Voices of Excellence from Arts and Sciences The Ohio State University

Trevon Logan by Voices of Excellence from Arts and Sciences

Elena Foulis, coordinator for the Spanish for Heritage language program in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and host of the Ohio Habla podcast, joins David Staley on this week's Voices of Excellence. She discusses her work as a public humanist, how she engages students in her classes, and what she learns hosting her very popular podcast

Cynthia Clopper, professor and chair of the department of linguistics, researches speech sounds: how we produce them, their acoustic characteristics, and their perception by listeners. She says that every time we say a word, like "cat," it's subtly different. For more of her discussion with David Staley, listen to this week's Voices of Excellence

Professor of sociology Elizabeth Cooksey studies social demography, life course transitions, and the development of youth and children. She also serves as the director of the Center for Human Resource Research, which started the first national longitudinal survey 55 years ago. The data from the study has been used in thousands of articles, and Cooksey describes how it works to David Staley on this week's Voices of Excellence

Professor Laura Kubatko, from the Department of Statistics and the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, is amazed by the advances she's seen in her career in how scientists translate "observations into formal mathematical or statistical models." Moreover, this is for her the "fun part," because they collaborate to explain "why [we] think [an event] is happening." She describes these developments and more with David Staley on this week's Voices of Excellence

Professor of Psychology Laura Wagner studies how children acquire language and learn about meaning, such as the progression of time in storytelling. Their interpretations of even simple stories like the famous chicken joke reveal hidden meanings about complicated linguistics and complex concepts of time. She discusses this and more with David Staley on this week's Voices of Excellence