GRO Previous Awardees

Qadeer Ahmed has a decade-long research experience in smart mobility, energy-efficient vehicles, vehicular cybersecurity and safety. He received doctorate in 2011 from Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He is now an assistant professor at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Ohio State. He also holds courtesy appointments with Ohio State’s Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Integrated Systems Engineering. He is also a fellow of Ohio State’s Center for Automotive Research. He has secured more than $7 million for his research projects from US DOE, US DOT, NHTSA, Cummins, PACCAR, Honda, Ohio Department of Higher Education, internal grants, Ford Motor Company, General Motors and SAE. He is serving as the lead advisor for the Buckeye AutoDrive Team. Ahmed has authored more than 130 international peer reviewed publications, eight provisional patents, and 11 invention disclosures. He has also served as editor for IFAC Advances in Automotive Control 2022 and is associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Transportation Electrification and IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics. He is a recipient of the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award by the Society of Automotive Engineering (SAE) in 2023, SAE’s L. Ray Buckendale Award in 2019 and Ohio State’s Lumley Research Award in 2018.

Benjamin Ahn, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Engineering Education at Ohio State. Ahn’s overarching research goal is to equip engineering students with the essential knowledge, skills and mindsets to excel in their engineering careers. His research spans diverse domains, including: the development of technical and professional skills in engineering students; mentoring practices within undergraduate research settings; teaching and learning practices in engineering; and the school-to-work transition of early-career engineers. Ahn earned his bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering with first-class honors from the University of New South Wales in Australia, his master’s degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Purdue University and his doctorate in Engineering Education from Purdue University. Following his graduation, he held a postdoctoral appointment at MIT. Before joining Ohio State, he was an associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Iowa State University.

Benjamin Bohrer, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Animal Sciences where his research program focuses on meat science and muscle biology. Working at the intersection of animal and food sciences, his primary goals are to advance food animal production systems to become more efficient and to improve eating quality and nutritional profile of foods. Projects in his lab include benchtop laboratory components such as proteomics and mass spectroscopy as well as applied components such as working directly with meat systems and conducting sensory analysis. In the future, he hopes to work closer with interdisciplinary teams to expand the farmgate-to-plate approach of his research to past the plate and better understand the digestive fate of foods using in-vitro and in-vivo systems and to increase consumer confidence in the nutrition of their foods.

Matt Briggs PT, DPT, PhD, AT, is a researcher and senior outcomes specialist in Rehabilitation Services at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center. He is also an assistant professor of practice in the Department of Orthopaedics, co-director of the Movement Analysis and Performance Lab, and PI in the Sports Medicine Research Institute. He is director of the Rehabilitation Outcomes & Assessment Research (ROAR) lab. His research interests and agenda focus on understanding factors that may be used to optimize systems and strategies for the delivery of rehabilitation interventions with a focus on improving care efficiency and quality while maximizing patient outcomes in diverse patient populations. He pursues his research agenda through multiple lenses including health services research, health informatics, educational research, movement analysis, and interventional approaches/strategies. Briggs is currently a Learning Health System Scholar through the Learning Health Systems Rehabilitation Research Network. He has also received awards related to his research including the Education Influencer Award from the Physical Therapy Learning Institute, Best Case Study award from the International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy, New Horizon award from the American Academy of Sports Physical Therapy, and Young Alumni Appreciation” ward from Creighton University’s School of Pharmacy and Health Professions. 

Guy Brock, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics in Ohio State’s College of Medicine. He has taken a leadership role in promoting team science and rigorous scientific conduct at Ohio State and Nationwide Children’s Hospital as associate director of the Center for Biostatistics and Director of the Biostatistics Resource at NCH. He collaborates extensively with clinical, basic and population science investigators including biostatistical oversight of multiple program project awards and multisite cooperative grants. Through his role as director of the Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design Core of the Center for Clinical Translational Science he supports clinical trial development, secondary data research and mentorship of junior investigators conducting clinical and translational research. This includes forming the Secondary Data Core to leverage claims data, electronic medical records, ongoing prospective cohort studies and registry data to conduct impactful research in surgical outcomes, suicide prevention, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. These collaborations motivate his methodological advances in biomedical informatics and clinical research including multistate transition models, competing risks, cluster validation, data integration and missing value imputation.

Daniel Dotson has been a science subject librarian in University Libraries since 2004, currently working with six academic departments in support of their teaching and research. These departments combined have more than 250 faculty, 600 graduate students and enroll thousands of undergraduate students in their courses. Teaching and affordability are two components of his position that heavily overlap with his research and service. His research includes multiple bibliometric studies of the scholarly publications of scientist, including theses/dissertations and journal articles, to analyze the use, publication and impact of scientific research. In addition to many service instances within the University Libraries, Dotson has been a regular member of the planning group for the annual Great Lakes Science Boot Camp for Librarians, which emphasizes librarians learning more about the research of scientists at research universities. OHI/O, Ohio State’s hackathon program, is one of the ventures he is most proud to have been involved in. His involvement has gone from heavy to advisory, he has enjoyed watching it balloon from one event in a library basement to a student-led program with hundreds of participants in multiple events throughout the year.

