Grants

Martha Belury, Professor, Human Nutrition

Approximately one in four adults in the US have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), a condition that accompanies central obesity, type 2 diabetes and other cardiometabolic diseases plaguing people in the United States. Therapies that reduce fat accumulation in the liver also reduce risk for cardiometabolic diseases; yet, other than weight loss, there lack effective lifestyle therapies that effectively and safely reduce ectopic lipid accumulation in the liver. Dietary oils rich in the bioactive fatty acid, linoleic acid (LA), are reduce waist circumference or visceral adipose, improve glycemic control or insulin sensitivity and reduce risk for type 2 diabetes. Our central hypothesis is that soybean oil supplementation reduces ectopic fat in the liver without altering total body weight while improved cardiometabolic risk markers in adults with NAFLD.

Christopher Zirkle, Associate Professor

This grant from the Ohio Department of Education provides funding to support the licensure program in career and technical education in Workforce Development and Education. Activities funded by the grant include a summer workshop for new career-technical education teachers and outreach and technical assistance to more than 30 Ohio school districts, including onsite teacher mentoring.

Dean Lillard, Professor, Consumer Sciences

The project will explore the economic and social effects the mitigation policies and information environment that COVID-19 spawned. We will link those policies to data from ongoing household-based panel studies from 10 countries and rich administrative data from an eleventh. We will exploit the substantial intra and inter-country temporal and geographic variation in non-pharmacological intervention policies induced by the COVID-19 disease. That variation, coupled with pre-COVID baseline levels or long-running trends in the outcomes we will study, will identify the effects of the mitigation policies. Project Details

Laura Justice, Professor; Executive Director of the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy (CCEC)

In the first study to use the innovative technology of radio frequency identification and voice recorders to analyze preschoolers’ social networks over time, faculty experts in early childhood development, engineering, physics and psychology from three universities will collaborate to examine a central research question: To what extent do peer social networks — that is, small groups of children — influence children’s language development in inclusive preschool settings over the course of an academic year? Knowledge gained from this study will help create an intervention for use by children’s peers to support more inclusive preschool classrooms, particularly for children with disabilities or language impairment. The researchers will also study how children’s social-emotional development is affected through peer social networks. Project Details

Barbara Boone, Program Director of Family Engagement

The CETE Family Engagement Program team is partnering with The Ohio Education Leadership Learning Consortium of the greater Cleveland area in the development of an online toolkit of resources for families. For this project, CETE will gather stakeholder input from  families of school age children in the greater Cleveland area along with input from education and organization leaders.  Building upon these insights and incorporating research based practices, the toolkit components will be developed and catalogued. The toolkit will be available to families, the Urban League, area schools and community organizations to equip and empower families as active partners in advocating for their child’s education and for equity and quality in the education system.

Rhodesia McMillian, Postdoctoral Scholar

Believe it or not, the term “education” cannot be found in the United States Constitution. There is, however, an inference of education written in the 14^th Amendment. Education has primarily been the responsibility of the states and litigation relative to student’s right to education has traditionally been remanded to the states and lower courts. On April 23, 2020 the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled—in the case of  Gary B. v. Whitmer—that, according to the United States Constitution, students have “a fundamental right” to a “basic minimum education.” This decision sets resounding precedence across other court circuits; inspiring the foundation for states to revise public school funding policies. Similarly, cases such as Cook v. Raimondo and Indigo Williams, et al. v. Phil Bryant et al have also centered the vital query—do American students have a constitutional right to education? This study is significant for examining the shifting jurisprudence toward determining if American students have a constitutional right to education.

Eric Anderman, Professor

This funding will be used to support a graduate research assistant on a collaborative project between the College of Education and Human Ecology at Ohio State and  Nationwide Children’s Hospital. The goal of the project is to eliminate inequities in adolescent health. The project uses Get Real, a proven effective pregnancy prevention curriculum, while expanding access to school-based and reproductive healthcare to address critical healthcare gaps in high need areas of Franklin County, Ohio. The project will enhance the impact of the interventions through supportive services including peer, parent, and summer programming. The project aims to serve 3,010 middle school students annually.

Donald Fuzer, Director of OSU Child Care Program

The Ohio State University Early Head Start Child Care Partnership was founded within the Schoenbaum Family Center in 2015 through a renewable five-year $18 million grant from the Department of Health and Human Services. In March 2021, the Partnership program was awarded additional expansion funding of a renewable five-year $10 million dollar grant award.  The program provides high-quality early education for eligible children and families and does so through its unique partnership model. The OSU-Early Head Start network is comprised of thirteen childcare centers, eleven family child care providers, numerous community agencies and five OSU colleges and departments. By pulling together these groups, the OSU-EHS Partnership Program maximizes the unique strengths of each group and deploys a “two-generation” approach to poverty alleviation. Partners work together to provide a wide range of services that include high-quality early childhood education (for 263 children from birth to age four); professional development, coaching, and curriculum support for early childhood professionals; parent coaching and home visiting; well-checks and vision screenings for children; and resources for families. The program was recognized by the Bipartisan Policy Center as a top partnership program in the country and continues to impact children and families throughout Franklin County.