gscnews

From the Chair

First and foremost, healthcare negotiations have been completed. After weeks of far-reaching negotiations that delved into every aspect of graduate student costs for next year, we were able to reach a deal with the administration that will avoid any large amount of graduate student pain as the result of allowing students to opt-out. Further, grad students with other health insurance will also be allowed to opt-out, saving some students $300 / year. As per your voice in the student survey, the average graduate student will only have increased costs of about $200 for next year. This includes Caltech housing, parking and healthcare changes for next year. Caltech administrators were very helpful in the process, and I'd like to thank Anneila Sargent and John Hall for helping bring the negotiations to a close without any need for student action.

Our healthcare plan for next year will be little changed. More details will follow. The new plan will include a low copay for office visits, an out-of-pocket maximum of $1000, $300 more for preventative care (such as a physical or to contribute toward an HPV vaccination), and reduced mental health benefits (for non-AB-88 illnesses). Deductible and in-network coverage will not change.

As part of this final deal, students will contribute an additional $25 annually towards healthcare. Next year, the institute has also applied a Health Center fee of $200 annually to cover the costs of the center. Additionally, we expect the average student to have $250-300 additional out of pocket costs for next year. To offset these increases in costs, the Institute has recommended that options raise their stipends by $500. Which options will be able to do this have not been finalized, but we will publish the list when it is known. From our discussions, we expect the number of students to receive this stipend increase will be well over 50%, but not 100%.

Normally, students would also see increased costs from inflation that would dilute the effect of these stipend increases. However, in recent months, the economy has undergone deflation rather than inflation, and we do not expect the cost of living to increase much, if at all, next year. Caltech has also agreed to a 2% increase in graduate student housing rates, as opposed to a 6% increase in housing costs for undergraduates. Additionally, there are no current plans to raise parking fees next year. The combination of these effects will limit the negative effects on the graduate students, and I again thank Caltech administrators for engaging a worried student population.

Finally, the GSC has passed an additional resolution on Open-Access, cosigning a statement with several other colleges and non-profits in opposition to representative Conyers' bill (which would reverse the NIH open-access policy and any attempts by other government agencies in the future to do something similar). Just days after this statement was signed, the House Judiciary Committee changed the language of the NIH mandate to force Conyers to rewrite his bill, delaying any action on his part. Additionally, closer to home, Caltech faculty unanimously recommended the creation of Caltech Collections, which will be a larger version of the existing CODA database. As a result of this action, 2-3 times as many Caltech papers will be posted online, for free, for all to see. No action has yet been taken to address the remaining 25-30% of Caltech papers that cannot be published open-access in some post-review form. The Caltech Library Committee is monitoring the faculty response to Caltech Collections, and will consider recommending broader policy changes in the future.

In short, this month alone we helped negotiate a multi-million dollar contract in your favor and nearly triple the institute's globally visible scholarly output. What could you do on the GSC? If you have any ideas about how to improve the institute or graduate student life, please join us! The GSC welcomes its new members on the second Thursday in April, in Winnett Lounge.

Social Committee Report

We have begun planning for the Summer Formal 2009. To help select the best date, please visit here to answer a few short questions. We need your input to ensure the best quality event!

Gradiators 2009 is May 30. Field day for grad students. Are you up to the challenge? To register your team, please go to gsc.caltech.edu/gradiators

We are proud to announce several upcoming URS events: hip hop night date TBA, LGBTQ games night date TBA, and LA Cultural Events dates TBA. All members of the Caltech community are invited to sign up for these events!

The Grand Finale of the 2008-2009 Caltech/UCLA/USC Club Night Series is April 10. This is your last chance to celebrate in style, so let's make it a good one. Remember for just $20 from you, we take care of your: pre-party gathering, transportation, and no-hassle, no-cover club entry. Social Committee has your back! To sign up, email your UID # to jacobsen@caltech.edu.

To keep up to date on all the programming the social committee is providing, please see gsc.caltech.edu/social, which received a makeover this month. Let us know what you think!