Chris Fortney, PhD, RN, FPCN, is an associate professor in the Martha S. Pitzer Center for Women, Children & Youth in the College of Nursing. Her research focuses on the experiences of critically ill infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and their families. Fortney uses descriptive data, behavioral observations, qualitative interviews, and prospective, longitudinal designs to investigate infant symptoms and suffering trajectories, and their effect on parent satisfaction, decision-making, distress and coping, and changes in care goals. Notably, she uncovered challenges in assessing and managing symptoms for NICU infants with life-threatening or life-limiting conditions. She developed a framework to assess the quality of the neonatal death experience and published pioneering patient-reported symptom data in this population. She has also explored nurse distress when caring for critically ill infants and collaborated with a bilingual community advisory board to transcreate research materials from English to Spanish. Currently, she is investigating the impact of social determinants of health on nurse-parent communication regarding infant symptom assessment and management. Fortney received her master’s and doctorate in Nursing from Ohio State and completed the Pediatric Patient-Centered Outcomes postdoctoral fellowship in the Center for Biobehavioral Health at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

Brian L. Foster, PhD, is an associate professor with tenure in the Division of Biosciences, College of Dentistry at Ohio State. He is the chair of the Graduate Studies Committee overseeing the Oral Biology doctorate program and DDS-PhD dual degree training program. He completed his doctorate in Oral Biology at the University of Washington and a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. The Foster lab focuses on the molecular biology of tooth and bone development, including genes, diseases and novel therapies. Foster has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications. In 2013, he received first place in the American Association for Dental Research Hatton Awards Competition and the International Association for Dental Research (IADR) Distinguished Scientist Young Investigator Award. In 2014, he was the recipient of the Association for Bone and Mineral Research (ASBMR) John Haddad Young Investigator Award. He achieved the Stazen Award for research excellence and received three consecutive paper of the year awards in Ohio State’s College of Dentistry. In 2020, he was an inaugural winner of the IADR Centennial Emerging Leaders Award. In 2023, he was selected for the first cohort of the Provost's Midcareer Scholars: Scarlet and Gray Associate Professor Program at Ohio State.

Lyda G. Garcia, PhD, joined the Department of Animal Sciences in February 2015. Raised in a rural south Texas town – just 40 miles east of the Texas-Mexico border and ninety miles from the Gulf of Mexico – she was involved in various areas of livestock. Raised by a cowboy and a public school teacher, Garcia developed a technique to relay her passion for agriculture and higher education inside and outside of the classroom. At Ohio State, Garcia is an associate professor in meat science who is responsible for teaching undergraduate courses in meat science (introduction to meat science, food animal processing, and meat carcass evaluation) and advises undergraduate Animal Sciences students. Additionally, Garcia is the meat extension specialist for the state of Ohio where she is highly involved in presenting at workshops, clinics and conferences on meat science, specifically targeting youth and livestock producers in the state of Ohio, all through extension. Garcia focuses on applied research in the area of meat science assisting the livestock and meat industry seeking to find practical solutions for existing problems.

Eben Kenah, PhD, grew up in central Ohio, went to Harvard for undergraduate, and earned a Doctorate of Science in epidemiology and a master’s in biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2008. He was a postdoctoral fellow in biostatistics and global health at the University of Washington from 2008-2011, and was in the Biostatistics Department and the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida from 2011-2017. He joined the Biostatistics Division in Ohio State’s College of Public Health in 2017, and lives in Gahanna with his wife and three sons.

Jennifer Lundine, PhD, CCC-SLP, BC-ANCDS, is an associate professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science at Ohio State and is the director of the Childhood Cognition, Communication, and Brain Injury Lab. Lundine completed her bachelor’s in Speech and Hearing Science and master’s in Speech-Language Pathology at Ohio State. She then worked as a speech-language pathologist on the rehabilitation unit at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus for more than a decade before returning to Ohio State for more graduate work. She earned her doctorate in Speech & Hearing Science in 2016, and then continued her work at Nationwide Children’s Hospital as a Clinical Therapies Research Scientist. She joined the faculty at Ohio State in the fall of 2017 and was promoted with tenure in 2022. She remains an affiliated clinical researcher at Nationwide Children’s. Lundine’s clinical, teaching and research interests include impairments associated with complex pediatric medical diagnoses, especially cognitive-communication disorders associated with acquired brain injury (ABI). Specifically, her research focuses on improving gaps in access to and utilization of services designed to support children with ABI and identifying specific approaches that would improve assessment and treatment practices following pediatric ABI.

Beau Meyer, DDS, MPH, is an associate professor with tenure In Ohio State’s College of Dentistry, an associate medical director with Partners For Kids, and has a medical staff appointment at Nationwide Children's Hospital. He completed dental school at Ohio State’s  College of Dentistry, and his residency training in pediatric dentistry concurrently with a master’s degree in health policy and management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After residency, he was an assistant professor and the pre-doctoral program director in Pediatric Dentistry at UNC. In 2020, he returned to Columbus where he serves in his current roles. His primary responsibilities include didactic and clinical instruction for dental students and pediatric dentistry residents, independent research, research advising for pediatric dentistry and public health graduate students, and clinical practice in the Dental Faculty Practice and hospital operating room. He is an active member of the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, serving as an expert consultant for their Pediatric Dental Medicaid and CHIP Advisory Committee and Chair for their Council on Pre-doctoral Education. His overall career goal is to improve the oral health trajectory of children.

