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Contact: Savannah Rattanavong, Office of the Provost, 785-864-6402, [email protected], @KUProvost

Shelley Hooks named as next University of Kansas vice chancellor for research

LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas has selected Shelley Hooks as the next vice chancellor for research. Hooks is the associate vice president for research at the University of Georgia and a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences at UGA’s College of Pharmacy. She will begin her new role Aug. 4.

“Throughout her career, Shelley has been a champion of multidisciplinary research, serving as an advocate for the advancement of innovation and discovery, and supporting the development of faculty, scholars and students,” said Barbara A. Bichelmeyer, KU provost and executive vice chancellor. “Shelley’s leadership will be essential in fostering a bold and unifying vision for the future of research, creative activity and engaged scholarship at KU. We are excited to welcome Shelley to the Jayhawk community.”

As vice chancellor for research, Hooks will lead KU’s research enterprise on the Lawrence and Edwards campuses and oversee research administration. She will help align the Office of Research with the university’s mission to educate leaders, build healthy communities and make discoveries that change the world.

“I am delighted to join the vibrant University of Kansas community,” Hooks said. “I am eager to partner with KU faculty, staff and students to drive forward our shared goals of advancing research, fostering innovation and nurturing creativity in all fields.”

She will succeed Belinda Sturm, who has served as KU’s interim vice chancellor for research since November. Sturm is the director of the Kansas National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Office and a professor of civil, environmental & architectural engineering.

“I greatly appreciate Belinda’s leadership and dedication to advancing our research enterprise and supporting our scholarly community during this time. I also thank the search committee for their great work and commitment throughout the search process,” Bichelmeyer said.

As UGA’s associate vice president for research since 2018, Hooks has overseen internal grants, awards and research personnel. She manages a portfolio of internal research funding programs and leads initiatives to support faculty, postdoctoral scholars and other research personnel. She also leads the Office of Research’s strategic plan and serves as a liaison among the office, academic units, centers, institutes and faculty.

Hooks previously served as the interim department head for UGA’s Department of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences and the interim director of the UGA Center for Drug Discovery.

As an independent investigator, Hooks focuses on signaling mechanisms and novel therapeutic strategies for cancer and neurological disease. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and the Marsha Rivkin Center for Ovarian Cancer Research. She also has supervised a number of graduate and undergraduate students with a focus on mentorship of underrepresented trainees.

Beyond her service at UGA, Hooks has served as an executive committee member for the Molecular Pharmacology division of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET), grant reviewer for the Marsha Rivkin Center for Ovarian Cancer and an editorial board member for ASPET’s peer-reviewed journal, Molecular Pharmacology. Hooks has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and abstracts.

Hooks earned her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Clemson University and her doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Virginia. She completed her postdoctoral research at the University of North Carolina’s Department of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine.

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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch

With wobbling stars, astronomers gauge mass of 126 exoplanets and find 15 new ones

LAWRENCE — Using data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, an astronomer at the University of Kansas led a study appearing today revealing 15 new exoplanets — planets beyond our solar system — along with the mass of 126 other exoplanets. The findings give astronomers new understanding of the makeup of exoplanets and their star systems generally.

The study cataloging the exoplanets — comprising severe and exceptional environments, some of which hold promise to support life — was conducted under auspices of the TESS-Keck Survey and appears in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement.

“These two facilities (TESS and Keck) work synergistically to study exoplanets,” said lead author Alex Polanski, doctoral student in physics & astronomy at KU, where he works at the KU ExoLab, a research group dedicated to the discovery and characterization of nearby planetary systems. “TESS is a satellite orbiting above Earth’s atmosphere, scanning the sky for exoplanets using the transit method.”

This transit method involves observing a planet as it passes in front of its host star, causing a slight dimming of the star’s light.

“By detecting and measuring these transit events, researchers can determine the planet’s orbital period and size,” Polanski said. “Larger planets block more light, making them easier to detect. However, transit data doesn’t provide information about the planet’s mass, which is crucial for understanding its composition.”

Using the Doppler effect to detect mass

To determine the mass of exoplanets, researchers used the Keck Observatory to execute a technique called “radial velocity,” according to Polanski.

“This method involves observing the host star and measuring its spectrum,” he said. “Stars contain elements like hydrogen, helium and iron, which create characteristic absorption lines in their spectra. As a planet orbits its star, the star experiences slight gravitational pull, causing it to wobble. This wobble shifts the star’s spectral lines due to the Doppler effect — similar to how a siren’s pitch changes as it moves towards or away from you. The amount of shift in the spectral lines is related to the planet’s mass; larger planets cause greater shifts.”

The KU researcher said radial velocity was used to discover the first exoplanets around sun-like stars in the 1990s, known as “hot Jupiters” — massive Jupiter-sized planets with short orbital periods of about 10 days. However, smaller planets, especially those between Earth and Neptune in size, create much smaller shifts and need more sensitive instruments like those at Keck.

