As Shawnee State University officially ends its 25th anniversary celebration, it invites community members to look toward the future during a special symposium entitled “Portsmouth, Ohio: Current Assets and Opportunities for the Future” to be held on Thursday, April 19, at 4 p.m. in the Flohr Lecture Hall of the Clark Memorial Library.

The symposium is open to the public and will include a presentation on a research project that was conducted by students during the fall semester as part of the Appalachian Teaching Project sponsored by the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC).

As part of the project, five students, under the guidance of instructors Chris Shaffer, director of the SSU Office of Institutional Effectiveness, and Dr. Brenda Haas, dean of the SSU University College, conducted research on Portsmouth’s community assets, including demographics, organizational capacity, infrastructure, and natural and manmade resources.

The students, Alina Dashkewitz, an organizational management and linguistics and translation studies major from Chelyabinsk, Russia; Mandie Maxwell, an international relations major with a minor in marketing and a concentration in Arabic from Wooster; Adam Phillips, a history and international relations major from Portsmouth; Jon Phillips, a history major from Portsmouth; and Franklin Wallbrown, a mathematical science major with a concentration in Geology from Minford presented their findings at a conference in Washington, D.C. in the fall and during the Celebration of Scholarship conference on SSU’s campus this spring.

“We wanted to have an opportunity to let the students share their research with the community,” Shaffer said. “This was an outstanding project and the students did an incredible job.”

Following the presentation, a panel discussion, moderated by Dr. Tim Scheurer, dean of the SSU College of Arts and Sciences, will be held. Panelists will include Ed Burghard, CEO and manager at The Burghard Group, LLC, which was established to introduce the Strengthening Brand America Project, a community of practice to catalyze the transfer of product and corporate branding expertise from the private sector to the public sector as a means to dramatically improve the competitiveness of states and communities for capital investment.

Burghard has more than 35 years’ experience in marketing and branding. This experience includes serving as Harley Procter Marketer for Proctor & Gamble, where he helped create the brand building framework model used globally by Proctor & Gamble to manage their brands and was recognized as one of the top three global marketers for the company. He served as executive director of the Ohio Business Development Coalition, leading the creation of a brand for the state of Ohio under Governor Taft. Burghard also served under Governor Ted Strickland and Governor John Kasich.

Clifford Poirot, Ph.D., professor of Economics at Shawnee State University, will also serve on the panel, as well as Portsmouth Mayor David Malone. Poirot has more than 20 years’ experience in education and has published research on economic history, financial crises in former centrally planned economies and the philosophy of economics.

Malone has served as Portsmouth’s mayor for more than a year and previously served on Portsmouth City Council, as its president.