Ohio State, through the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, is a founding partner with four other institutions, including Dartmouth College, George Washington University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Vanderbilt University.

“This partnership offers an exciting opportunity for scholars at a foundational point in their career as they pursue early research and discovery,” said Ohio State’s Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Trevor Brown. “Ohio State and the Chase Center look forward to working with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute to support our early career scholars.”

“This fellowship program focuses on fields of study that are critical to our civic life. The Chase Center will be a welcome home for new Reagan Institute Society of Fellows at Ohio State,” said Chase Center Executive Director Lee Strang. “This program provides both resources and, just as importantly, the valuable mentorship that young scholars need as they begin the next step in their academic career.”

The society gives scholars time and support to finish their first major work. Eligible scholars are focused on U.S. political history, America in the world, civic thought, science and technology studies, and law and economics. Applicants from any accredited doctoral program are eligible.

Fellows are selected by a committee of faculty representatives from each partner university, based on scholarly merit and a commitment to research that enriches intellectual diversity in their field.

“The academy loses too many of its most promising minds in the years immediately following the PhD. Not for lack of talent or ambition, but because the time and resources needed to complete serious scholarship are increasingly difficult to secure,” said Anthony Eames, the Jill Kent Chair in History, Civics, and Statecraft at the Ronald Reagan Institute. “This program offers a well-funded, structured path from dissertation to faculty appointment.”

The program includes two fellowship tracks:

• Five-Year Fellowship Appointment: Fellows are recent PhDs who will spend two years in residence at the Reagan Institute in Washington, D.C., with a stipend and research funds to complete a first book or major project. They build relationships across the capital’s research and policy community. Fellows then serve a three-year faculty appointment at a partner university, taking part in the life of their host department.
• Three-Year Graduate Fellowship Appointment: Graduate Fellows are doctoral candidates in their final year who spend one year in residence at the Reagan Institute completing their dissertation, followed by a two-year postdoctoral appointment at a partner university.

“President Reagan believed America’s dynamism depended on the vigorous competition of ideas,” said Roger Zakheim, Washington director of the institute. “The Society of Fellows invests in this competition by providing opportunities for a rising generation of scholars to refine their ideas within and beyond the university. We are proud to partner with seven institutions that share our conviction that the pursuit of intellectual pluralism makes universities better for scholars and students alike.”

The society will also appoint senior fellows from partner institutions who will serve as mentors to early fellows and graduate fellows. The society will further support graduate students with opportunities for research grants throughout their early careers.

Fellows receive an $80,000 annual salary during their two-year Washington residency and a $90,000 minimum annual salary during the three-year university appointment.

Graduate fellows receive a $60,000 annual salary during their one-year Washington residency and a $75,000 minimum annual salary during their two-year university appointment.

The society is now accepting applications for its inaugural cohort of fellows, with appointments beginning on Sept. 1, 2027. Interested scholars can learn more about the fellow application here and the graduate fellow application here.

A small plate price ending in a nonrounded number – in this case .99 – increases the chances customers will consider that a fair price for a reduced portion and make the purchase, according to a new study.

A rounded price ending with .00 was less likely to result in an intention to order a small plate because the cost was perceived as unfair, results showed.

“Many people think pricing is part of revenue management. So they’re coming only from the cost control and bottom-line perspective. But pricing is a marketing and framing strategy,” said senior study author Stephanie Liu, associate professor of hospitality management at The Ohio State University.

“We need to understand consumer psychology and consumer behavior so that we can help consumers make better decisions. So what we do is change the price of a small plate from $5.00 to $4.99. It’s just one cent difference. But psychologically, consumers feel so much better: ‘It’s fair. Now I can order the small plate.’”

The paper was published recently in the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management.

First author Xi Yu, who completed this work as a PhD student in the Hospitality Management Program at Ohio State, was inspired to examine smaller-portion pricing during the pandemic lockdown, when she was ordering a lot of half-sized sandwiches but didn’t pay half the price of the full size.

“I cannot eat the full size, so I always ordered a 6-inch sandwich, but I thought the price was unfair,” said Yu, now an associate professor of Faculty of International Tourism and Management at the City University of Macau.

The mixed-methods study consisted of interviews with consumers and an experiment asking participants to rate perceived price fairness and intention to order either regular-sized or smaller meals with varied pricing structures.

The interviews with 36 consumers identified three themes: Restaurant customers often perceived small plates as overpriced compared to portion size; concerns about pricing fairness emerged as a central issue; and nonrounded prices were associated with better value and higher chances for a purchase.

Participants also commented on the things they liked about small plates – they were a healthier dining choice, reduced food waste and broadened a meal’s variety.

In the experiment, 244 U.S. adults were asked to imagine ordering a lunch soup-and-sandwich combo at a fictitious restaurant. They were shown an image of either a small- or regular-sized meal priced at either $7.99 or $8.00 for a small serving and $11.99 or $12.00 for the regular serving.

Statistical analysis showed that the nonrounded prices signaled a discount or fair pricing, which increased the intention to order – but only for small plates. Perceived fairness was determined to be the psychological mechanism that drove this effect.

“The rationale is that the nonrounded price will always signal a sense of a discount,” Yu said. “For the regular plates, people don’t actually care about whether you give them a rounded or nonrounded price.”

The findings suggest it makes good business sense to sweeten the deal for small plates not just to increase sales, but to satisfy customers, the researchers said.

“It’s a hot topic in the industry, but there hasn’t been sufficient attention paid to it. There is literally no guidance on how to price small plates,” Liu said. “In our context, we want consumers to order the small plates if they fit their appetite. We don’t want them to choose the regular plate just to save money.”

Additional co-authors were Jay Kandampully, professor, and Huiling Huang, a PhD graduate, both of Ohio State’s Hospitality Management Program. Huang is now an assistant professor in integrated resort and tourism management at the University of Macau. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The study was recently published in Science Advances.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The study was published Nov. 2 in Nature Chemistry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other tips provided at the workshop to avoid fraud include:

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

· Resisting the urge to act immediately on a solicitation

· Using strong passwords on all accounts

· Not answering and blocking unwanted calls and texts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fisher Advantage focuses on developing graduates who are: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Oct. 6, the

What’s all this about?

I have known Francis — as an inspiration, mentor and friend — for over 35 years. This is almost as much time as he and hundreds of his collaborators have been working on the science and engineering behind this year’s announcement. I’m delighted to see this recognition for all of them, including some of my Ohio State colleagues. My own research is in theoretical neutrino astrophysics. I am not part of the IceCube Collaboration.

What are neutrinos?

Neutrinos are almost massless, almost non-interacting particles. They barely exist as the partners of electrons, but are stripped of the electron’s charge and mass, making them nearly ghosts. First theorized in 1932, it wasn’t until 1956 that neutrinos were discovered in the laboratory through their extraordinarily rare interactions. For example, about 100 billion neutrinos from the sun streamed through your eyeballs — no matter which way you were facing — in the time it took to read that sentence. Almost all did so harmlessly, but maybe once in your lifetime one will interact, which would be much less than what cosmic rays do all the time.

How can you observe astrophysical neutrinos?

Except for being almost impossible to detect, neutrinos are ideal astrophysical messengers. They are created in huge numbers in stars and other objects where material is hot and dense. Unlike other particles, including photons of light, they can easily escape from behind vast amounts of material. And unlike charged cosmic rays, which can have their directions scrambled by magnetic fields, nothing happens to neutrinos as they cross the universe. If we could somehow figure out how to easily detect these neutrinos when they arrive at Earth, this would all be great.

The trick to making this work is simple to say but hard to do — we need huge detectors where almost nothing ever happens. Although the probability of a neutrino interacting in a detector is tiny, it gets bigger in proportion to the size of the detector and how long it operates. And although it is relatively easy to build a huge detector that is sensitive to small signal events, the hard part is reducing the rates of background events, or noise, that mimics neutrino signal events.

Prior to IceCube, physics experimentalists had observed astrophysical neutrinos produced in the sun, from one exploding star (supernova 1987A) near our galaxy, and by cosmic rays in Earth’s atmosphere. But these were not yet enough sources to develop the potential of neutrino astronomy.

The long road to IceCube

What is IceCube? Located in one cubic kilometer of deep ice at the South Pole, it is an array of several thousand light detectors called photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). Ordinarily, deep under the ice is a dark and boring place. But when a neutrino interacts, it can produce charged particles that emit a flash of light that triggers the PMTs, allowing IceCube to reconstruct the position, direction and energy of the neutrino.

This required the development of extensive new technology and large, well-functioning experimental collaborations. Think how complicated it can be for a group of several people to cooperate on planning just a simple dinner out. Now imagine what is needed for many hundreds of people from around the world to work together for decades to build and operate a complex detector. Francis led this effort.

What did IceCube see and why does it matter?

In 2013, IceCube announced the detection of two astrophysical neutrinos, each at energies very close to 1 PeV, a specialized physics unit that means a single neutrino has 1,000,000,000,000,000 times more energy per particle than a visible photon of light.

In some sense, this was an incredible shock. Why should such high-energy particles even exist? The entire field of astronomy would be largely unchanged if they didn’t. The highest-energy particles produced by humans are protons in the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, and those are almost as energetic (only 100 times less) as those detected by IceCube. But the key distinction is in the power of the sources. You can walk around Geneva without being fried alive because you remain far enough from the beam. But astrophysical sources must be so bright that they can be seen from halfway across the universe, which is obviously very, very far away. It took many thousands of people and advanced technology to make the Large Hadron Collider work. In comparison, it’s astonishing how easily the universe can put together something incredibly more powerful.

Since those first two astrophysical neutrino signal events, IceCube has detected hundreds more. There are a few surprises. First, these events are dominantly coming from very distant sources, with some coming from the Milky Way, and none yet from the sun. This is the opposite order of the history of optical astronomy, where astronomers first discovered the sun, then the Milky Way, and then the vast universe of other galaxies. Second, we don’t know what the sources are! We know they are distant galaxies, but we don’t know which types. 

This is both frustrating and fun, because although there are conflicting hints in favor of different kinds of sources dominating, we just aren’t sure. It’s fun because we have so much new to learn. 

What’s next?

To progress, we’re going to need a bigger boat. That could be IceCube-Gen2, a laboratory that would house an optical-based detector about 10 times bigger than IceCube, intended to discover the individual sources behind the cosmic haze detected by its predecessor. IceCube-Gen2 would also include a new radio-based detector that is needed to allow the frequent detection of neutrinos at even higher energies. Together, these will help solve the mystery of how the universe makes such powerful accelerators of cosmic rays. They will also make tests of neutrino properties and interactions that could never be duplicated in laboratory experiments.

IceCube-Gen2 has been endorsed in the U.S. National Academies’ report on the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020 (Astro2020), for which Laura Cadonati (Georgia Tech) and I served as co-chairs for the Panel on Particle Astrophysics and Gravitation. It has also been endorsed by the 2023 Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, convened by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. As with IceCube, substantial international participation would be needed, and there is evident enthusiasm for this.

