In the News

Bryson Named to Associate Vice President Position

The departments of facilities and engineering and of project management and planning have been consolidated and are now led by Barbara White Bryson.

Bryson, formerly director of project management and planning, is now associate vice president for facilities, engineering, and planning. She has guided the campus through a surge of new construction, including the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, three colleges, and the Humanities Building, as well as the renovations of Rayzor and Herring Halls.

Russell Price has been named the new assistant vice president for facilities. Price, who has been with Rice for more than 20 years, was promoted from maintenance manager of facilities and engineering. Doug Tomlinson is now assistant vice president for engineering, and John Posch serves as the new director of project management.

New to the Board

Three new members have been named to the university’s board of trustees. Douglas Lee Foshee ’92, Carl E. Isgren ’61, and M. Kenneth Oshman ’62 began their four-year terms July 1.

Foshee is president, chief executive officer, and director of El Paso Corporation in Houston, the leading provider of natural gas services and the largest pipeline company in North America. Isgren is the retired president and CEO of Owen Healthcare Inc., in Houston, which offers hospital pharmacy management services in the United States. Oshman is chair and CEO of Echelon Corporation, a San Jose, California-based company that designs systems and software that link and automate industrial equipment, building environments, and devices ranging from light switches to conveyor belts.

Hutchinson Named to New Campus Post

Professor of chemistry John Hutchinson will serve as interim vice president for student affairs until a new campus position—dean of undergraduate education—can be filled. Hutchinson was associate vice president of student affairs under Zenaido Camacho, who retired in June from the position he held since 1994.

President David W. Leebron expects the new dean to bring student life more into the university’s academic structure and mission by enhancing the role of students as apprentice scholars and future leaders who learn in all facets of their experience.

The new deanship will report to the provost, the chief academic officer of the university, and will be held by a tenured Rice faculty member who is steeped in the intellectual process with students in the classroom and in research and embraces faculty academic values.

David Tenney Appointed Registrar

David Tenney took the helm as the new campus registrar in September. Previously the director of administration, planning, and finance in the Office of Information Technology (IT), Tenney may seem an unexpected choice for the position responsible for maintaining student records, handling registration, certifying enrollment, enforcing academic policies and procedures, overseeing the graduation of students, and scheduling classroom time.But his background in finance and administration and his experience in IT has given Tenney a unique set of skills that will be invaluable in his new role.

Since joining Rice in 1996, Tenney has been responsible for, among other things, business services, administration, human resources, accounting, project management, software management, and network monitoring. His goals include ensuring that the Office of the Registrar meets the needs of today’s students and serves as a strong advocate for the classroom. Tenney replaces Jerry Montag, who left Rice in July.

President Gillis Receives Many Parting Honorsrd

Before ending his term as president, Malcolm Gillis—along with his wife, Elizabeth—received a number of honors and awards from a diverse group of organizations.
Here is a sampling:

• NASA presented President Gillis its Distinguished Public Service Medal, its highest honor for public service by a nongovernment employee.
• The Rice Board of Trustees created the Malcolm Gillis University Professorship, Rice’s first named university professorship, presented “in recognition of the extensive contributions of Dr. Gillis.” The chair will be awarded to a current or future university professor selected by the trustees.
• The Institute of International Education honored Malcolm and Elizabeth Gillis for their work in international programs and education at a dinner program titled Educated Minds: A Passport to the World.
• The Center for the Healing of Racism honored Gillis with the 2004 Ally Award, presented to an individual who, through professional, social, and community efforts, has brought recognition and understanding to the pervasive problem of racism.
• The MIT Enterprise Forum awarded Gillis its first Leadership Award, which is given to a leader/visionary who best personifies the forum’s ideals of education and promotion of technological entrepreneurship.
• The Black Graduate Student Association presented Gillis with its Service Award, recognizing his distinguished leadership on campus.
• The Gillis’s received an Honorary “R” for their loyalty to Rice’s athletic teams and players and were honored by Rice’s coaches at Reckling Park in May.

Colvin, Jaffe Recognized for Energy Contributions

Rice University’s Vicki Colvin and Amy Myers Jaffe were among the honorees for the 2004 Key Women in Energy–Americas, a competition that recognizes 100 women in the Western Hemisphere for their contributions to the energy sector or related businesses. The honorees were selected from nearly 400 nominations by a jury of 12 industry peers in North and South America.

Colvin, professor of chemistry and in chemical engineering and director of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology, won the top award in the Innovation/Creativity category, which spotlights “problem-solving, outside-the-box thinkers who represent collective genius as inventors, tinkerers, scientists, and information technology and technology experts.”

She directs the only academic research center in the world that is dedicated to studying the interaction between nanomaterials and living organisms and ecosystems. Her research involves the control and understanding of material properties on nanometer-length scales. She is exploring a variety of potential applications for the new materials, including their use in holographic data storage devices, nanoelectronics components, and telecommunications equipment.

Jaffe, the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow for Energy Studies at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and associate director of both the Rice Energy Program and the Shell Center for Sustainability, was recognized in the Pathfinders/Trailblazers category, which honors “women who broke traditional barriers or changed the face of the energy industry at some point in their career.”

She is founder of the Baker Institute Energy Forum, whose mission is to promote the development of informed and realistic public policy choices in the energy area by educating policymakers and the public about important regional and global trends that shape world energy markets.

