has a long history of giving back to the university, and its members are always looking for different ways to make an impact. In 2019, when the OSURA Board learned that food insecurity was an issue for a significant number of students on the Columbus campus, they knew they had to help alleviate this issue.

With the help of University Advancement, OSURA created The Ohio State University Retirees Association Endowment Fund to Combat Student Food Insecurity and began raising money immediately. The fund has now hit the $100,000 mark.

“The OSURA board and members looked at plenty of options for this project but decided the best approach would be to give back to students,” said then OSURA president Steven D’Ambrosio. “The campus food pantry was just getting started [in 2018]. We had organized some food drives and small donations but wanted to do even more. We wanted to help give them some financial stability.” 

The 2017 Study on Collegiate Financial Wellness found 14.7% of undergraduate students at Ohio State reported having very low food security.

Experiencing food insecurity can lead to barriers for students including, but not limited to, being distracted in class, lower grades, dropping a class or discontinuing one’s education entirely. Some studies have shown that student grade point averages and university retention may be improved if universities take steps to address food insecurity on their campuses.

Food insecurity can also put students more at risk for experiencing adverse mental health effects, obesity, diabetes and maladaptive eating patterns that persist well beyond their college experience.

Student Life’s Student Wellness Center operates a client choice food pantry for students on campus. The Buckeye Food Alliance (BFA) pantry, located in Lincoln Tower, is available to all Ohio State students and distributes hundreds of pounds of food each week, including staples such as fresh produce, milk, eggs, meat, meat substitutes and personal care items. As a client choice food pantry, students can select their own foods, which allows them to better support their own nutritional needs. The pantry is run by students for students, operated by 15-20 student volunteers, one or two graduate students and one full-time employee.

BFA also provides educational outreach, and, because food insecurity is often coupled with other challenges, BFA works to connect students with other campus and community support resources they may need.

The pantry received 5,160 visits in 2020-2021, a record number, and is on pace to match or exceed that level this year.  

“Food insecurity is a real challenge on college campuses across the country,” says Buckeye Food Alliance Coordinator Nick Fowler. “This complex issue cannot be solved by one person or one organization alone. It takes a collaborative effort to ensure that No Buckeye Goes Hungry. Thanks to the university and amazing donors such as OSURA we are able to take one step closer to seeing a world where food insecurity does not exist at Ohio State.”

The donation from OSURA will help ensure that BFA has a reliable stream of income to support its mission for years to come. This income will support the acquisition of nutritious and inclusive food items, support general operations and allow BFA to plan ways to further support students in a holistic manner.

Several donors sponsored challenge matches for contributions of $5 to $10,000. Each of those challenges was exceeded. OSURA is still taking donations for the fund and expects the endowment to continue to grow.

“The response from our members has been so heart-warming,” said past OSURA president Margaret Teaford. “Their commitment to the fund, especially during the pandemic, is very rewarding. What began as an effort to make a gift to Ohio State for its 150th anniversary has grown into this endowed fund; we couldn’t be more pleased with the results!”

Since its founding in 1983, OSURA has enhanced the well-being of its members through educational, cultural and recreational programs, as well as kept them informed of state and university pension and benefit policies.

Church bells. Public proselytizing. Calls to prayer. Tantric chanting. What does religion sound like, and how can we learn new truths about the diversity of religion in the United States when we listen?

Isaac Weiner, associate professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State, has been probing these questions with the American Religious Sounds Project (ARSP). Through hundreds of field recordings nationwide that capture the sounds of religion at places such as homes, churches, temples, public protests and community events, the ARSP constructs a tangible sonic record that maps and contextualizes religion in profound and innovative ways.

Now, after eight years of research and hundreds of audio recordings, the ARSP is culminating in Religious Soundscapes, a reflective exhibition at the Urban Arts Space that features a series of thematic audio essays and invites visitors to experience religion as an audibly complex social, spatial, political and embodied phenomenon. The interactive, immersive exhibit opens with a reception from 5-7 p.m. on Tuesday, May 24, and runs through July 16.

“Religion sounds different depending on the space where it’s practiced,” said Weiner, who co-founded and co-directs the ARSP with Amy DeRogatis, chair and professor of religion and American culture in the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. “Institutional spaces like churches, synagogues and mosques might feature formal worship and formal liturgy. Homes and domestic spaces are much more intimate and family-based. So, we organized the exhibit not by discrete, bounded religious traditions, but by commonalities across traditions based on the different spaces in which religion is practiced. It’s a wonderful insight into thinking about what religion sounds like.”