Largest-ever uniform mass sample of exoplanets

“The TESS-Keck Survey represents the single largest contribution to understanding the physical nature and system architectures of new planets TESS has discovered,” said Ian Crossfield, associate professor of physics & astronomy at KU, who leads KU’s ExoLab and co-wrote the new paper. “Catalogs like this help astronomers place individual worlds in context with the rest of the exoplanet population.”

Indeed, beyond KU or Keck, a global team of astronomers from multiple institutions spent three years developing the catalog; they took TESS planetary data and analyzed 9,204 radial velocity measurements, 4,943 of which were recorded over the course of 301 observing nights using Keck Observatory’s planet-hunting instrument called the High-Resolution Echelle Spectrometer.

“With this information, along with the planets’ radii, scientists can estimate the planets’ densities and infer their possible compositions,” Polanski said. “This paper is the largest of its kind to date. The last similar one that came out was, I think, a sample of 27 exoplanets. This is up to 126 planets.”

The team said two planets — dubbed TOI-1824 b and TOI-1798 c — are so bizarre they might deepen astronomers’ grasp of planetary diversity and evolution in general:

TOI-1824 b: a superdense sub-Neptune

One of the densest sub-Neptunes in the catalog, TOI-1824 b, has incredible mass for a planet of its size.

“At nearly 19 times the mass of Earth, but only 2.6 times the size of our home planet, TOI-1824 b is an exoplanet oddity,” said co-author Joseph Murphy, doctoral student at the University of California-Santa Cruz. “Planets similar in size typically have a mass between roughly 6 and 12 times the mass of Earth.”

TOI-1798 c: a rare, extreme super-Earth

TOI-1798 is an orange dwarf, or K-type star, that has two planets: TOI–1798 b, a sub-Neptune that has an orbit of about eight days, and TOI–1798 c, a super-Earth that is so close to its host star, it makes one orbit in less than 12 hours. It’s one of only a few star systems believed to feature an inner planet with an ultra-short period (USP) orbit.

“While the majority of planets we know about today orbit their star faster than Mercury orbits the Sun, USPs take this to the extreme,” Crossfield said. “TOI-1798 c orbits its star so quickly that one year on this planet lasts less than half a day on Earth. Because of their proximity to their host star, USPs are also ultra-hot— receiving more than 3,000 times the radiation that Earth receives from the Sun. Existing in this extreme environment means that this planet has likely lost any atmosphere that it initially formed.”

Polanski said a better knowledge of exoplanets and their star systems would give us a better understanding of our own solar system.

“Astronomy has gone through several phases of ‘great demotions,’” he said. “We used to believe Earth was the center of the universe. Then we learned it isn’t even the center of the solar system. From there, we discovered Earth is just one planet among many in a galaxy, which is one among billions of galaxies. However, our solar system might be more unique than we thought. About half of all Sun-like stars have a binary companion. Our Sun does not. Only about 10% of Sun-like stars have gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn. This suggests our solar system might be less typical than we assumed.”

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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman

Expert on Iranian artists can comment on Cannes director drama

LAWRENCE — The surprise appearance today of the apparently exiled Iranian movie director Mohammad Rasoulof at the Cannes Film Festival shows “the ongoing pressure placed on artists who challenge the regime’s monopoly over the country’s sociopolitical and cultural discourse,” says the author of a recent book on the subject.

Rana Esfandiary, University of Kansas assistant professor of theatre & dance, grew up in Iran and is the author of “At the Threshold: Contemporary Theatre, Art and Music of Iran” (Routledge, 2023).

She is available to the media to comment on the situation that led to Rasoulof’s pending eight-year jail sentence and apparent exile.

“I know Mohammad Rasoulof,” Esfandiary said. “However, I haven’t seen his latest movie. I know he was pressured to not enter it and then to withdraw its entry at Cannes, which he refused, and then he received such a lengthy prison sentence.

“He is like Jafar Panahi, who is banned from working inside Iran and prohibited from leaving the country. Panahi smuggled his movie, ‘This is Not a Film,’ out of Iran on USB drive hidden inside a cake to enter it into Cannes years ago. Stuff like this happens to artists quite frequently.

“Theatre director Ali Akbar Alizad, about whom I wrote extensively, left Iran in August and now lives in Wales. So he is out, too, after he faced so much restriction regarding his theatre works and teaching practice in the light of the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.”

Media may quote from the interview above or arrange to speak with Esfandiary by contacting Rick Hellman, KU public affairs officer, at (913) 620-8786 or by email.

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KU News Service

1450 Jayhawk Blvd.

Lawrence KS 66045

Phone: 785-864-3256

Fax: 785-864-3339

[email protected]

http://www.news.ku.edu

Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]

Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs