Mitchell Lazarow (BS ASP student) assisting in the set up of a weather monitoring station at Franklinton Farms on West Rich St. This station was purchased with funds from a grant from the Sustainability Institute to study the urban heat island aspect of OSU’s Columbus campus. Placing a station outside of Campus will allow our State Climate Office of Ohio to look at the Campus temperature regimes in the larger context of the City of Columbus. This station will assist our partners at Franklinton Farms to achieve their goals of growing and sharing food in the community by providing them with data specific to their site.

Faculty News: 

Harvey Miller is featured on the latest episode of Prognosis Ohio, a podcast about health and healthcare in Ohio. The conversation covers the infrastructure bill, scooters, Ubers, public transit, walking and health care access.

Student News: 

Pranav Padmanabhan (BA student, Geography) was awarded a $7500 Undergraduate Research Scholarship from the Arts and Sciences Honors Committee for his research proposal titled Conceptualizing ‘harm reduction’ as a contested ideological terrain: a dual-system model of harm reduction approaches to overdose prevention in Columbus, Ohio. Grassroots activists have been using mutual aid to combat the increasingly devastating overdose crisis in North America for decades, while nonprofit and government entities have only more recently begun providing the same services as these mutual aid groups, and have co-opted "harm reduction" to surveil people who use drugs as part of the biopolitical aims of the state. This project will rely on interviews with harm reduction service providers in Columbus who represent both philosophies of harm reduction to describe how the mechanisms of legitimacy of once-radical solutions and agency of people who use drugs play out in an urban setting. 

Sean Whelan (undergraduate major in ASP) was awarded the AAG Council Award for Best Graduate and Undergraduate Student Papers at the East Lakes Regional Division meeting. His paper was titled "Establishing a Climatology of Significant Tornadoes within the Southern United States". He received a $1,000 travel stipend for the national AAG meeting in New York.

Alumni News: 

Dr. Zhiying Li (PhD Geography, 2021) won The Story Exchange’s first annual Women In Science Incentive Prize. She is one of five female scientists who received grants of $5,000 each to continue their work related to climate change and the water crisis. Dr. Zhiying Li is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College.

Darla Munroe
Professor and Chair