Co-curators Alison Furlong, ARSP project coordinator, and Lauren Pond, ARSP content producer, as well as Vicki Brennan of the University of Vermont and Ely Lyonblum of the University of Toronto, listened to hours of field recordings and identified the importance of place as a central theme around which to curate the exhibit.

The project includes over 100 recordings from central Ohio — from worship music inside a Methodist church and a singing bowl circle at Whetstone Park to ritualistic Buddhist chanting at a home in Worthington and a ceremonial Druid invocation at ComFest in Goodale Park. Religious Soundscapes captures the spatial, cultural and linguistic diversity of religion elucidated by the ARSP and presents it to a broad audience. The exhibit also invites the communities recorded, students who produced recordings, and colleagues and scholars who collaborated on the project.

“When you pay attention to sound, it allows one to think about religious practices in ways that get beyond texts and institutions,” DeRogatis said. “Tuning into this different sensation allows us to explore questions as big and simple as ‘What is religion and religious practice?’ … It’s a question that really engages the public because people like to think about the sounds of their own traditions, and they like to talk about how hearing sounds that are not from their religious traditions affects them.”

The ARSP team is also partnering with the Smithsonian Institution to create a traveling exhibit that uses interactive posters to give users a visual and auditory experience of religious life. Each poster includes a QR code, and when scanned with a smartphone or tablet, viewers can listen to field recordings associated with each poster. Community centers, libraries and schools will be able to request printed copies of the posters from the Smithsonian for free. Weiner said it is the first time the Smithsonian has created a traveling poster exhibit that features a sound component.

 “The work Isaac and I have done has built bridges and has been an example for these two institutions about how sharing resources and collaboration can be done to the benefit of everyone,” DeRogatis said.

For Weiner and DeRogatis, the Religious Soundscapes exhibition marks the end of a long, fruitful journey that has redefined their approaches to scholarship. Starting as a classroom exercise, the ARSP evolved into a large-scale collaborative initiative that inspired spinoff research projects, engaged community partners and informed new pedagogical methodologies for religious studies.

“I look back and just express tremendous pride in all we’ve accomplished,” Weiner said. “The actual products we’ve created, as well as the networks of collaboration among faculty, students and community we fostered, this is a moment to celebrate that work.”

The American Religious Sounds Project is supported by funding to Ohio State’s Center for the Study of Religion from the Henry Luce Foundation. Other support has been provided by the Humanities Without Walls Consortium, based at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Material support is also provided by Michigan State and Ohio State.

“We are delighted to announce a transformational new initiative intended to allow for greater access to the center itself,” said Kelly Stevelt, the center’s co-interim executive director. “Starting with our summer platform…, we are thrilled to be leading the way for museums in Ohio by offering free gallery admission all year-round to everyone.”

Executive Vice President and Provost Melissa L. Gilliam spoke to an assembled crowd about the Wexner Center’s upcoming events and how they fit into the larger picture of Ohio State as an arts destination.

“The Wex really anchors the university’s commitment to the arts and links us to the larger community and to the state and to the world,” Gilliam said. “It’s extraordinary and unique among its peers.”

Gilliam said the free admission policy reflects the university’s priorities.

“One of the things the Wex does so beautifully, with the help of many of you, is to focus on issues of equity and also access and affordability, really trying to make our galleries free and open and the work that we do that much more accessible,” she said.

jaamil olawale kosoko, guest curator of “Portal For(e),” introduced the summer-long exhibition. Their role as curator is part of the artist’s three-year collaboration with the institution as an Artist Residency Award recipient. The exhibition provides interconnected events that invite visitors to ruminate on Black feminism and queer theory, as well as intimacy and wellness. In addition to works by kosoko, “Portal For(e)” features pieces from nora chipaumire, Jennifer Harge and Devin Drake, Dana Michele, Jasmine Murrell and Keioui Keijaun Thomas.

“Through sharing space alongside each other, the artists featured in ‘Portal For(e)’ pronounced an otherwise unpronounced critical interpretation,” kosoko said. “We’re re-worlding a world anew during this time of heightened global violence and perpetual pandemics.”

Free gallery admission is made in possible in part through a partnership with the American Electric Power Foundation and other supporters in the community. Another benefit available to Wexner Center guests this summer is discounted parking for film and video and performing arts events thanks to a partnership with CampusParc. Those events will require paid admission.

