‘Time and Change’ is lifting up faculty members

During her long Ohio State career, Gifford Weary saw how philanthropy strengthened teaching and research. So when the former dean and department chair retired, she invested in an idea that she believes is the most effective way to support students and faculty: endowed positions.

In 2023, Weary and her family foundation gave $5 million to Ohio State to create the Collaborative on the Science of Polarization and Misinformation (C-SPAM), which includes a new endowed chair position, set to be held by Professor Kurt Gray. This is one of more than 100 endowed chairs and professorships gifted during Time and Change: The Ohio State Campaign. These endowments are powerful tools, helping with recruitment, retention and team building. “These are some of the highest honors that we bestow on faculty, and, in turn, we expect a lot from them,” says Weary, a psychologist and chair of The Ohio State University Foundation Board. “We expect them to transform our programs, our departments. Really, their requirement is to elevate the profile of the university.”

Here are three endowed faculty members doing just that.

Dr. Sakima Smith ’14 MPH

Bob Frick Research Chair in Heart Failure and Arrhythmia 

Drawn to research: As an Ohio State cardiology fellow, Smith faced a crossroads. Unsure about his future as a researcher, he sought out Peter Mohler, the then-director of the Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute. The two hit it off, and Smith started a one-month rotation in Mohler’s lab doing basic science research. One month turned into three, and after securing a grant, Smith ended up spending two years exploring the underlying mechanisms of abnormal heart rhythms and failure. “That work changed the trajectory of my career,” he says.

Cardio-oncology: Smith joined the faculty at Ohio State in 2014 and started his laboratory a year later. Soon, he began to investigate the connection between anticancer drugs and heart disease, a new field of study. In 2022, Smith was appointed to his endowed position, one of six cardiovascular research chairs established by Bob and Corrine Frick through an $18 million gift. Smith’s position has helped him grow his lab, recruit new students and conduct foundational research, which led to a $2 million National Institutes of Health grant to dig deeper into the links between cancer treatment and heart disease. “The philanthropic support allows you to do these preliminary experiments that are necessary to get proof-of-principle data that you can then use for a larger grant,” Smith says.

Learn more about Smith on his clinician webpage.

Margaret Kwoka

Lawrence “Larry” Herman Professor in Law

Living the dream: Kwoka’s career path came into focus during her first year at Northeastern University School of Law. “I can still picture the classroom and the day,” she recalls. “I was looking at my professor, and I thought to myself, ‘One day, I want to do that. That’s what I want to do right there.’” Today, Kwoka has achieved that goal. A faculty member at the Moritz College of Law, Kwoka has broad influence as a researcher, teacher and advocate, just like the professors she once idolized. “This is the dream,” Kwoka says. “I arrived, and it is every bit as good as I hoped it would be.”

Government transparency: Kwoka is one of three law professors endowed by health care entrepreneur Kara Trott ’91 JD, who gave the university $4 million in 2021 to, in part, fund the positions. In 2021, Kwoka published Saving the Freedom of Information Act, a book that documents how a law intended for government oversight has instead become a vehicle for those seeking private economic gain. For her next book, Kwoka is collaborating with counterparts around the world to explore how transparency laws have fared under populist governments. She says her endowed professorship has helped her build upon her research and connect with colleagues. “It’s really been meaningful to my career in terms of the work I want to do,” she says.

Learn more about Kwoka on her Moritz College of Law webpage.

Ange-Marie Hancock

ENGIE-Axium Endowed Professor of Political Science

Women’s basketball: After graduating from New York University in 1990, Hancock took a job working for the NBA. There, league officials enlisted her to research an interesting question: Would it be viable for the men’s pro basketball league to start a women’s offshoot? Hancock spent several months looking into the question, including a survey of Ohio State and 24 other top women’s collegiate basketball programs. That work provided a research foundation for the WNBA, which was founded 1996. By that time, however, Hancock had made her own big decision. Inspired by her WNBA research, she left pro sports to enroll in the graduate program at the University of North Carolina. “I was a social scientist before I knew I was a social scientist,” she says.

Coming home: A Worthington native, Hancock returned to Central Ohio in 2023 to accept her endowed position, one of five professorships supported by Ohio State Energy Partners, the university’s comprehensive energy management partnership, through a $9.5 million gift in 2018. By then, Hancock already was an accomplished scholar with an endowed position at the University of Southern California, where she worked for 14 years. But she was attracted to the Ohio State job because the new role came with a research budget, a perk her USC job lacked. Now, Hancock is writing a book called The Scope and Vision of African American Political Thought. This ambitious project traces more than 250 years of Black thinkers, including major figures such as Frederick Douglass and lesser-known folks such as Old Elizabeth, a 19th-century preacher and former slave. “She actually used the court system in Massachusetts to sue for her freedom, and the court system said, ‘You know what? You’re right.’”

Read more about Hancock on her Department of Political Science webpage.