The Ohio State University

04/24/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 04/25/2025 13:19

Honda gift establishes endowed professorship in automotive manufacturing

Ohio State leaders with Honda's Bob Nelson (second from left) and Shubho Bhattacharya (third from right).
Photo: The Ohio State University
24
April
2025
|
15:30 PM
America/New_York

Honda gift establishes endowed professorship in automotive manufacturing

$1 million gift to Ohio State College of Engineering part of historic fundraising campaign

The Ohio State University

Building on 25 years of a beneficial partnership, Honda has announced a $1 million gift to The Ohio State University to establish the Honda Endowed Professorship in Automotive Manufacturing in the College of Engineering.

Honda's gift came during the final month of the university's historic fundraising campaign, Time and Change: The Ohio State Campaign, adding to its successful close. The gift was recognized on April 2 at a ceremonial check presentation on campus.

"This partnership between Ohio State and Honda is exemplary. Not only do we challenge each other for the benefit of our students, but we work together to impact positively the entire mobility industry and the nation as a whole," said College of Engineering Dean Ayanna Howard. "This latest investment is about how we can combine our superpowers to both prepare students for career success and establish Ohio as an epicenter of automotive manufacturing talent."

The endowed professorship will provide leadership for and administration of the college's newly launched Automotive Manufacturing Certificate Program. Honda provided the impetus for Ohio State to start exploring the feasibility of such a program and worked closely with the university to bring it to fruition.

Open to all engineering majors, the certificate consists of 13 credit hours and is delivered entirely in person. The goal is to increase interest in automotive industry careers and build relevant skills. Upon completion of the certificate, students will gain practical experience with equipment and processes used in each of the various areas of automotive manufacturing, as well as exposure to the application of different engineering disciplines in the field.

Honda's gift will leverage the College of Engineering's matching program, which enables the college to receive matching funds from the university for certain endowed gifts. The matching professorship will be established as the Honda Endowed Professorship in Artificial Intelligence in Mechanics and Manufacturing, supporting a tenure-track faculty position in the college, with preference for a faculty member with a joint appointment in the departments of Integrated Systems Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering.

"This gift is not about Honda. It isn't about our plants in Ohio. It is about working together to help grow the future of manufacturing in the U.S.," said Bob Nelson, American Honda executive vice president. "This Automotive Manufacturing Certificate program will play a large role in equipping students with the tools they need to be successful in our industry."

"We are grateful to Honda for 25 years of unwavering partnership and support, which has not only advanced research and innovation but also enriched the educational experiences of countless students," said Peter J. Mohler, executive vice president for the Enterprise for Research, Innovation and Knowledge at Ohio State. "Thanks to this latest announcement, we can look forward to many more years of shared success and partnership to develop the future workforce for manufacturing in the United States."

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More Ohio State News

25
,
| 11:03 AM America/New_York

Scientists are working to shed new light on an enduring climate mystery - one that, if solved, could help them make more accurate predictions about the planet's future.

In a new study, data from ice cores collected from Greenland, Antarctica and various tropical mountains were compared to climate model simulations made of the Holocene, a geologic era that began about 11,700 years ago. Natural data and climate simulations of this time, specifically for Earth's average temperature, have been puzzlingly at odds with each other, most notably in tropical mountains.

Discrepancies in the long-term trend between the model predictions and the natural proxy records have led researchers to call this mismatch the Holocene temperature conundrum.

Now, using oxygen isotope data from ice cores, researchers found that ice core data and computer models of the Holocene do match when analyzing polar regions like Greenland and Antarctica. However, that is not the case for Earth's tropical mountains, said Yuntao Bao, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral scholar in geography at The Ohio State University.

"Current climate models posit that the planet experienced an early, steady increase in warming throughout the Holocene, but most of the paleoclimate samples suggest that later in the Holocene Earth experienced a global cooling period," said Bao.

The team found that ice core data from tropical mountains like Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Huascarán in Peru suggest possible cooling by 0.8 to 1.8 degrees Celsius, whereas models suggest a prolonged warming by 1.5 degrees.

These climate variations were driven by orbital forcing, or changes in the Earth-sun orbit that influence the global climate. However, the model-data mismatch over tropical mountains presents a challenge for researchers in explaining the underlying causes of tropical mountain oxygen isotopic ratios and the associated temperature changes during the Holocene. Climate simulations also tend to overlook important factors, such as vegetation and land use, that could have influenced Holocene temperatures, said Bao.

"All models have different kinds of uncertainties," he said. "But by using ice core isotopic data as a guide, we can find a better way to evaluate how good or how bad our climate models are."

The study was recently published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

The type of simulation the researchers used to address the conundrum is called the Community Earth System Model, a system that incorporates global details like atmosphere, ocean, land and river runoff components to build precise past and future climate projections.

While scientists are still unclear on why the model fails to explain the mechanisms behind these discrepancies over the tropical mountain areas, the study does note that no single factor, such as global temperature fluctuations or heavy rainfall, could effectively explain these Holocene-era patterns.

Still, putting effort into understanding these issues is well worth it to improve future paleoclimate interpretations, said Lonnie Thompson, co-author of the study and a professor in earth sciences at Ohio State.

"This type of study is extremely important because we're looking at both the shortcomings in the data and the models," he said. "The natural world is very complex, so when you try to capture this and put it into a model, that's a big job."

Most climate models that don't account for feedbacks like land use, vegetation, dust and volcanic emissions aren't as accurate at predicting the natural world, said Thompson. On the other hand, proxy data collected from ice cores are some of the most reproducible types of climate evidence from one century to the next, so paleoclimatologists consider them reliable narrators of Earth's complex history.

"If technology cannot capture these very subtle natural variabilities, then it raises big questions about what its output says for the future," Thompson said.

The study concludes by calling for the paleoclimate community to help refine global climate models and bolster future climate projections, especially during a time when Earth is experiencing rapid biodiversity losses.

"Big breakthroughs in science are going to come along the boundaries of collaboration," said Thompson. "We can work together to tackle these issues."

Co-authors include Zhengyu Liu and Ellen Mosley-Thompson from Ohio State, as well as Lingfeng Wan from Ocean University of China and Jiuyou Lu from Laoshan Laboratory in China. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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