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Ģ����Ƶ University has named four faculty members as the 2025-26 Presidential Research Scholars.

This year’s award winners are Hee-Jong Seo, Saw Wai Hla, Jim Montgomery and Julie Suhr.

Each year, the Presidential Research Scholars program recognizes OHIO faculty members who have garnered national and international prominence in research, scholarship and creative activity and who demonstrate clear promise for continued, significant productivity in their research/creative activity.

Each Presidential Research Scholar receives $6,000 to be used at the scholar's discretion as an honorarium or to support research or creative works.

This year, applications were sought for the category of Physical Sciences and Engineering and the category of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Two award recipients were chosen from each category.

Applications for the Humanities category and the Life and Biomedical Sciences category will be solicited in 2026. For nomination and application deadlines and guidelines, visit www.ohio.edu/research/funding.

The 2025-26 Presidential Research Scholars

Hee-Jong Seo, Ph.D., is a professor of physics and astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences and the director of the Astrophysical Institute.

Seo has pursued a research agenda in high precision cosmology with large scale structure. She studies the distributions of galaxies and matter on very large scales to infer how our universe has expanded, what our universe is composed of, and therefore to collect observational clues to identify dark energy and dark matter, which together makes up 95% of universe while still being quite mysterious. Seo’s research work has been widely published.

Earlier this year, Seo led an international research team that on a project that traced ripples from relic cosmic sound over 11 billion years of cosmic history with unprecedented precision. You can read more about that research work here.

Saw Wai Hla, Ph.D., is a professor of physics and astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences and the director of the Nanoscale Quantum Phenomena Institute (NQPI). He is also a scientist in the Nanoscience and Technology Division at Argonne National Laboratory.

Hla’s research is focused on nano and quantum sciences using low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), synchrotron x-ray STM and atomic/molecular manipulation. He is a world leading researcher in the areas of STM single molecule manipulations, single molecule spintronics, and molecular machines on surfaces. He is widely published and has given more than 140 talks around the world on his research work.

Hla is recognized internationally for his research work, including his groundbreaking discovery as the first scientist in the world to capture an image of a single atom using an X-ray. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the 2024 Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year Laureate for Physical Sciences. You can read more about Hla and his research in this OHIO Today article.

Jim Montgomery, Ph.D., is a professor of hearing, speech and language sciences and associate director of Communication Sciences and Disorder in the College of Health Sciences and Professions. 

His area of expertise is language and cognitive sciences with application to childhood language impairment and reading comprehension disabilities. He was a practicing speech-language pathologist for many years in various interdisciplinary clinical settings and focused on the diagnosis and treatment of language impairment in school-age children.

His teaching focuses on language and cognitive impairments in school-age children and adolescents with language impairment. He has an active research program focusing on these children’s cognition and sentence comprehension and interventions to remediate their sentence comprehension deficits. 
Montgomery is widely published and has a long history of receiving external funding to support his research work. He has received several awards for his teaching and research work including being named a Fellow in the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. You can read more about his research work here.

Julie Suhr, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology and director of clinical training in the College of Arts and Sciences. 

Suhr’s area of specialty is clinical neuropsychology, which she views as an integration of clinical psychology and neuroscience, or as her students put it “keeping the psychology in neuropsychology.” Her research reflects this integration, and the importance of a good understanding of psychology in order to understand neuroscience.

One major topic of current research interest is the effect of psychological (non-neurological) variables on neuropsychological performance. Since 1997, Suhr’s lab has conducted free cognitive screening for older adults in the local community, and this has led to several interesting research projects related to distinguishing age-related cognitive changes from early signs of dementia and the relationship of aging-related cognitive changes to real world outcomes such as driving.

Suhr is widely published and is regularly invited to give addresses and lead workshops around the world. She has received numerous awards for her work including being named a Fellow of the National Academy of Neuropsychology in 2018 and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association in 2016. You can read more about Suhr and a recent Science Café presentation she gave at Ģ����Ƶ University here.

For more information on the Presidential Research Scholars awards program, please visit the Presidential Research Scholars website.