Community Briefs

Professor, pioneering researcher dies at 84

Dr. Milton I. Roemer, a pioneering health services researcher,
teacher and professional whose prescience of industry trends and
possibilities led to his significant contributions to health policy
in the United States and abroad, died of heart failure Jan. 3 after
a brief illness.

Roemer, a professor emeritus of the UCLA School of Public
Health’s Department of Health Services, was 84.

Roemer’s many notable achievements include studies showing
that in an insured population, a hospital bed built is a bed filled
““ a finding that contributed to enactment of certificate of
need legislation and comprehensive health planning. This finding
was so robust that it bears his name: Roemer’s Law.

His research at UCLA encouraged the development of HMOs,
promoted the use of ambulatory care and documented the need for
national health insurance covering the total population. He
advocated development of doctoral training in health administration
to prepare students for leadership in public health practice, and
established an endowed fellowship to support students in this
program.

In addition to his 38 years as a teacher and researcher at UCLA,
Roemer served at all levels of health administration ““
county, state, national and international. During his 60-year
career he worked in 71 countries and published 32 books and 430
articles on the social aspects of health services.

In 1992 the Centers for Disease Control gave Roemer its Joseph
W. Mountain Award. In 1997 he was given the Lifetime Achievement
Award of the APHA International Health Section and the
Distinguished Career Award of the Association for Health Services
Research.

Roemer is survived by his wife of 61 years, Ruth Roemer; his
son, John E. Roemer, of New York City; his daughter, Beth Roemer
Lewis, of Berkeley; and six grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at UCLA in the spring.

Astronomers find fast stars

SAN DIEGO “”mdash; Astronomers have found 154 rapidly moving
stars towards the center of our galaxy and our brightest
neighboring galaxy.

The findings are being presented today by Dr. Andrew J. Drake of
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the Massive Compact
Halo Objects collaboration, during the annual meeting of the
American Astronomical Society in San Diego.

The results are of special interest because this is the first
time scientists have been able to discover such objects in front of
the millions of stars seen at the Galactic center and our brightest
neighbor galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

To date, among the thousands of known High Proper Motion stars,
few have been discovered in the most densely packed regions of the
sky, where stars appear to merge together in images because of
their extreme density.

“Until now astronomers have been unable to detect HPM
stars in the most dense locations because of the extreme density of
stars towards the Galactic center,” said Drake, who works at
Livermore’s Institute for Geophysics and Planetary
Physics.

“Toward the Galactic center, the billions of stars within
our galaxy form the bright band in the sky known as the Milky
Way,” he continued.

Another region where the density of stars makes discovery of the
moving ones difficult is towards the LMC. To the naked eye this
galaxy appears as a faint nebulous patch in the southern sky.
Through a small telescope the presence of millions of individual
stars becomes recognizable.

Drake looked at images of stars in the Galactic center and the
LMC taken over seven years.

Compiled from Daily Bruin wire reports.