Kris Paulsen, PhD, is a specialist in contemporary art, with a focus on time-based, computational media, and immersive media. She is an associate professor in the Department of History of Art and Program in Film Studies at Ohio State. Her work traces the intersections of art and engineering, with a particular emphasis on telepresence, virtuality, and artificial intelligence. Here/There: Telepresence, Touch,and Art at the Interface (MIT Press, 2017), Paulsen’s first book, received the 2018 Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her current book project, Future Artifacts, examines how contemporary artists strategically deploy emergent technologies and the science-fiction fantasies that fuel capitalist speculation to redress Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian promises. She oversees several large collaborations on campus, including an ongoing, multi-year partnership with the Columbus Museum of Art that involves students in the creation of museum exhibitions and publications, and the Art, Technology, and Social Change Micro-Residency Program, which brings artistic research to bear on today’s most pressing social justice issues. Paulsen is also the curator of multiple exhibitions, including Sarah Rosalena: In All Directions, currently featured in the Columbus Museum of Art.

Shayne B. Piasta, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Ohio State and a faculty associate at the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy. Her areas of expertise include early and emergent literacy development, and her research focuses on empirical validation of educational practices to support young children’s language and literacy learning. Much of her research involves experimental evaluation of professional development, educational programs, and specific literacy practices aimed at increasing children’s language and literacy outcomes, along with examination of teacher, classroom, and other factors associated with children’s literacy gains – including teacher knowledge to support literacy.  Piasta’s work has been funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, Spencer Foundation, and National Institutes of Health.  She has served on numerous editorial boards during her career and is currently an associate editor for Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal.  She has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in the field and has received numerous awards for her work, including the Carol Connor Midcareer Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Barack Obama and Dina Feitelson Research Award from the International Literacy Association.

Jay Plasman, PhD, is an assistant professor in Workforce Development and Education program housed in the College of Education and Human Ecology’s Department of Educational Studies at Ohio State. Plasman earned his doctorate in Education Policy, Leadership, and Methodology from the University of California Santa Barbara. He also earned a master’s in Education – Research Methods from the University of California Santa Barbara, a master’s in International Service from Roehampton University in London, England, and a bachelor’s in American Studies from Carleton College. Plasman currently serves as an associate editor for the International Journal of Training and Development. His research focuses broadly understanding and innovating workforce development and education programming to improve outcomes for a diverse range of students. More specifically, his work explores how STEM-related career and technical education coursework may be particularly beneficial for traditionally disadvantaged students including students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, students with disabilities, and students in non-traditional fields of study. Plasman’s work has appeared in well-respected journals such as Educational Researcher, American Educational Research Journal, and Teachers College Record.

Rongjun Qin, PhD, is an associate professor in Geomatics and Computer Vision at Ohio State. He received doctorate from the ETH Zurich in Photogrammetry, and holds a master’s degree in Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and a bachelor’s degree in Computational Mathematics from Wuhan University. His research interest lies in the intersection among Photogrammetry, Computer Vision and Remote Sensing, with specialization on 3D scene modeling and interpretation of multi-modality and multi-source sensor data. Qin serves as an associate editor for the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, the Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing journal, and the editorial member of the Photogrammetric Record journal. He was the chairing the ISPRS working group of Satellite Constellation for Remote Sensing (2016-2022), and now is the commission secretary supporting the ISPRS Commission II Presidents. He is also an IEEE Senior Member. His awards include the first prize of Mathematical Modeling Contest 2009, winner of IARPA Topcoder 3D challenge, winner of IEEE Data fusion contest (2019, 2020), ASPRS Talbert Abrams Grand Award, Duan Brown Senior Award, ISPRS CATCON Silver Award etc.

Carmen Quatman, MD, PhD, is an orthopedic surgeon-scientist with fellowship training in Orthopaedic Trauma, Fracture Care and Geriatrics. She is an associate professor with tenure in the Departments of Emergency Medicine and Orthopaedic Surgery. She completed her medical and doctorate degrees at the University of Toledo College of Medicine, as well as post-doctoral research fellowships at Ohio State’s Sports Health and Performance Institute and Cincinnati Children’s Sports Medicine Biodynamics Center. She is a surgeon-scientist who has ample experience working within research teams from basic research to translational and implementation science. The common theme throughout her prior research is how mobility is a keystone feature in quality of life. At the age of 17, she sustained a traumatic knee injury and was confronted with news that she may not be able to walk in a few years without significant reconstructive surgery. As a result of these experiences, she has been obsessed with innovative musculoskeletal injury prevention and surgical outcomes strategies across the aging spectrum.

