Exploring OSU Research: From Sports Enthusiasm to Digital Footprints (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: As the stadium and arena voice of the Cowboys, I get excited about touchdowns and three-pointers. But when they asked me if I could get equally as enthusiastic about the research going on on the OSU campus, I kind of felt like they had thrown me a curveball. Have you ever wondered about what our researchers do and how it impacts all of us? To answer that, the division of the Vice President for Research has launched a video series, so tune in to watch straight talk about research. I can tell you this, after getting a sneak peek, I may just start doing some play-by-play from the research laboratory. Now, like Bullet, here comes Research. Go Pokes.

Speaker 2: Everywhere we go, almost everything we do leaves digital footprints. From searching the web for a good deal, to figuring out where our favorite restaurant is, to learning how many miles we worked out using our wearable devices. Technology has changed our lives in a way that we couldn't really anticipate, and we interact with the world differently. And every day we see more and more advances when it comes to incorporating and embracing connected technologies. Leveraging the millions of data points generated from the various sources of technologies appropriately and efficiently will set the leaders of industry apart from those who do not embrace this growing aspect of our lives. And public health is no different. My research combines traditional public health approaches of examining disease patterns with large analytic techniques to help others in the field develop better and more informed approaches to solving large public health problems. Sometimes these issues can be very traditional and well-known health issues such as diabetes or opioid addictions. We look at clinical patterns within lab, visit, or prescription data to find precursors of diabetes onset or complications of drug-seeking behaviors. Sometimes the issues can be a bit more of a social nature, such as examining human trafficking patterns from millions of publicly available online ads and examining interactions between parents and adolescent children when discussing difficult and stressful topics like sexual risk avoidance while being monitored using wearable devices that measure breathing, heart rate, and body temperature. Rarely do I get to see the long-term impact of my research, but knowing that work like mine goes to help inform and improve other programs like interventions for diabetes prevention and teen pregnancy prevention or to inform law enforcement activities for potential human trafficking networks keeps me coming back every day and teaching others how to do the same thing. The next generation of business and health analysts will understand the digital revolution has shaped our world into something new and they will be ready to take up where we have left off.