In the News
Bioengineer Deem Recognized for Research Excellence
Bioengineering’s Michael W. Deem was awarded the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ 2004 Allan P. Colburn Award, which recognizes excellence in publications by a young member of the institute and includes a $5,000 prize.
Deem’s seminal work in protein evolution is at the forefront of the interface between biology and materials science, according to Kyriacos Athanasiou, the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Bioengineering, who spearheaded Deem’s nomination. The John W. Cox Professor in Biochemical and Genetic Engineering and professor of physics and astronomy, Deem specializes in statistical mechanics, specifically the computer simulation of complex molecular systems. He is interested in four main areas of research: the adaptive immune system response, cancer vaccines, protein structure and drug discovery, and zeolite structure and nucleation. His group uses both simulation and analytical statistical mechanics to attack these problems.
In many instances, his methods have opened the door for the investigation of increasingly tailored, microscopic properties of both solid-state and biological systems. Moreover, his pioneering techniques in atomic-level simulation also allow for the computation of both meso- and macroscopic properties of materials.
Neal Lane Earns Gillis Professorship
Neal Lane has been appointed the Malcolm Gillis University Professor, Rice’s first named university professorship.
The title of university professor is an appointment-at-large, enabling the faculty member to teach in any academic department and share expertise broadly across disciplines to foster greater intellectual pursuits at Rice. The named professorship recognizes the achievements of former Rice president Malcolm Gillis and was created by the donation of $4 million from 52 donors.
The appointment, made by President David Leebron on the recommendation of Howard Hughes Provost Eugene Levy and with the approval of the Rice Board of Trustees, was effective July 1.
Lane, a professor at Rice for 27 years before leaving to serve as science advisor to President Clinton and director of the National Science Foundation, also is a senior fellow in science and technology at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and a professor of physics and astronomy. He returned to Rice in 2001.
Rice Scientist Recognized as Pioneer in Tissue Engineering
Rice University bioengineer Antonios Mikos has been awarded the prestigious Marshall R. Urist Award by the Orthopedic Research Society.
Mikos is the John W. Cox Professor in Bioengineering, professor of chemical engineering, and director of the John W. Cox Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering at Rice. He also serves as director of Rice’s Center for Excellence in Tissue Engineering.
The Urist Award, established in 1996 and sponsored by Osiris Therapeutics, Inc., is given annually to one person who has established a reputation as a cutting-edge researcher in tissue regeneration. The award includes a $5,000 prize.
Over the past 13 years, Mikos’s laboratory has developed extensive expertise in fabricating synthetic materials with tailored chemistries for specific tissue-engineered repair of orthopedic injuries. For example, Mikos and his associates have created several novel materials based on fumaric acid, a natural product found in mammalian cell metabolism. The new materials are nontoxic to surrounding cells and tissues, and they degrade over time into products that are excreted from the body. When used as surgically implanted scaffolds, these materials act as a template, guiding the body’s cells as they form new tissue to replace flesh or bone that’s been lost to disease or injury. Since the scaffolds break down naturally, no further surgery is needed to remove them once they are implanted.
Mikos’s lab also has developed techniques for growing new bone and cartilage tissue by seeding the scaffolds with cells. Because his group’s scaffolds are highly porous and contain a large surface area, they allow seeded cells to receive nutrients from the body while the new tissue forms, thus overcoming one of the major roadblocks to tissue engineering. In addition, Mikos and his associates are developing nonsurgical approaches for scaffold implantation. In this case, the scaffold material is injected as a liquid at the site of an injury, and it is exposed to light or other chemicals that cause it to harden within a few minutes. Once the material sets, it acts as an immediate aid in the body’s efforts to form new tissue and heal itself.
Recently, the Mikos laboratory has been working on composite materials that support and guide developing tissues through the controlled release of bioactive molecules, and they are investigating nano-structured materials that can enhance the strength and load-bearing properties of scaffolds for orthopedic applications.
A pioneer in the field of tissue engineering, Mikos is a founding editor of the journal Tissue Engineering and a member of the editorial boards of numerous other journals. He also is the organizer of the continuing education course Advances in Tissue Engineering offered annually at Rice since 1993.
Pol Spanos Earns Top Engineering Distinction
Pol Spanos, the Lewis B. Ryon Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for developing methods of predicting the dynamic behavior and reliability of structural systems in diverse loading environments.
Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made important contributions to engineering research, practice, or education. Spanos becomes the 13th NAE member on Rice’s engineering faculty.
His research focuses on the dynamics and vibrations of structural and mechanical systems under a variety of loads, with a particular emphasis on systems exhibiting nonlinear behavior or exposed to risk-inducing conditions. His research group also studies fatigue and fracture issues of modern composite materials and signal processing algorithms for biomedical applications.
Spanos’s solution techniques are applied to such themes as estimation of seismic spectra; flow-induced vibrations of offshore rigs, marine risers, and pipelines; certification of payloads in space shuttle/station missions; directional oil well drilling; vibration and aseismic protection of structures and equipment; wind-loads simulation; and signal processing of electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms.
Computer Science’s Wallach Selected for Election Task Force
Rice’s Dan Wallach has been selected to serve on a task force examining issues that arose in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election. Wallach, assistant professor of computer science and in electrical and computer engineering, was named to the Democratic National Committee’s Ohio Election Task Force, a group charged with taking an in-depth look at the voter registration problems, long lines at polls, the issuance and counting of provisional ballots, and voting equipment irregularities that voters faced during the 2004 presidential election in Ohio.
The group comprises 10 nonpartisan experts, including attorneys, political scientists, and statisticians. Wallach, an expert in computer security, co-authored a groundbreaking study in 2003 that revealed significant flaws in the software at the heart of what is believed to be one of the country’s most popular electronic voting systems. He has testified about voting security issues before government bodies in the United States, Mexico, and the European Union.
West Tapped to Head IBB
Jennifer West, the Isabel C. Cameron Professor of Bioengineering and professor in chemical engineering, has been named director of Rice University’s Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering (IBB). She succeeds the late Fred Rudolph.
IBB was established in 1986 by then-president George Rupp to foster cross-disciplinary research and education programs encompassing the biological, chemical, and engineering fields. The institute has received funding for a number of programs that promote cross-disciplinary training, including multiyear training grants from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. Over the past 15 years, these grants have supported more than 200 graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and undergraduates. The institute also has been instrumental in developing new graduate and undergraduate programs in bioengineering, including the establishment of the Department of Bioengineering in 1995.
More recently, three centers have developed from the institute: the Center for Plant Science, the Bioinformatics Group (formed in conjunction with the Computer and Information Technology Institute), and the Center for Excellence in Tissue Engineering. IBB also sponsors two summer programs for high school students from the Science Academy of South Texas, HISD’s Milby High School, and the YES College Preparatory School in Houston.
Quenemoen, Grandy Named CSC Fellows
Caroline Quenemoen, assistant professor of art history, and Richard Grandy, the Carolyn and Fred McManis Professor of Philosophy, have been awarded 2004–05 teaching-release fellowships by the Center for the Study of Cultures (CSC) to pursue their respective research projects.
Quenemoen was selected for her project, “Architecture and Empire: The Significance of the Palatine Complex for Roman Identity Formation in Italy and the West.” Based on her fieldwork and research in Italy, France, and Spain, she will write the final chapter of her book on the critical role Augustus’s Palatine Complex played in the formation of the Roman Empire.
Quenemoen will demonstrate that the Palatine Complex became a mechanism that unified his empire. The physical aspects of the buildings themselves, combined with the evidence of ritual practices, bound the local populations to the larger image of the empire, she says. Quenemoen wants to give attention to a monument that has been overlooked as a part of Roman architecture. Her book argues that this monument was crucial to the formation of Augustus’s identity and uses it as a foundation for understanding Augustan ideology and politics.
In his project, titled “Soft Borders, Bright Colors: The Cognition and Metaphysics of Everyday Objects,” Grandy proposes to reveal flaws in the claims that philosophers and scientists have made regarding the significance of ordinary objects.
Since the scientific revolution of the 1600s, philosophers have come to think that physical objects—tables, chairs, and cars, for example—aren’t important in a deep philosophical sense, he explains. Their ideas have been accepted by the general public, but through his CSC project, Grandy will pen a book arguing that the widely shared understanding of what science says about everyday objects is misleading and needs to be reconsidered.
