In the News

Athanasiou Next President of Biomedical Organization
Bioengineering professor Kyriacos Athanasiou was elected the 2003–2004 president of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) at the organization’s annual fall meeting in Houston.

BMES is an international professional organization representing more than 3,000 bioengineers and biomedical engineers. Athanasiou’s one-year term as president will begin in October 2003.

Athanasiou, who joined the Rice faculty in 2000, has been a member of BMES since 1991. He currently serves on the BMES board of directors and is chair of its finance committee and past chair of the membership committee. He also is faculty adviser to Rice’s student chapter of BMES. BMES was incorporated in 1968 to increase knowledge of biomedical engineering and its use.

Killian Earns Prestigious Packard Fellowship
Rice University physicist Thomas C. Killian’s groundbreaking work adapting techniques developed in atomic physics to open up a new area of plasma research in the realm of the ultracold has earned him a place in the national spotlight. Last September, he was awarded a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering. The prestigious fellowships are awarded each year to just 20 of the nation’s most promising young scientists.

The five-year fellowship, from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, includes $625,000 in unrestricted grant funds. Killian said winning the award was both surprising and overwhelming at first. “I am deeply honored to be selected because there were many deserving candidates,” he said.

The foundation accepted just 100 nominations for the fellowships from a select list of 50 invited universities, and Killian is the first Rice faculty member to receive the award. “This really changes everything for me,” said Killian, who’s been at Rice about 18 months. “Before, if a piece of equipment cost $15,000, I’d have my students build it for $1,000 to save the money, even though that might cost valuable time. Now, I can just spend the money and move on.”

New Acting Director of Asian Studies Named
Jeffrey J. Kripal, the Lynette S. Autry Associate Professor of Religious Studies, has been named acting director of the Asian Studies Program. Kripal’s areas of special interest are 19th-century Bengal, modern Hinduism, and Tantric studies. His current research includes the history of Esalen, the countercultural and New Age mecca in Big Sur, California, that played such an important role in translating Asian religious traditions into forms and practices accessible to American culture.

Tapia Honored for Efforts for Minorities
Richard Tapia, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics, was one of the guests of honor last November at the second Blackwell–Tapia Conference at the University of California–Berkeley.

The two-day conference honored Tapia and mathematician David Blackwell, the first African American named to the National Academy of Sciences and professor emeritus of statistics at UC–Berkeley, for both their academic achievements and their longstanding efforts to create, support, and maintain opportunities for minority scientists, statisticians, and mathematicians across the nation.

The conference, sponsored by Cornell University and UC–Berkeley’s Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, included the awarding of the first Blackwell–Tapia Prize to Arlie O. Petters, professor of mathematics at Duke University. The Blackwell–Tapia Prize honors a mathematical scientist who is not only a noted researcher but also a mentor and a champion of efforts to overcome the underrepresentation of minorities in mathematics.

Vardi, Tarlov Elected Fellows of AAAS
Two researchers at Rice University have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) by their peers in the world’s largest federation of scientists.

Moshe Vardi, director of Rice’s Computer and Information Technology Institute and a professor of computational engineering and computer science, was honored for his distinguished contributions to logic and the verification of computer hardware and software.

Alvin Tarlov, a senior fellow in health policy at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, was chosen for his distinguished leadership in medicine and health policy and for helping to forge stronger ties between the social sciences and biological sciences.

Members and steering groups of AAAS can nominate candidates for AAAS Fellow, an honor that recognizes efforts to advance science or foster applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. The association’s policy-making council votes on each year’s list of new fellows. More than 10 million members comprise AAAS, which publishes the prestigious journal, Science.