2024 GRO Academy Cohort

Qadeer Ahmed, PhD, 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 orthopaedic 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.