Potential competitors to IceCube-Gen2 include two proposals led by China — TRIDENT (TRopIcal DEep-sea Neutrino Telescope) and High-energy Underwater Neutrino Telescope (HUNT) — that would go directly to detectors that would significantly exceed even the size of IceCube-Gen2, but without U.S. participation.

This is thus a pivotal moment for U.S. leadership in growing the field of neutrino astronomy. From decades of work, we have learned an important lesson — catching neutrinos takes patience, but they reward it richly.

John Beacom is an Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy at The Ohio State University. This article is abridged and edited from one originally self-published in Medium.

Kara J. Trott received the John B. Gerlach Sr. Development Volunteer Award, which recognizes those who demonstrate exceptional leadership, commitment and personal investment in Ohio State fundraising efforts. Keith D. Monda, Veronica B. Brady and G. Gilbert “Gil” Cloyd were awarded the Everett D. Reese Medal, Ohio State’s highest honor recognizing exceptional service in private philanthropy.

“Kara, Keith, Veronica and Gil are extraordinary leaders who truly embody the Buckeye ethos of paying forward to future generations,” said Ohio State President Ravi V. Bellamkonda. “Through their leadership, generosity and vision, they have expanded opportunities for students, advanced discovery, supported health and well-being and inspired countless others to make a difference.”

A graduate of Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law, Trott is the founder and board chair of Quantum Health, an innovative company dedicated to helping people navigate the healthcare system while improving outcomes for employers, patients and families.

Trott has established endowed faculty positions in law, architecture and psychiatry with her philanthropy to the university, while advancing initiatives focused on immigration advocacy, trauma resilience and mental healthcare. She has also given her time and expertise to Ohio State’s highest governing and advisory boards, and currently serves on the university’s Board of Trustees.

“Ohio State has played an important role in my life and career, and I am grateful for it every day,” Trott said. “I’ve always believed that when you see a problem, you should work toward a solution. It is an honor to give to students, faculty and programs that are helping people reach their potential and improve lives.”

Together, Monda and Brady’s support established the Monda Student Resource Center, which provides students access to food, housing, clothing, emergency financial assistance and mental health resources. They have also helped nearly 800 Ohio State students participate in international learning experiences, broadening their perspectives and preparing them to lead in an increasingly interconnected world.

Their generosity can be seen across campus, including the public art installation Borealis by John Henry, and with scholarships and an endowed faculty position.

Monda, who earned two economics degrees from Ohio State, is the retired president and chief operating officer of Coach, Inc. He has devoted much of his post-corporate career to philanthropy, particularly in the areas of education, hunger relief and the well-being of children and families.

“Our simple motto is: ‘Be Good and Do Good,’” Monda said. “It means showing up where there is a need, leveling the playing field and providing opportunity.”

“Ohio State students have big dreams, and it has been a privilege to help open doors that allow them to explore the world, pursue their goals and build meaningful futures,” Brady added.

A first-generation college student and 1969 graduate of Ohio State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, Cloyd has spent more than five decades investing in the college and broader university.

After a distinguished career that included serving as chief technology officer for Procter & Gamble, with his philanthropic leadership, Cloyd continued to act on his belief that everyone deserves a quality education. He and his late wife, Susan, have supported scholarships for veterinary students and through the Scarlet and Gray Advantage program. He has also championed Ohio State Lima, helping fund renovations to Galvin Hall and expand educational access for students across the region.

“Ohio State changed my trajectory,” Cloyd said. “My hope is that today’s talented young people can discover how education can set them up in life. That’s why I continue to encourage others to invest in students and in the mission of this great university.”  

Michael C. Eicher, Ohio State’s senior vice president for external affairs and president of The Ohio State University Foundation, shared that this year’s honorees have created a legacy that aligns with the Buckeye values of leadership, service and generosity.

“Most importantly, Kara, Keith, Veronica and Gil show us what it means to answer the call when our communities need us,” Eicher said.

“If you think about being a patient-oriented researcher, what’s the highest achievement? It is if something you found out changes how that condition or disease is cared for,” said Zadnik, professor of optometry at The Ohio State University and former dean of the College of Optometry.

That career highlight is now matched by one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine: Zadnik’s election this year to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM).

Zadnik is being recognized for her pioneering and exemplary contributions in vision science – in particular, identifying the major risk factors for nearsightedness (myopia) onset in children and defining the protective nature of outdoor time on the development of myopia in kids, as well as for her exceptional mentorship and leadership.

“I am really flattered, deeply honored and humbled,” said Zadnik, who holds the Glenn A. Fry Professorship in Optometry and Physiological Optics. “I also love that this brings attention to the area of research and study around this idea that we could treat and possibly even prevent nearsightedness in kids, which occurred during my career development.

“The reason that’s important isn’t so you or I could wear thinner eyeglasses. The tissues in the elongated myopic eye are stretched and fragile, and as we age, we are at more risk for retinal detachment and other sight-threatening conditions late in life. If myopia detection and treatment can slow that elongation, those risks could be decreased.”

The NAM was founded in 1970 as the Institute of Medicine and is one of three academies that make up the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in the United States. The academies are private, nonprofit institutions that work outside of government to provide objective advice on matters of science, technology and health.

Zadnik is one of 11 current Ohio State faculty members who have been elected to the academy. New members are elected by current members through a process that recognizes individuals who have made major contributions to the advancement of the medical sciences, health care and public health.

“As a patient-oriented researcher, Dr. Zadnik has transformed the field of optometry and vision science through groundbreaking work to better understand and manage myopia in children,” said John M. Horack, vice president for research at Ohio State. “Her research has improved the eye health of countless young patients, while her extraordinary mentorship and leadership have helped shape the next generation of scientists and clinicians. Her induction into the National Academy of Medicine is a well-deserved recognition of the contributions she has made to science and patient care.”

As the first optometrist elected to NAM, Zadnik said she sees an opportunity to be an ambassador for preventive vision science research in an organization comprising medical doctors, including pediatricians.

“I like to think that on this larger non-optometric stage, I might have opportunities to talk to policymakers, decision-makers and people who take care of children every day,” she said.

The NAM citation also recognizes Zadnik’s leadership in describing the natural history of the ocular disease keratoconus. Early in her career, she led an eight-year study following over 1,200 people with the corneal disorder, which causes the clear “window” at the front of the eye to become conical in shape. The study focused on understanding the trajectory of a disease with an average onset in people who are in their 20s.

“We mapped the course of this rare disease,” she said. “I think the data we gathered and published about the disease and how it progresses, including the risk factors for progression, laid the groundwork for much of what we know about the disease today.”

Zadnik launched her research career while pursuing her PhD in physiological optics at the University of California, Berkeley, and practicing as a clinician-researcher at the University of California, Davis. She joined the Ohio State faculty as an assistant professor in 1996, bringing two significant National Institutes of Health grants with her. One of those, an investigation of risk factors for myopia in children that began at Berkeley but eventually grew into a multicenter study, was funded by the National Eye Institute for 20 years.

Thirty years into her Ohio State career, there’s still plenty of work to do with that study’s findings along with efforts in the College of Optometry and for the university.

“We’re still analyzing data and still publishing papers because we followed 5,000 kids from first grade to eighth grade,” she said. “I’m still teaching, I’m still chairing the Biomedical Sciences Institutional Review Board.”

Zadnik was dean of Ohio State’s College of Optometry from 2014 until June of this year, and held the posts of interim executive vice president and provost and interim dean of the College of Public Health in recent years, as well. She was president of the American Academy of Optometry, the Association of Schools and Colleges of Optometry, and the National Board of Examiners in Optometry. More recently, she was inducted into her high school hall of fame in science and technology – an honor that was more meaningful than she had imagined it would be.

Originally from Kent, Ohio, Zadnik lived and was educated in California for 20 years before moving back to join Ohio State. She recalls an optometry colleague from northeast Ohio who sent an email at that time that said, “It’s time to come home.”

And that is how she continues to think of Ohio and its flagship university.

“Ohio means a lot to me. Ohio State means a lot to me,” she said. “Ohio State and Ohio State Optometry made an academic home for me at a time when that was exactly what my work and career needed, where I could thrive and train graduate students.

“And for the College of Optometry to be right in the center of the health sciences campus – I knew that was going to be good. I just didn’t know how good and how enriching having other health science colleagues and collaborations a stone’s throw away would be. It’s meant the world to me.”

The Ohio Statewide Family Engagement Center at the Center on Education and Training for Employment (CETE) presented the virtual summit. The event brought together parents, teachers and administrators from throughout Ohio to discuss strategies to increase families’ involvement in their education.

“This conference affirms the importance of family engagement and vitality in enhancing the lives of children,” said Erik Porfeli, interim dean of the College of Education and Human Ecology, which houses CETE. “We know that family is among the most powerful of human contexts and that partnerships between families and educators are vital to support students in academic and human development.”

Conference sessions included discussions on strengthening partnerships and enhancing trust among families and educators, strategies to increase the statewide high school graduation rate, and increasing student and parental involvement in science, math, technology and engineering (STEM) programs.

“Sometimes in education, when we talk about family engagement, it can feel overwhelming. We think we have to overhaul the entire system overnight,” Barbara Boone, director of the Ohio Statewide Family Engagement Center, told attendees.

“But really, lasting change starts like this: One drop. … The statement you make in a meeting that tells a parent that their child may be having some struggles now, and that’s normal and it’s not forever. You’ll be there to support them and their child will learn and have a bright future. That single drop creates a ripple, creates a change in the climate. It builds trust. It’s the power of a small step.”

In one session, principals from central Ohio middle schools shared best practices on how to engage parents in helping to not only help their children reach their full academic potential, but to ensure they have the best overall experience in school.

Tabbetha Greco, assistant principal of Bexley Middle School, said the school recently surveyed parents of students who transitioned from elementary to middle school to determine how to best provide information to streamline the process.

The survey helped administrators and teachers determine, “How are we getting information? How are we receiving information?” Greco said. “Who’s collaborating with us? Who’s evaluating us? And then who’s knocking on the door, calling our offices with concerns? How do we involve them in some of the solutions?”

Cassie Muller, middle school dean of instruction at Graham Elementary and Middle School in Columbus, said administrators and teachers collaborate each year before the school year begins. They brainstorm on how to best provide parents with resources to help their children learn math and address issues that may cause the students to fall behind.

“We hear that from families a lot: ‘I don’t know how to do this math that kids are doing nowadays,’ but we give them resources so that they can support their student,” Muller said. “There’s also a calendar link. … Each grade level has their own section so that if families have students in multiple grade levels, they just have a one-stop shop to look for to know exactly what their student’s doing that week, what test they have.”

In her keynote address, Shalinee Sharma, author of “Math Mind” and CEO of the nonprofit Zearn, which provides instructional support for math educators, offered insights on how parents can help their children overcome obstacles to learning.

