By Stephen M. Gavazzi, Ph.D.

The Latest News, Views, and Announcements

What's New at CHRR

This month, CHRR signed an MOU with Auriv.io, a company founded by former Amazon and Microsoft leaders that combines customer data, advanced modeling, and geo-targeted activation that “turns intelligence into measurable growth.” In a press release posted on LinkedIn, Auriv.io stated the following:

This is a public-private research collaboration built to produce data that institutions, policymakers, and major commercial clients can actually trust, defend, and act on. Here's why this matters: CHRR at The Ohio State University — led by Stephen Gavazzi and a team with decades of longitudinal research expertise — has built some of the most respected datasets in the country. Their rigor and institutional credibility are unmatched. Auriv.io brings proprietary data infrastructure, AI-driven modeling, and the commercial activation engine to turn those insights into decisions at scale. The thesis is simple: the next generation of data intelligence can't come from academia alone or industry alone. It requires both research discipline and commercial speed, institutional credibility and modern AI infrastructure. 

This is bigger than one initiative. Ohio State is one of the most prolific research engines in the country, generating breakthroughs across data science, behavioral research, public policy, and AI. There's an enormous amount of innovation coming out of that university that deserves a faster path to market. Our goal is to be the partner that brings it to life.

Stay tuned for more information about this exciting new partnership!

CHRR’s Leadership Team

During our most recent round of Quarterly Check-In (QCI) meetings, several IT staff members proactively highlighted some communication-oriented issues that ultimately reached the Leadership Team. In response, the decision was made by Leadership Team members to support my meeting directly with the entire IT staff.

As a direct result, I had the pleasure of meeting with the CHRR IT team two weeks ago for a “Donuts with the Director” gathering. With coffee courtesy of IT Director Nick Ramser and pastries brought by yours truly, we enjoyed an animated and productive hour-long conversation which covered a variety of topics. Thank you to everyone who attended that meeting either live or virtually!

I came away from this meeting with two takeaways. First, as I reported back to Leadership Team members in our meeting last week, I hope to have future informal small-group meetings with other CHRR staff members who wish to have this sort of contact with me. Your Leadership Team representative will be coming to you and your colleagues in the not-too-distant future to discuss your team’s interest in doing so.

Second, this meeting solidified my belief that CHRR is a living body with many specialized parts, with each project seeming to serve as a sort of vital organ (with unique functions and capabilities). If you resonate with this kind of metaphor, then you might join me in seeing how IT serves as the connective tissue that binds all of our parts together, providing the structure, support, and communication pathways that allow our whole organization to function as one. This role isn’t about centrality or control. Instead, it’s about enabling coordinated movement, reducing friction, and ensuring that when one part of CHRR needs to act, the others can respond smoothly. Bottom line: IT helps us stay flexible, resilient, and ready for whatever challenges come next.

CHRR Team Member Celebrations

Every month, we celebrate the work anniversaries of CHRR’s valued employees. Similar to last year, there are no CHRR team members who started to work for us in the month of March! So instead of celebrating with any single employee of our center, allow me to thank each and every CHRR team member for your commitment to the CHRR mission! You are an awesome group of professionals!

Things You Might Want to Know

Accessibility Reminder: Your Role Going Forward

As we approach the April ADA Title II compliance deadline, this is a good time to remember that accessibility is a shared responsibility across our Center. Whether you create documents, presentations, or other digital content, each of us plays a part in ensuring our work is usable by all. To support you, we’re collecting staff questions about accessibility. If you have a question, or if you’re unsure whether something you’re working on is accessible, please reach out to Laura Rusnak. Your questions will help us identify where additional guidance would be most helpful for staff.

Fourth and Fifth Articles Published by the University Design Institute

Building on top of several articles I co-authored with Ohio State University President Emeritus Gordon Gee and Arizona State University’s David Rosowsky, two more articles of ours have been published by the University Design Institute. The fourth article is titled “Restoring Trust: Continuous Listening and the Civic Mission of Universities” and can be viewed on the University Design Institute website.

The fifth article – Morrill Act 250: Reinterpreting the Public Research University Compact as Civic Trust in America’s Third Century – is the culmination of these four previous articles. From this writing:

The original Morrill compact did not settle every question in advance. Rather, it opened a national conversation about what higher education could become in service to a democratic society, inviting the nation to imagine a system of learning that grew alongside its people. The Morrill Act 250 blueprint extends that invitation to our own moment in time, asking not for certainty but for a renewed willingness to inquire, adapt, and build together. The central question we pose is both straightforward and profound: what might change if universities and communities wrote the next chapter of the public research compact together, rather than having it written for them?

The answers will surely differ by state, region, and institution, reflecting the diverse histories, capacities, and aspirations that shape each place. Yet the spirit of the work remains consistent: progress will come through collaborative imagination that bridges differences; through disciplined listening that treats every community as a partner in defining shared purpose; through transparent practices that make institutional decisions legible to the public; and through results that citizens can recognize as their own contributions to the nation’s civic life. What the original compact offered in aspiration, the Morrill Act 250 reinterpretation seeks to offer in practice: an evolving, collective effort to align knowledge with the public good in ways that strengthen trust, expand opportunity, and fortify democracy for America’s third century.