October 2026 Newsletter
News and Events
Angelica Vazquez-Ortega, Bob Midden, Helen Michaels, Kevin McCluney, Ganming Liu, Jyotshana Gautam, Lauren Brown, Trevor DGroote, Shikshya Gautam, Genna Hunt, and Ethan Glassman were all presenters or co-authors of posters or talks at the Great Lakes Coastal Symposium in Huron, OH October 26 – 28. Great work representing BGSU CGLWS at this important regional event for coastal stakeholders, including managers, restoration practitioners, scientists, educators, and university students!
BGSU News has a great story covering our 2026 Pilot Interdisciplinary REU program, featuring Mason Murphy along with the five undergraduate students who participated in this first year. We are excited to expand this program in 2027!
Congrats to Hans Wildschutte and James Metcalf who recently received Ohio Sea Grant funding for their small grant entitled “Identification of HAB-associated Bacteria for Biocontrol Applications”!
Also congrats to Kevin McCluney and Lauren Brown for their newly funded Ohio Sea Grant small grant project “Plant Traits and Allocation Strategies to Maximize Wetland Nutrient Retention”.
Helen Michaels and Kevin McCluney shared about their HABRI-funded research findings in a Freshwater Science webinar “Freshwater Science: Which Wetland Plants Are Best at Capturing Nutrients?” on Oct. 29
The Toledo Blade had an article covering Gov. DeWine’s visit to Toledo to highlight his H2Ohio program, with our own Bob Midden speaking about the LEARN wetland monitoring program during the visit. Additionally, work by James Metcalf was mentioned in this Toledo Blade editorial calling for a continuation of funding for the H2Ohio program.
Arijit Khan recently participated in the Dagstuhl Seminar 26411 "Large Language Models Meet Knowledge Graphs" Oct 4-9 in Germany.
Congrats to Jenn Stucker for winning an RGD Branding Award for her 2025-26 In the Round Speaker Series (Robin Wall Kimmerer) materials!
George Bullerjahn and Mike McKay got to spend an afternoon on board the Viking ship Octantis while moored in Detroit, visiting BGSU alumna Dr. Kate Brown who was serving as a visiting scientist.
Ganming Liu attended the Geological Society of America (GSA) 2026 Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, from October 11-14. He presented hydrologic modeling work on H2Ohio wetlands, titled "Integrating Novel Numerical Modeling and Field Observations to Advance Nutrient-Reduction Wetland Management", with center member Kevin McCluney and other researchers as co-authors.
We had a good turnout for our roundtable meeting with Betco/Environzyme folks on Oct. 14, with Arijit Khan, Nate Manning, George Bullerjahn, Bob Midden, Sarah Emery, and Hans Wildschutte joining the discussion. Environzyme’s interests range from wastewater treatment to aquaculture to hazardous waste remediation to agriculture, so hopefully we can find new ways to partner with them in the future. We will work with the BGSU Office of Industry Partnerships to plan a site visit later this year. Thanks to Hans for facilitating this connection!
Nate Manning, Mason Murphy, and Sarah Emery made the trip over to Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge on Oct. 16 and had a great meeting with ONWR staff. We also visited an estuary site slated for restoration activities in summer 2027. ONWR staff are particularly interested in getting some pre-restoration measures of this habitat so let us know if you are interested in sampling fish, water, or other aspects of this unique system! A big thanks to BGSU alumna Alex Marshall, now Community Engagement and Programs Coordinator for Friends of ONWR, for facilitating this trip!
Arijit Khan gave a talk titled “Graph-Native LLMs and Agentic Systems” at the ACM Student Chapter, hosted by the Department of Computer Science on Oct. 27.
Ganming Liu co-authored a research article exploring the intricate relationship between paleo-hydrological settings and the sustainability of ancient human societies in the Sahara Desert. It was selected as a Feature Paper and highlighted on the journal's front cover! You can read the full cover story here.
Amílcar Challú has a short-term fellowship, October-November 2026, at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. His project is titled “The Age of Hunger in Late Colonial Mexico.” Amílcar was also selected as a 2026 Fellow in the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) Faculty Innovation Fellowship, a competitive national program bringing together faculty leaders from across the country to drive meaningful change in higher education.
Recent Publications
Bhowmick, S. S., A. Khan, and B. Choi. 2026. From Human-Graph to Agent-Graph Interaction: State of the Art and Future Directions. Proc. VLDB Endow. 19:4878–4883.
Fang, P., A. Khan, Z. Wu, Z. Li, Y. Zhou, F. Wang, and D. Feng. 2026. FeLoG: Scalable and Efficient Distributed Graph Embedding with Feedback Loop Mechanism. Proc. VLDB Endow. 19:2803–2816.
Fu, J., Tang, H., Khan, A. et al. LLM-powered clustering for entity resolution. The VLDB Journal 35, 57 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-026-01006-1
Schwartz, Franklin, and Ganming Liu. 2026. "Serendipity in Settings and Hydrologic Processes Helped People Survive Extreme Environments of the Sahara Desert" Hydrology 13, no. 8: 207. https://doi.org/10.3390/hydrology13080207
Wang, H., H. Tang, J. Fu, A. Khan, S. Mehrotra, X. Ke, and Y. Gao. 2026. LLM-CER: An Interactive System for In-Context Clustering-Based Entity Resolution with Large Language Models. Proc. VLDB Endow. 19:4746–4749.
Member Spotlights
Graduate Member
Hsin-Ho Wei
PhD Candidate & Teaching Assistant
Biology - Dr. Vipa Phuntumart
Molecular Biology & Biotechnology
I am originally from Taiwan and my advisor is Dr. Vipa Phuntumart.
BGSU has a strong aquatic research program and provided me with a Teaching Assistant (TA) opportunity, which allowed me to support my graduate studies and continue my research.
My research focuses on developing fast, on-site testing tools (using LAMP and CRISPR) to detect Saprolegnia, a water mold that is lethal to fish. This helps aquaculture farmers and environmental monitors quickly identify potential disease outbreaks, allowing them to optimize treatment timing and keep aquatic ecosystems healthy.
After defending my PhD in 2026, I want to work as a researcher in molecular biology or biotechnology. I plan to continue working in the agricultural sector, whether plant- or fish-based, and I hope to use my skills to make a meaningful contribution to agriculture.
Whenever I am near the Great Lakes, I always get great vibes from the water. Every visit is my favorite, as it allows me to recharge, relax, and observe nature.
Faculty Member
Amílcar E. Challú
Full Professor
Department of History
Environmental & Public History
I’m originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I lived half of my life. I moved to Bowling Green in 2005, so I now BG consider it my hometown, and the Great Black Swamp as my homeswamp.
I’m working on two fronts: public history programs about the early history of the great Black Swamp in the Black Swamp. Stay tuned for an announcement for an event in February about maple tapping, which is a three-way collaboration between Wyandotte Nation, Wood County Parks, and BGSU.
Second, I’m working with Sarah Emery and Arijit Khan on a project to create a database and digital portal to the land surveys of Ohio and the midwest. The land surveys are the first systematic record of vegetation and other landscape features when the land was acquired by the U.S. federal government. They date from the 1780s to the 1840s. As a subset of this work I’m collaborating with Jaksyn Trimbach (history major) and Sarah Emery in an analysis of ecological characteristics of the Wyandotte reservations at the time of their removal.
History, environmental science (including biology), curatorial studies (e.g. creating interpretive trails and exhibits), and more recently computer science and digital humanities.
My favorite classes are: American Environmental History (HIST3385), and History in the age of AI (HIST4812 and HIST5820). I haven’t taught it for a while by the seminar on environmental history is among my favorite too! (HIST6821 - if you’re a student and interested,let me know, so I can prioritize its scheduling.)
Isle Royale is in my bucket list. I love all the great lakes. My favorites are Lake Michigan (the sand dunes) and Lake Superior (e.g. pictured rocks). In the GL watershed, I love the great black swamp and the boundary waters.
Updated: 10/22/2026 06:55PM