Get your geek on with Guess Who, a new STEM gameshow filled with laughter, learning, and LIES! Join our guessers as they try to figure out who’s lying and who’s telling the truth in order to match up three graduate students to their field of study. Try your hand at this fast-paced trivia challenge to see if you can Guess Who. Guess Who is a quarterly event offered virtually or in a hybrid setting. Check out details about previous episodes with links to our YouTube channel below.
Episode Four – May 4th, 2022
Our May show was hosted by Courtney Price, Research Program Manager with the sustainability Institute, and Wayne Schlingman, Director of the Arne Slettebak Planetarium in the Department of Astronomy.
Courtney and Wayne were joined by a cast of three magnificent graduate students, recent graduates, and guessers, including:
- Allison Chartrand – PhD candidate, School of Earth Sciences
- Marcos Miranda – PhD student, Civil, Environmental, and Geodetic Engineering Graduate Program
- Helen Chen – 2022 PhD graduate, Neuroscience. Congrats Dr. Chen!
- Ash Davis – Meta Actor with Shadowbox
- Jonathan Jacobs – Professor of Plant Pathology in the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
Unanswered Questions
For once we had time for live Q&A! Even so, we have one outstanding question that Allison was kind enough to provide after the show.
Audience question: How high or low does an airplane have to fly to collect radar?
Allison’s answer: The ice thickness radar data I use were collected from an altitude of ~2000 m, or ~6,500 feet! Commercial flights fly at 36,000 feet (almost 11,000 m), so the NASA planes have to fly much lower over ice to collect good data. The DC-8 plane that was in my photo can fly steadily as low as 500 m. This was fun for me to look into!
Episode Three – December 1st, 2021
Our December show was hosted by Courtney Price, then Outreach & Education Specialist with ABRC & CAPS/now Research Program Manager with the Sustainability Institute.
Courtney was joined by a fabulous cast of graduate students and guessers, including:
- Ashley Brooks – MFA candidate in the Design and Research Development program within the Department of Design.
- Jordan ‘JL’ Hartman – PhD student in the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science.
- Claire Rapp – Graduate student in the School of Environment and Natural Resources.
- Theodore ‘Teddy’ Chao – Professor of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education and Human Ecology
- Donnalyn Roxey – Innovation Facilitator with Knowinnovation
Unanswered Questions
While we try to stay on schedule and include as many audience questions as possible during the live show, time often gets away from us. In December we left one question for Claire unanswered. See the question and Claire’s response below.
Audience question: What does current research say has been the impact of poor decision-making in wildfire management?
Claire’s answer: In decision psychology, we typically define whether a decision is good or bad not based on the outcome, but based on the process. People can do everything right and make all the right decisions and things can go poorly, and people can also do everything wrong and somehow still come out on top. If you want to make sure that over time and on average outcomes are good, then you need to make sure decisions are made in a thorough, defensible, and transparent way. When it comes to wildfire management, it can be really easy in the heat of the moment to get caught up in sticking to tried-and-true methods even when they’re not working. For example, when the fire is displaying extreme behavior, houses are burning, and emotions are high, it can be tempting to just continue throwing more bulldozers, more aircraft, more people at it to try and stop it. But a better decision-making process would be to be aware of things like the sunk cost bias. The sunk cost bias is our tendency to continue to do something bad because we’ve put resources into it already. If you’ve ever finished a movie you hated because you already paid for the ticket or you already watched half of it, then you’ve fallen prey to the sunk-cost bias. Current research suggests that fire managers tend to focus much too heavily on short-term risk at the expense of long-term risk. Putting out all fires at the smallest size possible, even when the risk is extremely low, contributes to long-term risk of catastrophic fire through fuel accumulation (after all, many ecosystems need fire in order to be healthy and resilient). However, letting a fire get bigger so future fires aren’t as big seems counter-intuitive, and there are a lot of social, psychological, and policy barriers that make it a difficult decision to make.
Episode Two – September 1st, 2021
Our September 1st episode was hosted by Wayne Schlingman, Director of the Arne Slettebak Planetarium in the Department of Astronomy.
Wayne was joined by a wonderful cast of guessers, graduate students and postdocs, including:
- Emily Griffith– PhD student in Astronomy
- Emilie Beaudon – Postdoctoral Scholar at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center
- Nick Geis – PhD student in mathematics
- Katheryn Kelley – Director of the Ohio Manufacturing Institute
- Johnny DiLoretto – WCBE media personality & community relations
Episode One – May 5th, 2021
The inaugural Guess Who event was hosted by Jason Cervenec, Education & Outreach Director for the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center.
Jason was joined by a hilarious cast of guessers and graduate students, including:
- Chelsea Mann –
- Kali Mattingly – PhD student in Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology
- Zach Konkel – PhD student in Translational Plant Sciences
- Z (Lena) Tenney – Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Officer for the College of Pharmacy
- Ty Owen – Musician, Application Developer at Victoria’s Secret