An important step is often a mindset shift in which parents communicate to their children that they’re capable of learning math, Sharma said.

She shared an anecdote in which the mother of her son’s preschool classmate told Sharma that the classmate’s family are artists and, therefore, “We’re just not math people.” Sharma said she encouraged the mother to change her messaging to ensure her children would be receptive to learning.

“All kids are math kids, and even if you don’t believe it yet, just say it. That’s a small change and that will have extraordinary impact,” Sharma said. “When math makes sense, kids build confidence.”

For more information about the Ohio Statewide Family Engagement Center and the 2027 Family Leaders for Ohio Schools Academy, a leadership program for parents of children in K-12 Ohio public schools, visit the program’s website.

Researchers, posed as “secret shoppers” looking for appointments for issues including anxiety and grief, called 5,822 psychiatrists and psychologists on commercial provider lists in five states — Delaware, Montana, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Virginia.

Their aim was to test whether the provider information in insurance directories actually connected patients with available, in-network mental health professionals.

A successful call (meaning someone picked up the phone) resulted in an appointment with the health care provider only 24% of the time. If the caller was willing to see another clinician, an appointment could be made 31% of the time.

The research, led by Simon Haeder and Wendy Xu of The Ohio State University College of Public Health, appears today in JAMA Health Forum.

“Access to mental health care in the U.S. is a well-documented struggle. This shows that even those with private insurance, who are told they have many providers to choose from, can have a hard time getting the care they need,” Haeder said.

The researchers couldn’t analyze more than 6 in 10 calls because they reached an automated system or answering machine and could not speak with a person.

When analyzing the remaining 2,252 calls, Haeder and his colleagues found:

• 56% revealed inaccurate information in the provider directory.
• 22% of calls didn’t result in an appointment because of capacity limitations, including providers not accepting new patients.
• Callers were told they’d have to wait an average of 20.5 days for care, with longer waits for psychiatry than psychology.

“Providers move, change phone numbers, leave practices or otherwise become unavailable, but those changes aren’t always reflected in insurance directories,” Haeder said.

Insurers may also list clinicians who are part of a contracted group even when those individual clinicians aren’t actually available. Researchers describe these as “ghost” providers or networks because they appear to exist on paper but aren’t necessarily accessible to patients.

“Our study speaks to a broader problem in American healthcare: the disconnect between having health insurance and actually being able to use it,” said Xu, an Ohio State professor of health services management and policy.

“Inaccurate provider directories are not simply an administrative inconvenience. They can create substantial barriers to care, leaving people effectively underinsured despite having insurance.”

Challenges with provider network directories have been documented across healthcare and are especially worrisome when it comes to people looking for help with mental health concerns, the researchers said.

“Seeking help can already be difficult for someone experiencing anxiety, grief or another mental health concern, and that’s exacerbated when they’re running into answering machines, unavailable providers and ‘in-network’ psychologists who’ve moved to another state,” Haeder said.

Provider-directory accuracy is a longstanding, systemic problem across specialties, with its roots in several challenges, including inconsistent regulation and enforcement and incentives for insurers to beef up provider lists, he said.

“I’d love to see a centralized provider directory that clinicians maintain and insurers can access, rather than every insurer separately trying to maintain its own database,” Haeder said.

The study received funding from Inseparable, a national mental health advocacy organization.

Other researchers who worked on the study are Ohio State doctoral student Yuqin Lou and Benjamin Miller of Stanford University.

Publishing today (Oct. 16, 2026) in The Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, the 52 authors agreed to 28 recommendations designed to help first responders, healthcare professionals and agencies work toward five primary goals: timely recognition of traumatic brain injury (TBI), safe recovery, operational readiness, reduced stigma and first responder-centered care. 

Researchers and clinicians at The Ohio State University assembled the team that developed the guidelines, which apply to law enforcement officers, corrections personnel, firefighters and emergency medical technicians (EMTs) – a group of professionals at high risk for violent interactions, falls and car crashes working in a demanding culture that makes it tough to seek help. 

While addressing injury prevention, treatment and return to duty, the recommendations also recognize that better outcomes will require education, supportive reporting practices and organizational cultures that enable first responders to identify injuries and access appropriate care. The authors wrote in the paper that management of traumatic brain injuries in first responders “must shift from an individual burden to an organizational responsibility.” 

“The first step is recognizing that TBI is a problem in first responders. I think everybody thinks of it as a sports problem, but there are a lot of other populations that TBI impacts, and, clearly, first responders is one of them,” said lead author Jaclyn Caccese, associate professor in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Ohio State. 

“We don’t have to start from scratch. There is a lot we can learn from sports and the military, but those approaches have to be adapted with first responders to reflect the realities of their work. That partnership is really important if we want the recommendations to be practical, trusted and ultimately useful.” 

The authors convened at Ohio State last spring to pursue consensus on protocols surrounding six frameworks that they had been discussing in smaller groups for months before they met.

• workplace policies
• injury prevention measures
• challenges of recognizing injuries
• diagnosis and treatment of the injury
• mental health monitoring
• steps needed to get a concussed first responder back to work 

Though concussion research on athletes and military personnel has informed this work, the complex nature of first responders’ responsibilities brings a different set of challenges after a TBI: Symptoms can interfere with duties that require making split-second decisions, while driving at high speed with lights and sirens can provoke symptoms. Shift work disrupts sleep, which is essential to repairing the brain. An additional strike to the head could set back the recovery process.

The recommendations emphasize shared organizational responsibility, supportive and non-punitive reporting and referral processes, clinician-guided care, occupation-specific return to duty progression and continued research partnerships with first responder communities. 

Two recently published studies led by Caccese and colleagues provided new details on the size of the problem of TBIs in first responders. 

In a statewide survey of Ohio law enforcement and corrections officers, 64.1% of respondents reported at least one lifetime TBI, and 28.3% reported duty-related TBI. Nearly three-quarters of the duty-related injuries had never been diagnosed or treated. 

A review of 23 studies of TBI occurrence in first responders showed the prevalence of a lifetime TBI in this population was 58.8%. The research also showed there is a high risk for TBI in firefighters and revealed that head injuries in EMTs have barely been studied at all. 

New federal funding will support an investigation into symptoms and recovery timing in first responders. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health awarded Ohio State $1.9 million to fund a project adapting the sideline assessment and repeated testing of injured athletes as closely as possible to the law enforcement environment. Personnel with a head injury will be compared to uninjured controls on a range of symptoms 72 hours after the TBI, once symptoms have resolved, when they’re cleared for unrestricted work and six months later. 

“The idea is to look at what are the common mechanisms of injury, how long does it take officers on average to hit those milestones, and what do their trajectories look like?” said Caccese, who is the principal investigator on the grant. “And we’ll also look at the risk factors for persisting symptoms – for officers who do take longer to recover, why do they take longer to recover?” 

Many other consensus statement authors are working to shrink the gap of research on TBI in first responders and helping spread the word about the recommendations and the collaborative process that led to them. A major next step is working with first responder organizations to determine how the recommendations can be implemented across different agencies and occupational settings. Caccese and colleagues are presenting the consensus statement at the International Association of Chiefs of Police in late October. 

Though there is a lot more work to be done, Caccese said publication of the recommendations is a significant milestone in the effort to build more consistent, evidence-informed systems of TBI care with and for first responders, whose workplace safety and well-being “really affects everyone.” 

“A first responder should not have to recognize a TBI alone, decide whether reporting it could threaten a career, find a clinician who understands the demands of the job, negotiate appropriate work restrictions, and determine when it is safe to resume a high-risk duty,” she and colleagues wrote in a preface to the topical issue of the journal. “Yet in many settings, there is no clear system to guide that process. The consensus statement offers a framework for beginning to build one.” 

This work was supported by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs endorsed by the Department of Defense through the Traumatic Brain Injury and Psychological Health Research Program, and by Ohio State’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and Center for Brain Injury Recovery & Discovery. 

Additional Ohio State co-authors are James Oñate, Nathan Edwards, Andrew Sas, Carly Smith, Thomas Beach, Laura Boxley, Michael Guthrie, Jacek Kolacz, Patrick McKenna, Ashish R. Panchal, Bryant Walrod and Jeffrey J. Wing.

These imperfections, usually caused by tiny distortions within the material, could be a powerful design tool for building complex, three-dimensional structures.

Using a two-step process to strengthen a pair of metal alloys, researchers found that organizing defects in dense networks could arrange the atoms within the material in a way that strengthened the alloys without changing the chemical composition.

Notably, this method significantly increased both the amount of stress the metals could withstand and their resistance to gradual warping at high temperatures. These results suggest that adding a layer of engineered defects to structural materials could complement conventional materials design, said Andreas Bezold, lead author of the study and an adjunct assistant professor of materials science and engineering at The Ohio State University.

“Defects are very important to learn more about, because by understanding how they interact with a material’s internal structure helps us design stronger materials,” he said.

The study is published today (Oct. 15, 2026) in Science.

Built on previous Ohio State research that showed how microscopic defects that form during deformation can be turned into layers that strengthen the structure, this team’s approach is the first to introduce densities that fully enrich these alloys. Using this method to develop alloys with more advanced properties could help scientists create more sustainable, longer-lasting materials.

“We wanted to make these strengthening structures a deliberate part of the material’s design,” said Bezold. “So it was fascinating to see how defects could have such a positive effect on the overall durability of the alloys.”

To measure how defects could strengthen metal, researchers first deformed the crystals in a cobalt-nickel-based superalloy and a cobalt-chromium-tungsten alloy, then used heat to slowly age them. This process created atomically thin, dense features in the structure that scientists could analyze.

Utilizing a combination of two techniques, transmission electron microscopy and computer simulations, the team found that the resulting boost in strength was linked to how atoms were arranged around the structural defects. Altering this complex formation could influence the strength of the material.

“Seeing the strengthening process on the atomic scale was quite stunning, since despite being associated with damage, the right defects with the right structure and chemistry can actually make a material stronger,” said Michael Mills, co-author of the study and a professor of materials science and engineering at Ohio State.

In the future, this method could be used to create high-strength alloys for technologies that have to withstand high temperatures, such as aircraft turbine engines or power plant machinery. For now, Bezold’s team is helping pave the way for richer design principles in engineering.

“This is a field that is quickly becoming very exciting,” he said. “We hope that this idea becomes a new lever that strengthens and pushes the limits of material engineering even further.”

This study was supported by Ohio State’s Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis, the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. Other co-authors include Yunzhi Wang from Ohio State; Manuel Köbrich, Jan Vollhüter, Lukas Amon, Jan Vollhüter, Mathias Göken, Steffen Neumeier, Nicolas Karpstein and Erdmann Spiecker from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany; and Longsheng Feng from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

A growing body of research shows that urban green spaces — parks and other areas lined with plants, grass and trees — improve community and individual health outcomes by encouraging physical activity, reducing stress and improving air quality. They’ve also been associated with reduced gun violence and other violent crimes, but the relationship is complex, and not fully understood.

