By Stephen M. Gavazzi, Ph.D.

The Latest News, Views, and Announcements

MLK Day Celebration

This newsletter is being released one day later than usual because of our university’s celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. As many of you know, the annual MLK Jr. Day of Service that is organized by our university took place yesterday. This year, a bright spotlight was cast on Pay It Forward, the student cohort within the Office of Student Life that honored MLK Jr. by giving back and engaging in a morning of community service.

What’s New at CHRR

There is a new face at CHRR! Please help us extend a warm welcome to Jack Riley, our newest student employee. In his own words:

"Hi everyone, I’m Jack Riley, and I'm the student videographer for CHRR’s 60th Anniversary project. I am a second-year student at OSU, majoring in Moving-Image Production. I’m from Mason, Ohio and I enjoy reading and working on personal film projects when I’m not busy with coursework."

CHRR's Leadership Team

Our 60^th Anniversary Celebration Committee has been hard at work this past month, passing on their latest idea to the CHRR Leadership Team for further review and discussion. Brainstorming activities have generated an exploration of a new funding opportunity that has been labeled the “Missing Piece” campaign. It is often said that students are the lifeblood of a university, and CHRR has had its share of undergraduate and graduate students over the years.

As many readers know, several senior employees got their start at CHRR as student workers. Additionally, countless numbers of student honors projects, master’s theses, and doctoral dissertations have been completed as a direct result of data generated through CHRR research efforts. To date, however, there has been no systematic process put into place that would encourage and sustain student involvement in the various efforts underway at CHRR.

The committee’s proposal seeks to remedy this one “missing piece” in the complete picture of CHRR services and activities by creating and maintaining a full-spectrum practicum and internship program. CHRR holds the potential for offering both intensive research experiences and meaningful employment opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. In an ideal world, undergraduate students would work alongside and be mentored by master’s and doctoral students, who in turn would all collaborate and be supervised by faculty members and senior research staff (all of which would be overseen by a Lead Faculty Advisor). Any number of research-intensive classes already taught at The Ohio State University could serve as the prerequisite coursework (as well as recruiting grounds) for such experiences and opportunities. Students would apply to enter a practicum course that would involve observation, mentoring, participation in various hands-on activities at CHRR, as well as planning for and executing one research-intensive project. Each student and the Lead Faculty Advisor would develop a contract that identifies their individualized learning outcomes for the practicum experience, including the documentation of skillsets necessary to qualify for a paid internship experience. Depending on a given individual’s skillsets, work experiences, and professional interests, these paid internships would allow students to gain on-the-job experiences while being paid for meaningful and practical work efforts. More information about this “Missing Piece” campaign will be available in the near future!

CHRR Team Member Celebrations

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” -Michael Jordan

This month we are observing the work anniversaries of six valued employees:

• Xiaohong Angerer, 23 years of service to CHRR.
• Frank Marino, 30 years of service to CHRR.
• Mary Persons, 18 years of service to CHRR.
• Laura Rusnak, 8 years of service to CHRR.
• Jacob Ruth, 7 years of service to CHRR.

That’s a total of 86 years of service to our center (and an average of over 17 years). Thank you for your commitment to the CHRR mission!

A special shout out was given on social media to Frank Marino, who celebrated 30 years of employment with CHRR this month. As noted in recent X (Twitter) and LinkedIn posts, Frank is one of our resident data gurus and is a long-time archivist for the center's National Longitudinal Surveys work. Thanks for all that you do, Frank!

Things You Might Want to Know

ASC funds Research Instrumentation and Infrastructure Grant Proposal

A hearty congratulations to Nick Ramser and the IT Team! Last fall, an invitation went out for submissions to the ASC Instrumentation and Infrastructure Grant Program (IIGP), a program designed to advance the research and creative expression activities of Arts and Sciences faculty and students. We received notification last week that we were awarded one of the IIGP grants!

This IIGP award will allow our IT Team to upgrade the hardware capabilities of our Data Repository and Data Enclave research services, largely by acquiring a high-performance compute and storage infrastructure solution. In essence, this system will enable secure and scalable access to sensitive research data and ensure the necessary resources are available to support data-intensive computational analyses. According to Nick, the proposed infrastructure solution is a new hardware server cluster that offers the following features:

1. High-Performance Compute Power – The cluster will feature Intel Xeon Gold processors with a total of 96 cores and 192 threads and 3TB of DDR5 memory, offering substantial computational power. This will permit multiple concurrent enclave sessions and allow for data-intensive statistical applications.
2. Storage Capacity – Powered by state-of-the-art NVMe SSD storage drives, the cluster will include approximately 50TB of useable storage capacity, with next-generation storage features such as inline deduplication and compression.
3. Hardware-Based Encryption – Hardware based encryption protects data in transit and at rest. This will ensure all researcher data is protected, complying with University and Federal security standards.

The order is being placed this week, so CHRR and its clients will be positively impacted by this award in the very near future!