Sarah Short, PhD, earned her doctorate in Genetics and Development in 2012 from Cornell University, where her research was supported by a Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship. She then continued her training as a Ruth L. Kirschstein postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Short joined the Department of Entomology at Ohio State as an assistant professor in August 2018. Her research is broadly focused on understanding variation in transmission of infectious diseases by mosquitoes. She studies how mosquitoes interact with harmful and helpful microbes, the formation of microbial communities within mosquitoes and ticks, the impacts of commensal microbes on pathogen susceptibility and transmission, and the ecological and evolutionary forces shaping mosquito immune defense. Her extension program is focused on protecting Ohioans from mosquito and tick bites and increasing awareness about biting arthropods and the diseases they transmit.

Kareem M. Usher, PhD, is an associate professor of City and Regional Planning at the Knowlton School of Architecture. His academic identity can be described as a public scholar who strives to create a peaceful, just and loving world by reducing human suffering through community-engaged planning research. Usher’s research focuses on urban food systems, and he engages this topic at the intersection of food access, social justice, regional governance and community economic development. His work has spanned geographies: rural-suburban-urban, Global South-Global North, Mid-Western-Southern United States, cultures and socio-economic groups: African American, Appalachian, Non-Hispanic European, and Indigenous Peoples: Belizean ethnic groups – Kriol, Garifuna, and Maya (Q’echi). Acknowledging that there remains much to know and understand in order to address ‘wicked’ social problems and effect sustainable change, Usher employs compassionate community engagement to uncover and lift up new ways of knowing – new epistemologies co-created with citizens who are the experts in their communities.

Katie Vinopal, PhD, has a research focus that centers on understanding how to design policies and reform institutions to better contribute to the positive development of children and tackle long-standing issues of social inequity. Vinopal received her doctorate in public administration from American University and a bachelor’s in mathematics from Xavier University. Prior to her academic career, Vinopal worked at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. She also worked on food security and poverty in the nonprofit sector for the Food Research and Action Center. Vinopal has been awarded the 2020 Public Management Research Association Riccucci-O’Leary Award for Best Article on Diversity, an Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management 40 for 40 Fellowship in 2018, and was a Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration emerging scholar in 2015. She is also the recipient of the 2021 Glenn College’s Mary K. Marvel Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award and the 2021 Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award through the Undergraduate Research and Creative Inquiry Office at Ohio State. Vinopal’s work has been published in high impact journals, including Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Educational Researcher, and Developmental Psychology, among others.

Daniel Walker, PhD, MPH, is vice chair of research and associate professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine. He is also a member of CATALYST - the Center for the Advancement of Team Science, Analytics, and Systems Thinking in Health Services and Implementation Science Research – in Ohio State’s College of Medicine. He holds a courtesy appointment in the College of Medicine’s Department of Biomedical Informatics and in the Division of Health Services Management and Policy in the College of Public Health. His research focuses on a wide range of health services research topics, but is particularly attentive to the issues of organizational change for primary care and health systems as they seek to address health disparities. He is particularly interested I community-engaged, implementation science that considers multi-stakeholder perspectives on health service innovations to improve patient and provider engagement and address social needs. Walker received his doctorate in Global Health Management and Policy from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and his Master of Public Health in Health Management and Policy from Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health.

Shu-Hua (Sue) Wang, MD, PharmD, MPH&TM, is professor of medicine with tenure in Ohio State’s College of Medicine, Internal Medicine Department and Infectious Disease Division.  She is also the director for Research and Implementation Science and Research for the Global One Health initiative and Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) thematic lead for Infectious Diseases Institute. Wang leads the CDC Global Action in Healthcare Network-Antimicrobial Resistance to improve infection prevention and control and enhance laboratory capacity.  She also works with community partners in central Ohio to increase TB awareness and wellness in the Asian American population. She serves as the Medical TB Consultant for Ohio Department of Health and Medical TB consultant and educational trainer for the CDC TB Center of Excellence for the Northeast region based at the Global TB Institute at New Jersey Medical School.

Jason Wester, PhD, joined the Department of Neuroscience as an assistant professor in 2019. He earned a bachelor’s in Computer Science at the University of Miami and a doctorate in Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. During his postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, he became interested in how neural circuits assemble themselves during development and how this process can be disrupted to cause neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism. At Ohio State, his lab uses molecular genetic techniques available in mice to investigate the synaptic connectivity and physiology of neural circuits with cell-type precision. They knock out key disease risk-genes during early development and then investigate how loss of these genes alters circuit organization and function. Their goal is to determine which aspects of neural circuits change and why this causes pathological disruptions to cognition and behavior. Because the cell-types and circuits they study are conserved from mice to humans, the hope is this knowledge will guide precise therapeutic approaches.

Candice Askwith, PhD is an associate professor and vice chair of research in the Department of Neuroscience. The Askwith lab is focused on understanding how factors in the extracellular environment work through ion channels and G-protein coupled receptors to control neuronal signaling and cell death. Changes in the interstitial environment of the brain control behavior and neurological injury. Understanding how neurons sense and respond to signals within this extracellular space is critical for developing novel therapeutic strategies to treat mental illness and neurological disease. Specifically, the lab is investigating how the acid sensing ion channels and extracellular pH fluctuations change neuronal signaling to control cell death following cerebral ischemia or injury. The lab focuses on dissecting the cellular signaling pathways that control acid-dependent cell death and determining how activation of specific G-protein coupled receptors can interfere with these processes to mediate neuroprotection.