While attending a recent conference, the study’s lead author, Gia Barboza-Salerno, made a point that resonated with fellow researchers who study urban greenery and violence prevention: When it comes to the effects of green space on communities, local context matters.

“It’s not as simple as planting a tree and thinking that alone will solve it,” said Barboza-Salerno, an associate professor in Ohio State’s colleges of social work and public health. “Even though we know urban greenery is a great prevention measure for a lot of reasons, we don’t understand how or whether there’s an interaction between where this greenery is — the local context in which the greenery sits — and a subsequent reduction in violence.”

That question became the basis for a study published this month in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening. Barboza-Salerno’s team looked at how green space, neighborhood disadvantage and gun violence intersect in Cook County, Illinois, which reported the most homicides in the U.S. in 2022.

“Firearm-related violence is a public health crisis in this country, and it disproportionately affects young Black males,” Barboza-Salerno said. According to research cited in the study, racial and ethnic disparities in violence are often linked to factors such as poverty, limited educational and employment opportunities, economic inequality and residential segregation. Urban green spaces may offer protective benefits, but no previous study had specifically investigated greenery near the locations of firearm-related deaths as it would be seen from the street level, from a pedestrian’s point of view, according to the study.

“We really wanted to show in this paper that urban planning is a critical part of public health prevention by evaluating the quality of streets that people traverse daily in their activity spaces,” Barboza-Salerno said.

As director of Ohio State’s Investigating Spatial Structures in Urban Environments (ISSUES) Lab, Barboza-Salerno leads a research group that uses advanced spatial statistics, geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) and machine learning to understand how neighborhood environments shape health, safety and social well-being.

For this study, the team examined 899 firearm homicides and 2,256 natural deaths in the county in 2023 and compared them with natural deaths of people similar in age, sex and race who died nearby. By using Google Street View images and machine learning tools, they measured the amount and types of greenery a person would actually see from the street where each death occurred.

The study found that more visible greenery, tree canopy and green space along walkable streets were linked to lower odds that a death in that location was a firearm-related homicide. But the benefits of green space aren’t universal. Tree cover and greenery offered the most protection in less disadvantaged neighborhoods, while in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, being closer to a park was actually linked to a higher risk of firearm homicide.

The researchers attribute this finding to multidimensional measures of social deprivation, including poverty, structural housing disadvantage, economic inequality, family structure and income, having a stronger impact than a neighborhood’s green spaces.

“Green space is very important and critical for violence prevention, but not all green space matters equally,” Barboza-Salerno said. “Basically, if you lived in a socially advantaged environment, having green space mattered more for reducing violence than in a socially disadvantaged area. Green space should be thought of as a violence-prevention intervention, yet the green space that does the most protective work tends to be concentrated in more advantaged neighborhoods. That’s a double inequity: disadvantaged areas get less quality green space, and the green space they get is less protective without other supports.”

When parks in disadvantaged neighborhoods aren’t well-maintained or used regularly, they can become more of an eyesore than a protective factor, Barboza-Salerno said. Whereas in neighborhoods with more resources, well-kept parks have a beautification effect that can improve how people feel, and strengthen neighbors’ willingness to look out for one another.

“In these very [disadvantaged] areas, there’s a lot of economic disinvestment, and that is the association with violence, not the park per se,” Barboza-Salerno said.

The researchers caution that the study looked only at environments, not individuals. “We only looked at the location of death for the person in the context of the environment at that moment,” said Taylor Harrington, a doctoral candidate in public health and a co-author of the study. “It doesn’t encapsulate their whole lived experience or exposure throughout life up until that point.”

Barboza-Salerno has seen green space work as part of a broader effort. As the lead researcher at the Violence Prevention Collaborative in Boston and Director of Research for the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), Barboza-Salerno partnered with youth development organizations that employed young people to fix up local parks. The work gave them new skills and changed how neighbors perceived them.

Among other things, parks can provide safe places for children to play, socialize and have positive reciprocal interactions. Alongside housing and food security, “it’s one part of a comprehensive community-building approach that needs to be scaled to see effective violence prevention in this country,” Barboza-Salerno said. “If we think carefully about where green spaces are placed and why they make a difference, this could be huge.”

Other Ohio State co-authors of the study are Balaji Ramesh and Jeffrey Wing of the College of Public Health.

Kristin Wickham-Saxon, assistant professional practice professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been signing since she was a child. When it was discovered that a younger cousin was born deaf, Wickham-Saxon and her mother joined family sign language classes at her cousin’s preschool.

“Having her in my life has enriched it in ways that I can’t put into words,” she said. “I see the value in the work we do because I see the impact it makes in the daily life of my cousin, my deaf friends, when they can interact more easily in their day-to-day lives. That’s something we want to bring to our students in the major.”

The ASL: Applied Communications and Community Studies major covers both language and intercultural competence as well as Deaf cultures and histories. Not a member of the Deaf community herself, Wickham-Saxon worked with the university’s ASL program to ensure deaf perspectives are included in the coursework.

“Our deaf and hearing instructors all had a say,” she said. “And all of us are connected, in some way, to Deaf communities. … Everyone is bringing a different worldview to the table.”

Wickham-Saxon said the university’s ASL courses always had a waitlist, particularly for ASL 1101, the introductory course. Now, there are three students officially enrolled in the major, with more planning to follow. There are 150 students enrolled in the ASL Studies minor, and Wickham-Saxon is optimistic about future enrollment. 

“There are 180 high schools in Ohio that offer ASL,” she said. “I reached out to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce to let them know that we exist. My jaw hit the floor. I had no idea there were that many schools. Just think about how many potential ASL majors are out there in Ohio.”

Like in many spoken languages, Deaf history is part of learning ASL, Wickham-Saxon said.

“You can’t understand a language without understanding the people who are the users of that language,” she said.

Exclusion is a throughline experienced by deaf people, she said. Recognizing that helps students understand how to work as partners with deaf communities, how ASL evolved and how it functions today.

For example, ASL sentence structure differs from spoken English. When deaf people are encouraged to speak and sign simultaneously, the sentence doesn’t follow ASL syntax and the facial grammar is removed, making it harder for everyone to understand one another.

In addition to classroom learning, students have the chance to engage in service-learning with deaf communities outside of Ohio State.

“We’re lucky,” Wickham-Saxon said. “In central Ohio, we have the largest deaf population in the state. In Columbus, we have the Ohio School for the Deaf just a couple of miles up the road. There are deaf education programs in Columbus City Schools and Upper Arlington Schools. Local agencies and organizations provide a range of services to meet the unique needs of deaf people.

“We want the course to connect students with those organizations and hopefully, students will get authentic learning experiences. They’ll have a chance to understand family dynamics.”

In the United States, around 70% of families with deaf children don’t sign, Wickham-Saxon said. Not having access to language can have devastating consequences for children.

“If you don’t have a solid language by the time you’re 5,” she said, “you’re playing catch-up for the rest of your life, linguistically and cognitively.  And families, if they don’t know the language, they can’t be a language model.”

While majors are learning to work with and within deaf communities, the skills they learn in the program are transferable.

“The things we’re looking at are accessibility in a broader sense,” Wickham-Saxon said. “The things our students will learn, they can take with them into any job, any profession. This is a skillset they can take anywhere.”

Accessibility and service are important to Wickham-Saxon.

“That’s the root of why I wanted to teach ASL at Ohio State,” she said. “That land-grant mission, serving the community. That’s exactly what we’re doing.”

But the literary benefits to a reader’s well-being don’t stop there, according to the results: For those of us holding a grudge against someone who wronged us, this literary technique has potential to help us find a way to forgive offenders in our own lives, too. 

The writing technique is called “internal focalization,” when the story narrative gives us access to a character’s innermost thoughts – in this case, a man’s regret about his careless act. Being transported into the character’s mind elicits empathy toward him and forgiveness for his wrongdoing. Study participants who were prompted to reflect on a past transgression tended to extend their forgiveness of a fictional person to that real-life event. 

“If you just give people a story without the empathy technique, they’re not likely to forgive a character. But if you put the technique in, they not only forgive the character, but are then more likely to forgive other people in their actual life,” said senior author Angus Fletcher, a professor of English at The Ohio State University’s Project Narrative. 

With Gallup research finding that over 1 in 5 people worldwide routinely feel angry, Fletcher said, this study suggests stories may be a prescription to better emotional health. 

“What’s really great about literature is you don’t have to be at a crisis point to use it,” he said. “It’s something that you can just use a little bit to help get you through daily anger, daily depression, daily pessimism, daily anxiety. The right literature, once you learn how to use it, can help pop you out of that, can give you more joy, more optimism, more love, more empathy, all of these positive effects.” 

Fletcher completed the study with Mark Matthews, a recent Ohio State PhD graduate in social psychology. The research was published Oct. 1 in Frontiers in Psychology. 

For over 2,000 years, people have believed literature helps create empathy, aiding us in getting over anger and seeing situations from another person’s perspective – all of which are beneficial to mental health and social function. Scientists reported that they had demonstrated this influence in a 2013 study, finding that reading passages of literary fiction, compared to nonfiction or popular fiction, enhanced a reader’s ability to understand others’ beliefs and desires – a concept known as theory of mind. 

But efforts to replicate that study – by others and the original researchers themselves – have not panned out. So for this research, Fletcher and Matthews used scientific precision to focus on one writing technique that they predicted would pinpoint one way in which literature influences the human emotion of empathy that leads to forgiveness. 

“We said, ‘What do we know about the history of how artists develop these techniques for creating empathy?’ We put the most powerful of those techniques into a story, and then tested whether that story without the technique creates empathy and if the story with the technique creates empathy,” Fletcher said. “By being more precise about it, we were able to identify these very specific mechanisms and connections.” 

The story is about a woman named Mary who, as a child, watched her puppy die after being hit by a car and swore off dog ownership until, at 85, she adopted a puppy to heal her lifelong grief. She hires a repairman, warning him to keep the door shut so the dog can’t get out. He leaves the door open and the puppy escapes, to Mary’s horror. 

Study participants are then offered different information about the repairman’s act: Either he disregarded Mary’s warning, meaning it was entirely his fault, or he accidentally left the door open because he was distracted by personal issues at home. In the next section, the internal focalization appears: “The repairman thought to himself, I wish I didn’t leave the door open,” a contrast to the nonliterary condition: “The repairman said to Mary, ‘I wish I didn’t leave the door open.’” 

Over the course of three studies involving a total of 1,563 people, Fletcher and Matthews found that forgiveness of a fictional character can be promoted through the literary technique of internal focalization, and that facilitating literary forgiveness can bring about forgiveness of real-life transgressions. Based on how the study was designed, the fictional forgiveness had to occur first. 

What study participants never learned is whether Mary forgave the repairman – Matthews and Fletcher deliberately omitted that detail so as not to model the behavior. 