He believes that looking at logical and scientific principles with a critical eye does not undermine common sense but can provide a deeper justification of the importance of everyday objects. He hopes his book will provide an example of how to find a balance between questioning scientific claims and rejecting them.
The CSC annually awards teaching-release fellowships to Rice faculty in the humanities, social sciences, architecture, and music. Fellows are released from teaching for one semester to pursue their research projects. At the conclusion of their leave, fellows present their research in a public lecture to the Rice community.
Three Faculty Win NSF CAREER Grants
Three Rice faculty members won prestigious CAREER grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) this spring. CAREER grants, which support early career development of junior faculty, are among the most competitive at the NSF, with about 400 of the five-year grants awarded across all disciplines each year.
This year’s winners are Robert Raphael, the T.N. Law Assistant Professor in Bioengineering; Adrian Lenardic, assistant professor of earth science; and T.S. Eugene Ng, assistant professor of computer science.
Typically ranging from $400,000 to $500,000, CAREER grants support the early career-development activities of scholars who are most likely to become academic leaders in their field. CAREER recipients are selected on the basis of creative proposals that will build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education. The focus on both education and research is one of the things that distinguishes CAREER grants from other NSF research programs that focus more closely on lab research.
Raphael’s CAREER research is in the field of membrane-based bionanotechnology. It will focus on prestin, a critical membrane protein found in the outer hair cells of the inner ear. Raphael aims to characterize the electromechanical characteristics of membranes containing prestin and to lay the groundwork for bionanotechnological devices based on prestin. On the education side, Raphael plans to develop a new interdisciplinary course in bionanotechnology to be taught to graduate students and upper-level undergraduates.
Lenardic will create a visualization studio and computer simulation that will be used not only for university research and teaching but also by K–12 students and educators, artists, and science communicators. Part of the program involves building a computer model that simulates geologic processes as diverse as plate tectonics, mantle dynamics, surface erosion, continental collisions, and planetary cooling. Another element of Lenardic’s project is the creation of a workshop where advanced undergraduate and graduate students develop hands-on demonstrations of the key concepts in geoscience. Ultimately, Lenardic hopes the program will encourage students to see beyond artificial boundaries within subfields and gain a greater understanding of how processes are interconnected.
Ng is leading the Internet geometry project, which aims to “map” the Internet’s crucial properties—connectivity, delay, and bandwidth—into geometric models to obtain new fundamental insights into the structure of the vast and complex Internet.
Moreover, the “Internet coordinates” created by the mapping can enable a new generation of scalable and performance-aware network software and protocols. The Internet coordinates would work much like the geometric longitudes and latitudes that are used to determine distances between locations on Earth. Ng hopes to develop a public, global-scale distributed system that will enable all Internet nodes to independently compute their network geometric properties. On the education side, Ng plans to use the End System Multicast conferencing tool that he co-developed to facilitate joint-university teaching and interuniversity design competitions.
Faculty have won 21 CAREER grants while at Rice worth almost $7.5 million since the program’s inception in 1995.
Three Win Smalley/Curl Innovation Funds
The Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) has awarded the first grants from the Smalley/Curl Fund for Innovation to faculty members Michael S. Wong, Rebekah Drezek, and Jason Hafner.
The one-year, $15,000 grants are designed to provide faculty with seed funds to develop novel ideas that have the potential of impacting all areas of nanotechnology. CNST’s innovation fund was established in 2003 in honor of Richard Smalley, University Professor, the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry, and professor of physics, and Robert Curl, University Professor, the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor of Natural Sciences, and professor of chemistry.
Hafner and Drezek are studying the synthesis, functionalization, and optical properties of gold nanorods so that they may be used in biomedical applications. They aim to develop bright, biocompatible contrast agents that can “light up” cells that are expressing specific molecular markers indicative of early precancerous changes. With the seed money from the Smalley/Curl Fund for Innovation, Drezek, the Stanley C. Moore Assistant Professor in Bioengineering and in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Hafner, assistant professor of physics and astronomy and of chemistry, will evaluate targeted nanorods as molecular probes for reflectance confocal microscopy and optical coherence tomography—two real-time, high-resolution optical imaging techniques.