“Please mark your calendars,” Stevelt said. “We hope to see you regularly and often here at the Wex.”  

“Portal For(e)” kicks off on Thursday, June 9, with a preview party and a dub reggae night at the Wex. A week of opening celebrations will follow.

This notion was a through-line in Johnson’s speech this week at the Ohio Union, the first Patterson Lecture since 2019 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Begun in 2004, the lecture series allows a prominent figure to discuss the challenges facing higher education. It was named in honor of Ohio State graduate Jim Patterson, whose commitment to the land-grant mission led him to the university’s Board of Trustees, serving from 1994-2003 and as board chair in his final year.

Despite the size of Ohio’s economy, Johnson noted that the state ranks poorly across several measures, including per capita income, public health and educational attainment. It is incumbent upon Ohio State, she said, to partner with the communities that have supported the university. This can be done in many ways, including workforce development with employers like Intel, which recently committed $20 billion to two new semiconductor factories in Licking County.

“Building the workforce Intel requires is beyond what a single university, even one with our scale, can do. It is going to take a regional effort,” Johnson said. “So we are working with other public and private universities in Ohio and beyond – including Ohio’s two historically Black universities, Central State University and Wilberforce University – to develop the curricula that will lead students to careers at Intel and at other tech-intensive businesses.”

In addition to contributing to the state, Ohio State must make its top-tier education accessible for all its students, Johnson said. The university’s Scarlet and Gray Advantage program, which will offer undergraduate students the opportunity to earn a debt-free degree within the decade, is beginning with a pilot program this fall with 125 students.

“Since student debt is a complex national problem, and there are many kinds of borrowers, the pilot will allow us to work out the knots,” she said. “Ultimately, our 10-year goal is to do this at scale, with thousands more students a year graduating Ohio State without the burden of loans.”

Free from debt, students can then embark on a journey of lifelong learning. Johnson described a platform that will allow for just that.

“I envision doing this with an education cloud where students can personalize their education, earning micro-credentials that can stack as they progress through Ohio State – and then long after they graduate, as knowledge in their field expands,” she said.

Academic advisers will work in tandem with this program, Johnson said, helping students plot an academic path that can lead to exciting, engaging careers.

Johnson asked the audience to consider the purpose of land-grant universities. Who are the people they are meant to serve: the students who attend them, the communities that engage with them, the faculty who conduct research at them?

Ohio State can be all of these things, she said.

“It is time to redefine what it means to be a great land-grant university in the 21st century – to become a university of the people, by the people, for the people,” Johnson said. “Down the road, that is where real excellence lies – as well as the possibility of inspiring all institutions all across the nation to do the same.

“The beauty is, we have the size, scale and scope to lead,” she said, in closing. “I intend to make sure we do that.”

The James F. Patterson Land-Grant University Lecture is hosted by The Ohio State University Office of Outreach and Engagement.

Abdurraqib spoke with Marcus Jackson, associate professor in the Department of English, read a passage from an upcoming work and answered questions from the audience. 

“I never really thought about writing as a lifestyle,” Abdurraqib said. “I always thought about it as a way to exit the life I had, to be carried away elsewhere.”

This perspective brought questions about his approach to his audience. The author said he hardly thinks of his audience anymore.

“Once you do the work and put it out into the world, you don’t have access to it any longer,” he said. “While I have immense gratitude for folks who spend time with my work, I don’t know if there’s a single thing or even a handful of things that I hope people will gain from my writing – other than, perhaps, a more generous outlook on something that existed in one way for the reader and could now exist in another way.”

It was this notion, of a subject representing multiple things, that Abdurraqib and Jackson discussed most in-depth. The excerpt Abdurraqib shared began with an observation about professional basketball player LeBron James’ graying beard. From there, the passage unspooled into a rumination on age, baldness and mortality.

Sports, he said, offer a narrative framework that is useful for writing.

“I need to have a grounding point. A home base, if you will. If you get too far out, you’re vulnerable. You need to have a home base you can run back to. That’s what I use sports for here,” Abdurraqib said.

Continuing with this line of thought, Jackson offered that familiarity with sports trains the brain to plan for failure, in life and in writing.

“You plan for options in the play,” he said.

It is this flexibility that Abdurraqib said is essential to develop. When asked about advice for fellow writers, he said, “it depends on what that person wants out of that journey. So, the best advice I have is: Define what you want out of this journey. And then make clear to yourself that whatever you want can be malleable.