Fostering empathy in readers involved creating conditions in the story that enabled detection of the pathway to forgiveness. Before we can forgive, we have to feel a sense of outrage at the repairman’s callous attitude about keeping the dog safe. And it’s one thing to opt for forgiveness, which is called decisional forgiveness. It’s different when we engage in emotional forgiveness and restore closeness in a relationship, Matthews said. 

“Once we know the transgression is someone’s fault, what we discover is that if we can create a condition where you can see the internal remorse, the internal world of the person, people can feel the sincerity of it. They can open up and connect with the emotions that person is having,” he said. “As a result, now we have the opportunity to forgive them more.” 

Both types of forgiveness toward a fictional character and a real-life transgressor were elicited by the literary technique. 

The core idea is that exposure to literature changes our perception of the world around us, Matthews said. “That’s the hope. That’s the goal,” he said. “And in our study, we wanted to approximate that.” 

The effect isn’t restricted to the written word, Fletcher said. 

“People often report being much more in tune with their emotions when they’re watching a movie or reading a novel than they do in regular life, and that’s telling you something,” he said. “So I think what this piece really points to is a single instance of a much larger phenomenon, which is an emotional health crisis that we’re experiencing because we’re spending too much time with technology and not enough time with these ancient sources of human wisdom.” 

This work was supported by Ohio State’s Department of English.

Featuring Batman television and film themes from the 1960s to present, the band pulled a variety of formations out of its utility belt, including the Batmobile, Bat-signal and the Caped Crusader himself.

Saturday’s i-dotter was Matthew Sliwinski, an earth sciences major from Westerville, Ohio.

Oklo’s investment will facilitate the launch of an undergraduate nuclear engineering major, renovate instructional and research facilities, create an endowed professorship and support student scholarships. Together, the company’s support, gifts from its executives and university matching funds for scholarships will deliver a total impact of $4.5 million.

“Industry demand for nuclear engineers continues to grow, and Ohio State is expanding to meet that need,” said College of Engineering Interim Dean B. Shanker. “Oklo’s support will help us launch a new undergraduate major and give students access to the faculty, facilities and hands-on experience that prepare them to contribute from the start of their careers.”

Currently, only graduate students can earn a nuclear engineering degree at Ohio State. With Oklo’s support, the college will develop the undergraduate curriculum, hire additional faculty and modernize space and equipment for an anticipated autumn 2027 launch of an accredited nuclear engineering major.

The investment will also expand research capabilities at Ohio State’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, which has supported teaching and research on west campus since 1961. The university will rename the facility the Oklo Nuclear Reactor Laboratory.

In Scott Laboratory on main campus, Ohio State will create the Oklo Experiential Engineering Education Lab. The new lab will support capstone teams, hands-on build work, simulation and modeling, and interdisciplinary engineering projects.

“Ohio helped build America’s nuclear industry and the people of the Buckeye State will help lead its future,” said John Hanson, a native Ohioan and Ohio State alumnus who serves as corporate chief of staff and leads Oklo’s power business. “The next generation of nuclear engineers will turn the technologies we’re developing today into the reliable energy our country needs for decades to come. By expanding access to nuclear engineering education and hands-on research, Ohio State is preparing students to lead that work. Together, we’re connecting education with real-world opportunity, so students can put their knowledge to work building advanced nuclear technologies right here in Ohio.”

The Oklo Endowed Professorship in Nuclear Engineering will help Ohio State recruit and retain leading scholars in the field. Gifts from company executives will also establish two endowed scholarship funds to support nuclear engineering students: the Dr. John Hanson and Dr. Lindsey Pack Endowed Scholarship Fund and the Dr. Jacob DeWitte and Caroline Ann DeWitte Endowed Scholarship Fund in Nuclear Engineering.

David C. Jacobs began plotting his career path early in high school. It would begin at The Ohio State University with a bachelor’s degree in finance and marketing before continuing on Wall Street as a stockbroker.

“It didn’t quite work out as planned,” he said. “But my time at Ohio State afforded me the opportunity to pivot quickly into a different industry altogether.”

That industry was insurance, where Jacobs spent more than 35 years building successful teams, growing his companies’ revenue and expanding into new markets and products.

And while he never made it to the trading floor, Jacobs never lost interest in investing. Throughout his career, the former president and COO of Oswald Companies continued to invest in people, real estate and his alma mater.

Most recently, Jacobs and his wife Brenda, who is also an Ohio State alumna, helped establish the Jacobs Family Business Lab at the Fisher College of Business. The new hands-on learning space is designed to provide students with practical knowledge in investments, artificial intelligence, innovation and emerging business technologies.

Located on the first floor of Mason Hall on Ohio State’s Columbus campus, the lab includes 30 Bloomberg terminals where students can monitor and analyze real-time market data.

“Bloomberg gives students pursuing careers on Wall Street — in investment banking, institutional asset management and wealth management — a significant competitive advantage,” said Matt Sheridan, senior lecturer in finance and the Bloomberg lab director. “It is the most powerful investment tool in the world and is leveraged by financial professionals to access market data, analyze securities, conduct research and make investment decisions. More than 300,000 professionals use Bloomberg terminals as an integral part of their daily work.”

Prior to the lab’s dedication in September, students had access to just 12 terminals in a space that didn’t allow room for instruction.

“Although the college has several computer labs, none are designed as dynamic, interactive teaching spaces,” said Sheridan. “The Jacobs Lab is filling this important gap by creating a highly engaging classroom environment that allows students to learn by doing, interact with professional financial tools and develop skills that directly translate to the workplace. Most importantly, this experience has the potential to make a meaningful difference in the educational and professional lives of our students.”

Jacobs said making a difference and increasing the job potential for Fisher students is what he and his wife intended for the lab.

“I hope that it can be transformational for the students,” Jacobs said. “Students coming out of Fisher are some of the top in the country.”

Jacobs joined Fisher’s Alumni Board and four years ago became a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council. That’s when he learned about the need for a larger business lab.

“The lab was something that piqued my interest because I wanted to do something to give back to the students,” he said. “Brenda and I wanted our gift to be educationally based.”

Sheridan said the new state-of-the-art terminals will bring finance to life for students.

“A hands-on environment will allow me to move beyond teaching students about financial data and instead have them actively use it to analyze markets, evaluate investments and solve real-world financial problems,” said Sheridan, who teaches in the Specialized Master of Finance program.

Professors across all departments and disciplines can use the lab for instruction. In addition to new terminals, the lab includes a digital stock ticker that scrolls around the room’s exterior.

The new lab is a blueprint for the direction in which Fisher is headed, said Aravind Chandrasekaran, Fisher’s interim dean.

“When we talk about disrupting business education in ways that meet the needs of our students and workforce development, the Jacobs Family Lab is proof of that concept,” he said. “It’s a space that’s adaptable and designed to meet the needs of how today’s students want ― and need ― to learn. Thanks to Dave and Brenda’s incredible dedication and generosity, we’re excited to take a giant step forward in our shared goal of creating a holistic educational experience that’s focused on the future of business.”

DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and The Sugarhill Gang are among the pioneering figures credited with inspiring generations of hip-hop artists and shaping a cultural and musical movement. The School of Music at The Ohio State University has introduced a minor in hip-hop studies starting this semester and hopes to influence the next generation of artists and DJs that will make their own mark on the culture.

The minor comes after years of planning and direction by assistant professors Jason Rawls, Stevie Johnson and many others.

“The hip-hop minor itself is truly exciting, but what Jason Rawls, Stevie Johnson and lecturer of hip-hop DJ O Sharp are building reaches well beyond the new curriculum alone. They are shaping the culture of the School of Music, bringing real breadth to what we teach and to who we are,” said Michael Ibrahim, the director of the School of Music. “They are opening new pathways into the school for students who may never have pictured themselves here.”

Johnson specifically can identify with the latter part of Ibrahim’s statement.

Johnson received his undergraduate degree in health and exercise science at the University of Oklahoma but taught himself how to create beats in his dorm room. When working on a curriculum and plan for the new minor, Johnson said he and Rawls reflected on their time as students, when hip-hop wasn’t thought of in an academic context.

“Nineteen-year-old Stevie was very introverted and didn’t have these classes or mentors,” Johnson reflected on his undergraduate career. “I am grateful for the trajectory and success of my career, but I also wonder what it would have looked like if I had certain things in place and opportunities to publish or perform.”

The ability to learn hip-hop and create beats is just the beginning of what the minor has to offer. Students are required to take MUSIC 3450: “The Art and Politics of Hip-hop,” in addition to MUSIC 3354: “Hip-Hop Sampling and Beat Making.” In order to complete the minor, students must complete 15 credit hours across five courses, including three electives.

In “The Art and Politics of Hip-Hop,” described as the program’s flagship course by Rawls, students will learn the four main elements of hip-hop; DJing, graffiti, break-dancing and emceeing. All these elements were at the core of hip-hop culture when it began in New York City and continue to be pillars today.

“We focus on teaching students about these elements and why they’re important and why they shouldn’t be forgotten,” Rawls said. “Nowadays, people only think about the music part of hip-hop, and that’s a very important part, don’t get me wrong, but there are other facets to the culture. That’s what we make sure students are aware of and what they learn.”

Rawls acknowledged that graffiti is illegal and he is not encouraging students to participate in it. Rather, he wants them to look at graffiti with an artistic lens and how that artwork visually framed the genre and impacted hip-hop’s focus on creative and personal expression.

“What we stress and what we talk about in that course is the appreciation and understanding of why people did it and continue to do it,” he said.

In Johnson’s “Hip-Hop Sampling and Beat Making” class, students don’t report to a classroom on the first day. Instead, he takes them to a record store.

“A lot of these students have never been in a record store, let alone touched vinyl,” Johnson said. “They don’t know what it means to get an idea of what the music would sound like based on the artwork or looking at the liner notes. They have a rhythm roulette challenge where they pick three records, and they have to make a beat out of the records that they chose.”

Even if a student isn’t a music major or doesn’t plan on exploring working as a DJ, Johnson said the hip-hop studies minor teaches students many skills that can be applied to any career path. He explains that in a 30- to 40-second span, a DJ will be tasked with playing a record and listening to his next mix in his headphones, while also carrying on a conversation with a patron discussing the music being played. Being able to multitask at that level and be successful in doing so builds a skill set that is transferrable to many walks of life.

“The ability to have to make important decisions at an incredibly rapid rate is something that people won’t see on the surface of a DJ or their booth,” he said. “It is something that is taking place as our students are learning to perform and make decisions on the fly.”

For Rawls and Johnson, the hip-hop studies minor is about more than just music. It is about creating a space for students to create beats, discover new career paths and learn about the culture that surrounds hip-hop while also developing skills that will serve them in their postgraduate careers.

“They are opening creative and professional doors for students past their graduation,” Ibrahim said of the school’s hip-hop faculty. “Students rave about their classes, and the deeper story is in the ripple effect, felt outside our building, off campus, and across the music and hip-hop communities at large.”

A professor of chemistry and biochemistry, Nagib is the first Ohio State faculty member to receive a Blavatnik National Award.

