On Friday, October 25th, Dr. Alex Lentsch, Jacob G. Schmidlapp Professor and Chair

Department of Environmental and Public Health Sciences, attended and welcomed the attendees to the 25th symposium.

The keynote speaker was Dr. Gordon Gillespie, Professor, University of Cincinnati College of Nursing. His presentation was called “State of the Science for Workplace Violence in Healthcare Research.” Dr. Gillespie has been a registered nurse for nearly 30 years working in emergency department, public health, and academic settings. His research on workplace violence has been cited by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, U.S. Government Accountability Office, American Nurses Association, and practitioners and researchers across five continents. He chaired the national workplace violence conference, guest edited two interprofessional journal issues on workplace violence, co-chaired the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario’s second edition of the Best Practice Guideline “Preventing and Managing Bullying and Violence in the Workplace”, and served as an international Director of the Emergency Nurses Association.

2023-24 PRP awardees presented their final project results. Topics included;

2024-25 PRP awardees presented project plans in the form of posters as well as 4 other poster presenters that applied to present at the symposium. Topics included;

The symposium concluded with a panel discussion among experts in the field; Dr. Amit Bhattacharya, Dr. Dr. Sripriya Nannu Shankar, Dr. Yevgen Nazarenko from the University of Cincinnati Department of Environmental and Public Health Sciences as well as Dr. Tom Huston from the University of Cincinnati College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The panel was facilitated by Dr. Beverly Hittle, University of Cincinnati College of Nursing. 

Jessica Bloomer, program director at the University of Cincinnati ERC, presented awards; two for people’s choice favorite poster and podium presenters, two that a panel of judges selected for best podium and poster presenters, and the top three that participated the most in the event app.

The award winners were:

The symposium used the Whova event app which allowed for online networking, access to event resources, and a leaderboard contest that all attendees could participate in to win prizes by engaging in the app. The leaderboard winners were Onyinye Ezeifeka (third), Peggy Berry (second), and Itohan Egbedion (first). The symposium gave many attendees the opportunity to interact with each other as well as learn about new research areas.

The symposium posters and presentation recordings can be viewed in the PRP Symposium Archive.

Thank you to the Ohio Association of Occupational Health Nurses for sponsoring the symposium this year!

The PRP program is now accepting applications for projects for the 2025-26 funding period, due February 7, 2025. Information and application instructions can be found here.