 Okay, we're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech and Education Matters in many ways. So this is about education and it's about how education matters with Basilis Sirmos. He's vice president of research and innovation at UH Manoa or UH in general. Let me say that. Welcome to the show, Basilis. Thank you, Jay, for having me. It's always a pleasure to be with you. Yeah, well, these are difficult times, obviously, including for the university. You've been on lockdown for a while. Your students have been studying by remote, most of them. And I wonder if you could give me a snapshot of where we are in that continuum. When are things opening up? How are they opening up? What challenges do you see in opening things up? So it's probably a lot of your viewers know President Lassner has made an announcement that in the fall, August, the university will open up for our students in some type of a form. Probably, we're not going to come back to the normal standard, if you will, but we'll open up our campus. And we will try to provide some type of hybrid experience between distance learning and in-class classes. We're going to make sure we actually follow whatever the science tells us to do. They are social distancing, the mask, the sanitizers, but we're hopeful that we can put a place together. We're also working very closely with our Department of Health. We always ask for their guidance of how to do things and how to bring up all our campuses to functionality. It's going to be a difficult form, but hopefully amongst our faculty and students, we'll do it. Well, it strikes me that if there's anybody who can pull this off, it's the university. Why? Because the university has all this talent. And part of the talent is the faculty, of course, teaching and using the technology and more than that, developing the technology. And so, you have Zoom. We have all, every one of us has learned about Zoom. That's quite interesting. You and I were at Dave Carl's 70th birthday on Friday, and it was all by Zoom, and 70 odd people showed up. And it worked very well, don't you think? Indeed, it did. And as you said, it's going to be all about technology. So, for us to open up, there are going to be two things that are going to be very important. One is contact tracing and the other is testing. So, testing, testing to death and contact tracing, these are very important issues. And we're trying to put a plan together. We have the technology also within the university. So, we're trying to work with the Department of Health to see how we can use our technology and our laboratories to open our campuses safely. So, yes, it is all about technology. Yeah, and that contact tracing, I was telling you that there was an announcement that Google and Facebook were collaborating on the possibility of a smartphone app, which would help contact tracing. And I can see, in fact, we had a show about what that might include, the functionality that might include. And it was pretty exciting to imagine how that would work and what it would do for a given community. Well, it seems to me this is one of those areas where information technology has developed at the university or with collaborating with others by the university could be not only valuable in terms of returning to normal operations. I shouldn't use the word normal, we're never going to have normal again to routine operations at the university. And it also will have an effect on, could have an effect on the state in general. So, for example, if it was useful to provide some comfort to visitors, that Hawaii was not only a beautiful place and a great environment, but also a safe environment where they didn't have to worry about getting sick. That would really open the gates for tourism again. And I think we need that just as a practical matter. So it's an example of the university reaching out with its resources, its technology, its science, and helping the community in such a way so that everyone benefits. Yeah, so we are in alignment with the state, we're in alignment and in talks with the Department of Health, we have a very good relationship with Dr. Park and Dr. Anderson. So we have, we're working on plans to how to open and also help the state, especially with the contact tracing piece. It is difficult, it's not, it sounds much easier than it actually is, it is time consuming and we are going to be providing some of our health students to do some of the contact tracing or in health graduates, health sciences graduates. So this is something that we're looking forward to do and help. And as you said, I think both the state and it's not one individual, but us as a state that we have done an outstanding job of containing the outbreak, if you will. Honolulu is a major metropolitan area and we haven't seen an outbreak like we've seen in other areas. So I think the community has done outstandingly in containing this pandemic. So hopefully we will be able to do as good coming in the future. So I'm very, I'm very hopeful. Yeah, I think we all, we all recognize that the university is an important engine of the economy, directly and indirectly, and we need to get it back, you know, on its feet soon. I guess the question in the meantime is can we talk a little about how you've suffered because every business and every institution, educational and otherwise, I suffered. So for us, the lack of students on campus does present a problem, a financial problem. Our campus services are not working, our residence halls are not open. Our classrooms are not open. So we are seeing a loss of revenue for all our auxiliary and commercial operations. We are looking at the legislature this week of how they will deal with pretty large haul in the budget, a billion dollars is a big number to plug. On the other hand, on the research