Founded in 2007 to celebrate the potential of early career scientists, the award recognizes scientific advances by researchers in three fields: life sciences, chemical sciences, and physical sciences and engineering. Of the 18 finalists nominated in this year’s cohort, Nagib is one of three laureates who will receive a $250,000 cash prize — the largest unrestricted scientific award available to early-career scientists in the United States.

Nagib, who joined Ohio State in 2014, was awarded the highest honor in the chemical sciences category for his work enabling the faster discovery of better, longer-lasting pharmaceuticals. “I’ve always been passionate about the discovery of new medicines,” said Nagib, holder of the Dr. Harold “Hal” Miller and Betty J. Miller Endowed Chair in Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry. “That’s been the guiding star for the successes in my career, playing in sandboxes or empty areas where nobody else is looking.”

In Nagib’s lab, his team develops new ways to create key medicinal building blocks by harnessing reactive chemical species called radicals and carbenes. On average, it takes 10 to 15 years for new medicines to be discovered and brought to market, but Nagib’s methods address this by helping chemists create more potent and selective medicines faster, cheaper, and more efficiently.

“My dream for the advances that we develop is that it’s simple, so easy that anyone in the world can do it without any specialized techniques or strategies,” said Nagib. “Our goal is to democratize radical chemistry so it can be used by all, and even in AI workflows.”

Previously selected as a Blavatnik National Awards finalist in 2024, Nagib has since focused his research program on using artificial intelligence to design new catalysts for drug candidates. One such effort led Nagib’s team to create an open-source database so that any researcher with a smartphone can simulate chemical reactions and learn how to use radicals selectively, too.

Using their models, chemical predictions that once would’ve taken more than a day can now be accomplished in a few seconds, said Nagib. Despite such huge automated leaps, he hopes such tools inspire the next generation of young scientists to continue to think outside the box.

“Creativity doesn’t come from sitting alone and having a eureka moment,” Nagib said. “It comes from constantly discussing new ideas, thinking about why they didn’t pan out and then coming up with new ones together.”

On Oct. 6, Nagib is being honored at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City during the 2026 Blavatnik Awards Gala ceremony, where the winning scientists will give a short presentation about their work. Since 2007, the Blavatnik Awards have invested more than $20 million in over 500 scientists worldwide. Finalists are selected by an independent jury of distinguished scientists. This year, 372 young scientists were nominated, representing 187 academic and research institutions across 43 states and the District of Columbia.

“The most exciting science is the stuff on the edge of possible, but persevering to get such ideas to work is the rewarding part of it,” said Nagib. “I think that’s the coolest part of discovery.”

Nagib plans to use the monetary award to support ongoing lab projects, procure much-needed equipment and lab instruments, and pursue other exciting new ideas.

“This award mainly reflects how excited the community is about the work we’re doing at Ohio State,” said Nagib. “To be recognized in this way, it really motivates us to keep chasing the stars.”

The Ohio State University Office of Student Life hosted The Big Table at The ’Shoe on Sept. 29 at Ohio Stadium to facilitate conversation among students, faculty, staff and community members.

Launched in 2016 by the Columbus Foundation, the Big Table is an annual community conversation held citywide in Columbus. Participants share stories about acts of kindness and discuss how to foster a sense of belonging throughout the community.

Among the participants at Ohio State’s gathering was the university’s first lady, Lalita Kaligotla, an associate professor in the College of Nursing and senior director for Leadership, Policy Engagement and Innovation. The event centered on the university’s Listen. Learn. Discuss. platform.

“Today there are over a hundred of these events happening around the city of Columbus. You are part of a movement that’s happening,” Tracy Stuck, assistant vice president of student life, told attendees. “The beauty of today is you have one goal, which is to meet someone you didn’t know when you walked in, and also it’s to listen and to be curious.”

Leading the discussion were Melissa Shivers, senior vice president of student life, and John Warner, executive vice president and chief executive officer of the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center.

During the event, participants gathered in small groups and shared responses to questions that Shivers and Warner posed. Participants shared anecdotes about people who have made a difference in their lives, spoke about experiences that brought them joy and reiterated statements from fellow attendees that made an impression.  

Shivers said The Big Table supports Ohio State’s focus on promoting kindness.

“It’s about how do we interact and engage with one another?” she said. “Just last week at the university, we hosted a food packing event where we packed over 325,000 bags of food to send to southern Ohio.”

The Big Table also promotes hope, Warner said. He cited medical research indicating that hope can contribute to a patient’s emotional and physical well-being.

“There’s real science behind hope, integrating it into all that you do,” he said. “In fact, there are several large [clinical] trials of 25,000-plus patients followed over 14 or so years with either heart disease or cancer. And if they had a feeling of hope from the very first day they received the news of their diagnosis, they do much better. That’s important in all that we do.”

For more information about Listen. Learn. Discuss. and a calendar of upcoming events, visit the program’s website.

“Founders Fair is a networking summit for students who want to be entrepreneurs or are actively building something while in school,” said Swartley, a finance major. “It brings together talented students and connects them with mentors and investors who can help them aspire to what they want to be.” 

Swartley co-founded and leads the event with Zach Carlo, a student at Miami University, whom he met at an entrepreneurship networking event. A team of several other student founders helps manage the initiative. 

“We were able to see that having mentors and being thoughtful about going to networking events and building relationships can have such a profound impact on what you’re able to do, not just in college, but also after,” Swartley said. “We had this idea to bring together student founders with a bunch of mentors and connections that we’ve made.” 

The first Founders Fair took place in Oxford, Ohio, in April, with 110 students from 22 universities and over 80 mentors in attendance. The duo has now brought the initiative to Columbus, with the second Founders Fair occurring on Oct. 2 at The Loom. The day-long summit featured speed mentoring, presentations from select student startups, and a keynote address from Max Brickman, founder of Columbus-based venture capital firm Heartland Ventures. 

For Swartley, Founders Fair is an opportunity to pay forward the wisdom and mentorship he’s received through Ohio State programs. Swartley was a 2025 winner of the President’s Buckeye Award (PBA), a several-month-long competition among student-led ventures competing for $50,000 in startup funding, culminating in finalist presentations to a panel of entrepreneurs and investors. Swartley’s winning startup, Mobile Pantry, delivers fresh produce to homes at discounted rates to combat food insecurity with dignity. 

“The PBA program helped me get partnerships, helped me really understand what it means to be a student founder and gave me an appreciation for giving back and finding new ways to help other entrepreneurs,” he said. 

Ohio State is now growing its support for student startups through BuildX, an initiative unveiled during President Ravi V. Bellamkonda’s recent State of the University address. BuildX aims to support 100 student startups annually by 2030 and provides dedicated venture development coursework, founder mentors and a competitive summer accelerator experience.  

“It’s great to see the university investing in entrepreneurship. As I’m doing with Founders Fair, it’s important to amplify the founder ecosystem and community so that we bring in more investment and resources,” Swartley said. “The more you do that, the more likely we are to succeed, and the more likely we are to help Columbus become a city of innovation, a city where we can have people doing startups at a very high level.” 

Swartley hopes students who attended his event walked away with internship opportunities as well as investors and customers for their ventures. What matters most to him, though, is the relationships attendees built with fellow students and mentors. 

“Success for me is really the energy in the room, just seeing people light up by the conversations that they’re able to have, the meetings that they’re able to get and the people that they’re able to meet,” he said. “You never know where a conversation will lead you, and that’s really what we want to come out of Founders Fair: students meeting people who can change their lives.” 

To learn more about the Columbus Founders Fair, visit the program website. 

“Cenovus has a long history of supporting access to excellence for future generations of innovators, and this latest investment in Ohio State’s students and programs will create transformative impact across the communities we serve,” said Ohio State President Ravi V. Bellamkonda. “We are deeply grateful to Cenovus for their partnership and their confidence in the extraordinary academic experience Ohio State offers, both at our regional campuses and in Columbus. We look forward to working closely together to expand opportunity and build a skilled workforce for Ohio’s future.” 

At an event celebrating the donation, Eric Zimpfer, head of downstream at Cenovus, spoke about the importance of businesses supporting their local communities. Cenovus, a Calgary-based integrated energy company, has its U.S. regional headquarters in Dublin, Ohio. 

“Developing the next generation of skilled talent is essential to the future of our business and industry,” Zimpfer said. “This partnership allows us to support students in meaningful ways while strengthening our connections to Ohio State’s engineering and business programs, which are closely aligned with the skills we need across our Ohio operations.”

Nate Hager, a 2017 Ohio State alumnus and senior process development engineer at Cenovus, shared his experience: first as a high school student who toured the company’s Lima refinery, then as a Buckeye completing a chemical engineering degree, and finally as a Cenovus employee who has worked with Ohio State students through Cenovus’s student ambassador program. 

The partnership is mutually beneficial, he said, bringing together “a company that prioritizes acquiring top talent and developing their abilities and a university that prioritizes the success of their students and supporting their career aspirations.”

Half of the donation will support the Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) Honors program, including “Multidisciplinary Engineering Capstone Design,” an integrated business and engineering honors course. The IBE Honors Program prepares the next generation of business and technology leaders through an interdisciplinary approach.

Cenovus is one of the project sponsors for the 2026-27 academic year. Thirty-six students, half studying business and half studying engineering, spend the semester studying an industry and its real-world problems. They are challenged to find solutions together, across disciplines. They also have the chance to network with experts in the same field.

Tessa Haffner is six weeks into the class. Haffner, a fourth-year food, agricultural and biological engineering major, said the program is helping her understand how to work collaboratively with people in business fields.

“It’s about learning how to talk that same language,” she said. “I also feel like it gives me more professional mobility. I’m an ambitious girl, so I want to participate in all the opportunities that I can.”

Haffner has found her Cenovus mentors to be open and eager to help her learn. They’re always willing to answer questions and will help track down answers if they can’t, Haffner said.

“I think Cenovus is a great company to work with,” she said. “I’ve gained a lot of knowledge and background within oil refineries and that industry that I wouldn’t really have had a chance to experience otherwise.”

Even if she doesn’t join the oil industry after graduating, Haffner said the skills she’s learned are transferable.

“I’ve learned how to approach something that you don’t know how to approach,” she said. “How to interact with different professionals with different backgrounds, meeting them in the middle.”

In observance of the nation’s 250th anniversary, The Ohio State University recently hosted a discussion about the origins and enduring impact of the United States Constitution. The event, “Remember Our Union,” was held at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the annual observance of Constitution Day, Sept. 17.

“We have representatives from across the institution here. We have academic leaders, we have faculty members, we have staff members and, most importantly, we have students,” said Interim Executive Vice President and Provost Trevor Brown. “Constitution Day is a day to celebrate and think about and reflect on one of the most remarkable contributions to democracy, but also to learn.”

Jason Opal, dean and director of Ohio State Mansfield and professor of history, delivered the keynote address. The Constitution continues to guide modern-day legal proceedings and politics, he said.

