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OPERS, STRS officials confident during downturn

January 8, 2009

by Adam King

Ohio’s state pension retirement funds have the strength to stand up to the economic turmoil and continue business as usual, according to officials with both funds.

Mike Nehf, executive director of the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio (STRS), said the fund’s current financial state also means retirees will keep receiving their monthly pension payments.

“We’re concerned as you would expect us to be, but we invest for the long term and continue to make investments with the long term in mind,” said Nehf. “The board continues to look at its asset allocation — the way it invests its money.

We’ll continue to have actuarial studies on employee and employer contributions to the system, and we’ll continue to report through our newsletters, Web site and during our board meetings our status each month.”

STRS, which covers Ohio State faculty, is using only a small portion of its assets to pay current pensions, which means it has time for the markets to come back up in order to cover future retirees, Nehf said.

The one area where STRS Ohio is feeling the crunch is in its health care program for retirees. Just one-third of those in the program are non-Medicare recipients, but half of all claims come from that group. The health care program fund, which is separate from the pension fund, pays out $1.5 million per day for health care costs.

House Bill 315, currently up for consideration in the General Assembly, would draw another 2.5 percent of teachers’ salaries and 2.5 percent of employers’ contributions over a five-year period (0.5 percent per year), resulting in a $500 million annual injection. With that dedicated revenue stream, STRS Ohio said it can meet future health care costs on a long-term basis.

The Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, which covers every other state worker including OSU staff, said in a statement on its Web site that it will navigate through this storm as it has others in its 73-year history.

“Our fund is strong enough to weather these challenges in the financial market,” the statement read. “The pension funds for our 908,000 members are safe. The stability and financing of our pension system is solid.

“As a long-term investor, OPERS weathers the ups and downs in the market with a diversified portfolio spread over many asset classes and has a disciplined approach to investments.”

Looking for extraterrestrial life in all the right places

January 8, 2009

Scientists are expanding the search for extraterrestrial life — and they’ve set their sights on some decidedly unearthly planets.

Cold “super-Earths” — giant, “snowball” planets that astronomers have spied on the outskirts of faraway solar systems — could potentially support some kind of life, the scientists have found.

Such planets are plentiful; experts estimate that one-third of all solar systems contain super-Earths.

“We know there are a lot of super-Earths out there, and the next generation of telescopes will be even better at spotting them,” said Scott Gaudi, assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State.

Despite the name, a super-Earth has little in common with the Earth that we know — other than the fact it has a solid surface. A super-Earth is covered with ice and may have a substantial atmosphere — perhaps much thicker than the Earth’s.

Yet Gaudi joined with Eric Gaidos of the University of Hawaii and Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to model whether such planets might harbor a liquid ocean that could support life and whether they might be detectable from Earth.

Gaidos reported the team’s early results at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco last month.

“It turns out that if super-Earths are young enough, massive enough or have a thick atmosphere, they could have liquid water under the ice or even on the surface,” Gaudi said. “And we will almost certainly be able to detect these habitable planets if they exist.”

The most promising technique for finding super-Earths is the one Gaudi prefers: Gravitational microlensing. When one star happens to cross in front of another as seen from Earth, it magnifies the light from the more distant star like a lens. If planets are orbiting the lens star, they boost the magnification briefly as they pass by.

Gaudi and his colleagues first discussed the project this summer at an Aspen Center for Physics workshop. The workshops are sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and they offer an informal atmosphere for scientists to propose new ideas.

There, the three talked about using microlensing to search for life in a new way.

Most such efforts focus on finding planets in another solar system’s “habitable zone” — the distance from a star where temperatures are just right for supporting liquid water on the surface and, thus, for life as we know it.

But water is much more plentiful beyond the habitable zone, in the outer reaches of a solar system, Gaudi said. It’s most often found as ice — at the heart of gas planets such as Jupiter, on frozen moons such as Europa and on super-Earths. In fact, Earth’s water probably originated elsewhere, and found its way here on comets or asteroids.

So rather than looking for warm planets like Earth that happened to acquire water, Gaudi and his colleagues decided to look at cold super-Earths that formed with water already in place.

They examined the likelihood that some internal heat source might enable liquid water to form under the ice. As Gaidos and Seager modeled scenarios for heating the interior of super-Earths, Gaudi modeled whether the planets they hypothesized would be detectable.

Gaidos and Seager found that very big super-Earths, ones around 10 times the mass of Earth, could retain enough heat from their formation to form a liquid ocean beneath the ice — even though those planets would be located some five times farther from their star than Earth is from its sun.

Gaudi determined that such planets would be detectable. In fact, microlensing is best at detecting planets that far out in a solar system, he said.

As to what type of life might be found there, it’s too early to speculate.

“A more worrisome question is, if these planets have life on them, how would we know it?” he said. “We have a hard enough time trying to figure out whether there’s life on Europa, let alone something that’s hundreds of light years away.”

18 OSU faculty earn AAAS fellowships

January 8, 2009

An astronomer who’s leading the pack in finding planets outside our solar system, a dental researcher who’s interviewed the Dalai Lama and an anthropologist who’s fought to keep science in Ohio’s public school classrooms are among the 18 Ohio State faculty who have been named as new Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest science organization in the world.