area, we have been fortunate. This is going to be a record year for the University of Hawaii in research expenditures. So we're looking on an increase on research awards and expenditures. So this is great for our faculty, is great for our students, postdocs and the 10,000 people we hire on these 450 million dollars that we get annually from the federal government. So at least one stream of revenue within the university is stable and will be stable in the foreseeable future. And to give you an example of why this is so important, our budget, the university budget has three main revenue streams. One is the general final location. One is the tuition we receive from the students. And the third one is from a research. Roughly each one of those revenues is one third of our budget. So at least one third of our budget is stable and will be stable for the foreseeable future. So we're looking forward to open up for our research labs too. It's important that we maintain our research. We are operating at this time. But with the lack of students it must be a little bit more difficult. So there is a little bit of hope there. Well, like Stanford, if you hit a good technology science project that can be commercialized through your commercialization, what is it, accelerator? Yes, we have our UH Ventures accelerator. It's our accelerator is still working through Zoom, if you will. So we do all our training and all our meetings through Zoom. So we're still working our acceleration programs, the UH Ventures, our technology programs. So these are going well. Actually, we have a couple of those ventures in the health area. And one of them is in the pharmacy and how we can use pharmacists to better provide health care services. So we're looking at all these type of activities. And some of them have a lot of potential. So as I said, in the research area, we feel very positive for our future. Hawaii is a unique place. And I tell everybody it's not only location, location about tourism. It's location, location about a lot of things in this state. And this state is wonderful for oceanography, sea level rise, climate change, astronomy, multi-ethnic studies in health care. So we are a leader because of our location. So we want to maintain that. And as you said, if we somehow market the state of Hawaii as a safe place to travel and vacation, we're going to be a leader as we have been in tourism as well. Because at the end of the day, the tourism is a big part of our economy. And we want to provide a safe place for people to travel and for us to live so. So we're very, we're excited. Yes, we're going to have challenges. But on the other hand, challenges also produce opportunities. And we see a lot of opportunities for our university, for our students and our faculty. And we have great faculty and great students. Well, it goes back 10 years or so. But at a meeting of the Hawaii Venture Capital Association, which includes investors and technology people, technology entrepreneurs, there was a fellow who stood up and said, we really know about tourism. We know how it works. We have years of experience with it right down to exactly how you do it. And what was remarkable for him, and he was recently out of the service at the time, and he was an information technology person. What was remarkable for him was that the information technology that the hotels are using was developed outside of Hawaii. So I think there's a lush opportunity there, especially now, when they have to come back, when they'll be in the mood for new technology, maybe better technology than they had before to be more efficient, not only in the hotel registration side, but on all the tours, the accessory uses that feed into the hotels. So this could be a brand new tourism, not the same. And the university could be involved in that on the information tech. It just comes to mind because of that discussion 10 years ago. Yeah, and you're absolutely right. It's not only the tourism. It's going to be in every state of our life. It's going to be very different. And technology is going to be integrated very, very deeply. And to give you an idea, it's not only in tourism, but it's also in information systems, in financial services. You see we have the Hawaii Executive Council with the True Initiative. They are integrating technology in a lot of different areas, in a lot of different services. So it is something that the community understands. The university is part of that effort. We're working with Hawaii Business Roundtable. We're working with the private sector. You're going to see an explosion in jobs and technologies, not only in the Zoom and the IT, but in the backbone of that technology, whether that's cybersecurity, information system, computer systems, you're going to see an unbelievable explosion. So if I were a new graduate, I would look to go into the areas of computer science, data science, data visualization. There's going to be an explosion of jobs out there. So I had to put the plug there for my type of area. Well, you know, what's coming too is talking about Zoom and how everybody's getting used to it. Fact is there's a lot of people who are going to need retraining, because their old jobs may have gone away. And how do you reach? Well, the university can and does retrain them. It can use Zoom. They don't have to go to the campus. They don't have to park or anything. They can use Zoom, go to classes. They can engage the same way you and I are engaging right now, if not better, better than the normal arrangement, then they could be retrained. And then they could be more useful. And the economy can be more flexible or more nimble with that. And so the university can provide that kind of outreach as never before in order to be in a collaboration with community at large. Yeah. And you're absolutely