“The Constitution was formed in the summer of 1787. It was released on Sept. 17, which is the occasion for our gathering,” he said. “It was ratified on its own terms the following summer, and it went into effect the following spring in 1789 with the inauguration of the first president, George Washington, and the installation of his first Congress. And [the Constitution] is still in charge. It is still our fundamental law for this moment.”

The event also included a panel discussion featuring Benjamin McKean, associate professor of political science, and Margaret Newell, professor of history. Christopher McKnight Nichols, Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, and professor of history, served as moderator.

Several high-profile events on all sides of the political spectrum in recent history have centered on the Constitution, McKean said. He cited the example of Occupy Wall Street, a movement to bring awareness to economic inequality that began on Sept. 17, 2011.

“I do think that it is striking to think about how many different valences Constitution Day can have,” McKean said. “I think that it would be a mistake to reduce it to any one political tendency.”

The nation’s founders intended the Constitution to act as a “living document,” updated periodically to address societal changes, Newell said.

“It was not as static a document that now appears in public debate. … It was a document that government modified, Congress modified immediately and continued to do so,” she said. “I would say it’s a historic document that says something really important. But also, it’s that susceptibility to amendment, change and flexibility that’s made it still relevant in the 21st century.”

It is well-established that comparing your body to someone else’s can lead to a negative body image and disordered eating. Popular theories in the field suggest that across the lifespan, our peers, parents and the media we consume all reinforce societal beauty standards, driving people to measure their own value against unrealistic ideals. However, according to the study published recently in Body Image, people are just as likely to compare their current bodies to their former appearance, with equally harmful results. And few scholars have studied this phenomenon in-depth.

“There’s so much literature on social comparison, especially in body image and eating disorder literatures, and there’s virtually nothing on self-oriented comparison,” said lead author Tracy Tylka, a professor of clinical psychology at Ohio State’s Marion campus.

Findings in Tylka’s new work, and a measurement scale she and colleagues created and validated, may have potential to alter psychological treatment for people seeking help with adjusting to appearance-related changes – including aging.

“Self-oriented comparison matters. It is uniquely associated with body image and eating behavior,” she said. “In clinical treatment, we shouldn’t just focus on how clients are comparing themselves to others, but also how they are comparing themselves to previous versions of themselves.”

For Tylka, the gap became clear during conversations with her former Ohio State graduate student and the study’s co-author, Nichole Wood-Barcalow, who now works in private practice in Westerville, Ohio. Wood-Barcalow had noticed a pattern among her clients, who frequently compared their current appearance with how they looked in old photos, videos and memories of their younger selves.

They would tell Wood-Barcalow, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe how much I’ve changed.”

These reflections were often triggered by major life milestones and physical changes, including puberty, pregnancy, menopause, andropause, illness, aging and weight fluctuations. While some people felt they had changed for the better, most perceived these appearance-related shifts negatively.

Tylka has a deep background in psychometrics and analysis and has created scales that measure everything from intuitive eating and body appreciation to body acceptance by others. Established scales measuring social comparison are used regularly in research and clinical practice, so when Tylka searched for a trait-based scale to measure self-oriented comparison, she was surprised to learn it didn’t exist yet.

“Once we found out this was such an untouched construct with no scale developed to measure it, I knew we had to assess it,” she said.

Historically, she explained, body image and eating disorder research have focused on young white women or adolescents, who are comparing themselves more to others than to previous versions of the self.

“The body image field has been late to notice ageism and the lack of research on the aging process as it relates to body image. As we age, we move further away from what society tells us we should look like, and we compare ourselves to previous versions, photos or videos from decades ago,” Tylka said.

Tylka worked with Wood-Barcalow and other experts to design an 11-item measure of self-oriented appearance comparison, named the Self-Oriented Comparison Scale for Appearance (SOCS-A). They tested the scale across two separate community samples of U.S. adults to confirm its accuracy.

Through statistical analysis, the study confirmed support for two distinct subscales: upward and downward self-oriented comparison. Upward comparison involves measuring your current reflection against a past vision of yourself where you felt more attractive, while downward comparison means looking back at a photo, memory or time when you felt less attractive. Among study participants, researchers found that upward comparison was strongly linked to negative body image, body shame, rumination and disordered eating. Downward comparison, by contrast, was associated with lower levels of shame and higher appearance pride and body appreciation.

“What surprised us was that downward comparison was viewed more favorably. We were expecting a pattern more similar to social comparison, where downward comparison is also maladaptive,” Tylka said. “People think comparing themselves to others they view as less attractive would make them feel good, but downward social comparison is linked to body-focused shame, guilt and less body image flexibility.”

In other words, when we use others as a gauge to evaluate ourselves, we might feel bad for those other people or guilty for making comparisons. Downward self-oriented comparison, however, often means you worked to change or overcome something you didn’t like about your appearance, so you’re more likely to report feeling a sense of pride and accomplishment.

The study results also revealed gender differences. While the scale worked the same way structurally across the gender spectrum, women scored considerably higher than men on upward self-oriented comparison, while men scored higher on downward self-oriented comparison.

Tylka said this finding aligns with societal pressures: Women are expected to maintain a certain appearance, and if they deviate from that in any way, it tends to bother them more because their worth in society is often tied to appearance.

She hopes that the SOCS-A will be translated and used by research teams around the world – and in prevention programs, clinical interventions and therapy settings — to explore the experiences of diverse groups of people going through appearance-related changes and evaluate whether upward self-oriented comparison decreases as a result of treatment.

“Beyond age, I think (the SOCS-A) has relevance to be explored in the context of GLP-1 use,” Tylka added. “I am starting to do research with colleagues on GLP-1s, body image and eating behavior. We haven’t analyzed the data yet, but I think the intersection with self-oriented comparison will be really interesting.”

This work was funded by an Ohio State Joan Huber Fellowship Grant.

In honor of the 90th anniversary of legendary Buckeyes track athlete Jesse Owens’ 1936 Olympic triumphs, Owens’ descendants and university representatives participated in a recent panel discussion about his place in history.

The Ohio State University’s Sports and Society Institute hosted the event at Thompson Library in partnership with America 250-Ohio State and Ohio State Libraries.

In the 1936 collegiate track season, Owens was undefeated in 42 events for Ohio State. At that year’s Olympics in Nazi-controlled Berlin, Owens won gold medals in the 100-meter dash, 200-meter dash, broad jump, and as a member of the 4x100-meter relay team.

Although Owens didn’t graduate from Ohio State, the university awarded him an honorary doctorate of athletic arts in 1972.

“There’s no one who has had more of an impact from a sports perspective on this country that touches Ohio State than Jesse Owens,” said Nicole Kraft, professor of journalism practice and director of the Sports and Society Institute. “The privilege of having Jesse Owens as part of our family and part of the legacy that we share at Ohio State is really extraordinary.”  

The panel discussion featured Owens’ grandchildren Stuart Owens Rankin and Marlene Hemphill Dortch, a graduate of Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law.

Owens Rankin said when people find out he’s related to the track legend, he’s taken aback by the reverence that people of all backgrounds express for his grandfather.

“It is heartening and it fills you with pride to see people’s reactions and their astonishment and awe,” he said. “Ninety years later, his accomplishments still holding the impact that they have on people is pretty special.”

Hemphill Dortch said she enjoys talking about her grandfather’s legacy, but he also taught her and her family to take pride in their own achievements.

By interacting with people who express curiosity about her grandfather, “it really gives other people the opportunity to learn more about him and also to share their stories and experiences,” she said.

“I think it is a testament to how we were raised, is that we are proud of his accomplishments, but those were his accomplishments. ‘So what are you going to do?’ And I think that’s what we live by: He is an inspiration for us to be of service.”

The panel also featured 1988 Olympic track gold medalist Butch Reynolds, an Ohio State alumnus; Rosalind Joseph, director and head coach of Ohio State’s track and field and cross country programs; Fox Sports anchor Gus Johnson; and Kevin Jones, author of “Jesse Owens: A Life in American History.”

Reynolds said Owens’ legacy influenced his decision to attend Ohio State. The young athlete saw Owens as a role model for overcoming obstacles.

“I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to go to Ohio State because I know that Jesse Owens came here,’” he said. “I know that he won four gold medals, so I know he can endure [challenges] through the tradition of The Ohio State University. I said, ‘I can come here because I’m going to be good. I’m going to be strong.’”

Joseph said many young Buckeye track athletes are eager to carry on Owens’ tradition of excellence.

“It’s always nice to hear when they get to campus, the knowledge that they have for Jesse Owens,” she said.

“If you’re a track and field athlete, you don’t know Jesse Owens because you’re a track and field athlete. You know him because of his impact, not only in sports, but in his legacy across the world. There’s a lot of affinity for student athletes who want to come here and be a part of that.”                    

Prior to the panel discussion, Kraft and John Davidson, Ohio State’s faculty representative with the Athletics Department, discussed the historical significance of Owens winning four gold medals in Germany on the brink of World War II.

Owens’ place in history has not only been cemented at Ohio State with facilities such as the Jesse Owens Memorial Stadium, but also in Berlin, Davidson said. The city named a road after him, Jesse Owens Way, near the historic Olympic stadium.

“I think the reception of the crowd, the public broadly, was actually fairly welcoming” when Owens made history at the Olympics, Davidson said. “Jesse Owens is revered.”

“It felt very special to be part of such a large network across the globe,” said AFIC director Marisa Sheldon, “and to recognize that there are people working towards these same goals in 60+ countries.”

In 2007, WHO created the Global Age-Friendly Cities Guide. Cities identified as age-friendly work to strength their community in eight categories – including housing, transportation and social participation – chosen by older people, caregivers and service providers. Columbus joined the AFIC network in 2016, through the support of Mayor Andrew J. Ginther.

Sheldon was joined by Holly Dabelko-Schoeny, professor in the College of Social Work, and Katie Simpson, a doctoral student in the college. For Simpson, the experience was both exciting and overwhelming.

“Being on the global stage as a doctoral student, seeing all those career researchers,” she said, “I’ve read their papers, I’ve cited their papers, I’ve looked at their work. That’s what I want to be when I grow up and all of a sudden, we’re in a room together.”

Simpson presented research on food insecurity and its relevance to WHO’s guide. Food insecurity is not currently one of the eight domains that WHO considers for age-friendly communities, Dabelko-Schoeny said. Simpson’s research will help guide future initiatives.

“I was really proud of the fact that one of our doctoral students is a thought leader around what kinds of changes need to occur in the framework. While there hasn’t been a lot of talk about food insecurity previously, the talk at the congress was led by Katie. It is exciting for Ohio State and for the College of Social Work.”

Simpson wasn’t the only Ohio State attendee making waves. Dabelko-Schoeny was part of a team mapping all the existing interventions under the age-friendly framework, Sheldon said. The only U.S.-based researcher on the project, Dabelko-Schoeny reported the group’s findings at the multiday event.

