2018 Outreach and Engagement Funded Grant Proposals

Economic and Workforce Development through Food Processing Community Education and Project Commercialization

Food entrepreneurs and small businesses face a steep learning curve in terms of food safety, processing techniques, and regulatory compliance. Indeed, few if any food producers get into production because of their love for process management and regulations. OSU Extension (OSUE) plays an important role in assisting these entrepreneurs by providing professional development programs, technical services, and promotional engagement of local food systems within the community.

This program will address (1) the need for technical services for processors by funding a process analysis service needed in product development and regulatory compliance, (2) connecting entrepreneurs and established food businesses to equipment infrastructure and an experienced workforce supported by facilities and programming at regional incubators (3) the development of training for the extension system so that county-based personnel can assist with the roll out of these resources and provide local business assistance and food safety staff training. Funding from this grant will be combined with support from additional programs that are also committed to these objectives. Our core team has extensive experience in community education, entrepreneur and small business support, food safety training and implementation, and direct marketing of foods and beverages.

Team Lead: Abigail Snyder, OSU Extension, College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

Preventing Falls: A Community Based Intervention Program

The most common cause of injury for individuals in Franklin County is falls, and EMS fall calls for older adults have increased by 268% over the past decade. Falls in older adults often result in catastrophic injuries that lead to profound changes in mobility, the ability to care for oneself, and overall life expectancy. Falls among older adults also have significant downstream effects on our local and national healthcare systems. Direct medical costs for fall injuries in the U.S. are estimated at $31 billion annually. Falls among older adults that lead to significant injury or death often occur at home among individuals who strongly desire to continue to live in their own home.

Currently, no significant intervention is available by Emergency Medical Services (EMS) to prevent subsequent falls. Funding from the Connect and Collaborate grant will support a community based intervention study. Specifically, this study will evaluate the effects of paramedic distribution and installation of a fall prevention toolkit on participating residents' usage of the fall prevention toolkit items, fear of falling, and number of in-home falls with an existing community paramedic infrastructure. Additionally, stakeholder input and toolkit refinement for rural community distribution will be developed. Once the objectives of this project are met, we expect a reduction in the number of preventable in-home falls among community members, which in turn could open up new opportunities to redirect additional emergency responder resources toward non-emergency based fall prevention efforts creating a sustainable fall prevention model.

Team Lead: Carmen Quatman, MD, PhD, OSU College of Medicine

Columbus, Ohio Collaboration of Dentists, Pharmacists, and Physicians to Address Overprescribing Antibiotics

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) states that 30-50% of outpatient antibiotic prescriptions are not necessary or prescribed incorrectly. One in five emergency department visits is for an antibiotic adverse event. Antibiotics are societal drugs because individual use affects not only individuals, but also others in the community. The more we use antibiotics the less effective they become due to development of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic misuse and resistance affects an entire community. Combating antibiotic resistance requires a collaborative effort from a diverse group of healthcare providers, including dentists. The CDC states dentists prescribe 10% of all outpatient antibiotic prescriptions (25.6 million prescriptions annually). An area of ongoing controversy is antibiotic prophylaxis for joint implant patients who need a dental procedure.

In 2009, the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons put out a blanket statement to consider antibiotics for all patients with joint replacements, who undergo any dental procedure with potential to cause bacteremia. The 2015 American Dental Association (ADA) Guideline states, In general, patients with prosthetic joint implants, prophylaxis/preventive antibiotics are not recommended prior to dental procedures to prevent a prosthetic joint infection. Dentists are in put in a difficult situation when joint implant patients demand antibiotics prior to dental procedures based on orthopedic surgeon advice. The Connect and Collaborate grant will be used to host a stakeholders meeting to engage collaboration among local dentists, orthopedic surgeons and OSU antibiotic stewardship experts to address overprescribing antibiotics.

Team Lead: Debbie Goff, College of Pharmacy

Philosophy and Critical Thinking (PACT) Summer Camp

Philosophy and Critical Thinking (PACT) brings high school students from very different backgrounds together for intensive, week-long summer programs, taught by students and faculty at Ohio State University. The training involves learning and applying critical reasoning skills in the context of social problems that have abstract as well as applied dimensions. Campers learn to analyze arguments, research controversial topics, and to debate and create poster presentations on these topics, working in teams. They work with instructors in small groups, getting intense personal feedback. They also learn from faculty who are experts on the topics.

