Forrest Schoessow

A PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and recipient of a Sharpe Innovation Commons Seed Grant, Forrest Schoessow has learned about the Earth by exploring its diverse landscapes and studying the intersections of nature and humanity. He has scaled mountains around the globe and once voyaged the length of the Mississippi River via canoe. He leads the Mountain Drone Team at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, and last summer, he studied glacier retreat exacerbated by climate change in the Andes Mountains.

Cindy Tran Nguyen

Based on the 2001 book-turned-movie starring Reese Witherspoon, the Broadway musical Legally Blonde took the stage at Ohio State last fall. Cindy Tran Nguyen, a theatre and marketing double major, played the lead role of Elle Woods, a California sorority girl turned Harvard Law student. “When I was growing up," she said, "I didn’t have anybody to look up to in terms of media and movies and YouTube — none of them were Asian. I wasn’t able to see myself in this career at all, and when I picked up theatre, I was thinking, ‘I’m going to make an impact on the stage.’”

Rachel Miller

Rachel Miller, a PhD student in the Department of English, is researching girlhood, media and pop culture in the 1990s. Her dissertation focuses on the specific space of girls’ bedrooms, which she argues are archives of cultural and feminist history. “This project really started as an ode to my teenage bedroom," she said. "While lots of scholars look at this media in isolation, I wanted to think about this ecosystem as a whole.” Miller was a recipient of the university’s 2018 Presidential Fellowships, the most prestigious award given by Ohio State’s Graduate School. Two-thirds of fellowships went to Arts and Sciences students.

Sesquicentennial Scholars

In honor of its 150th anniversary, Ohio State awarded 150 scholarships to students for the 2019-20 academic year. Of those, 32 students come from the College of Arts and Sciences. The Sesquicentennial Student Scholar Leadership Program demonstrates a commitment to increasing access and affordability while recognizing students’ academic and non-academic accomplishments and diverse interests.

Hasan Jeffries

The field school Hasan Jeffries, associate professor of history, leads to James Madison’s Montpelier in Virginia sheds light on the intersections between early U.S. history and how slavery served as a foundation on which the country was formed. Students explore the home and plantation of the former U.S. president before touring nearby Charlottesville, Virginia, where Heather Heyer was murdered during a white supremacist counterprotest.

Ann Hamilton

Distinguished University Professor and renowned multimedia artist Ann Hamilton is the mastermind behind a giant marble mosaic filling the walls New York City's WTC Cortlandt Street subway station, which reopened in 2018 for the first time since it was destroyed during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Hamilton's “CHORUS” spans 4,350 square feet and spells out text from the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Ahmad Al-Jallad

Ahmad Al-Jallad, M.S. Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies and associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, is a philologist, epigraphist and language historian who scours the Arabian deserts searching for clues that tell the forgotten story of the Arabic language and its speakers before Islam. Inscriptions written in Safaitic — an extinct indigenous script of Arabia — are etched in rock faces throughout northern Saudi Arabia. These engravings, Al-Jallad says, are key in adding clarity and context to the region’s ancient past.

Arctic Butterflies

Butterflies are among the many species vulnerable to climate change, with even slight environmental shifts affecting certain populations. That’s why the Museum of Biological Diversity’s Triplehorn Insect Collection sought the public’s help in creating a digital archive of thousands of Arctic (Oeneis) butterflies that were donated to the museum in 2015 by Ohio State alumnus David K. Parshall. Over the course of a year, hundreds of volunteers accessed detailed images of the butterflies through an online citizen science platform and entered specimen data. Contributors didn’t need any specialized knowledge, thanks to the museum’s tutorial on reading and interpreting the images.

Buckeye Aha! Math Moments (BAMM)

Buckeye Aha! Math Moments (BAMM) is an outreach initiative aimed at teaching kids the fun side of math. The program, created by visiting professor of mathematics Érika Roldán Roa, has held workshops in local schools, hosted mathematics summer camps and was part of the COSI Science Festival last May.

“I think mathematics could be not only a profession, but an activity you can do as a hobby — for fun. People are designed to get pleasure out of recognizing patterns and solving problems. Mathematics, as a hobby, allows us to just enjoy that pleasure.”

Digital Animation: A Technology Mentoring Program for Young Women

Since 1999, the Advanced Computer Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) has hosted Digital Animation: A Technology Mentoring Program for Young Women. Founded by Maria Palazzi, a professor in the Department of Design and former director of ACCAD, The free summer program guides middle school girls through two weeks of collaborative, project-based storytelling activities that teach them how to storyboard, animate, voice record and build 3D models.

“It feels very right to be doing this kind of community engagement. To be making available these kinds of experiences for young women seems really important.”