Daily Lobo new mexico
The Independent Student Voice of UNM since 1895
Physical Plant receives awards
thursday October 23, 2014 | Volume 119 | Issue 47
cat eyeing Eye-catching corsets
By Tomas Lujan
UNM energy engineers at the Physical Plant Department were recognized by the New Mexico Association of Energy Engineers with two prestigious awards for decades of achievements in increasing energy efficiency on campus. The PPD’s Engineering and Energy Services division won the Corporate Energy Management award for “outstanding accomplishments in developing, organizing, managing and implementing their corporate energy management program,” according to the NMAEE website. And Donald Swick, University facilities engineer, was honored with Energy Engineer of the Year award for his lifetime achievements. “The award is given to an individual for outstanding accomplishments in promoting the practices, principles and procedures of energy engineering,” the website said. Swick said his individual award is based on his work in energy conservation for the past 40 years at various locations around the state. Most of his work at UNM has involved upgrading the infrastructures of some of UNM’s oldest facilities, such as Northrop and Regener Halls, he said. “Each of those projects was a total upgrade of building controls, improvements to the heating and cooling systems and reduced wattage to lighting systems,” Swick said. “Typically, we saw in the range of 35- to 45-percent savings in each of those projects.” The true honor is having the opportunity to work with a talented group of engineers at the PPD, he said. “Not only are we looking at projects that involve improving the performance within buildings, we have developed a group of technicians that have the training and the skills to install, operate and maintain these new digital control systems,” Swick said. David Penasa, facilities engineer-electrical, said he has been involved with the PPD for 11 years. He and his fellow engineers have been working hard to reduce UNM’s energy dependence and “to be recognized for (their) work is extremely gratifying,” he said. “The fact that we can save on the order of more than a million dollars a year in utility costs by implementing these energy conservation projects, I think, is pretty impressive,” Penasa said. Penasa has also been promoted to the position of Manager of the facilities. He said that UNM can continue to expect significant contributions to energy efficiency around campus.
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Engineering page 3
William Aranda / Daily Lobo / @_WilliamAranda
Sharon Lokey’s kitten, Coda, sits next to a pile of homemade corsets at her home. For the full story see pages 8-9.
Space-time continuing thanks to grant $12 million grant from NIH will remain for the next five years
By Raleigh Silversmith The General Medical Sciences portion of the National Institutes of Health has given UNM’s Spatiotemporal Modeling Center more space and time for its research. Spatiotemporal research, also known as spatial-temporal, is the study of time and space as a whole. The STMC uses this method for cellular biology and aims to find better treatments for fighting ailments such as colon and pancreatic cancers. The Center’s $12 million grant has been renewed for another five years, raising the STMC’s hopes for recruiting up-andcoming researchers.
“Our research emphasizes the development of new single-cell and single-molecule technologies to generate improved quantitative data for modeling,” the STMC website states. The STMC is part of the UNM Health Sciences Center. It is also one of 14 institutes currently funded under the National Institutes of Health. Bridget Wilson, a professor in the Pathology Department at the UNM School of Medicine with more than 20 years of experience, specializes in imaging for cellular biology. “We take advantage of the scientific and technological
strengths in New Mexico, particularly in imaging and computation,” Wilson said. The STMC works with scientists from throughout the state, and cooperates with other UNM departments such as the UNM School of Engineering and even Los Alamos National Laboratories. There are 29 alumni of the program now positioned at universities, industry laboratories and medical schools. These departments usually work in conjunction with UNM’s Cancer Center, which is just one of 68 NCI-Designated Cancer Centers throughout the nation and is recognized for its excellent
contributions to cancer research. The center brings state-of-theart diagnoses and treatments of cancer to New Mexicans, utilizing federal and private funding of some $77 million for 60 percent of adults and nearly all children battling cancer. New Mexico’s largest team of oncology physicians and research scientists are “board-certified and specialize in every cancer,” and come from highly regarded institutions such as Johns Hopkins, the Mayo Clinic and partners with Memorial Medical Center in Las Cruces.
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Clinic sets sights on local disease By Lauren Topper
It might have been any group of settlers that brought the genetic mutation, unaware that it would pass from generation to generation. Now, hundreds of years later, many in New Mexico are still living with this incurable “family curse.” Dr. Sarah Youssof, a physician in the UNM Department of Neurology, is laying the groundwork for human clinical trials for this rare genetic disease known as oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy (OPMD). She is working to develop outcome measures gauging the severity of the disease that can be used to evaluate treatment options. According to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention’s website, OPMD is a type of muscular dystrophy that causes degeneration of certain muscles — initially muscles in the eyes and throat — leading to difficulty swallowing and opening the eyelids. OPMD can also cause weakness in the limbs, and symptoms of OPMD typically appear around middle age. The disease affects approximately 1 in 100,000 people, CDC officials said. However, it’s far less rare in New Mexico than in any other area of the country. “While it is an extremely rare disease — there are fewer than 150 definite cases in the state — approximately 12 times as many Hispanics in New Mexico
have the disease compared to the non-Hispanic population,” Youssof said. This is a result of what she called the “founder effect,” which may occur when a very small group of people migrate and settle in a new area, as occurred hundreds of years ago in New Mexico. The isolation of the newly settled population results in a small gene pool that amplifies the occurrence of any genetic diseases in the descendents of these people, she said. As a result of New Mexico’s high prevalence, UNMH has a unique clinic dedicated specifically to OPMD, which Youssof runs. Her challenges are not limit-
ed the lack of treatment options available; the absence of a set of criteria by which clinicians can evaluate sufferers is stressful as well, she said. “Why haven’t we done definitive studies of treatments, treatment outcomes? That seems like an obvious thing,” Youssof said. “There’s a lot of preparatory work that needs to be done before you can conduct a study. A very simple thing is, well, what do you measure? This is a disease that is very slow — it develops over years, decades. It affects a lot of different muscles, you know — eyes, throat, limb muscles. So what are you going to look at as your outcome?”
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OPMD page 2