Andrew Loney, UG-Bio; pre-Med
LII Research Associate

It is a pleasure to announce the promotion of Andrew Loney, UG Biology, to the position of Research Associate.  Andrew has served as our lab’s Research Technician and demonstrated great dedication and skill pulling secondary data from NHANES, as well as build a database for the spinal cord injury (SCI) project.  This promotion is based on our need to have Andrew devote all his attention on the SCI project and manage the complete data collection process.  In this new role, Andrew will supervise the project and actively gather demographics, blood pressure, and other associated data, during each patient visits.  Additionally, he will handle all the scheduling of SCI participant visits over fall and spring semester. An added task is to build an image library that properly reflects the type of Doppler data that we have recorded and will be used for our publications.  Lastly, Andrew will transferring the final Excel spreadsheet to Dr. Matt Farrow and our statistician, at the end of spring semester. Congratulations Andrew on this very important promotion!

Nioole Weikle, PhD-LII Alumni

We are very excited to announce that Drs. Nicole Weikle and Evans have committed to Wolters Kluwer Publishers, to create a new musculoskeletal ultrasound textbook.  This will be a large expansion of Dr. Evans previous chapter on the topic in the 4th edition of Kawamura and Nolan’s Abdomen and Superficial Structures textbook.  This exciting project will include significant contributing authors Christopher Kanner, MD-Radiology, John Mickley, MD-Orthopedics, and Robert McIntyre, BS.  The text will likely be published in 2028, but requires significant effort over the next year to allow the publishers to print the hard copy.  The text will build on classic scanning techniques but have the innovation of a Radiologist suggestions for diagnostic reporting and a Orthopedist utlization of the data.  We are very excited about this year long project. The true star of the production is Paul Michael Embry, our model for lab images.  Paul’s father was the original model for the Merrill’s Atlas of Radiographic Procedures and Positioning.

Huriah Al Sultan, MS
PhD Candidate

It is indeed an honor to just be nominated as an OSU Presidential Fellow and Huriah Al Sultan, MS will be the school’s nominee for this prestigious award.   The Ohio State University Presidential Fellowships are designed to recognize outstanding scholarly accomplishments and potential of graduate students entering the final phase of their dissertation research or terminal degree project. If awarded, the Presidential Fellowships provide financial support so the fellow may devote one year, 3 consecutive semesters of full-time study to the completion of the dissertation or degree project and to graduate unimpeded by other duties. Recipients of this award embody the highest standards of scholarship in OSU’s graduate programs.  Huriah’s research has been on the diagnostic ability to detect post-COVID changes in the heart, lungs, and quality of life in children and young adults.  Huriah has been fortunate to have worked with OSU Medical Center experts to use MRI to add diagnostic information on COVID survivors, as well as the first to use the new FDA approved MRI protocol for lung imaging.

Certainly, there has been great upheaval in our federal sources for grant funding and none more so than in the National Institute of Health’s centers and institutes.  In our lab, we are continuing to demonstrate our ability to meet the recently released Tenets of Gold Standard Science.  Here are the NIH’s Tenets of Gold Standard Science and our ways of meeting them:

• Reproducible– In the LII, we make sure all our methods are clearly explained
• Transparent-The way we conduct our work is open for review and inspection
• Communicative of error and uncertainty-LII staff always discuss all our results openly, to address any source of error
• Collaborative and interdisciplinary-This who we are in the LII!
• Skeptical of its findings and assumptions– Our staff and students meet weekly to critique all the projects and their preliminary findings
• Structured for falsifiability of hypotheses-All LII projects are built on a primary aim and supported hypotheses that guide the work plan
• Subject to unbiased peer review-The work produced by the LII is submitted for review internally for collaborator edits and to peer-reviewed journals
• Accepting of negative results as positive outcomes-each manuscript and grant proposal review gets rigorous comment and ranking; we work to refine and polish our work based on those outcomes
• Without conflicts of interest– The Ohio State University requires that all our staff and students declare any form of COI-annually.

In the LII, we continue to strive and meet the moment and embrace all federal guidelines.  Dr. Evans was recently invited to train as a future NIH grant reviewer.