right. Actually, the job market is never going to look the same in the future. So a lot of people are going to have to retrain and to up their skills in order to re-enter the job market. And both the UH Manoa, which is our research campus and our four years in the community colleges, they have a leading role to play into that retraining effort. And there are going to be thousands of people who are going to be retraining in the next couple of years. And hopefully they're going to be retraining at good paying jobs. And they're going to be retrained for skills that they're going to retain for the rest of their lives. Because as I tell people, think what happened after 9-11, we actually stood a whole industry out of that 9-11. It's called TSA and everything that goes around it. What is going to happen after we start thinking again, we're going to stand out the whole industry after COVID-19 and it's going to look as big and as large as a TSA. So you're going to have to retrain a whole set of people to be able to perform this type of activity. So I am hopeful that the vaccine will be found. I don't know how soon it's going to be. It's more likely going to be a couple of years from now, as opposed to people saying in September or October. I also want to remind your viewers that there has been no vaccine in the history for coronavirus. Never been found once. So I'm pretty sure now it's going to be the exception because it is a pandemic. But I want to be very careful saying all of a sudden, before we have a vaccine, and then we go back to what it used to be. I'm not so sure about it. You know, but that reminds me of something we should discuss and that is the work at the John A. Burns School of Medicine. You have some very international and local, very skilled world-class researchers there in the medical school and in the Cancer Research Center. We've talked to a number of them about their work in virology, and we talked to one most recently that really interests me. His name was Lu Peng, and he's Chinese, although he's been in the U.S. for 20 years. I think he studied research in the Midwest and then joined Japsum. And he's working on a project involving a therapeutic which suppresses the immune reaction, the cytokine reaction in COVID. And he's working on it. This is very interesting. He's working on it with an old buddy of his who is from Wuhan, who is a biochemical medical researcher in Wuhan. I say to myself, this is really important that we do this, that we have people here in the medical school working on these things and that they collaborate with other people around the world. I mean, global collaborations could be necessary, not only for vaccine but for therapeutics. And you have that going right now. I don't know what the stage is. And actually Japsum has a wonderful department of Tropical Infectious Diseases with Dr. Nurekar, Vivek Nurekar, and Axl, Dr. Axl. So we have a pretty good department. And I don't know if you saw in the news UCSD is going to be opening up and the way they're going to try to open the campus up is by engaging their medical school and providing testing for everybody pretty much on the campus and try to do testing and contact tracing before going into fall operations and run a pilot program. So I'm pretty sure that Japsum and the Cancer Center and the School of Nursing are going to play a paramount role for us opening up the campus and also a paramount role for opening up our communities for our citizens to be safe. So we're looking in several types of pilot programs to engage Japsum and the Department of Tropical Infectious Diseases to lead the way. Yeah, very promising. And one thing you said before about airport security and TSA and all that, there was an article in the paper a few days ago about Hong Kong and there have been some clever people in Hong Kong who have designed a sanitation, a Senate, and what do you want to call it, a cleanup machine. I can't think of the right word at the airport. So like right now you walk through and the machine takes a picture of you at x-rays, whatever it does to see if you have weapons or something of concern. This machine is different. This machine actually sanitizes you, your whole body as you walk through. And they're doing this right now in Hong Kong. So I say to myself, well gee, we could do that. It doesn't sound like it's rocket science. It's just a matter of using the available technology and building a machine like that but doing it better and doing it here and publicizing it's part of our safe environment here in Hawaii for tourists. Yes, and you're absolutely right. It's going to, there is going to be technology. The human ingenuity has no bounds. So I'm very hopeful that we're going to see some tremendous technological advances in the healthcare system. And you're going to see machines that they probably going to screen people in a couple of minutes. And while you're going through a TSA machine, probably you're going to be going through another TSA testing station. And you're going to have like a health passport that says hey, he or she is free of COVID-19 on any other pandemic. So how this thing or the virus is how these things are going to be integrated within the community and within the system is going to be quite a complex issue. And very interesting. So as I said, I do perceive there's going to be a whole technology industry around this type of activities for us and everybody else in the world. Yeah. And these technologies also, aside from affecting tourism, they also affect the average person. I mean, for example, my wife and me are still holed up crawling the walls. A lot of people we know are doing that. And we have little Zoom meetings with them on Sunday night. And we, we all have a gimlet together, you know, virtually. And we're probably going to