The Department of Physics offers Ph.D. degrees through an increasingly strong, broad, and diverse, graduate program that successfully prepares our students for careers in academia, industry, and teaching. The size and breadth of our faculty enables us to be in the top 10–20 nationally in the number of Ph.D. degrees awarded annually, offering world-class training in a wide variety of research areas, including a Physics Education Research group that is a leader in developing innovative graduate education. Since the last external re- view, the academic credentials of the students that have enrolled in the graduate program have steadily increased (Figure 3). This has been accomplished while simultaneously improving the racial and ethnic diversity of the program so that, by autumn semester 2018, about 25% of domestic graduate students were underrepresented minorities. These achievements are, in part, attributable to the Department’s establishment of an MS-to-PhD Bridge Program that started in 2013, and by its increasing use of holistic admission practices. While by these metrics, the graduate program has been on a positive trajectory, challenges have emerged since the last review that must be met to maintain the growth of our graduate program. Chief among these is the significant decrease in departmental support for 1st- and 2nd-year graduate students as GTAs or department-supported GRAs, which for reasons discussed in Section 4.3 presents an existential threat to the long-term health of the graduate program and consequently the Department. Our goal is to address these concerns such that we can consolidate our position as one of the strongest, largest, and most diverse graduate programs in the country. The most recent ranking of physics departments by the National Research Council places Ohio State (approximately) 24th nationally and 13th among public universities.

This figure from the Grad Student Dashboard shows the increasingly diverse makeup of the Department of Physics Grad Student Cohort.