In the News

Bill Sick

Brendan Hassett

Amy Myers Jaffe

James Kinsey

B. Paul Padley

Elora Shehabuddin

Adria Baker

Diane Butler

Sicks Endow Dean of Engineering Chair
Bill Sick ’57, Rice University trustee and longtime university supporter, and his wife, Stephanie, have increased their commitment to the William and Stephanie Sick Professorship to make it the permanent chair held by Rice’s dean of engineering. Sallie Keller-McNulty is the first dean of engineering to hold the chair.

Originally, the Sicks endowed a professorship in entrepreneurship, which was held by Steve Currall at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management until he left the university last fall. With the Sicks’ recent increased commitment, the Sick Chair has become the second at Rice dedicated in perpetuity for a dean; the first is in the School of Architecture.

The Sicks have given generously of their time and energies to Rice during the past 25 years. In 2003, Bill Sick received the Outstanding Engineering Alumnus Award, and he was selected for a 2006 Association of Rice Alumni Distinguished Alumni Award. He has been a member of the Board of Trustees since 1996.

Math’s Hassett Wins Almost $1 Million in Support
In theoretical mathematics, progress depends not on expensive supercomputers or laboratories but on brainpower. So funding is generally given to develop and support people such as Brendan Hassett, professor of mathematics, who scored a major coup for Rice this past spring by winning almost $1 million in National Science Foundation (NSF) funding for postdoctoral researchers and graduate students at Rice and three other institutions.

Focused research-group grants like this are among the most competitive mathematics awards handed out by the NSF. The funds will pay for a series of meetings over the next three years aimed at generating breakthroughs in a specific area of algebraic geometry that is ripe for innovation. Hassett, the principal investigator on the grant, is joined by collaborators Yuri Tschinkel of New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematics, Johan de Jong of Columbia University, and Jason Starr of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hassett and his colleagues are interested in parametric solutions—general solutions that account for all possible specific solutions—and in finding parametric solutions not just for one equation but for an entire class of equations.

Baker Institute’s Jaffe Becomes Co-Chair of Forum
As the new university co-chair of the Rice Global Engineering and Construction (E&C) Forum, Amy Myers Jaffe plans to promote greater interaction among professionals in the engineering and construction businesses and Rice faculty from a variety of disciplines.

To achieve this goal, Jaffe, the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and associate director of the Rice Energy Program, has invited several Rice scholars to speak at monthly roundtable meetings of the E&C Forum, an organization focused solely on the discussion and study of problems and opportunities facing the contracting side of the industry. Stephen Klineberg, professor of sociology, for example, recently led a discussion on workforce trends in Houston, and Ramon Gonzalez, the William W. Akers Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been invited to speak on the future of biofuels.

Jaffe—along with E&C Forum founder Ahmad Durrani, professor of civil and environmental engineering—also helped organize the E&C Forum’s annual conference, held October 17 at the Baker Institute. This year’s theme was “Strategies for a Turbulent, Resource-Constrained World: Delivering on Tomorrow’s Contracts.”

Kinsey to Chair Welch Scientific Advisory Board
James Kinsey, the D.R. Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Science at Rice, has been named chair of the Welch Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). Kinsey succeeds former Rice president Norman Hackerman, who had been chair of the SAB since 1982.

Kinsey is a Texas native and earned his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in chemistry from Rice in 1956 and 1959, respectively. He was the first doctoral student of Nobel laureate Robert Curl, University Professor Emeritus and the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor Emeritus of Chemistry.

Kinsey served as dean of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences from 1988 until 1998. He also served as interim provost of Rice from 1993 to 1994.

Particle Physicist Padley Tapped to Lead $40 Million European Project
Rice physicist B. Paul Padley has been chosen to lead the scientific operations for a $40 million system of particle detectors at the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Scheduled to begin operations next year, the LHC is poised to become the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. Housed in a sprawling 27-kilometer ring of subterranean tunnels on the border between France and Switzerland, the LHC will smash together beams of protons traveling near light speed to recreate high-energy conditions that existed during the universe’s infancy.