stay that way until we feel comfortable. And there's a lot of people like that. Not everybody. Some people really have to work. It's critical. But there's a lot of people who don't, they'll manage without working. They're not going to feel comfortable and until something comes along, it makes them feel comfortable. The technology you're talking about will make people in general, the population of the state, feel comfortable to go back to work, to try new things, to take risks to be entrepreneurs, start businesses, what have you. And so what the university does in this regard has a, has still yet another effect on our reopening. Yes. And as you mentioned, Jay, it is not only about the technology and about opening up the economy, it is about how safe the people feel to go out there. Because you can open as many stores as as many malls you want, as many restaurants you want, but if the community does not feel safe to visit those places, the economy still will suffer. So it's going to be a tough road back to normalcy because it's not only a technology issue, but it is also a culture issue. It is also how you feel to go out and do the things that you used to do, right? And that is as important as anything else. So how we feel safe and what it takes for us to feel safe is very important. Yeah, one other thing I wanted to talk to you about is faculty. And I wondered if you had had any adverse effect in losing faculty, in having to cut faculty, in having to cut faculty pay, whether if we see any of that in the future. And what is the state of your recruiting process right now to bring in more faculty? You have a huge number of faculty and you must always be involved in recruiting faculty and researchers. So what is it like? So let me start with an easy one. The president following Governor Eeg's executive order has put a freeze on all hiring, faculty, staff, everybody until further notice. So most of the faculty recruiting has been put on a standstill. We have not lost any faculty, but what I worry about is that faculty is overworked, the workload is going to increase. Distance learning is a wonderful tool, but you have to retrain yourself. You have to retrain how you're going to deliver classes on an online environment. So that will be a new challenge. However, our faculty is smart enough and good enough to figure that out. So that's another thing. And then how our research labs are going to work. And right now they're working pretty good as long as we follow the social distancing measures. What I worry is that as faculty retire mostly, especially if there are any pay reductions because some people and especially more senior people will probably decide to retire. Then you get very good, you lose very good faculty and then you don't have the opportunity to replenish that faculty talent we lost. And that's where I'm worried because that $450 million doesn't show up because all of a sudden somebody told us, here is some money for you to spend. It shows up because our faculty competes all the time to get that money. So if we do not replenish the faculty talent, our extramural funds also going to suffer. So these are in worries we have. Hopefully the legislature is going to be kind to us and is going to be kind to a lot of other actually state agencies. And we all understand that it's going to be difficult and we all going to suffer but we're going to get through this. I'm sure you will. Well, one thing comes to mind is that you know, right now your sports are really down. You can't bring people together for sports. It may be that they can do baseball on Zoom, but that's hard. And I wonder how your sports programs have fared under COVID and what the plan would be and what the benefits would be in reopening them. That is a million dollar question. And it's not only for UH. It is for every institution of higher education. Sports is a big part of the campus life, the campus engagement. It is a source of revenue. It is a source of pride for our university. It is our marketing to the mainland and everybody and everywhere else. So with the lack of athletics, there is going to be a really tough, tough time ahead. So if I were the president, that probably would be the number one thing that would wake every night of the athletics program. But thank God I'm not. Yeah. The other thing, Mr. Los, is that when you're in your job, you always have new projects ahead of you. You're always planning new things. It's part of the way things work at a major university. And of course, you had to be looking for the funding for these projects. So I would imagine that you had a number of projects there on the slate at the end of 2019, which have been stopped. And I wonder if, with due regard for the fact that you are going to need funding from the university, from the legislature and the university should be a high priority for the legislature for all the reasons we've been discussing. What about these projects? Aren't they also high priorities for you to be able to start them up again? They sure are. And we are actually within the research area. And I think within the university we're good stewards of our financial resources. And for the time being, projects that they have been stopped, we have a bridge funding for people to pay. So we can do that for a couple more months. We are looking to see how the legislature is going to react to the billion dollar budget deficit and then make a determination how to restore some of those projects and make them financially viable again. Well, thank you, Vosilos. Vosilos Simos, the vice president of research and innovation at UH. And he certainly got his job cut out for him in the next few months. I really appreciate you taking the time with us, Vosilos. Thank you, Jay. And always a pleasure to be with you. Always a pleasure. Aloha.