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BY CYNTHIA LEE
UCLA Today Staff
The extraordinary events of the past year have
kept the nation in a tailspin — the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon; the deaths of five unsuspecting
victims of anthrax; the tainted letters sent by a still-at-large
assailant who infected 18 and spurred 30,000 fearful people to
start a regimen of prophylactic antibiotics.
But this has also been a year of extraordinary
response as the work of engineers, bioterrorism experts and public
health professionals took on new urgency. Since 9/11, the University
of California, the national laboratories it manages, UCLA and
its sister institutions have been at the forefront of that response
in California to the war effort against terrorism.
“Acting together, the UCLA community has met the challenges
of 9/11 admirably,”
Chancellor Albert Carnesale told thousands who
gathered in Dickson Plaza on the one-year anniversary of the attacks.
“I’m proud of all of you. We have tried, and we will
continue to try, to make sense out of what is clearly a senseless
tragedy. We are committed to working together with like-minded
people and institutions everywhere to ensure that the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11 will be the last of their kind.”
In the past year, dozens of UC experts have testified
before or briefed government officials on topics ranging from
toxins to “dirty bombs.” As universities assessed
their own roles in a post-9/11 environment, Chancellor Carnesale,
an authority in international relations and security, served on
panels at an Association of American Universities meeting in April
and at the Third Annual Science Coalition National Media Roundtable
last May.
UCLA experts also offered information and reassurance
in news interviews on topics ranging from building structure safety
to trauma response and recovery.
THE THREAT OF BIOTERRORISM
As near-hysteria gripped a nation confronted by anthrax, health
professionals at UCLA disseminated valuable information.
Physicians at the David Geffen School of Medicine
developed a Web site linking the public to essential information
from more than 30 health-care professionals and experts on bioterrorism,
emergency medicine and disaster response.
“The project was aimed at relieving the
sense of fear and confusion that has prevailed since the anthrax
attacks,” said UCLA emergency medicine specialist Eric Savitsky,
project co-coordinator and associate professor of medicine.
To familiarize physicians with the agents most
likely to be used in a bioterrorist incident, faculty with the
Center for Public Health & Disasters pulled together a comprehensive
Web site as well.
As state leaders tried to grasp the complexities
of this new problem, Peter Katona, an infectious disease and bioterrorism
expert and assistant clinical professor, briefed the State Assembly
Committee on Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials on the issues.
UCLA’s team at Environment, Health and Safety,
which responded to about 100 incidents of suspected (but unsubstantiated)
anthrax on campus, expanded its training activities with the LAPD,
the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the L.A.
FBI Office. Director Rick Greenwood recently helped prepare videotapes
for a NASA proposal to use space technology to develop tests for
detecting biowarfare agents.
As more cases of anthrax contamination surfaced,
a 30-member Bioterrorism Preparedness Task Force was mobilized
to ensure that the campus and the UCLA Medical Center were ready
to respond. Task force members are still engaged in activities
on a local, state and federal level, said David Pegues, task force
chair and an infectious-disease epidemiologist.
“There’s now an attempt to organize a coordinated
UC-wide response, to bring researchers in the basic sciences,
such as biology and chemistry, together with experts in health
policy, engineering and those with an interest in biowarfare and
biodefense, to form a systemwide bioterrorism center that can
tap into federal grant opportunities,” said Pegues. “Such
a center would foster collaboration and build on the strength
of all the campuses.”
Katona, a task force member, has been asked by
the UC Office of the President to create a UCLA plan as part of
this effort.
THE POST-9/11 BATTLEFIELD
Among the UC researchers working across a wide range of scientific
disciplines on issues of homeland security and military defense
are faculty at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering
and Applied Science:
• Sensors. Tiny, wireless sensors known
as micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) magnetometers could
give the military the kind of surveillance necessary to detect
tanks, trucks or even terrorists hiding in caves, to depths of
100 feet.
“You really can’t carry out military
operations without equipment, weaponry and vehicles — all
of which are made of metal,” said Professor Jack Judy of
electrical engineering, who leads the team building MEMS magnetometers
with funding from the Department of Defense. “When metal
moves, it disturbs the earth’s magnetic field. And we know
how to detect changes in the earth’s magnetic field.”
MEMS magnetometers, along with other powerful
wireless sensors developed by electrical engineering professors
Bill Kaiser and Greg Pottie and tested in field exercises with
the Marine Corps and Navy, could be scattered by airdrop, inserted
by artillery or individually positioned to provide tactical information.
Further, tiny sensors that can monitor soil and air for contaminants
are being developed by UCLA’s new Center for Embedded Networked
Sensing, which will receive up to $40 million for research from
the National Science Foundation.
• Unmanned vehicle networks. Researchers
are designing networks to enable unmanned battlefield vehicles
to communicate with one another.
The Multimedia Intelligent Network of Unattended Mobile Agents
(Minuteman) “will enable the Navy to bring a fully networked
force to the battlefield,” said Computer Science Professor
Mario Gerla, who heads the $11-million project funded by the Office
of Naval Research. “This will be the glue that holds together
supporting technologies such as mission planning, path planning,
reasoning, decision-making and distributed real-time computing
and control.”
• Battlefield strategy. Another engineering
team is using computers to help military leaders determine how
a campaign will fare before committing troops and equipment.
“One can pose scenarios, and then this model helps guide
the decision-making process,” said Jeff Shamma, professor
of mechanical and aerospace engineering. Information, such as
the objectives of both friendly and hostile forces and the number
of troops and tanks each side possesses, is fed into a computer,
which then simulates the outcome of any proposed course of action.
• Dynamic vision. Computer Science Professor
Stefano Soatto and researchers at the engineering school’s
Vision Lab, which he heads, are attempting to equip computers
with human-like vision.
“In practice, the human visual system is
still by far the best around, but this may not be so for long,”
Soatto said.
The projects under way involve “dynamic
vision,” the ability of a computer to use visual sensory
information to perform assigned tasks, such as exploring underground
bunkers or monitoring bank vaults, in response to what the computer
“sees.”
COPING WITH TRAUMA
Post-9/11, UCLA faculty have addressed more than the physical
threat of terrorism. Psychiatrists here brought the emotional
trauma of that day’s events into focus when they helped
craft a documentary that appeared on PBS stations nationwide this
month. It tells the story of three generations of one Brooklyn
family caught up in the evacuation of lower Manhattan following
the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.
The National Center for Child Traumatic Stress,
jointly operated by the UCLA Neuropsychi-atric Institute and the
Duke University Medical Center, and UCLA’s Center for Community
Health underwrote the film and helped shape its content to depict
traumatic experiences, post-traumatic stress reactions and recovery.
This December, the campus will host a three-day
interdisciplinary symposium on the human response to trauma. The
meeting is being convened by the Brain Research and
Neuropsychiatric institutes at UCLA, the Anxiety
Project at UCLA, the Graduate Division and the Foundation for
Psycho-cultural Research. National trauma experts will discuss
post-traumatic stress disorder as it shapes and is shaped by our
biology, culture and our shared agony over events such as 9/11.
Contributing to this story were David
Brown, Rachel Champeau, Judy Lin-Eftekhar, Dan Page and Chris
Sutton.
Copyright 2002 UC Regents
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