“The work that these researchers have done in their respective fields of study is an outstanding reminder of their exceptional contributions to science in general, and to this university,” said Caroline Whitacre, vice president for research.

Only one other institution in the country surpassed Ohio State this year in the number of new Fellows. In fact, Ohio State has either been first or second annually since 2002 in the number of faculty named and is believed to have the largest contingent of current Fellows of any university in the country.

This year’s election brings the total number of AAAS Fellows at OSU to 159.

“Ohio State’s large contingent of AAAS fellows from many disciplines underscores the excellence of our faculty,” said President Gordon Gee. “They are among this nation’s finest scholars, and their expertise in the classroom and the laboratory directly benefits our students and our state.”

The University of California, Irvine had the most honored faculty with 21 named as Fellows. 

A total of 486 AAAS members nationally were named Fellows because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. New Fellows will be recognized Feb. 14 during the 2009 AAAS annual meeting in Chicago.

Ohio State’s faculty newly named as Fellows include:

• Hojjat Adeli, Civil, Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science: For distinguished contributions to computational infrastructure engineering and worldwide leadership in computational science and engineering as a prolific author, keynote speaker and editor-in-chief of journals.
• Steven Clinton, Hematology/Oncology and Human Nutrition: For distinguished contributions to cancer research, particularly studies of diet, nutrition and pharmaceutical agents on etiology, prevention and therapy of genitourinary cancers.
• Robert Coleman, Chemistry: For distinguished contributions to chemistry and medicinal chemistry, particularly on synthetic, organic and bioorganic chemistry, and studies of naturally occurring antitumor agents.
• Peter Curtis, Evolutionary, Ecological and Organismal Biology: For distinguished contributions to global change biology and restoration ecology, and for outstanding service as an academic department chair and research administrator.
• Andrew Gould, Astronomy: For pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of gravitational microlensing, particularly as a tool for detection of planets around stars outside our own solar system.
• Tsonwin Hai, Center for Molecular Neurobiology and Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry: For distinguished contributions to molecular biology, particularly studies of ATF/CREB family of transcription factors on stress responses in cancer and diabetes.
• Randall Harris, Emergency Medicine and Pathology and Public Health – Epidemiology: For distinguished contributions to cancer epidemiology and chemoprevention, particularly for studies of cyclooxygenase-2 inhibitor anti-inflammatory drugs in the prevention of cancer.
• Anita Hopper, Molecular Genetics: For distinguished contributions to molecular genetics and cell biology, particularly for the elucidation of mechanisms that control the distribution of transfer RNA.
• Rebecca Jackson, Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation: For distinguished contributions to endocrinology, particularly for women’s health and postmenopausal osteoporosis, and as vice chair of the Women’s Health Initiative.
• Chris Kochanek, Astronomy: For pioneering contributions to the theory of strong gravitational lensing and its application to the study of dark matter, cosmological parameters and galaxy evolution.
• Jeffrey McKee, Anthropology and Evolutionary, Ecological and Organismal Biology: For distinguished contributions to paleoanthropology, evolutionary biology and science education.
• Chia-Hsiang Menq, Mechanical Engineering: For distinguished contributions to mechanical engineering, particularly on coordinate metrology, ultra-precision motion control and instrumentation for imaging and manipulation of microstructures.
• Nitin Padture, Materials Science Engineering: For outstanding contributions to advanced ceramics and nanomaterials, particularly for understanding of processing and mechanical behavior of ceramic composites and coatings.
• Thomas Santner, Statistics and Public Health – Biostatistics: For distinguished contributions to statistics, major developments in the design, analysis and application of computer experiments and outstanding service to the profession.
• Larry Schlesinger, Infectious Diseases, Microbiology and Molecular Virology, Immunology and Medical Genetics: For distinguished contributions and leadership to the fields of microbiology and infectious diseases, particularly in pathogenesis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection and lung innate immunity.
• John Sheridan, Oral Biology and Molecular Virology, Immunology and Medical Genetics: For distinguished contributions to immunology and virology, particularly in the area of neuroendocrine regulation of the immune response, anti-viral immunity and viral pathogenesis.
• Gary Wenk, Psychology and Neuroscience and Molecular Virology, Immunology and Medical Genetics: For distinguished contributions in neuropharmacology, neurodegenerative diseases,and neuroinflammatory processes.
• William Yuh, Radiology: For distinguished contributions to medical science, including dynamic contrast enhanced and high dose MR and individualized management for cancer and acute stroke.

Johnson & Johnson exec tapped to lead Fisher college

January 8, 2009

Christine Poon has built her career upon the notion that research is crucial to business success.

As she’s risen to the position of vice chairman of Johnson & Johnson and worldwide chair of that company’s Pharmaceuticals Group, part of her responsibility was to oversee the expansion of its pharmaceutical research pipeline.

She’ll bring that experience and more with her when she becomes dean of the Max M. Fisher College of Business in April 2009.    Continue reading ‘Johnson & Johnson exec tapped to lead Fisher college’

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