One goal is improving the critical thinking and learning skills of the campers. Another is to give OSU students (graduate and undergraduate) pedagogical experience and skills in training younger students, and to increase their mastery of the philosophical material. In addition, OSU faculty organizers will use the program as source material for their research on effective pedagogy in philosophy and critical thinking. Columbus Metropolitan Library Northside Branch will provide space and logistical support for the camp, and assist with recruitment. This serves the librarys mission by increasing its exposure to its target community.

Team Lead: Justin DArms, Department of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences

Animations for Introduction to the Science of Cancer: A Free Online Course Offered by Ohio States Comprehensive Cancer Center James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute

Introduction to the Science of Cancer (ISOC) is a free online course for people in Ohio and globally. Thirty-five OSUCCC James oncologists and researchers explain cancer in user-friendly terms. With five modules and 40 videos, the course explains the nature of cancer and cancer diagnosis, treatment, prevention and research. ISOC, which is part of the Global One Health initiative, is designed for people who have a limited knowledge of science but who want a better understanding of cancer. It has been accessed by thousands of people globally, used in high-school classrooms and for onsite workshops at two hospitals in Zimbabwe. It has been well received all around, and this Connect and Collaborate Grant will further extend its usefulness.

We will use this grant to develop 10 animated illustrations that will help learners better understand key molecular and cellular concepts related to cancer development, diagnosis, treatment and prevention. These graphics will also find additional use in a book version of ISOC to be published by OSU Press in open-access online and print editions and for press releases and stories in the OSUCCC James research magazine, Frontiers. These illustrations and animations will help us better achieve the courses ultimate goal: to slow the anticipated growth in worldwide cancer incidence by promoting cancer prevention among individuals, communities and nations.

Team Lead: Darrell Ward, OSU Wexner Medical Center

Development of an Education and Outreach Program to Assist Fresh Produce Growers with Meeting Food Safety Requirements

Fresh produce is the leading cause of foodborne illnesses in the country and Ohio growers must meet federal food safety standards to ensure that their produce is safe. Understanding regulatory requirements, awareness of safe agricultural practices, and developing and following written food safety plans (FSP) are critical steps toward minimizing the risk of on farm produce contamination. OSU lags behind other land grant universities in providing fresh produce safety education and training programs. In addition, stakeholder awareness of fresh produce safety programming available at OSU is low compared to their awareness of programming in other states. We have formed a team of Food Safety State Specialists, Extension educators, OSU students, community organizations, and industry partners to provide a diverse group of Ohio growers with the tools and resources needed to supply consumers with a safe product.

To address these needs, we will provide: i) pre-harvest food safety knowledge and awareness training to new and underserved produce growers in the community; ii) farm food safety plan writing workshops and on-farm audit readiness programs; and iii) a roadmap for an OSU food safety training program for FSMA equivalence. In order to achieve our goal in improving fresh produce safety and sustaining the fresh produce industry, we will form a fresh produce safety education and training cooperative with participating food safety experts from Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky.

Launching the Data Science for Women Summer Camp

Data science and analytics (DSA) is transforming the global economy and academic research; however, there is a shortage of job candidates with DSA skills, with up to half of job postings going unfilled. A 2017 report by the Business-Higher Education Forum and PwC predicts that this shortage will likely expand, and gaps among gender (men outnumber women 3:1) and underrepresented minority groups will widen. Properly addressing these must include outreach to women and minorities at an age when they first begin to consider college and career goals.

In July 2018, the Translational Data Analytics Institute (TDAI) will launch an annual Data Science for Women Summer Camp for girls in 8-10th grades to help address this gap. Campers will build skills in problem solving, analytical thinking, analytical tools usage, and communication, while also exploring careers in DSA. Our goal is to expose more young women in Franklin County especially those from high student poverty school districts and underrepresented minority groups to the field of data science and analytics, and create a pipeline of women who ultimately pursue DSA degrees and careers. Our camp will be unique among outreach programs, as existing camps both in Ohio and nationwide focus on coding, animation, math, engineering, and STEM in general. And only a handful of DSA camps nationally serves minority groups. The Data Science for Women Summer Camp aims to address a critical action for change noted in the BHEF-PWC report: To expand pathways that lead to a diverse analytics workforce.

