Welcome to our second EEOB Alumni Newsletter. We hope that you enjoyed our first issue and that this issue will continue to keep you abreast of what is going on in EEOB.
2020 was an unexpected challenge for all of us here at OSU, just as I am sure it was for our alumni wherever you are. As biologists, we can look at the COVID-19 pandemic as a phenomenon of biological interest and as an opportunity to bring lessons on biology to our students. Nevertheless, we suffer its effects ourselves and sympathize with those in our communities who have often suffered more. When the call for personal protective equipment came out at OSU early in the pandemic, EEOB stepped up and donated dozens of boxes of gloves and other supplies to the medical center. We also needed to develop online teaching skills quickly as the university pivoted to remote course delivery. I am proud of what our faculty, lecturers and graduate teaching assistants were able to do in such short order. We have continued much online delivery into spring of 2021, but are cautiously hopeful that autumn 2021 will look much more like the campus that we are used to and miss.
Issues of racial injustice also came to the fore nationally during this time and have spurred OSU and EEOB to action and self-reflection about how we can be agents of change for the better as we welcome and support diversity. For those of us who study biodiversity and sometimes the impact of its loss, it is not much of a stretch to appreciate the benefits of human diversity in the richness and range of perspectives and experiences that it brings to scholarship, teaching and problem solving. I am proud of the diversity that we have been able to achieve in EEOB thus far, but I recognize that we still have much to do in cultivating an inclusive workplace for all of our department members and working toward a department that reflects the diversity of the broader community.
OSU has a new leader, President Kristina M. Johnson, as of last September. Stepping into such a position in the middle of the twin crises of a pandemic and racial injustice cannot be easy, but she is off to a good start with an ambitious plan for OSU. In EEOB, we were happy to welcome a new faculty member to our Lima Campus, Dr. Robin Bagley, and you can read here her impressions and plans as she settles in. Not only teaching has been upended, but research as well, as we have had to adapt to reduced densities in our laboratories and limitations on fieldwork, which is so important to many of our department faculty. Assistant Professor Andreas Chavez writes here about his work with squirrels as a subject for evolutionary studies. His lab members would have been in the field last summer had we not been restricted by the necessary pandemic policies.
We have in fact adjusted to life under these new rules. Professor Hans Klompen, writing from the Acarology Collection, has plenty of research material to work on, as many of us who are located at the Museum of Biological Diversity do. And in labs across the department, we have managed to keep the research enterprise moving forward, just as we have with teaching, and the university has done a commendable job of keeping infection rates low.
In closing, I want to thank Professor Norman Johnson and the rest of the EEOB Communications Committee for pulling this newsletter together. We want to keep this ball rolling and increase interactions with the greater EEOB family. As we are frequently reminded about the COVID19 situation, “we are all in this together”, and the same can be said, in a broader and much more positive way, about the OSU EEOB community. Please let us hear from you, especially with respect to how your EEOB experience has made a difference in your life. It would be great to feature some alumni stories in our next issue.
Stay healthy and best wishes for 2021.