Jones School’s Currall, Zhou Awarded NSF Grantn

Two Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management professors and a Columbia University Business School professor have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their research proposal “Strategic Planning, Technology Commercialization, and Organizational Effectiveness in National Science Foundation-Funded Engineering Research Centers.”

Steven C. Currall, the William and Stephanie Sick Professor of Entrepreneurship and associate professor of management, psychology, and statistics; Jing Zhou, associate professor of management; and Toby E. Stuart of Columbia University will conduct an organizational analysis of NSF-funded engineering research centers (ERCs). The aims of the project will be to understand how ERCs manage new science and engineering discoveries by academic researchers and the ways these new technologies become commercial products that can benefit society, how ERCs carry out strategic planning, and what factors determine the creativity and innovation of scientists and engineers who work in ERCs.

In 1985, the NSF launched the Engineering Research Center Program. Its mission is to foster national well-being and economic competitiveness by promoting university–industry collaboration to advance the nation’s technological leadership. Based on their own first-hand involvement with strategic planning and organization of an NSF-funded science and engineering research center, the professors will seek to identify best practices that have been developed by various ERCs and develop plans to diffuse these practices among other ERCs.

The $437,313 grant is being administered by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, which provides a network and resources for Rice students, faculty, researchers, alumni, and others to develop start-up technology businesses. This is the first major research grant to the alliance and represents the formal launch of its research program in technology entrepreneurship.

El-Gamal Named First Islamic Finance Scholar

Rice economics professor Mahmoud El-Gamal has been appointed as the first Islamic Finance Scholar-in-Residence at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

El-Gamal, chair of Islamic economics, finance, and management and professor of statistics and of economics, is the principal advisor on Islamic finance to senior treasury officials, and he acts as a liaison with international organizations seeking to monitor and create standards for Islamic finance. His interactions with various U.S. government agencies offer an overview of the recent developments on formulating new and harmonizing current international regulatory standards. During his tenure, he will have an opportunity to conduct workshops on Islamic finance, including an overview of the industry, prudent supervision/regulation, accounting standards, governance practices, and debt management.

The purpose of the Islamic Finance Scholar-in-Residence program is to promote broader awareness of Islamic finance practices internationally and domestically for U.S. government policymakers, regulators, and the public at large. El-Gamal, who has an extensive background in Islamic finance, will play a critical role in advancing the importance of promoting good practices in risk management and transparency in this area.

Engineering’s Wiesner Earns Research Honors

One of Rice’s leading environmental researchers, Mark Wiesner, has been named a Pierre de Fermat Laureate, a prestigious French honor conferred by an international panel of scientists.

The internationally renowned foreign university scholars who are de Fermat Laureates are given a “chair of excellence” that provides financial support to develop international, collaborative research programs with French scholars. Wiesner, professor of civil and environmental engineering and chemical engineering, is a pioneer in the application of membrane processes to environmental separations and water treatment. He also serves as director of Rice’s Environmental and Energy Systems Institute, and he spearheaded the university’s environment and nanotechnology initiative in collaboration with French researchers.

Wiesner will use the chair funding to develop a collaborative program in membrane science at Rice and the chemical engineering laboratory at the Institut National Polytechnique in Toulouse, France, home to one of the world’s most renowned membrane research teams.

Membrane technology has applications in water treatment, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, pulp and paper processing, food processing, and many other industries. Using state-of-the-art research from the fields of nanotechnology, materials science, and industrial processing, membrane researchers are developing products that can cut operating costs through energy savings, for example, while at the same time improving their performance.

Research Associate in Chemistry Wins Ford Fellowship

Ramon Colorado Jr., a postdoctoral research associate in the lab of Andrew Barron, the Charles W. Duncan Jr.–Welch Professor of Chemistry and professor of materials science, has been awarded a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship from the Ford Foundation.

The foundation’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for Minorities helps foster diversity on the nation’s college and university campuses by identifying outstanding researchers and scholars who are members of underrepresented minority groups. The program is highly competitive, with just 20 annual awards covering more than two dozen disciplines in the physical sciences, social sciences, humanities, life sciences, music, and other fields. The fellowships are administered by the National Research Council.

The award includes a $40,000 stipend and a $1,500 employing institution allowance. Colorado, who earned his PhD in 2002 from the University of Houston, is developing methods for coating carbon nanotubes with materials such as silica and silicates that eliminate undesirable interactions between the nanotubes and facilitate their incorporation into functional composites and advanced devices.
Also receiving a fellowship from the Ford Foundation was Crystal Redden, a graduate student in the lab of R. Bruce Weisman, professor of chemistry. The graduate student in chemistry received a Predoctoral Fellowship for Minorities. The foundation awards only about 60 of these awards each year.

F&E’s Elba Lopez Distinguishes Herself with Customer-First Attitude

Elba Lopez not only performs her job as a custodial supervisor to the best of her ability, but she also takes it upon herself to make sure other employees excel as well. For all she’s done in her 29 years on campus, Lopez has received Rice University’s Distinguished Employee Award. Staff members who have worked under Lopez over the years wrote letters of nomination praising her supervisory skills as well as her personal qualities.

The Distinguished Employee Award is given by the human resources department on behalf of the university to recognize employees who perform above and beyond their job descriptions to the benefit of the Rice community.

— Reported by B. J. Almond, Jade Boyd, Margot Dimond, Jennifer Evans, Lindsey Fielder, and Loren Wilkerson