Team Lead: Jenna McGuire, Translational Data Analytics Institute, Office of Academic Affairs

WestSide Storytelling Collaborative (WSC): Youth Storytellers and Artists Transforming Visions of their Community

Research indicates that participation in collaborative, artistic processes contributes to youth educational and community engagement, while also supporting youth cross-cultural understanding (Enciso 2011; Faltis & Abedi 2013; Heath 2012; Orellana 2016). Columbuss west side is home to a diverse community of longtime residents and immigrant families, creating a remarkable place for youth to engage with cross-cultural histories and worldviews. Public storytelling and artistic transformation of stories can inspire new perceptions and more equal relationships among youth as they create images of others experiences and examine their own distinct beliefs and practices (Enciso 2010; 2017). Likewise, partnerships with community artists will lead to a stronger arts program for youth (P21Partnership 2015).

The WestSide Storytelling Collaborative will pair 10-12 youth with 5 mentor artists for collaborative learning, cross-cultural understanding, community-based storytelling, and art-making. The youth-adult artist partnership will culminate in a multi-media community exhibit featuring dual presentations by adult-artist and student-artist teams. The WSC will also engage Ohio arts organizations and west side arts leadership groups committed to forming a sustainable youth arts-mentoring project.

Team Lead: Patricia Enciso, College of Education and Human Ecology

Improving Diagnosis of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis in Human and Cattle in China

One person dies of tuberculosis (TB) every 21 seconds, with 10.4 million new TB cases reported in 2016. China is one of six countries accounting for 60% of total TB cases in the world, with 918,000 new TB cases reported in 2016 at a case rate of 67 per 100,000 populations. Of the TB cases worldwide, it is estimated that 5% to 15% are due to Mycobacterium bovis, cause of bovine-TB infection. The epidemiology of bovine-TB in China is unknown due to a lack of surveillance. M. bovis can be transmitted from animal to human by consumption of raw milk and close contact with respiratory secretions. In rural China, increase zoonotic transmission is suspected due to close contact between farmers and cattle. M. bovis causes increase morbidity and mortality with an extensive impact on human and animal health and global economy. There is no gold standard test for bovine-TB diagnosis in animals.

We will validate two commercially available point-of-care TB diagnostic tests (Alere DetermineTM. Urine LAM-Ag and Lionex tests, Rapid Blood test) and a novel in-house produced thin-layer agar based TB culture (CX) test to screen for bovine-TB in cattle and humans in rural China. We hypothesize that our point-of-care diagnostic tests will enable faster diagnose of bovine-TB cases and significantly aid in preventing transmission of this disease between animals and from animals to humans. We will also organize via OSU-China Gateway a Global One Health Scientific Workshop in Beijing (China) bringing together OSU/US faculty and key Chinese partners to further expand our global One Health Initiative.

Team Lead: Shu-Hua Wang, College of Medicine

Establishing a Collective Impact Center in Marion, Ohio

The Collective Impact approach is a proven method to impact complex social issues by bringing together leaders from the private, public and non-profit sectors to focus on a common agenda and shared indicators around social determinants of health. Through the development of a unified vison for impact, shared measures to track progress, coordinated mutually reinforcing activities, and trust among all partners, our team will implement the Collective Impact framework in Marion, Ohio. The ultimate vision is for there to be a powerful collaborative of diverse, cross sector stakeholders including community leaders, educators, business, nonprofits, funders, law enforcement, faith leaders, medical community, service providers, and community members, including young people who are all working together on linked activities and held accountable by shared goals in order to dramatically improve Marion County health rankings.

In order to achieve this, the project team will collect local data for a deeper understanding of neighborhood demographics, root causes of problems, and gaps and asset identification. Simultaneously, OSU Extension will facilitate community engagement to help identify overlooked spaces, neighborhood issues, and recruit resident involvement for improvements and change in our community. We will improve organizational readiness by providing training, technical assistance, support, and coaching throughout the project from a Collective Impact leadership team (i.e. team members). Finally, we will coordinate implementation of a long-term community level effort to improve population level outcomes.

Team Lead: Whitney Gherman, OSU Extension

The Global Sustainable Village

Student service-learning projects need a learning laboratory on campus to research, develop, and prototype hands-on community service project solutions. We propose to develop a Global Sustainable

Village (GSV) to provide students appropriate space to develop hands-on skills and as a piloting ground for service-learning projects. Currently, students implement solutions without having an opportunity to fully engage with representative tools, techniques and materials before beginning work in the field. The ability to develop and work directly with technologies in a life-like setting before leaving campus will improve student experiences and learning outcomes, as well as strengthen OSU relationships with community partners and improve the impact of community development efforts for end-users. Such experiential learning will provide student groups the opportunity to develop sustained research projects that can be incorporated in a community service setting. The GSV is a collection of authentic living environments that accurately represents an integration of both the context and substance of student-generated humanitarian innovations developed in conjunction with our local and international partners. The goal is for all aspects of a familys needs to be incorporated in each residential space, including housing, food, water and power. This proposal represents the first step in realizing the vision of the GSV by producing a comprehensive site and building plan for the local (i.e., US-based) portion of the village.

