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We're proud of you and excited to see the impact you'll make no matter what new adventure you choose. Remember, we have a regularly updated Job & Internship Board for your use and a commencement photo album for you to freely download and share. Stay in touch! |
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Registration now open for the Applachian Ohio State of the Region Conference
Register today for the Fifth Annual 2016 Appalachian Ohio State of the Region Conference: "Exploring our Business Ecosystem," May 17, 2016, 8 a.m. - 3 p.m. Visit sotr.ohio.edu for free registration.
Ohio University's Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs was first established as an U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration (EDA) University Center in 1996. The Voinovich School University Center is a joint project with Bowling Green State University, which collectively serves 59 rural Ohio counties: 32 Appalachian counties and 27 counties in northwestern Ohio.
EDA University Centers are a partnership of the federal government and academia that makes the varied and vast resources of universities available to the economic development community.
The ongoing support received through the EDA assists the Voinovich School in providing direct business assistance services, applied research initiatives and an annual State of the Region Conference. The overall result is the positioning of the region for economic growth.
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Six teams with Voinovich School members awarded funding through OHIO Innovation Strategy
Godfrey Ogallo, MSES and IT graduate, works in the field on his water quality research.
Five faculty and staff teams received planning grants of up to $20,000 each and another four received major funding awards of approximately $1 million each through Ohio University's Innovation Strategy program. Three planning grant teams and three major funding award teams included members from the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs.
Launched in 2014, the Innovation Strategy program allocated up to $5 million for major awards and planning or seed grants in this round of funding to advance innovation in research, teaching and institutional operations at Ohio University.
The awarded projects that include Voinovich School team members include:
Planning Grants
- The "Partnership for Digitally Connected Environmental Monitoring" unites environmental science with journalism and public outreach initiatives. The planning grant will support environmental monitoring in Torch, Ohio, to measure the impact of hydraulic fracturing activities on the water supply. In addition, it will fund a website that will feature the environmental data and news reporting on the topic for citizens. The grant also will support a course for Ohio University students and a university/industry symposium.
Team members: Natalie Kruse (Lead), Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs; Morgan Vis-Chiasson, Jared DeForest, Amy Lynch, Dina Lopez and Kelly Johnson, College of Arts and Sciences; Andrew Alexander, Philip Campbell, Hans Kruse and Tom Hodson, Scripps College of Communication; Kevin Crist, Shawn Ostermann and Harsha Chenji, Russ College of Engineering and Technology; Jennifer Bowman, Gary Conley, Geoffrey Dabelko and Michael Zimmer, Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs.
- "SmartWorks for Enterprise Innovation" proposes to use process improvement strategies to create efficiencies and innovative solutions for Ohio University administrative operations. The planning grant will support a pilot project that seeks to develop an institution-wide process for student employee orientation.
Team members: Zaki Kuruppalil (Lead), Russ College of Engineering and Technology; Candice Morris, Instructional Innovations; Amy Taylor-Bianco and Ana Rosado Feger, College of Business; Charee Thompson and Hugh Martin, Scripps College of Communication; Todd Myers, Russ College of Engineering and Technology; John Glazer, TechGROWTH Ohio / Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs.
- "Collaborative Hub of Innovators and Entrepreneurial Foundations" will support a needs assessment and business plan for new campus spaces for Ohio University students engaged in entrepreneurship and innovation activities. The team will conduct a survey, explore best practices at other universities and develop a proposal for creating and funding the proposed spaces.
Team members: Luke Pittaway (Lead), College of Business; Jennifer Simon, Innovation Center; Michelle Ferrier, Scripps College of Communication; Jeffrey Giesey, Russ College of Engineering and Technology; Nathaniel Berger, College of Fine Arts; Lynn Gellermann, TechGROWTH Ohio / Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs.
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STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
Center for Entrepreneurship hosts Sixth Annual Idea Pitch Competition
The Center for Entrepreneurship at Ohio University hosted its Sixth Annual Bobcat Idea Pitch competition during the Student Research Expo at the Convocation Center on Thursday, April 14.
