The Daily Aztec - New joint doctoral programs

Quoted from http://www.thedailyaztec.com/city/new-joint-doctoral-programs-1.2184938:

The Daily Aztec - New joint doctoral programs

New joint doctoral programs

By Janel Bruan, Contributor

Published: Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Updated: Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Glenn Connelly / Photo Editor

San Diego State will soon offer two new joint doctoral programs, evolutionary biology and geophysics. Both programs are accepting students for next semester.

San Diego State is classified as a doctoral research university, and for a good reason.
Evolutionary biology and geophysics have joined the ranks as two new joint doctoral programs after being approved late last month.

It’s been 50 years since the creation of the Master Plan for Higher Education in California, which reserved the granting of doctoral degrees for the UC system and assigned the CSU system to train students at the master’s level. The caveat, which SDSU has taken advantage of, is that the plan allows CSUs to partner with doctoral-granting universities to create joint doctoral programs.

The first joint doctoral program was established in 1964 between chemists at SDSU and UCSD. The two universities created a partnership that allowed others that weren’t permitted to issue a doctoral degree the opportunity to join with them. The Ph.D.’s issued would be given through both universities simultaneously.

Sixteen joint doctoral programs have been established between CSU and UC schools, 14 of which are at SDSU. The last full program to be approved was computational sciences with Claremont Graduate University in 2002.

“The Ph.D. programs are a defining feature of SDSU,” Vice President for Research and Dean of Graduate Affairs Thomas Scott, Ph.D., said.

Whereas the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching classifies the other 22 CSUs as masters institutions, it classifies SDSU as a doctoral research university with high research activity, according to Scott.

Evolutionary biology is offered as a joint program with UC Riverside.

“Southern California is internationally recognized as an area with one of the world’s greatest biodiversity,” Annalisa Berta, program coordinator for the SDSU / UC Riverside joint doctoral program, said.  “We have a very strong Masters of Science program in evolutionary biology and we wanted to build on that to offer talented doctoral students the opportunity of coming to SDSU to study molecular evolution, genomics, paleontology, population biology and systematic.”

Each program has its own curriculum. Students who will take evolutionary biology will spend their first year at SDSU and the next year at UC Riverside taking classes as well as working in the lab. The remaining years will be spent back at SDSU working on their research.

“Evolutionary biology is a very broad, diverse field,” Berta said.  “It is especially relevant in society today. We know we are losing biodiversity due to human activities. In order to know what we’re losing we have to know what we have that is how to generate and maintain biodiversity.”

Berta said the program will also offer training in comparative genomics, which is the study of gene structures of different species and allows the study of the evolution of infectious diseases.

Students in the geophysics program will be collaborating with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Both programs took about 10 years to develop and proceed through all the levels of academic administrative review.

“The Ph.D. programs drive the designation of being a doctoral research university,” Scott said. “The faculty members from the Ph.D. programs are the ones that bring the disproportionate amount of our external funding that allows research to thrive. They really are the driving force behind what has become a major research university. It’s critically important for us to keep these healthy and continue to develop them as much as we can.”

Evolutionary biology and geophysics are both accepting students for next fall.

SDSU is currently in the process of developing more joint doctoral programs, according to Scott.

San Diego State University - Department of Geological Sciences - Joint Doctoral Program in Earthquake Science and Applied Geophysics

Quoted from http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/jdp/:

San Diego State University - Department of Geological Sciences - Joint Doctoral Program in Earthquake Science and Applied Geophysics

Geophysics
Earthquake Science and Applied Geophysics
Joint Doctoral Program

A new, challenging program of graduate study leading to a Joint Ph. D. in Geophysics has been initiated by the University of California, San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and San Diego State University. The program will start in the Fall of 2010.

THE PROGRAM
A joint graduate group from the Geophysics Program of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the Department of Geological Sciences at San Diego State University (SDSU) will offer a Joint Doctoral Program in Geophysics beginning in fall 2010. The complementary specialties and ongoing, vigorous collaborations between the two groups result in two focus areas: earthquake science and applied geophysics. Integrating geophysics at UCSD and SDSU will provide outstanding opportunities for students to develop the skills needed to address important local, regional, and global societal problems where geophysics can contribute to the solutions. Strong capabilities will be in:

1. earthquake-hazard investigations (incorporating tools such as observational and computational seismology, airborne and satellite-based geodesy and remote sensing, and earthquake geology), and
2. energy, resource, and environmental exploration methods (mainly land and marine seismology and electromagnetics).

Graduates of the program will be prepared to begin rewarding geophysics careers and assume leadership roles as university faculty, government scientists, and industry researchers. Joint UCSD and SDSU committees will administer and monitor the admission, advising, evaluation, graduation, and all other academic processes related to the joint doctoral program. Students will spend at least one academic year of residency at each campus. A Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. D.) degree in Geophysics will be awarded upon completion of the program in the names of The Regents of the University of California on behalf of the UCSD and The Trustees of the California State University on behalf of SDSU. The SDSU graduate cataloque description of the program can be viewed here pdf.

THE COMMUNITY
Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD is located on the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, California 24 kilometers from SDSU which is 19 kilometers east of downtown San Diego. San Diego enjoys a reputation for a highly desirable climate and life style. There are major cultural attractions such as music, dance, and theater performances and galleries exhibiting all types of visual works of art. San Diego is also well-known for its museums, theme parks, and a world-class zoo. Major spectator and participant sports abound at both the professional and amateur levels. The near-by ocean, mountains, and deserts provide an unusually diverse variety of yearround outdoor activities.