Team Lead: Howard Greene, College of Engineering

Establishing Partnerships between Academia, State Agencies, and Private Business to Deliver Nutrition Assistance to the Poor

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provide billions of dollars in food assistance to low-income households in the US. These benefits have been shown to reduce infant mortality, improve overall health, and help households become more food secure. Yet many eligible people do not participate and others leave benefits on the table. These are important issues because the health and well-being of lower income households are affected by the foods they consume. The Connect and Collaborate grant will support a study of factors that influence enrollment decisions in the WIC and SNAP programs using primary and secondary data sources.

Initially, we will establish a data sharing agreement with the Ohio Department of Healths WIC agency. Administrative data from Ohio will allow us to identify factors associated with underutilization of WIC benefits. Insights from this initial effort will contribute to the development of surveys that will be distributed to current WIC recipients, WIC-eligible nonparticipants who participated in the past, and WIC- eligible nonparticipants who have never enrolled in WIC. We will also examine SNAP utilization patterns. To secure access to SNAP enrollment data and facilitate future surveys targeted toward SNAP participants, we will establish ties with state SNAP administrators. At the same time, we will target a survey towards attendees at SNAP education courses run by OSU Extension. This will give us the initial results needed to inform more comprehensive analyses of SNAP administrative and survey data. Lastly, we plan to establish ties with local grocers. We expect these relationships to result in joint research efforts that ultimately link industry, state agencies, and academia. This project will provide unique policy-relevant insights about participation in food programs by conducting research through partnerships with a diverse set of stakeholders involved in the WIC and SNAP programs. This should contribute to food security, and more importantly, improvement in the lives of program recipients. We hope the project will also serve as a model for establishing similar partnerships in other states or for other government assistance programs.

Team Lead: Andrew Hanks, College of Education and Human Ecology

Integrating Remote Sensing for In-Season Corn Nitrogen Management

Remote sensing (RS) provides the agricultural community the opportunity to examine the spatial and temporal differences of crop and soil health. This information can be used to implement variable rate technologies, which helps to optimize the use on-farm resources, maximize economic profits and reduce environmental problems of crop production. This project will use RS images acquired throughout the growing season from manned and unmanned aircrafts to determine methods to improve in-season corn nitrogen (N) management. We will conduct field N management trials; collect ground-truth and RS images; and develop methods to process and analyze data, and a prototype to determine in-season N requirement. We already have collected a few hundred images and field data covering > 500 corn acres from the growing season of 2015 2017 across Ohio, and have developed some workflows to incorporate imagery into decision-making. However, we need to conduct more field experiments to improve the confidence of our developed workflows so they can be used across a wide range of Ohio crop fields.

We will work directly with farmers, consultants and agricultural technology providers on how imagery can be integrated into farm decisions during the growing season and season-end. The outcomes include a database of images and field collected data, and a prototype for integrating RS for in-season N management. Impacts include data informed on-farm decision making, environmental and economic benefits with elimination of out of season N application or reduced fertilizer application, and long-term mutual beneficial relationships between farmers, cities, industry partners, and the university.

Team Lead: John Fulton, Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering

Bringing Natural History to Life: Mini Exhibits for a COSI-AMNH Partnership

In fall of 2017, in partnership with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and the Columbus Downtown Development Corporation (CDDC), the Center of Science and Industry (COSI) opened the Dinosaur Gallery. This is part of an anticipated decades-long partnership that represents a $5 million investment by the State of Ohio, intended to draw visitors from outside of Ohio and to increase the visibility of COSI among the other large, interactive science museums across the country. The challenge in this new partnership lies in innovating the educational experiences that accompany the long-term exhibits. The planned collaboration addresses this challenge by engaging OSU students as innovators and translators of supportive, interactive exhibits. These activities take place within a new Service-Learning course in Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology and will generate supplemental, interactive activities for visitors to COSI as they provide students with opportunities to translate sophisticated, discipline-specific knowledge to diverse audiences.

The effort supports the community partner priority areas of education and workforce development. Experience in the communication of STEM concepts is foundational to successful employment in the field, but is not generally part of the major coursework required of majors in the sciences. Nonetheless, museums and science centers play a critical role in developing interest in STEM and are key to the success and engagement of many groups not currently well-represented in STEM. Thus, the proposed partnership provides training to current students and pathways for retention and recruitment for current and future students.

Team Lead: Marymegan Daly, College of Arts and Sciences

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Strengthening Capacity for Health and Education/Social Science in Ethiopia and Cameroon

Student engagement in meaningful, well-mentored research is an important component of research capacity building. In graduate degree programs, research capacity links directly to successful completion of a students masters thesis or PhD dissertation, the capstones of a successful graduate curriculum. Our two-year project will design a capacity building innovation to articulate and test a theory of change through a Model of Collaboration/Capacity Building (MCCB) focused on strengthening the research experience for Ohio State University (OSU) graduate students and for graduate students and faculty within two higher-education institutions (HEIs) in Africa: University of Ngaoundr (UNdr), Cameroon, and Addis Ababa University (AAU), Ethiopia.

Based on our experiences at OSU and within these institutions, the most powerful capacity building projects are those that are relevant to the local community; combine active research experience with tailored training in research design, data collection, and statistical methods; and include mentoring through the publication and dissemination process. Our strategy incorporates elements of effective service-learning translated to the graduate level. This design project will contribute to the development of well-trained graduate-level researchers or OSU and our partners and improve our combined capacity to conduct collaborative research in resource-poor environments. Our approach aligns with and builds upon our collective research and teaching experiences via the Global One Health initiative (GOHi) by linking education science and quantitative research methods (OConnell), observational study design and infectious diseases (Garabed), and capacity building and cultural exchange (Joseph).

Team Lead: Ann OConnell, College of Education and Human Ecology

Producing Qualified and Diverse Natural Resources Professionals through Advanced Partnerships and Experiential Learning Communities

Workforce diversity is deficient within environmental and natural resources fields when compared to societal demographics, a common trend but acute challenge in many occupational fields. A partnership between OSU-Mansfield, the School of Environment and Natural Resources (SENR) at OSU-Columbus, and First Energy aims to increase undergraduate student enrollment, engagement, and career placement of under-represented students of color. Our proposal aims for success both within the university and ultimately the workforce through a combination of experiential-learning communities, mentoring programs, and internships. By utilizing the natural resource assets at OSU-Mansfield, focused recruitment would cultivate a small number of incoming 1st year students into a faculty-led learning community to fundamentally address core equity questions, often through an environmental lens.

The Ecolab initiative currently at OSU-Mansfield already engages natural resources management, education, and agricultural sustainability in a manner designed to simultaneously address social issues from an ecological perspective and ecological issues from a social perspective. With a growing SENR curriculum now available at OSU-Mansfield coupled with experiential, field-based learning opportunities, campus-change students of color transitioning from OSU-Mansfield to Columbus campus will be uniquely and well-equipped by their enhanced regional campus experience. Select students participating in the First Energy Fellowship program would complete summer internships at OSU-Mansfield after their first year and benefit from additional investments by First Energy through personal mentoring and additional professional internship opportunities. The C&C grant also helps to fund a Mansfield campus property manager and facilitate expanded learning opportunities and research on First Energys right-of-way infrastructure at Ohio State Mansfield.

Team Lead: Gabriel Karns, College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

OSU-SJTU Center for Light-weighting Research and Education (CLRE)

The Connect and Collaborate grant will be used to establish the OSU-SJTU Center for Light-weighting Research and Education (CLRE), a world-class collaborative research and education center between The Ohio State University (OSU) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). The CLRE will carry out fundamental and applied research and support education/training in the development of lightweight metallic materials and their manufacturing processes. The center will promote technical collaborations and cultural exchanges between OSU and SJTU faculty, staff and students as well as the greater US-China communities. CLRE leverages investments in The Materials and Manufacturing for Sustainability (M&MS) Discovery Theme at OSU as well as intrinsic areas of expertise at OSU and SJTU. CLRE will (1) organize seminars and workshops at OSU and SJTU on light-weighting technologies; (2) support joint research projects between OSU and SJTU on fundamental science related to M&MS discovery theme; and (3) facilitate student exchanges between the two universities. The Center will seek industrial collaboration and other external support for sustainability.

Team Lead: Alan Luo, College of Engineering