RICE: Where Are We Now? Where Can We Go?
Graduate Programs and Research
A university such as Rice requires distinguished graduate programs. Ten years ago, it was very clear that we needed to strengthen, selectively, our graduate programs and the research enterprise of the university.
The fact is that the quality of our graduate programs directly affects our ability to compete for the best undergraduates. In 2003, we surveyed graduate students who were admitted to Rice but who also applied to the other top-ranked schools that are our principal competitors for graduate students. We then determined the percentages of those students who chose Rice and those who chose to attend each of the other schools. As a secondary gauge, we contrasted these figures against the comparative research distinction of our principal competitors based on an assessment of graduate programs by the National Research Council.
This survey showed us that, in head-to-head competition for undergraduates, we lose only to some schools that have higher-ranked graduate programs. We lose more than we win, for example, against MIT, Harvard, and Yale, but we win much more than 50 percent of the time against Duke, Northwestern, and Washington University.
Strong graduate programs also serve to keep outstanding faculty in front of all our students. Recruiting and retaining high-caliber faculty is much more than a matter of salary—the best faculty insist on top-quality undergraduate and graduate students to work with, and they require state-of-the-art facilities.
We have strengthened several PhD programs with expanded graduate student stipends and sharp upgrades in facilities. We also have enhanced graduate programs in our professional schools. Rice limits itself to three professional schools—business, music, and architecture—but we have given them the resources to be successful. The Jones School has achieved international stature in a short time, and its Executive Education Program has become one of the best in the country.
The Shepherd School of Music excels in symphony training, vocal training, and composition. In just one example of each: Graduate student James Gaffigan is currently serving as assistant director of the famed Cleveland Orchestra; Anna Christy, Rice ’98, opened October 18 in The Mikado and signed with the Met in early November; and Philip Miller, who has undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and has done postgraduate work in composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, taught theory and composition, and been a guest conductor of the University of Stockholm Symphony Orchestra, is currently a DMA composition student here. And just this year, the Shepherd School was one of eight leading music conservatories in the U.S. chosen by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to participate in the new Conservatory Project. This program showcases young performers who exhibit extraordinary talent in a series of classical, jazz, and opera performances at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater.
The School of Architecture’s faculty teach students how to excel in both design and in building. The school is widely recognized for pioneering new ways of thinking about architecture and its relation to society. Our architecture students frequently confront design challenges that deal with problems that have arisen in Houston, and they are encouraged to produce creative solutions rather than hew to established formulas. The result is an enviable record of international prominence in design and numerous national and regional awards.
Our School of Humanities, which began in 1912 with classes in English and modern languages, now comprises 11 departments. Outstanding among those are history, which is recognized internationally for its expertise in Southern U.S. history and intellectual and cultural history and English. Also important is philosophy, whose faculty have banded together with faculty in religious studies to create the Program on Biotechnology, Religion, and Ethics, which is examining the philosophical and moral implications of bioengineering and biomedical research. Finally, the Center for the Study of Cultures has made Rice an international focal point for studies that promote a greater understanding of other cultures in our increasingly interdependent world.
The School of Social Sciences features a number of faculty focusing on the interactions between people and technological issues ranging from digitization to healthcare. The faculty in its five departments have had a disproportionate influence on policymakers, business, and the media in issues ranging from local and national politics to the Middle East to ethnic conflicts in emerging democracies. They also have had a hand in the preservation of antiquities in West Africa. Faculty in the economics department have had a particularly strong impact in fiscal economics and in energy issues.
In science and engineering, we are building on the foundation provided by our first two Nobel prizes, won in 1996, and by our bright and hardworking young faculty. We have focused strongly on research fields where we have a comparative advantage: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and environmental technology. Our lasting contributions to theory and practice in these fields are too many to enumerate. Illustrative of the impact of our faculty is the field of digital signal processing, a combined effort of computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. Their work has produced algorithmic wizardry for data compression that is used in nearly every piece of digital equipment on earth, from hard disk drives to robotic controls to digital cell phones.
Of growing importance to us have been the new and challenging areas in the intersections of these fields. Bioinformatics, for example, is transforming the old trial-and-error method of classical medical research into a modern discipline of biomedical research based on information about networks of molecular interactions that control life. Bioinformatics also lends itself to computational technologies vital for comprehending both genomic data and the immensely more complex information in proteomics—the field that is attempting to understand the structure, function, and expression of proteins in genetic material.
And, of course, the now-established field of nanotechnology, pioneered at Rice with the discovery of buckminsterfullerene, has spawned numerous crossover research efforts with disciplines as varied as biomedicine, computation, communications, electronics and superconductivity, manufacturing and materials science, and environmental remediation. One particularly important line of research is the work being done by Professors Naomi Halas and Jennifer West. Halas and West have developed gold nanoshells—a new class of nanoscale particle with a core of silica coated with gold. About 20 times smaller than a red blood cell, gold nanoshells can be “tuned” to specifically absorb near-infrared light, which is optimal for medical imaging and treatment because it passes harmlessly through soft tissue, but which also appears to be destructive to cancer tissue.
To further our research goals, we created in 1995 a new Office of Technology Transfer, which deals with the steadily growing number of patents and patent applications emerging from our faculty’s research efforts. The results have been notable: Starting from very little, we have had 445 disclosures of discoveries since 1999 and three dozen new patents issued since that year.
We also have had nine new Rice-related technology start-up firms in the past five years, principally in the field of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and computer science. To help nurture spin-offs in our technology, we established in 2000 the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, which utilizes talent from the Jones Graduate School of Management, Brown School of Engineering, and Wiess School of Natural Sciences to actively build relationships between university research programs and business support.
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