THE UNIVERSITIES
More than 33,000 students make SDSU one of the largest schools in the 23-campus California State University System. SDSU is unique within the system because of its large research effort and 16 joint doctoral programs. SDSU was ranked the number one small research university in the nation by Academics Analytics using the faculty scholarly productivity (FSP) index. This index ranks UCSD as 11th in the large research university category. UCSD has over 22,000 students and ranked 7th in the 2008 U. S. News and World Report ratings of the country’s top public national universities; within the geophysics and seismology specialty, the UCSD Scripps program ranked 5th overall.

FINANCIAL SUPPORT
Annual stipends will be provided for all joint Ph. D. students, as will be the full cost of tuition. Students will also receive complete health benefit packages.

Prospective students for Fall 2010 are encouraged to send their inquiries to: Steven Day
Department of Geological Sciences
San Diego State University
San Diego, CA 92182-1020
day@moho.sdsu.edu

Temblor in Chile gives California insight - SignOnSanDiego.com

Quoted from http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/mar/04/temblor-in-chile-gives-california-insight-on/:

Temblor in Chile gives California insight - SignOnSanDiego.com

Temblor in Chile gives California insight

By Scott LaFee, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 12:59 a.m / AP

Soldiers patrol in Concepcion , Chile, Wednesday, March 3, 2010. An 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck central Chile early Saturday. The government sent soldiers and ordered a 6 p.m. to -noon curfew to quell looting. (AP Photo/ Natacha Pisarenko)

When an earthquake is powerful enough to shift Earth’s axis, even the toughest building codes in the world won’t stand tall.

The Saturday temblor in Chile registered a magnitude of 8.8. It was the world’s fifth-largest quake since 1900, strong enough to tweak the planet’s axis more than 3 inches and speed its spin ever so slightly.

Chile’s stringent building codes appear to have limited the quake’s worst effects to mostly older, seismically susceptible structures. They also may have provided a peek into how California might fare in a massive temblor.

In dealing with their long, mutual history of unsettled ground, Chile and California have created some of the toughest, most rigorously enforced seismic building codes and design standards in the world. But those rules and laws are no guarantee of safety, scientists and engineers said.

“People think the codes are intended to eliminate damage. They aren’t,” said Tom Rockwell, a professor of geological sciences at San Diego State University. “They’re meant to mitigate collapse and death. If we have a large earthquake, there will be damage. The hope is that it will not be deadly or catastrophic.”

Earthquake standards and building codes in California reflect an always-evolving assessment of risk and the function and value of different kinds of infrastructure, said Jorge Meneses, chairman of the seismic and geohazards practice group in the San Diego offices of Kleinfelder Inc., a national construction and engineering company.

The degree of acceptable damage depends on the structure’s importance, he said.

While modern homes may not crumble in a temblor, they could still suffer irreparable damage and have to be torn down, Meneses said. “Things like bridges, highways and hospitals are designed to withstand some damage and remain operating because they are vital to any recovery. And something like a nuclear power plant is extremely engineered because even the smallest amount of damage might have catastrophic consequences.”

Then there are the older structures.

“Some people think we don’t have ‘bad buildings’ in California,” said Richard McCarthy, director of the state’s Seismic Safety Commission. “We have thousands of them — structures made of unreinforced masonry or concrete or built to now-inadequate standards and not retrofitted. They’re all vulnerable to coming down.”

A major temblor in California is inevitable.

The U.S. Geological Survey said there’s a more than 99 percent chance that one or more quakes with a magnitude of at least 6.7 will occur somewhere in the state during the next 30 years. The chance of a quake registering 7.5 or greater in that time is 46 percent, and the epicenter would most likely be in Southern California.

But a “Big One” in California would not be like a big quake in Chile. The southern San Andreas fault zone, which extends from the Salton Sea to the town of Parkfield in Monterey County, poses the greatest seismic threat. But it isn’t capable of producing a magnitude-8.8 temblor, seismologists said.

California’s plate tectonics differ fundamentally from Chile’s. The San Andreas fault grinds horizontally rather than subducting — one plate diving below another. Also, the planet’s crust below California is thinner.

“To get a really big quake, you need a very large area and a lot of displacement,” Rockwell said. “The crust (beneath California) isn’t thick enough. Even in a worst-case scenario, I don’t think we would see anything larger than an 8.0 or 8.1.”

California has recorded just two earthquakes approaching magnitude 8: the 7.9 Tejon quake in 1857 and the 7.8 San Francisco quake in 1906.

Locally generated quakes tend to be much smaller, in the range of magnitude 3 to 5, though some active offshore fault zones may be capable of generating quakes of up to 7.7.

The deeper, stronger temblors in Chile often last for up to two minutes, while California quakes typically persist for 10 to 15 seconds, said Frieder Seible, dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego and an international expert on bridge and highway seismic safety.

Still, researchers such as Seible said every strong quake is potentially devastating and that most offer new insights. Both the magnitude-6.9 Loma Prieta temblor in 1989, which killed 63 people and caused $6 billion in damage, and the 6.7 Northridge quake in 1994, which killed 72 people and caused $20 billion in damage, resulted in significant revisions to seismic standards and building codes.

Earthquake damage is essentially the result of seismic motions beneath a structure, the nature of the soil it was built on and its construction.

In the Loma Prieta quake, 42 people died when a half-mile portion of the Cypress Freeway collapsed. The section had been constructed on man-made fill layered over soft mud. Adjacent sections of the freeway, built upon older, firmer sand and gravel deposits, didn’t collapse.

“We learn new things after every quake, and much of it has been implemented, such as the huge, $16 billion retrofitting effort of bridges and highways since 1989,” said Jose Restrepo, a UCSD professor of structural engineering. “I think new homes, too, are now well-constructed and would perform OK in a quake.”

Scott LaFee: (619) 293-1259; scott.lafee@uniontrib.com