Download Professor William I. Ausich School of Earth Sciences Director, Orton

Professor William I. Ausich
School of Earth Sciences
Director, Orton Geological Museum
William Ausich joined the faculty of The Ohio State University in 1984 and is currently a
professor in the School of Earth Sciences and Director of the Orton Geological Museum.
He served as Chair of the Department of Geological Sciences (1995-1999). Ausich
received his B.S. degree from the University of Illinois-Urbana (1974) and graduate
degrees from Indiana University-Bloomington (A.M., 1976; Ph.D., 1978). Prior to his
appointment at Ohio State, he was a faculty member in the Department of Geological
Sciences at Wright State University.
Ausich is a paleontologist who concentrates on crinoids, which are relatives of starfish
and sand dollars and were very important in many ancient shallow-water seas. His work
is concentrated in the following areas: 1, origination and early diversification of the
Crinoidea; 2, evolutionary dynamics of Paleozoic crinoid faunas through episodes of
climate-driven biosphere collapse and recovery; 3, phylogeny and classification of
Paleozoic crinoids; and 4, with Ohio State colleagues and students, pioneering work on
ancient biomarkers. Graduate and undergraduate students work in these and related areas,
and this work has been funded largely by the National Science Foundation. Research
results are published in five co-authored or co-edited books and monographs and more
than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles.
Ausich has won several awards and honors, including the Schuchert Award of the
Paleontological Society; Fulbright Fellowship; election to Fellow of the Geological
Society of America, Paleontological Society, and American Association for the
Advancement of Sciences; Richard Owen Award -- Outstanding Alumnus, Department of
Geological Sciences, Indiana University; the Research Medal from Universidade de Trásos-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal; and three Distinguished Teaching Awards from
School of Earth Sciences, The Ohio State University. In addition, he served as president
of the Paleontological Society from 2004-2006.
At Ohio State, he teaches a variety of freshman and graduate level courses in
paleontology and sedimentology (i.e., History of Life on Earth, Paleobiology,
Paleoecology, and Modern Carbonate Depositional Environments). He was a coorganizer of the Minor in Interdisciplinary Evolutionary Studies, the recent “Darwin –
Growth of an Idea” events during 2009, and has served on numerous University
committees.
Professor Linda Mizejewski
Department of Women’s Studies
Linda Mizejewski is a professor of Women’s Studies and has been teaching at the Ohio
State University since 1991. A feminist scholar of film and media studies, she has
published four books on gender issues in popular culture, ranging from famous showgirls
to women-detective characters and the development of romantic comedy. Her first book,
Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles
(Princeton, 1992), was the winner of the 1995 Nancy Dasher Award for best book in
literary or cultural criticism published between 1991 and 1994. She is also the author of
Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Duke, 1999) and Hardboiled and
High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2004). Her most
recent book, It Happened One Night (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) is part of the Wiley
Blackwell series on films often taught in undergraduate classes. Professor Mizejewski
has done considerable work in curricular development in both the English Department
and the Department of Women’s Studies and participated in the development of the Film
Studies major and the Popular Culture minor. She served as chair of Women’s Studies
from 2002 to 2006. Professor Mizejewski has been a Fulbright Lecturer in Slovakia and
Romania, and her research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment
for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2004, she won the
Ohio State University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. Her current research
project, “Women on Top,” focuses on women writers/performers of comedy on television
and in standup.