Inaugural Meek Scholars named

March 30, 2023

The Violet I. Meek Endowment for Faculty Scholarly Activity has its first recipients at The Ohio State University at Lima. Virginia Tompkins, associate professor of psychology, and Ivo Herzog, professor of mathematics, are the inaugural scholars. 

The endowment was established with gifts from Dr. Meek, Ohio State Lima dean and director from 1991-2003. It supports research and other scholarly activity for faculty members. Student work can also be supported if their work furthers the work of the faculty member. 

Both Herzog and Tompkins will present updates on their work as Meek scholars in 2024. 

Scholar: 
Virginia Tompkins

Virginia Tompkins

Department: Psychology

Project: Examination of Factors Influencing Young Children's Narrative Comprehension

Dr. Tompkins will take her research in a new direction in the next phase of her research on story comprehension in young children. She will study how book-level features impact children’s story comprehension, specifically the character’s gender and race. To examine the influence of character gender and race (and whether it matches the child’s) on preschoolers’ story comprehension, Tompkins will use four picture books with identical backgrounds, but with four different character sets: Black Male, Black Female, White Male, and White Female. The children will be randomly assigned to receive one of these four conditions. Pilot data from autumn 2022 shows that there is a large gender effect—children’s comprehension of the story is significantly greater when the story character’s gender matches their own. The race effect is weaker however and will take a much larger sample size. Tompkins will try new approaches to data collection—online advertising and the language lab at the Center of Science and Industry (COSI) in downtown Columbus and will recruit there through 2023 with the help of undergraduate research assistants. She will also recruit study participants online. 

Scholar:
Ivo Herzog

Ivo Herzog

Department: Mathematics

Project: Nonstandard Representation Theory

Dr. Herzog will pursue a project involving the applications of methods from mathematical logic to the study of representation theory. He will continue his work on the classification of certain classes of pseudo-finite dimensional modules of groups. He will also devote time to work on a book on the Model Theory of Modules. One of the goals of his book will be to reconcile the divergent points of view from model theoretic and category theoretic perspectives by carefully describing each aspect of one idiom and the philosophy behind it in terms of the other. This part of his book will serve as a kind of dictionary and will be complemented by mathematical exercises meant to illustrate the contrasts in technique. His time as a Meek scholar will also allow him to travel for the purpose of collaboration with his peers.