Voices of Excellence

Bryan Mark, Professor of Geography, studies climate-glacier-hydrologic dynamics over different time scales and serves as State Climatologist of Ohio. He joins David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence.

Meg Daly, Professor of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, studies animal systematics and ecology, serving as Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education. She’s particularly interested in studying how and why marine animals live where they do, most recently looking at sea anemones that live in temperate marine intertidal ecosystems.

Peter Mansoor, Professor and General Raymond E. Mason, Jr., Chair of Military History, researches modern U.S. military history, World War II, the Iraq War, and counterinsurgency warfare. He discusses his most recent research on the 1944-1945 liberation of the Philippines, the five types of military history, and the surprising breadth of attendees at military history conferences on this week’...

Julie Golomb, Associate Professor of Psychology, researches the interactions between visual perception, attention, memory, and eye movements using human behavioral and computational cognitive neuroscience techniques. She’s especially interested in questions like, “How do our brains convert patterns of light into rich perceptual experiences, and what can we learn from perceptual errors?...

Robin Judd, Associate Professor of History, explores how European and North African Jewish women met and married American, British, and Canadian soldiers and officers after the Holocaust in her latest book, Love, Liberation, and Loss: Jewish Military Marriages after the Holocaust . Her research illuminates how these couples developed relationships, what policies regulated their marriages, and what...

Ludmila Isurin, Professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, is an interdisciplinary scholar with multiple affiliations within Ohio State. Her latest book is Collective Remembering: Memory in the World and in the Mind , which she discusses with David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence.

Mari Noda, Professor in Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, is a specialist in East Asian language pedagogy and is primarily interested in curriculum, material development, and assessment. She seeks to help students not only understand a language, but to use that language as a mechanism to participate in the culture.

Brian Joseph, Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and the Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Languages and Linguistics, studies historical linguistics, the history of the Greek language, language contact, Greek, Albanian, and Balkan linguistics, and Sanskrit. He’s especially interested in the way that the similar experiences that cultures have with language influence h...

Carolina Lopez-Ruiz, Professor of Classics, studies ancient Greek literature and classical mythology, and Greek and Near Eastern interaction and colonization. She strives to show that this period was more than just traditional Greek influences, with many cultures interacting and influencing each other.

Zhengyu Liu is the Max Thomas Professor of Climate Dynamics in the Department of Geography. His areas of expertise include climate change, Earth systems modeling, and climate dynamics. He discusses how scientists can have confidence in their predictions about the future of climate on this week’s Voices of Excellence.

Paul Reitter, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, studies German-Jewish culture, the history of higher education, modernism, and critical theory, among other areas. His most recent book, co-authored with Chad Wellmon, is Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age , which examines the long history of the Humanities being described in terms of crisis.

Miranda Martinez, an Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies, researches race and public policy and economic, sociological, and cultural economies, among other areas. She looks at the impact of financial coaching in communities of color and how having an automated monthly savings plan can be a significant benefit over having to decide consciously to save every month.

Declan Smithies, Professor and Director of Philosophy Graduate Studies, researches what it means to know something and to have consciousness. His book, The Epistemic Role of Consciousness , argues that consciousness gives humans knowledge of the external world and that without consciousness, we wouldn’t know anything. Since a dog can know whether there’s food in its bowl by perceiving...

Dana Howard, Assistant Professor of Philosophy with an appointment in the Ohio State Center for Bioethics, researches medical care, often in palliative and internal medicine, to discover how information is shared and decisions reached. She shares her research with David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence.

W. Berry Lyons, Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Ohio State School of Earth Sciences, was born and raised in the sunny state of Florida, but much of his career has been focused on the decidedly colder Antarctic, where he’s researched the impact of climate and climate change on the McMurdo Dry Valleys, the continent’s largest ice-free area. 

Professor of Anthropology Mark Hubbe studies modern human dispersion with a special emphasis on the settlement of South America. He joins host David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence to discuss how the Americas were inhabited, what makes archeological evidence for human settlements controversial, and what methods are used to explore these questions.

Professor Katherine Borst Jones, Professor of Flute and Chair of Orchestral Instruments in the School of Music, not only commissions new musical works but performs them as well.

Daniel Wozniak, Professor of Microbial Infection and Immunity and Microbiology, studies bacterial pathogenesis and gene regulation. He joins David Staley to discuss his research that seeks to determine how bacteria live in human hosts and what kinds of treatment can stop their growth.

Professor Darla Munroe, Chair of the Department of Geography, studies land economics and human geography, with a focus on human environment interactions at a landscape level. She joins David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence to discuss her work on the forests of southeast Ohio and the methodological distinctions between economists and geographers, among other topics.

Yuri Kovchegov, Professor of Physics at The Ohio State University, studies quantum chromodynamics at high energy and nuclear theory, and was recently named to the 2020 class of Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He breaks down some of the intricacies of quantum mechanics with David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence.

Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures Jennifer Suchland is a 2020 Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Scholars and Society Fellow. She describes how the role of scholars in society is also the role of education in society, especially democracies. Her current research focuses on t...

When Dance Professor Susan Van Pelt Petry began working from home due to the pandemic, her interest in staying hopeful as an artist led her to begin creating 19 choreographed videos, aka 19ChoreOVIDs, a play on COVID-19. She describes these videos and more of her work with David Staley on this week’s Voices of Excellence.

Voices of Excellence will release its 100th episode on November 18th. Join host David Staley as Olivia Miltner from ASC Marketing and Communication talks to him about interviewing dozens of faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences, what he’s learned about interdisciplinary in the college, and what he hopes listeners gain from the podcast.

Joni Acuff is an Associate Professor, Graduate Studies Chair, and Diversity Chair in the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy. Recently, she’s been researching the collective work of artists and art educators of color, with an eye to recognizing and supporting emerging social justice collectives and coalitions.

Holly Nibert, Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics and Language Program Director in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, researches phonology and phonetics, the acquisition of a second language sound system, and the principles and practices of second language classroom instruction. Recently, she’s been writing a book about how to be a language program director, in an effort to he...