"The competition featured a group of very impressive companies and all the entrepreneurs pitched effectively and professionally, making an easy job for the judges," Michele Miglioulo, competition judge and executive-in-residence at TechGROWTH Ohio, said. "I was pleased to see very worthy social ventures to come out on top."
Husam Abu Hajar's pitch for Solid Waste Management for Energy Recovery received $1,200 and first place. Hajar's proposal addresses the environmental problem associated with enormous quantities of municipal solid wastes from Zaatari Camp - one of the largest refugee camps in the world located in Northern Jordan - by using the organic solid wastes to generate electricity that can be sold to the grid. This approach attempts to not only mitigate the adverse environmental impacts of landfilling these wastes, but also to create jobs within the local communities and produce a profit.
"Competing with so many brilliant ideas and winning first place means so much to me," Hajar said. "It is a motivation for me to make this idea a reality in the near future."
Team HeadSmart, composed of Alex Geiser, Zach Taylor, Patrick Hanlon and John Herbert, took second place and an $800 prize for their helmet-mounted accelerometer system that aims to detect potentially dangerous head impacts within youth football. The prototype includes an LED indicator system that correlates the intensity of the hit to the number of lights shown.
Alexander Jones won third place and $500 for pitching a biomimetic approach to watershed restoration that uses fungi as a living filter to remove metals, specifically iron. His project, "Myco-remediation of acid mine drainage (AMD) using native species of fungi," offers a low-tech, cost-effective option that does not rely on inputs of industrial materials, such in the case of lime dosing and steel slag beds, to function.
The 2016 Pitch judges were Noah Rosenblatt, first-place winner of the 2015 Expo Pitch; Godfrey Ogallo, third-place winner of the 2015 Expo Pitch; Carl Grant, executive vice president of business development at Cooley LLP; Paul Mass, president and CEO at Mass Ventures; Michele Miglioulo, executive-in-residence at TechGROWTH Ohio; and Jennifer Simon, director of the Ohio University Innovation Center.
The Center for Entrepreneurship's Idea Pitch Competition enables young, aspiring entrepreneurs to practice developing, researching and articulating their ideas in a fast-paced, fun forum. Participants learn how to effectively pitch an idea before judges, demonstrate why their idea is going to work and to do so in a short amount of time.
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2016 Earth Day Celebration celebrates accomplishments and looks to the future
Participants in Ohio University's 2016 Earth Day Celebration applauded efforts, shared their visions for the future and challenged  one another to continue to aggressively move forward with sustainability efforts.
The University's event was one event in a series of county-wide programs participating in the " Athens County Earth Week Extravaganza" which offered unified marketing on a series of programs happening throughout the county.
"We were thrilled when UpGrade Athens County suggested that we all pool our efforts to make our marketing more strategic and easy for the community to understand," said Annie Laurie Cadmus, director of sustainability at Ohio University. "We each got to honor our own programs while lifting each other up. It was a positive experience."
This year, the University's celebration was a two-part event. The day's celebrations started with lawn games, face painting and seedlings on the Walter Hall Lawn during the day and then the festivities moved inside to the Walter Hall Rotunda for a more formal evening event complete with a keynote speaker, an awards ceremony and a mini-festival of student and community efforts.
During the evening portion of the festivities, keynote speaker Sarah Conley-Ballew from UpGrade Athens County spoke of her journey as an activist in Athens County and encouraged attendees to take an active role in caring for the Earth. The Office of Sustainability then honored the nominees and winners of the 2016 Sustainability Awards (see photo for winners) and Graduate Student Senate celebrated the winners of the Sustain OHIO essay competition.
"STEP is a way for us to better connect and communicate with departments and offices campus-wide," explained Sustainability Project Coordinator Sam Crowl. "We designed it to address all aspects of the Sustainability Plan so departments and offices could become actively involved with implementing sustainability on a daily basis."
Participants work together as a team to complete a checklist of actions and pledges. Upon completion they are assigned a rating on a five tier scale and provided with resources and support to improve their rating in the future.
