After nearly three decades in the Infectious Diseases Division of the University of Illinois Chicago’s Department of Medicine, Dr. Mahmood Ghassemi was enjoying the scaled-back professional life of semi-retirement in 2020.
Then, COVID-19 hit. Amid nationwide pleas for retired health care workers to jump back in to help combat the coronavirus, Ghassemi answered a call to oversee the laboratory that processed thousands of samples for UIC’s COVID drug and vaccine clinical trials.
Ghassemi worked seven days a week early in the pandemic to help develop the treatments and shots that would bring the world back to normal life.
But the lead UIC researcher who enlisted him lamented that Ghassemi could be paid only a part-time salary so his state pension would remain intact.
“I said, ‘Don’t worry. The people are dying right and left. We should not talk about the compensation,’ ” Ghassemi says.
Eventually, Ghassemi was bumped to full-time pay but only after getting assurances from UIC and the State Universities Retirement System that his grant-funded work wouldn’t threaten his pension, according to Ghassemi.
But now the state pension system has accused Ghassemi of double-dipping — and it’s demanding that he pay back more than $80,000.
Officials with SURS, which administers pensions for more than 73,000 retired university and community college workers, won’t talk about it.
But Dr. Richard Novak, the now-retired UIC researcher who brought Ghassemi out of retirement to help him lead the unprecedented trials, says: “He’s really getting the shaft. They got it wrong.”
Ghassemi, 69, first was a student of Novak, in 1990. And then he was his colleague for nearly 30 years in UIC’s highly regarded infectious diseases division.
In 2016. Ghassemi put in for early retirement but stayed on part-time at the university — a split that allowed him to help launch another colleague’s private business.
As long as Ghassemi’s UIC pay was capped at 70% of his former full-time salary of about $113,000, Ghassemi’s roughly $7,100-a-month pension wasn’t in jeopardy, as he understood it.
That wasn’t an issue — until COVID turned life upside-down.
“We’re in the middle of a battle, and we need reinforcements,” Gov. JB Pritzker said in one of his daily televised coronavirus briefings in March 2020 when he asked retired health workers to return to service. “This is hero’s work. And all of you have our deepest gratitude for your willingness to serve.”
Ghassemi soon got a call from Novak, who had been recruited by the National Institutes of Health to test antiviral treatments and later run massive trials on the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines and to do so at breakneck speed.
A three-person staff grew to 30 as Ghassemi’s lab processed samples from dozens of people every day for weeks on end.
“We were working with tripled masks and gloves,” says Ghassemi, who still works part-time at UIC. “Everybody was scared then and rightfully so.”
Ghassemi’s long days at reduced pay went on for months — until Novak and Ghassemi say they were told by UIC officials that he could receive full-time pay without affecting his state pension under a provision of the law allowing that if the compensation is funded by state or federal grants.
An initial conversation with a SURS counselor left Ghassemi unclear on whether he’d take a pension hit. But, in a follow-up phone conversation, he says he was told his pension would be fine.
Then, in 2022, he got a letter from SURS that said the agency had determined he’d made more money than allowed while collecting his pension. They agency since has demanded that he pay back more than $80,000 plus interest.
“I was shocked, and then I was frightened,” Ghassemi says.
He has gone back and forth in an administrative hearing before the SURS board of trustees, a case that could last months and eventually land in court.
Daniel Glinert, his lawyer, says Ghassemi “went back into the fire at a financial detriment to himself, with the explicit blessing of UIC and no denial at all from SURS and later an explicit confirmation from SURS.”
Declining to discuss any of this, SURS’ general counsel says the pension fund “does not comment on individual members’ benefit claims.”
In filings before the pension board, the system has argued that the state law carve-out for grant-funded compensation doesn’t apply in Ghassemi’s case.
Glinert says contradictory provisions of Illinois’ pension code can be read to shield employers — but not workers — from penalties in such a situation.
“That contradiction puts workers in an impossible position — and no fiduciary should feel comfortable defending that outcome,” he says.
Ghassemi is still collecting his pension.
But the payback demand would be a huge cost for someone whose efforts “were critical to protecting the population and potentially ending the global pandemic,” says Novak, who worries that the situation could discourage other retirees from stepping up in a future global catastrophe.
“People would be hesitant to come out of retirement and be left holding the bag,” Novak says. “Mahmood is being made to pay the price for their mistake. It’s not fair to him.”