In the News

Collins Named VP for Finance
Reorganizing Rice’s administrative support services, President David W. Leebron has created the new Division of Finance and named Kathy Collins vice president for finance.

Collins, who formerly was associate vice president and budget director, reports to both the president and the provost, heading a division that includes the Budget Office, the Office of Institutional Research, and the Controller’s Office.

Before coming to Rice in 1995, Collins served for seven years as budget director with the U.S. Department of Transportation and nine years in the White House Office of Management and Budget. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in urban studies from Mount Holyoke College and a master of arts degree in city planning from Harvard University.

Levy Named Chair of NASA Committee
Rice’s Howard R. Hughes Provost and professor of physics and astronomy Eugene Levy has been named chair of NASA’s Planetary Protection Advisory Committee and a member of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC), a group that provides the space agency with independent advice and guidance on its major program and policy issues.

As chair of the planetary protection committee, Levy will lead the group that advises NASA on matters related to protecting planets, moons, comets, and asteroids. The committee’s focus is preserving the ability to study other worlds as they exist in their natural states, avoiding contamination that would obscure the ability to find life elsewhere—if it exists—and ensuring prudent precautions are taken to protect Earth’s biosphere in case it does. Levy has been a member of this committee since 2002.

As a member of the NAC, Levy will provide counsel directly to NASA’s administration on issues of space policy. Levy began his term in June and will serve along with the likes of former senator and astronaut John Glenn, author Homer Hickam, and filmmaker James Cameron.

Athanasiou Honored for Pioneering Work in Cartilage Bioengineering
Kyriacos Athanasiou, the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Bioengineering, has been elected to the inaugural class of fellows of the Biomedical Engineering Society, an international professional organization representing more than 3,000 bioengineers and biomedical engineers.

Athanasiou was selected as a fellow for pioneering work in articular cartilage bioengineering and for substantial contributions to research that have resulted in numerous bioengineering products.

He also received the first Van C. Mow Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Established in 2004, the medal is given to an individual who has made a significant impact on the field of bioengineering through research, education, professional development, and leadership in the profession as a mentor and through service to the bioengineering community.

Athanasiou’s research centers on the regeneration of cartilages of the musculoskeletal system—tissues that cannot heal themselves. His Musculoskeletal Bioengineering Laboratory conducts basic research on the healing processes of cartilage and applied research into methods of growing tissues in the lab.

Athanasiou has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and 200 conference proceedings and abstracts, and he holds some 25 U.S. patents. He has mentored more than 130 medical residents, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students. Moreover, three companies founded on his discoveries have, among them, 10 products approved by the Food and Drug Administration. One of those—VidaCare’s EZ-IO, a device used by paramedics and frontline military medics in Afghanistan and Iraq to inject lifesaving medications directly into the bones of patients suffering blood loss and shock—already is credited with saving numerous lives and was recognized recently with top honors in the critical-care and emergency medical category of the prestigious Medical Design Excellence Award competition.

Composer Chen Awarded Commission
Shih-Hui Chen, assistant professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School of Music, was one of seven composers awarded a commission for new musical works by the Serge Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress and the Koussevitzky Music Foundation Inc. The foundations perpetuate former Boston Symphony director Serge Koussevitzky’s lifelong efforts to encourage contemporary composers.

The Empyrean Ensemble, founded in 1988 at the University of California–Davis, will perform Chen’s commissioned work, scored for voice and chamber ensemble. Chen’s work has been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, and Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, among others. Her music frequently appears in programs abroad, and she is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and grants.

Bioengineer Drezek Wins AAMI Award
Rice University bioengineer Rebekah Drezek has been awarded the 2005 Becton Dickinson Career Achievement Award by the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI). Drezek is the Stanley C. Moore Assistant Professor of Bioengineering and an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering.
The AAMI Career Achievement Award is given each year to an individual who is innovative, creative, and fundamentally committed to improving the health and well-being of the world’s population. It recognizes outstanding achievement in the development of medical devices, instruments, or systems that will help all people live healthy lives. It includes a $1,500 prize.

Drezek was selected for her groundbreaking developments in optically based medical diagnostic tools for women’s healthcare and, specifically, for creating new technologies for the early detection of many cancers. She currently is developing new optical technologies for improved detection, diagnosis, and monitoring of breast, ovarian, and endometrial cancer.

