Buckeye’s DELTA Program Teaches Teachers to Take Their Course Online

Henry Griff is a teacher who is now teaching other teachers at OSU. Griffy is the liaison in the DELTA program, in the OSU Office of Distance Education and e-Learning. Distance Education Learning and Teaching Academy (DELTA) is a program intended to teach and support OSU faculty to be more effective online instructors.

DELTA is just one way in which OSU is working to keep their faculty and students at the forefront of how we teach and learn. The new DELTA plan asks for the university to be the benchmark of teaching practices and student success.

Marcia Ham, DELTA founder, and Griffy are running a monthly workshop in which instructors can bring in their course materials, lesson plans and questions about how to adapt them to an online classroom experience. Instructors like Connie Lutz, who needed to adapt new materials to an online format, have been given the opportunity to improve themselves through the DELTA program, and consequently their students.

Do Bacteria Get Sick? If So, What Does That Mean?

Buckeye researchers are diving into new worlds, observing the interplay between bacteria and the viruses (also known as phages) that infect them. Their study was published in The ISME Journal.

Whether it’s a body of water or a human body, viruses and bacteria interact inside these bodies and influence everything from world oxygen levels to if a new born will get sick. Knowing the secrets of these interactions could help future researchers figure out how to fight disease and save the planet. For the study, the researchers used some very special equipment in league with the US Dept. of Energy.

It allowed them a real-time look at what was going on when two of the same bacteria where given the same or different viruses or phages. They then could analyze, step by step, what was happening.

Researchers say it is not yet clear exactly where their observations and work will lead, but they hope it’ll reveal ways to improve the health of humans and the world we live in. Researchers pointed out that looking beyond what they called “ideal” interactions between viruses and bacteria—a more well-rounded knowledge is needed to move forward.

OSU Researchers Look at New Way to Fight Infection

Researchers at the Ohio State University may have figured out a novel way to fight diseases including HIV or autoimmune disorders might involve an enzyme called SAMHD1 that works on the immune system–according to new research at OSU.

SAMHD1 is a neutral in terms of good or bad–but it seems blocking its activity could stop the progression of diseases of the immune system. The current research was completed on human and mouse immune cells and was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. SAMHD1 was first discovered in 2000 and has been known to been linked to such disorders of the immune system like HIV and cancer.

Figuring out how SAMHD1 affects an immune diseases progressing is the goal of the new research.The new research demonstrates that SAMHD1 interacts with several cellular proteins that regulate innate immune responses. Most importantly they have learned it can act as an inhibitor for harmful bodily responses to viral infection.


Could Good Grades Hurt Women Entering the Job Market?

According to new OSU research it turns out that for women new to the job market having gotten good grades in college could do more harm than good when entering the job market. It found that some employers might value a woman’s perceived likability over her intelligence.

Men with high GPAs were two times as likely to be called back by an employer as women with the same GPA and comparable experience and background new Buckeye sponsored study found.

This problem was even worse in some fields. Female math majors were called back at a rate of three times less than their comparable male peers.

A survey in the research found that in a pool of 261 employers they valued competence and commitment when it came to potential male employees. When it came to women they preferred who did “OK”, but did not excel academically.


OSU Announces Spring Commencement Speaker

OSU will welcome CEO of the Gates Foundation, Dr. Sue-Desmond-Hellman for as its Spring Commencement speaker. Over 11,000 students will walk across the stage at this ceremony scheduled Sunday, May 6 at the OSU stadium.

Desmond-Hellman has played many roles–scientist and philanthropist–but in all her roles she has dedicated herself to bettering human lives. As CEO of the Gate’s foundation, she is the leader of their vision of a world where all humans are given the opportunity to be healthy and productive people

Desmond-Hellmann strives to build an organization in which talented and committed people help others thrive, fight diseases that hit the less-fortunate, and empower people.

She was also doing good work before leading the Gates Foundation, she  was the first female chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, the university in which she completed her clinical training there in the 1980s.