Harmony Bench, PhD is associate professor of dance and author of Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). Her research addresses practices, performances, and circulations of dance in the contexts of digital and screen media. For nearly a decade, she has collaborated with Kate Elswit to bring the digital humanities and dance history into greater dialogue through computational analysis and data visualization with projects such as Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry (www.dunhamsdata.org; winner of the 2021 ATHE/ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship), and Visceral Histories/Visual Arguments:Dance-Based Approaches to Data. From 2014-2019, she co-edited The International Journal of Screendance with Simon Ellis, and in 2021, she guest-edited the special issue This Is Where We Dance Now: COVID-19 and the New and Next in Dance Onscreen with Alexandra Harlig. For 2022-23, she is a Fellow with the Global Arts + Humanities at Ohio State.

E. Leigh Bonds, PhD, associate professor and digital humanities librarian, consults with faculty and students on applying digital humanities (DH) approaches to their research and teaching, teaches DH praxis and pedagogy, collaborates on projects, and leads the campus DH network. After six years in this role, Bonds understands the importance of engaging the DH community and leveraging existing resources in coordinated, collaborative efforts to develop and sustain a dynamic, multifaceted support network. To inform those endeavors, she follows emerging trends, tracks new projects and initiatives, learns new methodologies and tools, and actively serves and contributes to conversations in her professional field. She is a DH practitioner and pedagogue with training in specific methods and best practices, and experience working on collaborative project teams. As an active member of the broader digital humanities community, Bonds chairs the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s DH Group and reviews proposals annually for the Association of Digital Humanities Organizations’ and the Association for Computers and the Humanities’ conferences. At Ohio State, she serves as a GAHDT faculty fellow, co‐ leads the University Libraries’ digital scholarship strategic initiative, and serves on University Senate, Faculty Council and University Research Committee. Bonds holds a PhD in English from Texas Tech University.

Jordan Clark, PhD, studies novel ways of providing for environmental control, energy efficiency and power demand management in commercial, residential and agricultural buildings. His research interests include modeling of buildings and indoor environments, sensor hardware, HVAC systems, and interaction of buildings with larger energy systems. He has contributed to development of several hyper-efficient cooling and dehumidification products and volunteers for efforts around standardization of testing and rating of hardware for smart control of indoor environments at ASHRAE and HVI. He is currently leading the US Department of Energy Connected Communities project at Ohio State and serves as Chief Technology Officer for CoolYield Labs, LLC. Clark received his PhD and MS from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of the Building Energy and Environments Research Group. Before Ohio State, Clark held postdoctoral appointments at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Clark is a native Ohioan and lifelong Buckeye fan.

Jessica Cooperstone, PhD, is an assistant professor in the departments of Horticulture and Crop Science and Food Science and Technology, as well as part of the Foods for Health Discovery Theme. Working at the intersection of plant, food and nutritional sciences, her goal is to develop fruit and vegetable varieties that are purposefully designed for enhanced human health, backed up by clinical trial data and worthy of government supported health claims. Her interdisciplinary research group works to better understand how genetic and environmental factors affect the biosynthesis of phytochemicals in crops and how these compounds affect human health. Projects in the Cooperstone Lab combine analytical chemistry (both through traditional chemical analyses, and broader untargeted chemical profiling) with plant genetics/genomics, transcriptomics, microbiome data, sensory science, and measures of health outcomes and utilizes bioinformatics-based approaches.

Karen C. Dannemiller, PhD, directs the Indoor Environmental Quality research group, which addresses emerging environmental concerns within the built environment. She is an associate professor and College of Engineering Innovation Scholar with a joint appointment in Civil, Environmental & Geodetic Engineering and Environmental Health Sciences. She is also a core faculty member of the Sustainability Institute and has a courtesy appointment in Microbiology. Her work aims to improve understanding of chemical and microbial processes indoors that impact health while fostering student engagement. Funding sources include NSF, NIH, NASA, HUD, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and SOCHE/AFRL. Recent awards include National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, Buckeye Engineering Women in Executive Leadership (BEWEL) Leadership in Innovation Award, the Lumley Engineering Research Award, and selection in American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists’ 2022 40 under 40.

Sean Downey, PhD, is an ecological anthropologist whose research explores the social and environmental dynamics of farming and foraging societies, past and present. His work is guided by anthropology’s traditional focus on human cultural and biological variability, which he believes can provide important insights into pressing questions about contemporary societies and the environmental sustainability. In order to achieve this potential, he develops and applies novel methods of data collection and analysis in his studies. Please see the website for the Human Complexity Lab for more information.

