Students in the News

—Reported by Jade Boyd and Katherine Manuel

Graduate Students Win Support For Research on Deafness
Bioengineering graduate student Louise Organ, a fourth-year student in the laboratory of Robert Raphael, was awarded a National Research Service Award from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. The award, a Predoctoral Ruth L. Kirschstein Fellowship, includes two-and-a-half years of funding.

Organ is the second of Raphael’s students to receive a Kirschstein Fellowship in the past two years. The other, Jenni Greeson, won the award last year for a proposal to apply advanced optical imaging techniques to study the mechanical and biophysical properties of the protein prestin.

Both students conduct research that, according to Raphael, is leading to a greater understanding of nature’s most unique molecular motor. Organ’s research also involves prestin, a protein found in outer hair cells of the inner ear that converts electrical signals into physical motion, allowing the outer hair cells to act as biological audio amplifiers. Organ hopes to understand how changes in the structural properties of outer hair cell membranes affect the performance of prestin.

The research could help answer questions about why certain drugs, like aspirin, can cause temporary deafness, and may help scientists identify new classes of drugs that could allow some deaf people to hear for the very first time. Moreover, understanding how prestin operates lays the foundation for potential applications in bionanotechnology.

Computer Programming Team Wins Regional Competition
For the first time since 1985, a group of Rice students participated in the Tech Olympics, where they competed again 80 other teams from six continents in solving computer programming problems.

The Rice Blue Team, comprised of Wiess College students Paul Etienne Vouga, Gregory Malecha, and Ryan Prichard, earned a berth in the Tech Olympics by winning the 2005 South Central USA Regional Programming Contest, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), at Louisiana State University last November.

Rice’s Department of Computer Science sent a second team, the Gray team—including Will Rice College senior Shao Yu Cheng and Sid Richardson College freshmen Jae Woo Jeon and Derek Sessions—to the regional contest. That team placed 20th in a contest of 58 teams.

The Tech Olympics, officially called the ACM Programming Contest World Finals, was held in San Antonio in April and was won by Russia’s Saratov State University. ACM programming contests are intense five-hour sessions that require teams of three undergraduates to use their computer programming skills to solve eight complex problems under a demanding deadline. The students are judged not only on finding the correct solutions, but also on their programming speed.

Grad Student Earns Top Nano Honors
The Nanotechnology Foundation of Texas has awarded Rice University doctoral student Vinit Murthy its 2006 George Kozmetsky Award for Outstanding Graduate Research in Nanotechnology. The award includes a $5,000 prize.

Murthy, a fifth-year chemical engineering doctoral student in the research group of Michael Wong, assistant professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering and assistant professor in chemistry, studies nanoparticle assembly. Along with Wong, Murthy co-discovered a simple method to encapsulate any water-soluble compound easily and without damage.

The method is the most environmentally sensitive approach yet devised for making tiny hollow spheres called “microcapsules.” Microcapsule research is one of the most active fields in applied nanotechnology, with dozens of companies either developing or using the tiny containers—usually smaller than living cells—to deliver everything from drugs and imaging agents to perfumes and flavor enhancers.

Murthy has been very successful in creatively applying the physical and colloid chemistry of nanoparticles to the synthesis of functional materials, Wong notes. “His PhD research provides a great example of nanotechnology research performed at the basic science level that can readily transition into commercial products,” Wong says. “This award is a wonderful and well-deserved honor.”

The Kozmetsky Awards are the first awards of their kind to be offered in the United States to students working in fields related to nanotechnology. They are given annually to the top two graduate students in Texas. The award funds must be used for stipends, travel, lab supplies, books, and other costs directly associated with the students’ research.

Armed Forces Scholarship Allows Student to Pursue Graduate Degree
Jingyi Li, a master’s student in the Department of Computer Science, received a $3,000 scholarship from the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association to complete her graduate studies. Li was one of five students worldwide in 2006 to win the award, called the Ralph W. Shrader Diversity Scholarship.