Impact Update Spring 2025 New Grants
New grants bring opportunities for our staff and faculty to make discoveries that improve lives. Among the latest awards to our college are these contributions to important issues.
New grant augments opioid misuse prevention training in Ohio
Michael Betz, associate professor of Human Development and Family Science, received a grant from the OneOhio Recovery Foundation to support his project, Preventing Opioid Misuse through Resilience and Life Skills Training for Youth and Families: Region 9.
The three-year project, with Kelly Cabral, project director and co-investigator, addresses a critical need in Ohio’s opioid misuse mitigation strategy by expanding and enhancing a sustainable prevention framework that complements existing prevention, treatment, recovery and mental health efforts in the region.
The Ohio Youth Resilience Collaborative is a partnership between local community partners and the university to implement high-quality, evidence-based substance misuse prevention and mental health promotion programs in Ohio’s Pike, Scioto, Highland and Ross counties. It will use a multi-level approach to engage youth, caregivers and young adults.
$1.54M examines understudied causes of young children’s sleep deficiency
Rebecca Dore, PhD, Ohio State principal investigator and research director, and Hui Jiang, PhD, senior research specialist and co-investigator, both of the college’s Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, have received a $1.54 million grant to study sleep health among young children ages 2-5, living in families with risk factors such as low income, education and parent mental health.
The project, Defining Relationships of Early Mediators and Moderators of Sleep, is in collaboration with Professor Randi Bates, University of Cincinnati, under his grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Major causes of sleep deficiency affect around 40% of children at some point, and 11% through adulthood. If untreated, early sleep deficiency can contribute to health, behavior and learning disparities at kindergarten entry that may persist into adulthood.
The researchers will use a micro longitudinal study over six months of 550 racially and economically diverse families of young children (20-48 months of age, when sleep health disparities likely develop) in two geographic sites of the Midwest. It will provide a critical next step to reduce disparities in sleep health problems and their downstream effects.
Mellon Foundation funds Unite to Read Project
Patricia Enciso, professor of Elementary and Secondary Education, is partnering with Ashley Pérez, associate professor of comparative studies, Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences, in a two-year grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Unite to Read will engage university experts, community advocates and partner organizations in developing high-quality educational materials and public programming. They will coordinate events and programs that support young people’s access to a broad range of literature.
Enciso is an active leader in the literacy research field. She is currently co-editor of Issue #55 of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series: Lessons From the Field on the Science of Reading: School and Classroom Stories Across Contexts.
She and her co-editor seek papers that highlight powerful practices for teaching reading, with an emphasis on how educators can draw on a wide range of research-informed strategies.
Faculty joins grant to prepare special ed students for high school transitions
Carly Gilson, associate professor and principal investigator, and Matt Brock, professor, both of School Counseling (known as Counselor Education in the college), received a grant of just under $1 million to conduct ELEVATE: Equipping Learning, Empowering Vision, Achieving Transitions, and Engaging Families: A Doctoral Leadership Initiative.
Working under Professor Kendra Williams-Diehm, principal investigator at the University of Oklahoma, the consortium of six universities will train approximately 20 scholars beginning this autumn. Funding is granted from the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs.
This next generation of experts will address today’s gap in knowledge about how to support special education students in their transition from high school to adult life. They will become professors, researchers, administrators or directors in special education focused on the transition, including to competitive employment or postsecondary education and training.