Laszlo Farkas, MD, was born in Budapest/Hungary and grew up in Germany, where he attended school and medical school in Regensburg. He obtained his doctorate with a dissertation defense “summa cum laude” studying endotoxin effects in lung epithelial cells. After residency training at the University of Regensburg, Farkas joined Martin Kolb and Jack Gauldie at McMaster University as postdoctoral fellow to study molecular mechanisms of lung vascular and parenchymal remodeling. Farkas joined the faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University as instructor in 2011 with promotion to Assistant Professor in 2013. He built a nationally recognized research program studying endothelial cell and endothelial stem cell biology and inflammatory mechanisms of lung vascular remodeling at VCU. Publications include journals such as American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Science Translational Medicine, and Journal of Clinical Investigation. Multiple grants from the NIH/NHLBI and the American Heart Association have supported his research program. In 2019, Farkas joined the growing Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at Ohio State to expand his research program. New areas of research include the role of endolysosomal dysfunction and SARS-CoV- 2 induced endothelial dysfunction.

Erica R. Glasper, PhD, earned her bachelor's degree with honors in psychology from Randolph-Macon College and went on to earn her master's and doctorate in Psychobiology and Behavioral Neuroscience at Ohio State. Glasper’s postdoctoral studies began at Princeton University in 2006, where she was supported by fellowships from the UNCF/Merck Science Initiative and the NIH. In 2011, Glasper joined the faculty at the University of Maryland-College Park in the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor. It was there that she began her behavioral neuroendocrinology research program investigating how experiences shape our brain, behavior, and health. Following success as a researcher and educator, she was awarded tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2019. During the summer of 2021, Glasper returned to Ohio State, where she joined the Department of Neuroscience and the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research within the College of Medicine as an associate professor with tenure and the co-director of a NIH-funded postbaccalaureate program. Her successful research program is currently funded by the NIH, Ohio State's Wexner Medical Center and the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research.

Matthew Grizzard, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Communication. Situated within media psychology and communication, his research program examines moral judgment processes as they relate to the consumption of media entertainment, with a primary focus on evaluations of narratives and narrative characters. For example, current projects explore how viewers come to evaluate characters as heroes and villains, how relative differences between characters can explain the appeal of antiheroes, why viewers prefer some types of narrative endings over others, and what types of narrative content elicit moral emotions such as anger and guilt. His work on moral emotions seeks to understand how media violence can elicit moral emotions and how they might serve as motivators for prosocial responses Grizzard is a member of the editorial boards for Human Communication Research, Media Psychology and Psychology of Popular Media, and he is an associate editor of Journal of Media Psychology. He is also an officer in the Communication and Social Cognition Division of the National Communication Association. He has appeared as an expert in various popular press outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. Grizzard earned his PhD from Michigan State University.

Jennifer Hefner, PhD, is an associate professor in the Division of Health Management and Policy. She received both her master's in Public Health and doctorate in health services organization and policy from the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on applying management and organizational theories to the study of the implementation and dissemination of healthcare and social services programs. Currently, Hefner is working on projects related to 911 response to mental health crisis, food insecurity among diabetic patients, virtual teams for first episode psychosis treatment, medication treatment for opioid use disorder, and Ohio Medicaid’s Next Generation Managed Care program. Her work has been funded by grants from the NIH (NIA and NIDDK), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Ohio Department of Medicaid, and the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. Hefner teaches in the CPH MHA program and is also the editor of the annual book series Advances in Health Care Management.

Jeffrey B. Jacquet, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Environment and Natural Resources. One of the first sociologists to study the process of hydraulic fracturing, Jacquet has gone on to examine a range of renewable- and non-renewable-energy-related social and environmental systems at institutions including the University of Wyoming, Cornell University, and South Dakota State University. At Ohio State, Jacquet leads students through coursework and mentorship to examine the areas of energy, environment, and rural societies.

Rachel Louis Kajfez, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Engineering Education and the associate chair for Graduate Studies and Research Infrastructure in her department. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in Civil Engineering from Ohio State and earned her doctorate in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech. She joined the faculty at Ohio State in 2013 as an assistant professor of practice and transitioned to a tenure-track role after helping establish the Department of Engineering Education which grew out of the Engineering Education Innovation Center. She was also instrumental in creating Ohio State's PhD program in Engineering Education. Her research interests focus on the intersection between motivation and identity of undergraduate and graduate students, first-year engineering programs, mixed methods research, and innovative approaches to teaching. She is the principal investigator for the Research on Identity and Motivation in Engineering (RIME) Collaborative and co-directs the Toy Adaptation Program. She has a passion for developing processes and working on collaborative transdisciplinary projects.

Bryce Kerlin, MD, is a principal investigator in the Center for Clinical & Translational Research in the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital. Kerlin is also director of the Joan Fellowship in Pediatric Hemostasis-Thrombosis at Nationwide Children's Hospital, director of the Blood Disease Research Affinity Group, an attending physician in the Division of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology/BMT and a professor of pediatrics at Ohio State. Kerlin’s research is focused on the translational epidemiology of pediatric thrombosis, focusing on the clarification of biomarkers and clinical features linked to thrombosis, especially in pediatric kidney disease. He actively participates in clinical trials for new treatments in hemostasis and thrombosis, including new medications for hemophilia, von Willebrand disease, and blood clots. Kerlin earned his bachelor of science degree from Purdue University and his medical degree from the Medical College of Wisconsin. He trained in Pediatrics at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin and Coagulation Physiology at the Blood Research Institute (Milwaukee). Kerlin led the Hemophilia Treatment Center at Rady Children’s Hospital where he was also an assistant professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine before joining the faculty at Nationwide Children’s in 2004.