Drezek received another significant honor by earning a 2005 Beckman Young Investigator Award from the Beckman Foundation, which supports the work of the nation’s most promising young researchers in the chemical and life sciences. Only 20 of the awards are given each year. Drezek’s award comes with a three-year, $264,000 grant.

Former President Gillis Named to Board of Federal Agency
Malcolm Gillis, University Professor, the Ervin Kenneth Zingler Professor of Economics, and professor of management, has been appointed to the board of directors of the Vietnam Education Foundation.

The foundation is an independent U.S. federal agency founded by Congress to promote closer relations between the United States and Vietnam. It offers opportunities for Vietnamese nationals to pursue graduate and postgraduate studies in science and technology in the United States and for American citizens to teach in the same fields of study in Vietnam. The board is made up of six private citizens appointed by the White House, four members of Congress, and the secretaries of state, treasury, and education.

Kennedy Honored by AAAS
Ken Kennedy has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an organization founded in 1780 to honor intellectual achievement, leadership, and creativity.

Kennedy, University Professor and the Ann and John Doerr Professor of Computational Engineering in the Department of Computer Science, is among 196 new fellows of the academy, the nation’s oldest and most illustrious learned society.

Kennedy is one of the nation’s leading experts on high-performance computing. His research focuses on developing high-level programming tools for parallel and distributed computer systems. He currently leads two multi-institutional research efforts: the Los Alamos Computer Science Institute, a consortium of five universities and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Grid Application Development Software Project, a National Science Foundation-sponsored effort involving eight universities.

His national service includes a 1998 appointment to co-chair the Clinton administration’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, a group charged with reviewing the effectiveness of all of the nation’s federally funded research and development spending for information technology.

Kennedy, who earned his bachelor’s degree from Rice in 1967 and joined the faculty in 1971, helped found Rice’s computer science department, the Computer and Information Technology Institute, the Center for Research on Parallel Computation, and the Center for High Performance Software Research (HiPerSoft), which he still directs.

Tapia Named One of Tech’s ‘50 Most Important Hispanics’
The editors of Hispanic Engineer & Information Technology magazine have selected Rice’s Richard Tapia as one of the 50 Most Important Hispanics in Technology and Business for 2005. Honorees are chosen for the annual list based on their outstanding work in the field of technology and for their institutional leadership.

Tapia is the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics, associate director of graduate studies, and director of Rice’s Center for Excellence and Equity in Education.

The Top 50 list includes many of the nation’s highest-achieving Hispanic executives, managers, and researchers in industry, government, and academia. Honorees have demonstrated leadership on a broad front—not only in the workplace but also in their communities. Throughout 2005, honorees will be presented to young people as role models, and their accomplishments will be upheld as examples of the important daily contributions made by thousands of Hispanics in technology-related jobs.

Geologist Vail Awarded Franklin Medal
Peter Vail, the W. Maurice Ewing Professor Emeritus of Oceanography, was honored with the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science. It recognizes his pioneering and innovative ideas for using seismic reflections to identify sequences of subsurface rock layers, greatly enhancing exploration for oil-containing rock. He also discovered that similar changes in the rock record appear worldwide and can be attributed to global changes in sea level, thus contributing to greater understanding of Earth’s geological history.

Vail’s concepts have had far-reaching implications for both science and commerce, revolutionizing the field of stratigraphy and greatly enhancing methods for oil exploration. Vail joined Rice’s faculty in 1986 after a 30-year career at Exxon. He retired from Rice in 2001.

The Franklin Institute was established in 1824 in Philadelphia to train artisans and mechanics in the fundamentals of science. The Benjamin Franklin Medals are given annually in seven disciplines of science to those whose achievements reflect the spirit, innovation, and inspiration of Benjamin Franklin.

Awards Support Developing Careers of Young Engineers
Assistant professors Marcia O’Malley, mechanical engineering and materials science, and Yehia Massoud, electrical and computer engineering, have won Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards from the National Science Foundation.

The grants support early career development of junior faculty, and they are among the most competitive grants at the National Science Foundation, which awards only about 400 of the five-year grants across all disciplines each year. Career grants include both an educational and research component.

O’Malley will use her funding to develop innovative laboratory modules using haptic devices to enhance student learning, reinvigorate an introductory robotics course to include hands-on experiments with haptics and robotics, and promote high school outreach that includes internships, campus visits, and demonstrations using haptics to encourage students to pursue careers in science and engineering. Haptic technology allows users to simultaneously see and feel virtual environments through the use of computer-controlled desktop devices that contain sensors and actuators.

