Ohio State's University Outreach and Engagement Awards honor faculty, staff and students for outstanding achievement in producing engaged scholarship and community impact. Congratulations to this year's recipients from the College of Arts and Sciences!

Community Engaged Scholar Awards

The Community Engaged Scholar Award recognizes faculty members who have demonstrated co-created engaged scholarship that has positively impacted communities. Community Engaged Scholars have made significant contribution to Ohio State's culture of engagement, further establishing and strengthening the institution's commitment to communities.

Alfonso Cervera, Assistant Professor, Department of Dance

Alfonso Cervera is a first-generation Queer Mexican American performer, educator, curator and activist. His research and specialization as an independent artist focuses on the conversation between Queerness, Ballet Folklorico and Afro-Latine social dances in a contemporary auto-biographical embodied experience that he calls Poc-Chuc.

Rachel Skaggs, Associate Professor, Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy

Rachel Skaggs’s research focuses on how workers in post-bureaucratic employment situations (freelance, project-based, self-employment, and other forms of free agency) are able to craft careers out of a series of self-directed projects and jobs, particularly in creative industries. She is especially interested in how workers in these situations collaborate and cooperate along the way.

Community Engaged Graduate Student Award

The Community Engaged Graduate Student Award recognizes graduate students who have demonstrated engaged scholarship that has positively impacted communities through their research, scholarship and service.

Iyana Hill, Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy

Iyana Hill is an artist, curator and community organizer from Columbus, Ohio. As an artist she focuses on the liberation of Black people and the Black experience through the mediums of photography and ceramics. Her curatorial and community programming honors Black culture and thinks about accessibility, immersion and arts equity to articulate and honor Blackness. 

Brandon Rothrock, Department of Geography

Brandon Rothrock's dissertation research focuses on queer Appalachian livelihoods and resistance to petrochemical build-out and other environmentally polluting industries in the Ohio River Valley. Through his work, he hopes to further understandings of queer identity in relation to the environment and climate change.

Madison Von Deylen, Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology

Madison Von Deylen studies the evolution of animal behavior and physiology using mathematical modeling and experimental approaches. Specifically, she explores changes in organismal condition and fitness following environmental perturbation, employing various methods to assess individual and population health and quality, which, in turn, sheds light on ecosystem dynamics.

Read more about Madison's work

Programs of Excellence in Engaged Scholarship

To support and promote high-impact engaged scholarship, the Office of Outreach and Engagement has instituted a process to certify programs of excellence in engaged scholarship. The certification process seeks to annually identify and certify projects that demonstrate excellence in community-engaged scholarship and meet the criteria of high-impact engaged scholarship.

• Ghost Neighborhoods of Columbus, Center for Urban and Regional Analysis
• Shakespeare and Autism Project, Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts
• Building the Virtual Japan Experience: Enhancing Knowledge about Japan, East Asian Studies Center
• Dayton Deliberates
• On Board(hers)
• SciDome Planetarium Internship Program, Department of Astronomy, Ohio State Newark
• Philosophy for Humans (P4H) Learning Community, Department of Philosophy
• Students in Life Sciences Abroad, Department of Molecular Genetics

Learn more about the Shakespeare and Autism Project from the Voices of Excellence podcast

See the full list of awards on the Outreach and Engagement website.