Zhiqiang Lin, PhD, is a distinguished professor of engineering. His research interests center around systems and software security, with a key focus on developing automated binary analysis techniques for vulnerability discovery and malware analysis, and hardening the systems and software from binary code rewriting, virtualization and trusted execution environment. He has published more than 130 papers - 51 of which appeared in the top venues in cybersecurity including IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, USENIX Security, and NDSS. He has also served on the technical program committee of these conferences many times, chaired or co-chaired ISC (2019), FEAST (2019), ASIACCS (2021), and SECURECOMM (2022). Currently, he is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking. He was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Securing Computing, and IEEE Transactions of Mobile Computing. He is a recipient of Harrison Faculty Award for Excellence in Engineering Education, NSF CAREER award, AFOSR Young Investigator award, and Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University.

Tasleem J. Padamsee, PhD, is an assistant professor in the College of Public Health, and a faculty affiliate of the Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Department of Sociology. A sociologist by training, Padamsee brings theoretical and methodological tools from sociology and women’s studies to bear on public health problems. She is a scholar of health disparities and health systems, whose research program explores the intersections of social inequality, public policy, and health care. Her research has been funded by multiple federal agencies and private foundations. Padamsee leads the Daughter Sister Mother Project, which conducts multi-method studies of how diverse women at elevated risk for breast cancer make prevention decisions and how women can better be supported to manage their cancer risks. Since early 2020, Padamsee has been intensively involved in COVID-19 response, recovery, and research activities. She has helped shape Ohio’s response to COVID-19 in historically marginalized populations, co- authored Ohio’s COVID-19 Populations Needs Assessment, helped design the Wexner Medical Center’s mass COVID-19 vaccination site to advance regional health equity, and co-leads the C3-REACH research team (Committed to Communities Collaborative: Research and Engagement to Advance beyond COVID to Health Equity).

Shaurya Prakash graduated with a doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007. Following a stint at Rutgers University, he joined the faculty in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Ohio State in 2009. At Ohio State, he directs the Microsystems and Nanosystems Laboratory, where his team pioneers scientific discovery to enable novel technologies for applications in healthcare, energy systems, and water purification. Prakash has published several papers, including a book titled “Nanofluidics and Microfluidics: Systems and Applications.” He is currently the co-lead for the Microbial Communities area for Ohio State’s Infectious Diseases Institute. His multi-disciplinary research is funded by diverse government and industry sponsors. 

Carolyn J. Presley, MD, MHS, is an assistant professor on the tenure track in the Division of Medical Oncology/Department of Internal Medicine, the Comprehensive Cancer Center and The James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and her medical degree from Dartmouth Medical School. She completed residency in Internal Medicine and combined fellowship in Geriatric Oncology and Hematology at Yale University. She completed a master's in Health Sciences, also at Yale, within the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program sponsored by the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. She is an active member of the Ohio State Comprehensive Cancer Program, The American Geriatrics Society and the American Society of Clinical Oncology. She has been a long-time member of the international Cancer and Aging Research Group (CARG). Presley currently leads studies focused on maintaining functional independence among older adults with lung cancer. These studies incorporate geriatric assessment, embedded palliative care, and interventions to improve risk factors for treatment toxicity and functional decline. She has been funded by the National Institute of Aging, the BMS Foundation, the Rising Tide Foundation, and is one of the first two women to ever receive the preeminent Paul Beeson Emerging Leaders in Aging Career Development Award at Ohio State and received the National LEAD Rising Star Award for Women in hematology and oncology.

Kelly Purtell, PhD, is an associate professor of Human Development and Family Science in the College of Education and Human Ecology. She is a faculty associate at the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy and a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Population Research. She received her PhD in Psychology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research centers on understanding how contextual factors shape health and development among low-income children and adolescents, and on how policies and programs can enhance the developmental trajectories of these youth. Many of her current projects focus on policies and practices related to early childhood education and their influences on children’s development. The primary themes of her current work are: developing a comprehensive understanding of the classroom ecologies that children experience from preschool to grade 3 and the policies that influence them; examining the ways in which classroom age composition influences children’s learning and development in preschool; and understanding the ways in which social and educational policies shape the environments experienced by children in families experiencing economic disadvantage.

Leah Pyter, PhD is an integrative biologist and an associate professor in the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research and the Department of Psychiatry. She also earned her doctorate in behavioral neuroscience. She has 20 years of research experience in behavioral neurobiology, the last 15 of which have been focused on neuro-immune interactions that contribute to behavioral side effects of chemotherapy, such as fatigue, cognitive and mood deficits. Through her research, she hopes to improve the quality of life and health of cancer patients and survivors. The majority of her work has been directed at systematically identifying underlying biological mechanisms using rodent cancer models, although my lab has recently begun clinical research with breast cancer patients. Her training in integrative biology (endocrinology, neuroscience, immunology) facilitates a transdisciplinary theme in her approach to research questions, primarily how various physiological systems in the body communicate with the brain and vice versa during/after cancer. In her free time, she plays soccer, hikes with her dogs and goofs off with her kids and spouse.