Massoud’s CAREER project will focus on developing more efficient methods of designing integrated circuits and system-on-chip. Due to the continuously increasing operating frequencies, interconnect has become the main limiting factor of the performance of integrated circuits. To facilitate and develop the new system-oriented interconnect synthesis paradigm for mixed-signal nanoscale interconnects, Massoud and his research group will research and create analytical modeling, optimization, and synthesis methodologies that facilitate generalized design automation in integrated mixed-signal and system-on-chip designs. The system-oriented interconnect synthesis strategies will use statistical modeling methodologies incorporating inductance to produce layout that meets design constraints.

The educational component of Massoud’s grant calls for the use of a dynamic computer engineering curriculum in both his graduate class, which uses an innovative semester-long project emphasizing original research, and his undergraduate class, which stresses the fundamentals of the very large-scale integration design process.

Three Rice Faculty Earn Guggenheim Fellowships
Three Rice faculty members are among this year’s recipients of prestigious Guggeneheim Fellowships. Anthropologist Susan Ossman, computer scientist Moshe Vardi, and historian Martin Wiener were selected by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. This puts the number of Rice faculty who have received Guggenheim fellowships at 37.

Ossman, visiting associate professor of anthropology, will use her fellowship for a project titled “People of the Third Step: Arab Serial Migrants in a Global World.” She will conduct research on people from Arab nations who have been residents of two or more countries, so-called “serial migrants.” She will spend eight months developing a survey and traveling in the Arab world, Europe, and the United States to conduct in-depth interviews to understand what kinds of families and individuals such global movement creates and how increased serial migration is changing the Arab world.

Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering and professor of computer science, will use his award to lead the six-month “Special Program on Logic and Algorithms” at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England. The program aims to bring together leading theoretical computer scientists to bridge a longstanding divide between those who seek to ensure and verify the correctness of computing systems and those who measure and ensure the efficiency of computer resources. His program will center around a series of workshops focusing on developments in recent years that have begun to bridge the gap. More than 100 leading computer science theorists and mathematicians are expected to participate.

The Guggenheim received by Wiener, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of History, will support his continuing study of British criminal justice history. By examining a number of homicide cases in British colonies that evoked fundamental questions about the nature and rationale of British authority, Wiener will explore a deeper understanding of the dynamics of British imperialism and address emerging areas in the study of British history. The project will result in a book, tentatively titled An Empire of Law? Violence, Race, and Authority in the British Empire.

Business Information Center’s Shaw Earns Shapiro Award
Peggy Shaw’s dedication to maintaining high standards and her creative approach to her job are among the reasons she was selected as the 2005 recipient of the Shapiro Library Staff Innovation Award by the Staff Travel and Development Committee of Fondren Library.

Since joining the Fondren staff in 1986, Shaw has overseen the Business Information Center (BIC). Located at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Mangement, the center serves as a business and economics reference library for MBA students as well as for the rest of the Rice community and the general public. In addition to ordering books, journals, and other materials and managing the daily activities of the center, Shaw teaches classes for MBA students on how to use BIC services, conduct job searches, and research companies.

The BIC houses 5,000 volumes, including annual reports and periodicals, and a variety of electronic databases and services, such as Investexts and online access to the most current financial information.
The award, funded by an endowment from the late Beth Shapiro, who served as university librarian from 1991 until her death in 1995, was created to recognize a member of the Fondren Library staff who has developed an innovative program to provide library services at Rice or who has shown exemplary service to the university community.

Impact Awards Honor Outreach, Service
Several Rice faculty and staff members have been recognized with Impact Awards, given annually by the Women’s Resource Center to those who demonstrate service to the campus community, show involvement and participation in student life and activities at Rice and beyond, work to make a positive impact by raising awareness of women’s issues, and serve as role models in the empowerment of women.

The 2005 faculty and staff winners are Rebekah Drezek, the Stanley C. Moore Assistant Professor in Bioengineering and assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering; Yildiz Bayazitoglu, the Harry S. Cameron Professor in Mechanical Engineering; Martha Alexander, LANP administrator in electrical and computer engineering; and Eusebio Franco, custodial and grounds manager in facilities, engineering, and planning.

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