“Be honest with yourself about not only what you want, but what is acceptable,” he continued. “And then build a plan that can endure disappointments.”

A discussion about impostor syndrome led to a candid reflection from the author. It may have been hard for viewers to believe that a writer as accomplished as Abdurraqib, whose work has been published in Pen American, Vinyl, Pitchfork, The New Yorker and The New York Times, and who has won a Lenore Marshall Prize and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, still grapples with impostor syndrome.

“I’m an anxious person, I have an anxiety disorder, so to live a life believing oneself to be an impostor is almost baked into my DNA,” he said. “But the thing I constantly challenge myself on is: If I am an impostor, what is the worst that might happen? What is the worst that might happen in my work?”

Appropriately, the dialogue ended with a question about knowing when a work is finished. Abdurraqib argued that works are never done, and this open-endedness allows for further creative exploration in future endeavors. The works, he said, are never finished with him, either, and he revels in that feeling.

“So instead of asking the question, ‘Have I finished this?’ I return to the idea of: ‘Have I done the best that I can with the tools I have in this moment?’ That’s a way better question for me.”

Beverly Vandiver, interim executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and professor in the Department of Human Sciences (College of Education & Human Ecology), and Camille R. Quinn, assistant professor in the College of Social Work, will lead the Kirwan Institute’s project. Their work will use the institute’s evidence-based examination practices to illuminate the role of implicit bias in criminal justice. Joining Vandiver and Quinn are Kyle Strickland and Kip Holley, also from the Kirwan Institute.  

“We were one of the first places in the country to even start writing about implicit bias work,” said Vandiver. “Ohio State, by creating the Kirwan Institute and situating an institute on race and ethnicity, have done themselves a tremendous favor.”

“Working with the MacArthur Foundation is a privilege,” Quinn said, “as is engaging with other organizations that are looking at the same structural issues.” She is eager to collaborate “with organizations that are hitting the ground and engaging directly with populations around these issues,” she said, adding, “We want to assist in ways that are useful to them.”  

The role of implicit, or unconscious, bias in the criminal justice system cannot be overstated, both educators agree.

“It fits in almost any context,” Vandiver said. “It is part of the mindset of the people who are running the judicial system.”

These biases have led to a significant overrepresentation of Black people throughout the criminal justice system but especially in jails and prisons. According to the Safety and Justice Challenge, “while Black and Latinx people make up 30% of the U.S. population, they account for 51% of the jail population.”

The impact of this time behind bars has costs beyond the immediately obvious. The jailed person’s family and community often suffer financial, physical and emotional tolls as well. The Safety and Justice Challenge looks to find solutions to the increasingly large number of incarcerated people in the United States and to the ramifications this has throughout communities.

“There tend to be people who support prevention or intervention,” Quinn said, when it comes to keeping people out of prison. “I see the value in both.”

Quinn also sees the value in working with someone like Vandiver. Both women have practitioner backgrounds, which they believe is a benefit when working with Kirwan’s data-based approach.

“Hopefully [our work] will yield relief of burden at some point,” Quinn said. “That’s the way we think about research: There has to be some utility, something that people can walk away with and apply immediately.”

This utility is important not just for the organizations involved in the grant but for the Columbus community as well, Quinn said.  

“For Kirwan as an institution and also for Ohio State as a land-grant institution, part of our obligation and our duty is to ensure that the community we serve benefits from this work,” Quinn said.

While the task ahead is a daunting one, Vandiver and Quinn see Ohio as occupying a better position than other states.

“At this stage,” Quinn said, “where reform measures are direly needed, to be in a state that is open to reform efforts that others are not even considering, we are ahead of the curve.”

“We can do wonders cultivating our caring and compassionate communities. Together, we can share joy, share kindness and share what it means to be a Buckeye,” said President Kristina M. Johnson in a campus-wide email. “Today is the day to bring out the best in each other.”

Over the past several years, Buckeye Love has evolved from an affinity campaign highlighting love and appreciation for Ohio State and its community to include a more intentional focus on kindness and compassion. This year’s programming is centered around creating one intentional and impactful day for all of Buckeye Nation, when every member of the community can experience kindness.

Student groups are playing a special role in this year’s events. Ohio Staters is one of many groups helping to distribute 30,000 kindness cards across Ohio State’s campuses that direct the recipient to write small, thoughtful notes (included in the card) to two people, spreading the joy further.