Catherine Quatman-Yates, PT, DPT, PhD, is an associate professor in the Division of Physical Therapy within the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. She is dedicated to pursuing research that empowers individuals to engage in safe and physically active lifestyles across the lifespan. She is the director for the Leading Improvement-Focused Teams for Advancing Health System Outcomes Lab (LIFT Lab). She is diversely trained in philosophies and methods for a variety of inquiry paradigms including: classic experimental and quasi-experimental designs, naturalistic/qualitative approaches, complexity science approaches (e.g., social network analysis and non-linear time series analyses), and improvement/implementation science methods. Quatman-Yates leverages systems thinking/modeling and various investigative and analytic approaches to work toward ongoing improvement of patient outcomes for a variety of injuries and conditions. She has more than 50 peer-reviewed publications and has presented her work in more than 75 national and international venues. Quatman-Yates has received a number of awards related to her research including the Excellence in Research Award and New Horizon Award from the American Academy of Sports Physical Therapy and the Academy of Pediatric Physical Therapy’s Toby Long Paper of the Year Award. She was also a co-author on the now in press Clinical Practice Guidelines for Physical Therapy Evaluation and Treatment After Concussion/Mild Traumatic Brain Injury.

Audrey Sawyer, PhD, is an associate professor of Earth Sciences is the elected Divisional Chair of Climate, Water & Energy. She was a visiting scientist at the Spanish Research Council and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain in 2021-2022. Sawyer's research focus is surface water-groundwater interaction in streams and coastal waters. She seeks to understand how fluid flow influences water quality, its availability, and the implications for humans and ecosystems using computer models, laboratory tests, and field observations. She has authored over fifty scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Science. She is also the recipient of the Kohout Early Career Award in Hydrogeology from the Geological Society of America. Some of her recent projects include rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion in coastal aquifers, nitrogen and phosphorus fate in rivers and groundwater, and water access in the United States and East Africa. She teaches courses in hydrogeology, water issues, and introductory geology. Sawyer received a bachelor's degree in geology and environmental engineering from Rice University, a master's of science in geoscience from the Pennsylvania State University, and her doctorate in geological sciences at the University of Texas-Austin. She conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Delaware.

Jonathan L. Slaughter, MD, MPH, is a neonatologist and principal investigator in the Center for Perinatal Research within The Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital and an associate professor of pediatrics. Slaughter's ultimate goal is to improve outcomes important to neonatal patients and their families through research that leads directly to improvements in neonatal clinical care. His patient-centered research program focuses on comparative effectiveness research to determine which treatments work best for neonatal patients given specific clinical circumstances and patient characteristics. Slaughter’s two major NIH-funded research projects are: "Early Prediction of Spontaneous Patent Ductus Arteriosus (PDA) Closure and PDA-Associated Outcomes" (R01HL145032);  and the PIVOTAL Trial (UG3/UH3HL161338) that focuses on treatments and outcomes related to patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) in preterm infants. He also serves as the Nationwide Children's Hospital co-investigator/alternate principal investigator for the NICHD Neonatal Research Network.

Jonathan W. Song, PhD, is an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and co-director of the Center for Cancer Engineering-CURES. His research group has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and the Mark Foundation for Cancer Research and applies microtechnology, principles from tissue engineering, and quantitative engineering  analysis for studying the physical dynamics of tumor and vascular biology. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER and was named an Emerging Investigator by the Royal Society of Chemistry/Lab on a Chip. He received his bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University and his doctorate in biomedical engineering from the University of Michigan. Song was a post-doctoral fellow in the Edwin L. Steele Laboratory for Tumor Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

Alper Yilmaz, PhD, is a professor of geoinformatics. He is a fellow of ASPRS, a senior member of IEEE, and a senior member of the NAI. Yilmaz is serving as the president of the ISPRS Technical Commission II on Photogrammetry and the Editor-In-Chief for the Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing Journal. Yilmaz's research focuses on biomimetic navigation systems for unmanned systems, mining anomalies in multi-physics and multi-dimensional geospatial data. Based on a recent study from Stanford University and Elsevier, Yilmaz is listed among the top 2% most cited researchers in the fields of “Artificial Intelligence & Image Processing” and “Geological & Geomatics Engineering” in both career-long (1960-2021) and single year (2021) categories. Yilmaz’s research has received more than $12 million in extramural funding from NASA, NSF, DOD, DOE, and industry, resulting in more than 200 publications and patents that receiving more than 12,500 citations (Google Scholar). Yilmaz has been awarded the Outstanding Service Award in 2022 (ASPRS), the Innovator of Year in 2020, Presidential citation in 2019 from ASPRS, honorable mention for the Masao Horiba Award (Japan) in 2016, the Lumley Interdisciplinary Research Award in 2015, and the Lumley Research Award in 2012. He has advised 24 doctorate and 15 master's students to completion on topics ranging from photogrammetry, machine learning, and computer vision who have found positions in prominent academic institutions, industry, and the government.