The Earth Day celebration event concluded with an open house highlighting poster presentations of student sustainability research, local community organizations, student organizations and free saplings in honor of Arbor Day.
The Office of Sustainability staff met for their annual staff farewell directly following the event. There, the event's graduate student coordinator, Liz Rose, reflected on the day's successes.
"Having the more passive celebration on the lawn prior to the more formal event in Walter Rotunda allowed us to reach out to several different types of audiences," Rose told her team. "I think whoever plans this for next year needs to keep that in mind."
Next year's Earth Day planning has already begun, according to Cadmus.
"We usually partner with one or more groups for Earth Day because we feel there is power in numbers," Cadmus said. "This year, we were excited to have a county-wide partnership for the Earth Week Extravaganza! In an effort to make next year even better, we have already begun to approach potential partners for 2017."
Cadmus added that any group that is interested in partnering on Earth Day celebrations can email her at sustainability@ohio.edu.
This article was provided by Ohio University's Office of Sustainability.
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Ohio University envisions zero waste possibilities through RecycleMania achievements
In the 10 weeks spanning from early February into April, more than 200 colleges and universities competed in a nationwide recycling tournament, RecycleMania, all actively changing the way their school disposes of waste. As one of 208 participating institutions, Ohio University did not win the title, ranking 38th overall and fourth in the state, landing within the top 20 percent in the nation. OHIO did however discover just how capable it is to shift attitudes regarding recycling and waste disposal.
In pursuit of the one million pound goal, OHIO developed several methods to maximize recycling and composting throughout the University. Over the course of several weeks, Ohio University Campus Recycling worked to encourage and educate students, faculty and staff about the possibilities for resource recovery within the institution.
In addition to participating in the National GameDay Challenge, a contest in which schools attempt to divert the most waste produced at a single sporting event, one of OHIO's primary projects, the Race to Zero Waste, consisted of converting one of the school's colleges into a zero waste system. Through the implementation of composting and e-waste recycling opportunities, as well as efforts to reduce paper consumption, the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs saw nearly a 12 percent increase in waste recovery efforts, jumping from approximately 67 percent to nearly 79 percent recycling rates. This percentage indicates that almost 80 percent of waste produced within the three University buildings was diverted from the landfill and was instead recycled or composted.
 The Race to Zero Waste pilot indicates a path to future success in converting other University buildings. Over the past year, the entire University has experienced a similar increase in resource recovery, seeing the overall recycling rate jump from 38.3 percent to 49.63 percent in one year.
"This is the biggest one year jump that I've experienced in my time here," Ohio University Recycling and Zero Waste Manager Andrew Ladd said.
In the past semester, Ohio University Campus Recycling has made extensive efforts to provide more recycling opportunities campus-wide, both indoors and out. As one of 39 nationwide recipients of the Waste Management/Keep America Beautiful Think Green Grant, Ohio University has been able to convert 70 outdoor landfill bins to recycling, including all locations on the West residential and College Greens.
This article was provided by Ohio University Campus Recycling.
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JOB HIGHLIGHT
Director of Production at charity:water
As the Director of Production, you'll manage a team of project managers and be responsible for bridging cross-functional initiatives across multiple departments. You'll maintain a pristine, transparent organization-wide roadmap, properly resource initiatives, and ensure that a wide variety of projects, from software development to special events to creative campaigns, are effectively executed. You'll report to the Chief Operating Officer and occasionally lead strategic projects.
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Fifth Annual Appalachian Ohio State of the Region Conference
May 17, 8 a.m. - 3 p.m.
Baker Center
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Voinovich School in the News
"The gathering provided a unique opportunity to network with other university-based public service organizations and engage in productive discussions on topics that are high on the agendas of organizations such as ours."
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Impact & Innovation is a newsletter for the students, faculty and professionals of the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs.
Have an article idea? Contact Laura Alloway, Voinovich School Director of Marketing and Communications.
Impact & Innovation is written and created by Voinovich Scholar
M.C. Tilton.
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