Alumni Awardees See the Future in Glenn College Students

Public service, Matthew Damschroder says, impacts people and lifts up our entire civil society.

“For me, in all of the different roles that I’ve had, and particularly most recently at Job and Family Services, it’s exciting to very palpably experience helping people,” he said. “So whether it’s working with a child welfare system, foster parents and foster kids and adoption, child support, or through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, making sure that folks have resources in order to feed their household, those things have a greater kind of personal benefit or impact than just a salary.”

No stranger to the important work at Job and Family Services, Damschroder and his wife have been foster parents and have two adopted children. It has been a life-changing and life-affirming endeavor for all of them, and he wholeheartedly encourages everyone to be a champion for children and their future. 

Prior to his appointment as director of Ohio Department of Job and Family Services in 2021, Damschroder served as director of the Ohio Department of Administrative Services beginning in 2019. Before joining DAS, he served as state elections director in the office of then-Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted from 2011 to 2014, then as the assistant secretary of state and chief of staff. Previously, Damschroder led the Franklin County Board of Elections, one of the nation’s 25 largest local elections jurisdictions. In 2024, he received the Award for Public Service in Honor of John A. Begala from the Center for Community Solutions in Ohio.

In addition to his MA in Public Policy and Management from the Glenn College, Damschroder, a Columbus native, holds a BS in Business Administration from the Max M. Fisher College of Business at Ohio State.

“The arc of my career so far has been around identifying administrative burdens that are roadblocks for people that make it more difficult for them to engage with government or that can add costs and reduce efficiency,” he said.

Damschroder advises the next generation of public service leaders to stay engaged.

“Sometimes it can be a challenge to be in public service with just the ebbs and flows of administrations and how things change and laws are enacted. And so it’s always challenging,” he said. “Don’t let those things discourage you. View them as opportunities to excel still more in what you do. The personal rewards for being in public service are so incredibly tremendous, knowing that you’re improving the lives of other people.”

Having grown up on her family farm in western Ohio and becoming the first in her family to go to college, Mikayla Bodey is inspired by thinking about young rural Ohioans.

“I oftentimes think about what we can do as policymakers to try and make life better for young rural Ohioans who are maybe trying to start a business or maybe ready to go off to college or seek other higher education, enter the military or otherwise find their way into public service,” she said.

As the policy director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry under Ranking Member Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., she is the chief policy advisor for Senate Democrats on all issues in the committee’s jurisdiction. 

“I’ve been very blessed to have been part of numerous pieces of legislation that have been signed into law by the president,” Bodey said. 

Bodey previously led the committee’s work on rural economic development and energy issues for former Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. Under Stabenow, Bodey negotiated bipartisan rural broadband legislation in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, including many U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that serve rural communities with high-speed internet, and authored the Rural Development Subtitle of the Inflation Reduction Act, a historic $14 billion investment in rural clean energy that continues to power a lot of rural electric co-ops even to this day. 

“It’s an honor every day to work in the U.S. Senate and try to help senators advance their legislative priorities in the food and agriculture space, both to help secure thoughtful and diligent policy for farmers and rural communities and also for families who rely on nutrition assistance,” she said.

Prior to joining the committee, Bodey served as the senior legislative assistant for Rep. Angie Craig, D-Minn., and a legislative aide to former Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. 

“The Glenn College was really instrumental first in getting me to Washington, D.C., and putting me on Capitol Hill through the WAIP program, but also the Glenn College academic tracks really prepared me for the work that I do today,” said Bodey, who is a member of the Glenn College Alumni Society board and serves as chair of the D.C. Outreach Committee. “I was thankful enough to have great mentors and professors who were in food and agriculture who really gave me firsthand experience on the kinds of policies that I end up shaping now in my career.”

Judith Zimomra has an analogy for the work she’s doing as a faculty member at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

“It’s like you’re throwing a pebble into a lake and there’s the perpetual ripples every day,” she said. “You don’t know where those ripples are going to end 30, 40 or 50 years from now. But you know that some of the students in your class today are destined to be our leaders of tomorrow. And if there’s ever a time that we need good public sector leaders, it’s now.”

As a senior lecturer, she teaches undergraduate and graduate students as well as courses in the college’s Management Advancement for the Public Service (MAPS) program. She received the college’s Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2024 and 2025. Zimomra serves on the John Glenn College of Public Affairs Alumni Society Board of Directors and is the faculty advisor of the International City Management Association (ICMA) Student Chapter at Ohio State. She also sponsors the annual Charles Jr. and Anna Harmon Zimomra Scholarship, which is awarded to Glenn College MPA students, in memory of her parents, who both served on their hometown school board.

“What motivates me personally to give back to the Glenn College is that after a career in the public sector and working directly on projects and building buildings, stadiums and parks, I find that the opportunity to really have an impact on the next generation of public officials and public analysts and students who will become the future of our profession is extremely rewarding — more than I ever anticipated it could be,” Zimomra said.

She joined the college after a very successful career in public service — 22 years in Ohio working for the City of Worthington, Hamilton County and the City of Cleveland and 20 years in Florida as city manager of Sanibel Island. In 2013, she was recognized with the Glenn College Distinguished Alumni Award for Career Achievement.

During Zimomra’s tenure as city manager, Sanibel Island completed a $73 million sanitary sewer system and effluent reuse system, and the small town secured more than $65.3 million in grants, many for water quality and environmental initiatives. Additionally, she led the city as it navigated through the recovery of the impacts of Hurricanes Charlie and Irma and the 2018 red tide harmful algal bloom on Florida’s west coast. 

Zimomra earned her JD from Capital University Law School and her BA in speech communication and rhetoric from Kent State University.

She considers teaching at the Glenn College the perfect encore to her public service career.

“The greatest reward is the feedback from the students that you really made a difference in the work they’re planning to do: the internships they received, their capstone papers — all of which I’m involved in currently and I find extremely rewarding,” she said. “Last summer I had the opportunity to visit our students in the WAIP program in Washington, and to see the students blossom in their knowledge and their ability is just more reward than I would need.”

Read the latest edition of Public Address, the Glenn College magazine.