“The invitation to the congress came from WHO because of the work that we do at AFIC,” Dabelko-Schoeny said. “I was so honored to be invited to the table with this international group of scholars to map out our existing evidence in this space.”

“Real age-friendly transformation happens when older people, their communities, policymakers and researchers coproduce the future together,” said Thiago Hérick de Sá, who oversees age-friendly environments for WHO. “The Age-Friendly Innovation Center at The Ohio State University stands as a leading example, not just working to fulfill that vision but also willing to share their experience internationally, as we witnessed during the 3rd World Congress of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities in Spain this year.”

Meeting so many international peers was an extraordinary experience, Sheldon said.

“I often say that in our work, I don’t always know what the next step is when I meet a partner, but I’m glad I know you now so when that step arises, we have a relationship,” she said. “There was a lot of sharing and requests for follow-up. To have these networks across the country and across the globe is so powerful as we think about the future of our work.”

“That old saying, ‘We are better together,’ is really true,” Dabelko-Schoeny said. “To be at the table as a U.S. representative, as an Ohio State representative, it’s the collective that allows that to happen.”

On the world stage, an organization like AFIC has credibility because of its affiliation with a research powerhouse like Ohio State.

“We are known for having evidence-informed tools that can be used in the community,” Dabelko-Schoeny said. “The work we do is always with an eye for dissemination to older residents, practitioners, policymakers. We want to infuse our scientific understanding with engagement from our older adults, our ‘experience experts.’”

“Being in the College of Social Work at Ohio State allows local, grassroots work to happen,” Sheldon said. “Through the grounding of an institution that is well-respected, well-connected and does things in a rigorous way, we can build knowledge from what happens here.

“We’ve been doing this work for quite a long time now,” she added. “It’s exciting to see the vision come together. Being at Ohio State, the relationships, the work, the respect, the publications, it makes sense.”

The initiative reflects a university-wide commitment to creating a residential experience that goes beyond merely a place to live, and instead supports learning, well-being, community and engagement. By bringing together housing, dining, recreation, academic engagement and student support services, Ohio State aims to make the residential experience a competitive advantage and create vibrant residential communities where students have extraordinary opportunities to engage, learn and thrive.

"As I shared in my State of the University address, creating a signature undergraduate experience is one of the university's highest priorities," Bellamkonda said. “This includes providing a transformative residential experience that serves each student in line with our academic excellence mission. This initiative represents an opportunity to intentionally shape these experiences in ways that foster connection, support academic success and help every Buckeye reach their full potential."

Research consistently demonstrates that students who live on campus experience benefits that contribute to retention, persistence, community connection and overall success. Building on significant investments already underway in residence hall renovations and renewal, the Residential Experience Transformation initiative will take a broader view of how the university creates environments where students can flourish throughout their Ohio State journey.

University leaders emphasize that the effort is not simply a facilities plan.

"This work is fundamentally about student success," said Senior Vice President for Student Life Melissa Shivers. "Our goal is to create a residential experience that serves as a competitive advantage for Ohio State by intentionally integrating housing, dining, recreation, academic engagement and student support. We are moving beyond conversations about buildings to ask a more important question: How do we design residential communities that help students build meaningful relationships, connect their residential, dining and recreation needs with academic success, engage deeply with the university, access opportunities for growth and ultimately succeed both during and after their time at The Ohio State University?"

The initiative is being led by Shivers, Trevor Brown, interim executive vice president and provost, and Mike Papadakis, senior vice president and chief financial officer. Together, they are guiding a collaborative effort that connects student experience goals with the university's academic mission, enrollment strategy and long-term planning efforts.

A central focus of the initiative is strengthening the connection between where students live and how they learn. The work will explore opportunities to enhance academic engagement, expand support for student well-being and create residential communities that foster learning, leadership development and a stronger sense of connection to the community. Particular attention will be given to opportunities that further elevate the Honors and Scholars experience and support Ohio State's aspirations for a truly distinctive undergraduate journey.

To help shape the future of the residential experience, Ohio State will launch a comprehensive engagement process this fall. Students, faculty, staff, families, campus partners, alumni and community partners will be invited to participate in visioning sessions focused on identifying the experiences, programs and services that matter most to student success.

"The best ideas come from listening," said Brown. "The future of the Ohio State residential experience should be shaped by the students, faculty, staff, families and alumni who know firsthand the transformative impact these communities can have. Their voices will be essential as we define what the next generation of the Buckeye experience looks like."

The Residential Experience Transformation initiative aligns with Education for Citizenship 2035 and the university's broader efforts to strengthen student success, community and academic excellence. Through intentional planning and broad collaboration, Ohio State is working to create a residential experience that will serve future Buckeyes for decades to come.

The analysis, comparing ice cores drilled from the Guliya Plateau in 1992 and 2015, shows that both samples contained similar oxygen isotope patterns, suggesting that the environmental signals they contain are consistent and reproducible.

“Reproducibility of the records within a given ice cap is extremely important,” said Lonnie Thompson, lead author of the study, professor of earth sciences and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center at The Ohio State University. “If you get an identical record a quarter of a century later, it can tell you a lot about the behavior of the ice over time.”

To measure the true age of the ice, researchers employed advanced dating techniques to detect two radioactive isotopes, beryllium and chlorine, whose half-lives make them reliable tools for capturing large-scale environmental changes. In this paper, the international team used these elements to mark the Laschamp Geomagnetic Excursion, a reversal of Earth’s magnetic field that left major chemical traces in the ice more than 41,000 years ago.

By comparing these results with oxygen-isotope records from nearby Tibetan cave deposits, this team estimates that the Guliya record’s age may stretch back well over 128,000 years, said Thompson.

“It’s a really critical finding, because outside of the polar regions, this is the only ice core we have from the mountaintops that go back that far,” he said. “Records out of Huascarán only go back over 30,000 years, not over 100,000, so that makes Guliya a very unique record.”

The paper was published today in Science Advances.

Ice cores serve as vital climate archives of the locations and time periods they represent. Yet deciphering these flash-frozen treasure troves can be a challenge, as it requires an accurate knowledge of the ice core’s timescale, said Thompson.

For example, while previous work suggested that Guliya’s record stopped at the Mid-Holocene, an era that began nearly 12,000 years ago, evidence from this work lays to rest doubts about its chronology, confirming that some of its ice is, in fact, much older than the Holocene.

“If we only had Holocene-era ice in Tibet, that would mean that the big ice sheets from the last ice age didn’t persist through the early Holocene,” said Thompson. “But evidence shows that it did.”

While Guliya’s topography likely plays a role in its ability to preserve such old paleoclimate records, constructing a more accurate timescale for the ice cap may also offer answers to bigger environmental questions, such as when Earth’s intense periods of glaciation began and ended.

“When did ice start forming on the planet and what did those natural processes of loss look like?” said Thompson. “We need to know those things, and the only way you can really demonstrate it is with accurate time scales on these records.”

Because these results open new pathways for other types of detailed scientific investigations on Guliya ice cores, the team plans to use future samples to determine how other key climate and environmental indicators may change with this new acknowledgment of Earth’s geologic history.

“The big picture is that our results tell a very consistent story,” he said. “If you get the science right, it’s consistent. It’s our understanding of what it’s trying to tell us that has to catch up.”

This research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Ohio State co-authors include Mary Davis and Ellen Mosley-Thompson, as well as Juerg Beer from the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Christof Vockenhuber and Marcus Christl from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, Tandong Yao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Ninglian Wang and Ling Fang from Northwest University in China.

In a new study, researchers found that this protein, called linker histone H1, initially flits around inside a cell with no clear aim even in the presence of its target: a nucleosome containing spooled-up segments of DNA. H1 binds directly to two DNA strands sticking out from the nucleosome, but struggles to bind to the nucleosome itself until a chaperone protein escorts it there.

The team used single-molecule experiments to visualize individual H1 proteins and their nucleosome targets before, during and after H1 bound to the DNA and to the center of the nucleosome. Single-molecule methods provide direct understanding of the target processes by quantifying molecular motions and interactions one molecule at a time, said senior author Michael Poirier, professor of physics at The Ohio State University.

“Many proteins are dynamic, and the way you get at mechanistic dynamic information is by doing these single-molecule studies where you literally can watch in real time what individual molecules are doing,” Poirier said.

These insights are especially important when studying a protein with so much influence over cellular functions, he said.

“H1 is a key regulator of which genes are being used by a cell and which genes are not. If you want to understand how disease develops because gene expression is no longer working properly, then you need to understand how H1 works. Once you understand this, then you open up the possibility for new therapies that counteract this cause of disease.”

First author Ehsan Akbari, a research scientist in Poirier’s lab, led the team’s work. The research was published Sept. 22 in Molecular Cell.

Every cell in a plant, animal or human contains the organism’s entire DNA. In human cells, our 6-foot-long genome must fit inside the nucleus, which is less than 1/10th the width of a human hair. To do this, sections of genomic DNA spool around a collection of histone proteins to form nucleosomes – similarly to how a watering hose might be organized in a backyard.

Nucleosomes then fold in on each other, clumping together to form chromatin. The linker histone H1’s job is to facilitate chromatin compaction, ensuring DNA segments containing genes the cell isn’t using stay wrapped up and unavailable for expression.

“We know that H1 is important for compacting the genome, which is important for regulating gene expression,” Poirier said. “In the genome, regions that are going to be compacted are loaded with a lot of H1, while regions that are more open are going to have less H1.

“Most of your genes are turned off – you only use a small fraction of your genes for any particular cell, so most of the genes need to be maintained in these compacted states so their expression is turned off.”

Poirier and colleagues used optical tweezer instrumentation and single-molecule fluorescence measurements to visualize H1 interactions with DNA and a nucleosome. They observed that H1 continues to move around even after binding to DNA and, instead of loading onto the nucleosome by way of the DNA, the protein reflects away from the nucleosome.

“It moves around and doesn’t even go to the nucleosome, which I didn’t believe,” Poirier said. That’s when the team, predicting a chaperone protein might be the missing link, added three known linker histone chaperone proteins to the experiments.

“Amazingly, the chaperones did a bunch of things to regulate how H1 goes around and how it actually finds and gets onto nucleosomes. And that’s the main point, that people have not understood how H1 loads and gets onto a nucleosome,” he said. “What we found was that it actually will directly load and likes to slide along DNA – we also didn’t even know that it would do that – but it needs a chaperone to help get onto the actual nucleosome.”

Though this work doesn’t tell the entire H1 story, the step-by-step visualizations offer new hints about where the process could go wrong. Poirier’s lab has previously studied H1 variants and their post-translational modification that can occur – changing H1 targeting and function after it’s been fabricated by the cell.

“One very natural thing to do next is to look at how these variants, post-translational modifications, and, most importantly, cancer-relevant mutations influence H1 properties and function that we are now in a position to measure,” he said.

This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Additional co-authors were Nathaniel Burge of Ohio State and Matti Valdimarsson, Aritra Chowdhury and Benjamin Schuler of the University of Zurich.