Padley, associate professor of physics and astronomy, will lead the scientific operations of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) and one of its subsystems, the Endcap Muon System. The 13,000-ton CMS, is housed in an underground chamber in Cessy, France, just across the border from Geneva, Switzerland. The physical scale of the CMS project is matched by its human scale: the project team boasts 2,300 people from 159 scientific institutions.

A goal of CMS is to detect the rapid stream of muons that will be created in the LHC. Muons are short-lived particles that act like electrons but are far more massive. Detection of muons is crucial at the LHC because muons will play a key role in unveiling the physics of the Higgs field and of supersymmetry, two of the collider’s primary goals.

Shehabuddin Selected as Carnegie Scholar
Elora Shehabuddin, an assistant professor of humanities and political science, is among 20 leading scholars from across the nation selected as 2006 Carnegie Scholars, a prestigious fellowship awarded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to support innovative and pathbreaking scholarship. Her Carnegie fellowship is the first for Rice University.

Each of this year’s scholars will study themes focusing on Islam and the modern world. Shehabuddin’s research, titled “Women at the Muslim Center: Islamist Ideals and Democratic Exigencies,” will examine the role politically engaged Muslim women play in the transformation of Islamist politics in the 21st century.

Specifically, she will study how Jamaat-i-Islami, the main Islamist party in Bangladesh, and Hezbollah, the main Islamist party in Lebanon, have regarded issues of gender and how the presence of gender issues in national public discourse is compelling the parties to change their ideologies.

She hopes her study will inspire a rethinking of “our positions on one of the most contentious debates in the early years of the 21st century: Can Islam be supportive of democratic rights generally and women’s rights in particular?”

Each of the Carnegie Scholars will receive up to $100,000 over the next two years to help fund their research. The foundation receives 100 to 150 nominations annually from designated nominators and narrows that list to 40 finalists. It ultimately awards fellowships to 20 scholars. Shehabuddin, who joined the Rice faculty in 2001, teaches regularly in the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and in the Asian Studies Program.

Group Honors Baker with Advocate of the Year Award
In her 10 years leading Rice’s Office of International Students and Scholars, Adria Baker has helped countless international students and scholars secure education visas, procure funding, and adjust to life in the United States.

For this work, Baker was honored by the Association of International Educators (NAFSA) with the first Advocate of the Year Award. She was recognized especially for her efforts to raise awareness of international education in the state and federal governments.

Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, international students and scholars have faced strict regulations and endured an extensive process for coming to the United States to study. As a result, some potential students were lost to other countries with less-severe requirements. As NAFSA’s Texas state whip, Baker was charged with keeping state and national representatives abreast of the needs of international students and the universities they would be attending in an effort to keep students from going to other countries to study.

Last year, Baker successfully spearheaded Texas’s effort to pass an international education policy resolution through the Texas Senate as well as in the Texas House of Representatives in 2004. Baker also encourages and assists her colleagues to do the same in their respective states. As a result of her continued efforts on behalf of international education, Baker recently was invited by the director of Texas Homeland Security to join the Critical Infrastructure Protection Council as it addresses the Real ID Act, which directly affects all foreign visitors in Texas and throughout the United States.

Butler Takes on New Role at Fondren
As Rice’s Fondren Library transforms itself physically and virtually into a research library for the 21st century, Diane Butler is on the job to ensure its technology infrastructure meets the ever-changing needs of scholars and students.

Butler is now assistant university librarian for library systems, a new position at Fondren, with responsibilities that include overseeing the library’s information technology operations and collaborating with Rice’s Division of Information Technology (IT).

She will help IT staff appreciate the unique needs of the library and help library staff understand the resources they depend on for their work. Specifically, she will lead and manage the library systems team, collaborate with Fondren staff and administrators to develop and implement technology solutions in all areas of the library, and work closely with IT to stay informed about university-wide initiatives and plans. Aiding her in this task will be her solid ties to Rice’s IT division, where she worked for 11 years.

Butler previously worked with Fondren Library on the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, which explores the scholarly uses of the foundation’s digital archive of approximately 117,000 hours of videotaped testimony from Holocaust survivors and witnesses.

—Reported by B. J. Almond, Jade Boyd, Dawn Dorsey, and Jennifer Evans