Advocacy Committee Report

The Catalina RAs presented an overview of their RA duties. Grad RA duties have evolved from a single apartment manager type position to 3 graduate student RAs in the Catalina Complex. RAs assist with the safety net for graduates by supporting mental and physical well being of their residents. They get to know residents through community interactions, peer interactions, programming events, GSC events, etc. They provide assistance for community issues and mediating roommate conflicts. They bring students of concern to the attention of the student life office to make sure enough support is in place for that student. In the future, the Catalina RAs will have increased face to face time with residents during NSO activities and graduate office programming.

Havala Pye presented highlights from the GSC Housing and Cost of Living Survey (Fall 2008) pertaining to responses from students who were Catalina residents within the past 12 months of the survey. Results show that the RA role is not well defined (~0.5 on a scale of -5 to 5) compared to other areas in which Catalina RAs were rated. Younger year grads rated the RA role definition higher than upper year grads, which perhaps indicates a recent improvement in communicating their duties to the graduate student body.

The optional comments centered on the desire for more programming events with food, that 3 RAs are too many for the Catalinas, and the usefulness of some cleaning services (prompted by a survey question on cleaning services). The RAs thought that the response percentage in the survey was representative of the student body at large and pointed out that generally 10% of your residents take up 90% of your time in a residential life program.

The discussion centered on the workload of the current RAs and how many RAs are necessary to carry out the various RA duties and services that are expected of them. No consensus was reached about a recommended number of RAs, though everyone was in agreement that a female RA should be present in the Catalinas. A survey is being designed to gather more information from Catalina residents about the needs of the community, specifically-do residents want a female grad RA, do residents want RA programming, and if so what kind of programming? Safety net and crisis management are invaluable RA duties, what other responsibilities would you like to see an RA carry out? Further consultation of Student Affairs and the Graduate Office will help in making a recommendation for the graduate residential life program.

Academics Committee Report

We are now 2 terms into the year: are there any classes where the teaching (by faculty or TA) stood out? Is your advisor, or someone else on campus, going out of their way to make your graduate experience particularly meaningful? If so, nominate them at: www.its.caltech.edu/~gscacad/awardinfo.html.

We also continue to solicit information from all Caltech graduate students about ways to improve TA training and teaching and learning experiences in general across campus. Send your ideas to jshanata@caltech.edu.

Upcoming events include an April 28th Everhart Lecture Series talk by Josh Spurgeon at 4 pm in Guggenheim 101 (the Lees-Kubota lecture hall) and a Caltech Project for Effective Teaching (CPET) Seminar on designing courses by Dr. Michael Vicic (Lecturer in Chemical Engineering) on April 15th, 5:30 pm in the Beckman Institute Auditorium.

In its 2008-2009 budget, the GSC Board of Directors significantly increased its financial support of Academics Committee; we could use your help to turn these funds into effective and interesting programs. You can participate by becoming a member of the 2009-2010 Board of Directors, which will be elected to serve on behalf of graduate students on April 9th, 2009 in Winnett by getting nominated (see: www.gsc.caltech.edu/join.html for details). Alternatively, e-mail me (jshanata@caltech.edu) for details of the next Academics Committee meeting: noon in Chandler on Thursday, March 26th which, as always, is open to any Caltech graduate student.

Pasadena, Calif.-- A third-year PhD chemistry student at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is the first-ever winner of the newly created Lemelson-Caltech Student Prize.

Ophir Vermesh

Ophir Vermesh will receive $30,000 in recognition of his contributions to the creation of an innovative "blood barcode chip" that promises to revolutionize diagnostic medical testing. The Lemelson-Caltech Student Prize is supported through a partnership with the Lemelson-MIT Program. The program recognizes outstanding inventors, encourages sustainable new solutions to real-world problems, and enables and inspires young people to pursue creative lives and careers through invention. The Lemelson-MIT Prize has been handed out at MIT since 1994. Under a new effort to expand the prize, a similar award is now being given to Caltech students.

The selection committee also named a runner-up: William Chueh, a Caltech graduate student in materials science, who will receive a $10,000 award through the additional support of Caltech alumnus Michael Hunkapiller.