“Maybe it is for the person at Starbucks who gives you your drink every day or the person who sits next to you in class or your TA [teaching assistant]. We want you to spread that love around campus to other people,” said Ava Miller, president of Ohio Staters. The group, whose motto is “50 serving 50,000,” names its primary goal as improving the welfare of the campus community.

“National Random Acts of Kindness Day goes right along with that,” Miller said. “The initiative is to impact every single student and person who comes to campus that day, which is a big, meaningful goal. We wanted to help support it in any way we could.”

Another student group, the Boo Radley Society, is also participating in this year’s Buckeye Love events. The group, named after the famous character from To Kill a Mockingbird, performs random acts of kindness throughout the year. Buckeye Love was a natural fit, said Emily Stern, director of outreach for the organization.

“We’re starting the chain of doing something nice,” Stern said, “and we want everyone else to continue it. It’s so easy to put a smile on someone’s face.”

“Although we’re in a stressful time, you shouldn’t have to sacrifice being kind and letting people know you care about them. So, we thought, ‘What can we do to make this better?’ because that is what we need to focus on,” she said.

The Wexner Medical Center team is working hard to ensure its staff and visitors feel this kindness, too. Cookies and candy will be distributed throughout the day, as will messages of encouragement for patients and staff alike. As a special treat, tickets to upcoming Ohio State men’s basketball games will be part of a staff drawing.

“Our focus is on helping our staff feel appreciated and to encourage them to be kind to themselves,” said Mary Connolly, senior marketing consultant at the Wexner Medical Center, who helped develop the hospital’s programming for the day.

Students, faculty and staff will be sharing their surprise acts of kindness on social media throughout the day using the #BuckeyeLove hashtag, along with simple reminders to #BeKind.

Wilkerson spoke about the civil rights gains that have been achieved in the past 156 years and the progress yet to be made during her Dec. 1 keynote address for The Ohio State University’s 23rd Annual President and Provost’s Diversity Lecture and Cultural Arts Series.

“Slavery lasted so long that it will not be until next year – 2022 – that the United States will have been a free, independent country for as long as slavery lasted,” Wilkerson said.

The lecture, held virtually this year, was presented by The Ohio State University Office of Diversity and Inclusion in collaboration with the College of Education and Human Ecology, the College of Dentistry and the College of Engineering.

“Programs like the President and Provost’s Diversity Lecture and Cultural Arts Series provide an environment where we learn from the most distinguished authors, scholars and thought leaders,” Ohio State President Kristina M. Johnson said while introducing Wilkerson.

A Washington, D.C., native, Wilkerson studied journalism at Howard University and interned at the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994 as the New York Times’ Chicago bureau chief – making her the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

Wilkerson is the author of “The Warmth of Other Suns,” which chronicles the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North in the 20th century. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize, among other honors.

Wilkerson’s latest book, “Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents,” explores the concept that a ranking of individuals has existed in the United States since the nation’s inception, similar to formal caste systems of countries such as India.

The caste system in the United States is based on racial and socioeconomic factors that perpetuate inequality, Wilkerson said.

“Caste is an arbitrary, artificial, graded ranking of one’s standing in society,” she said. “Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions.”

Beyond slavery, one of the starkest examples of how caste has manifested in American society, Wilkerson said, is the system of Jim Crow segregation that lasted from the late 19th century through the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. The Jim Crow system denied African Americans rights such as voting, equitable schooling and housing, and restricted their use of public facilities such as drinking fountains, swimming pools and public transportation.

Wilkerson said civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. commented on the parallels between American segregation and India’s caste system. When King visited India in 1959, he was asked how it felt to be an “untouchable” in the United States – sparking a realization that was, indeed, the status of African Americans at the time.

“What we have seen shows us that Dr. King’s mission has not been fulfilled,” Wilkerson said. “It will be up to all of us to make it so, not only for our children and grandchildren, but for the species and the good of the planet.”

During a question-and-answer session with attendees following her lecture, Wilkerson offered advice for aspiring writers. She said she received the most valuable advice on how to succeed as a writer when she was interning at the Washington Post. Dorothy Butler Gilliam, the Post’s first African-American female reporter (and mother of Ohio State Provost Melissa L. Gilliam), told Wilkerson, “Whatever you write, make it memorable.”

“I took that to mean that whatever you write, it needs to be so powerful that people never forget it,” Wilkerson said. “And that’s what I strive to do in my work.”