Wong, assistant professor in chemical engineering and in chemistry, is developing methods for the self-assembly of hollow microcapsules by mixing inert nanoparticles and polymers at room temperature. Wong’s lab has learned to make these hollow capsules with “patchy” surfaces, and they can attach molecules to specific locations on those surfaces.
Placing molecules on a flat surface in a desired pattern is difficult, and it is even more difficult to do so on a curved surface. Wong’s method will make it easier to pattern molecular coatings on the capsule material. Ultimately, he hopes to engineer these patchy capsules for targeted drug delivery and other advanced encapsulation applications.
Adria Baker Honored With Elizabeth Gillis Award
For almost 10 years, Adria Baker has directed the Office of International Students and Scholars, earning praise from across the Rice campus. More accolades came her way recently when Baker was named recipient of the 2005 Elizabeth Gillis Award for Exemplary Service to Rice University.
The Office of International Students and Scholars provides services to undergraduate and graduate students and scholars who come to Rice from around the globe. Last year alone, there were almost 700 international students from 83 countries—14 percent of the overall Rice student population. The office also represents Rice to various federal agencies and maintains the university’s compliance with regulations concerning international students and scholars, a task that became more complex following 9/11.
Baker also has launched efforts to help the students and scholars adapt to American culture and campus life. She has organized workshops, training sessions, and cultural events, including annual traditional Thanksgiving dinners; developed support groups and programs; and ensured that students and their families are welcomed to their new community by pairing them with host families for their first year in the United States.
The Elizabeth Gillis Award, named for the wife of former Rice president Malcolm Gillis, is presented to a staff member who has shown consistently outstanding performance and embodies the exceptional attitude of service modeled by the award’s namesake.
Graham Inducted Into Texas Sports Hall of Fame
For an outstanding career of service and accomplishments to the sport of baseball, Rice head coach Wayne Graham was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame last winter.
Graham, a native Texan, joined a prestigious class of inductees that included current Houston Astros Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio, basketball coach Harley Redin of Wayland Baptist University, Olympic gold medalist Mary Lou Retton, and former Dallas Cowboys all-pro tackle Rayfield Wright.
Among Graham’s many accomplishments at Rice is leading the Owls to their first national championship in 2003, the same year he was inducted into the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame.
Johnson Named Rice’s First Sustainability Planner
As the university’s first sustainability planner, Richard Johnson will lead Rice in developing environmentally sustainable practices to ensure the university can meet the needs of coming generations.
Since he began in December, Johnson has been assessing the state of Rice’s environmental practices and conditions, including what the Rice community consumes, discards, reuses, and recycles. As a member of the facilities, engineering, and planning department, Johnson will be collaborating with the people who play a key role in the day-to-day operations and the future design of the university. He also will work with Paul Harcombe, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and Harcombe’s sustainability-oriented class, Rice Into the Future, as well as with students in the Environmental Club and on the Student Recycling Council. Johnson will be interacting with several of the university’s centers and institutes, including the Shell Center for Sustainability, the Center for the Study of the Environment and Society, and the Environmental and Energy Systems Institute.
Johnson has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Rice and a master’s in urban and environmental planning from the University of Virginia.
Kean Named Rice’s First University Historian
For two years, historian Melissa Kean assisted in the search for Rice’s seventh president and his subsequent transition into office. Now the deputy to the president has returned to her work preserving the school’s history, having been named Rice’s first university historian.
Kean (pronounced “Kane”) assumed the role of university centennial historian February 1. Among her first responsibilities is preparing for Rice’s centenary celebration in 2012. She will be working closely with John Boles, the William Pettus Hobby Professor of History, and Lee Pecht, university archivist, as they take on the historical work to be done for the celebration as well as for the intermediate events.
Kean is an authority on Rice’s past, having published histories of the School of Continuing Studies and the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management and, most recently, researching the history of Rice’s science and engineering schools. Her five degrees include four in history—a Rice doctorate, Rice and Creighton master’s, and an Iowa State bachelor’s—and a JD from the University of Iowa. In 2000, she won Rice’s John W. Gardner Award for Best Dissertation in the schools of humanities and social sciences. Currently under revision for the University of Georgia Press is her book At a Most Uncomfortable Speed: The Desegregation of the South’s Private Universities, 1945–64.
— Reported by B. J. Almond, Jade Boyd,
Jennifer Evans, and Lindsey Fielder
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