Vermesh--who works in the labs of James Heath, the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor and professor of chemistry at Caltech--has been a key contributor in an effort to develop a microfluidics chip designed to take a finger-prick of blood, separate the plasma from the whole blood, and then assay it for a large panel of blood-based protein biomarkers using a barcode-like format, all within a five minute time period. This microchip, called the Integrated Blood Barcode Chip (IBBC), has the potential to completely change how clinical-based blood protein biomarkers are measured. According to Heath, "As a measurement of the value of the IBBC, it is already being utilized in multiple human trials, including a brain cancer trial that involves oncologists at UCLA, and will eventually extend to include patients from Kaiser hospitals in California. Ophir's chip dramatically expedites and lowers the cost of testing for blood proteins in assessing disease."

Born in Israel in 1979, Vermesh and his family moved to the United States when he was two years old. He has grown up primarily in Southern California and earned his BS in chemistry and mathematics and his MS in chemical engineering in 2002 at Stanford University. After working briefly as a researcher in metabolic engineering and neurology labs at UCLA, Vermesh enrolled as a medical student at UCLA in the fall of 2004, where he is in his fifth year of the UCLA-Caltech MD/PhD program. He plans to pursue academic medicine and hopes to help bring the cost-effective IBBC to third-world countries, where access to health screening is limited.

William Chueh, a runner-up in this year's prize, works under Sossina Haile, professor of materials science and chemical engineering. Chueh has developed a method to produce fuel directly from heat, by heating and cooling cerium dioxide with the effect of splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. "William is, without question, an outstanding inventor with a passion for creating sustainable new solutions to real-world problems," says Haile, who has worked with Chueh when he was an undergraduate and graduate student at Caltech. "William has been and continues to be a remarkably creative and inventive force behind what may be one of the most significant breakthroughs in sustainable energy research of our times," says Haile.

The evaluation committee was so impressed by Chueh's project that the original second-place prize of $1,000 was raised to $10,000.

Born in Taiwan, Chueh immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of 11. He studied at Caltech, majoring in applied physics, and completed his senior thesis project with Haile on fuel cell catalysis. He remained in Haile's research group as a graduate student and is expected to graduate in 2010.

"The Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize finalists and winners have the potential to be the technological and entrepreneurial leaders of tomorrow," states Joshua Schuler, executive director of the Lemelson-MIT Program that oversees the Lemelson-Caltech Student Prize. "The winners were selected based on the potential societal impact of their inventions, their ability to act as role models, and their unwavering dedication to invention. These innovators are helping to close the gap between science and societal needs by making contributions that will foster cultural appreciation for invention's role in strengthening the U.S. economy."

Jerome H. Lemelson, one of U.S. history's most prolific inventors, and his wife Dorothy, founded the Lemelson-MIT Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is funded by the Lemelson Foundation, a philanthropy that celebrates and supports inventors and entrepreneurs in order to strengthen social and economic life in the United States and developing countries.

With further support from Caltech alumnus Michael Hunkapiller, the Lemelson-Caltech Student Prize program was able to offer a runner-up prize this year. Hunkapiller received his PhD at Caltech in 1974 and is a coinventor of the DNA sequencer, technology developed at Caltech that allowed the Human Genome Project to map and sequence the three billion base pairs of human DNA.

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More information:

Lemelson-Caltech Student Prize:
www.lemelson-prize.caltech.edu

Lemelson-MIT Program:
web.mit.edu/invent

MIT Takes the Lead on Open Access

The GSC urged Caltech to take a similar position earlier this academic year. In fact, according to GSC Chair Evans Boney, discussion about such a resolution between MIT and Caltech's GSC representatives may have helped push the proposal coming before MIT's faculty board.

The GRB: Call for reps and input

We are currently looking for more grad student representatives to sit on cases (of which there are only five to ten per year), since most options are NOT represented on the Board right now. However, even if the slots for your option are full, you can still become a director at large: www.its.caltech.edu/~grb

Furthermore, this year the GRB will making changes to its bylaws that will help us better publicize the Board's purpose and its workings. Hence, we're also looking for people to be a part of that process, whether it be as a member of the board or an outside observer. If you're interested in joining the GRB, want to provide input, or have any other GRB-related inquiries, just send an e-mail (eve@caltech.edu).

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