In the News
Reported by B. J. Almond, Jade Boyd, Dawn Dorsey, Jennifer Evans, Patrick Kurp, Lynette McGlamery, and Marilyn Howard Sparks
 |
|
|
|
Rice’s Sun Featured on New Houston PBS Series
Y. Ping Sun, university representative and wife of Rice president David Leebron, was featured in the October 22 episode of a new Houston Public Broadcasting System series titled Balancing Your Life.
The half-hour series, hosted by Ellen Susman, features women sharing their choices, challenges, and solutions in today’s ever-changing and demanding society. Sun, an attorney with Yetter & Warden LLP, is one of 26 women from varied professional, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds to be profiled on the show this season.
A native of Shanghai, China, Sun attended Beijing Language and Culture University and was offered a full scholarship to Princeton University, where she graduated cum laude in 1985 from the Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs. She received a JD in 1988 from Columbia University School of Law, where she served as an editor of the Journal of Transnational Law. Sun has practiced law in the New York offices of White & Case LLP and more recently at Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP, where she focused on corporate and international transactions.
As a university representative, Sun serves Rice in numerous roles on campus and in the Houston community. She is a member of the governing council at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music and an honorary chair of Rice’s Baker Institute Roundtable. She is a director of Texas Children’s Hospital, the Asia Society (Houston chapter), and Teach for America (Houston regional board). She is a board member of the Asian Chamber of Commerce and recently was appointed by Houston mayor Bill White to the Mayor’s International Affairs and Development Council.
Continuing Studies’ Kumari to Oversee Rice Education Outreach
Each year, some 7,000 K–12 teachers and 100,000 students in the Houston area and across Texas are touched by Rice University’s public education outreach efforts. To ensure continued success in this area and to identify new opportunities, Rice will draw on the experience of Siva Kumari, who has been appointed advisor to the provost on K–12 initiatives.
Kumari will analyze the more than 85 university-sponsored or hosted educational outreach initiatives currently in place at Rice. These range from well-funded centers to special projects mounted by individual faculty working with small groups of teachers and students. She also will identify new possibilities for reaching out to the K–12 community and make recommendations for sustainable, effective ways to conduct and to coordinate programs that are consistent with the university’s mission and that support Rice’s responsibility as a contributing member of the greater Houston community and the state of Texas.
Kumari has been working with Rice outreach programs for more than 12 years. In 2000, she joined Rice’s Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies, where she has directed K–12 projects that have had national impact. Under her leadership, Rice’s Advanced Placement (AP) Summer Institute for teachers has become the largest in the nation, and she started the International Baccalaureate (IB) programs for teachers, making Rice the only institute in the country with both AP and IB programs. Kumari created a unique model of professional development for K–12 teachers that engages higher-education faculty in the development of AP and IB teachers, and with a grant from the National Science Foundation, she created the AP Digital Library, which has nearly 9,700 national and international users. She also has been selected to participate in both national and international committees, experience that broadens her perspective on K–12 education.
Programs such as these enable Rice to magnify the impact of its outreach efforts. “As a smaller school, Rice can’t reach every individual in the K–12 community,” Kumari says, “But by teaching the teachers, as Rice does very well now, the university can re-energize these vital educators, who can go back and inspire others to make a difference in the lives of many students. I am confident that we are on the verge of exciting and positive changes that will have an impact on the future of Houston.”
Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Aazhang Earns Finnish Professorship
Behnaam Aazhang, the J.S. Abercrombie Professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has earned a Finnish Distinguished Professorship under a competitive new program by the Academy of Finland and Tekes, the Finnish funding agency for technology and innovation.
Aazhang’s project on flexible wireless communication systems is one of only 24 projects funded through the Finland Distinguished Professor Program, the goal of which is to raise the level of scientific and technological knowledge in Finland and to add a more international element to the Finnish research system.
During the five-year appointment, Aazhang will work with Matti Latva-aho, project leader in Finland and professor for digital transmission techniques at the University of Oulu in Finland, to develop technologies for future wireless communication systems. The goal is to develop technology in the areas of decentralized and self-organizing networks and operatorless radio access networks, focusing on radio technologies that apply to broadband wireless devices such as mobile phones, laptop computers, short-range communication devices, and body-area networks used in medical applications.
Ensor Receives First Global Forum Seed Grant
The Rice Global Engineering and Construction Forum (GECF) has awarded its first seed grant to Katherine Ensor, professor and chair of the Department of Statistics and director of the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems, for a study of risk assessment in the engineering and construction industry.
GECF, founded in 1997, is the only organization focused on the discussion and study of problems facing the contracting side of the engineering and construction industry. “It costs somebody money to assume these risks,” says GECF founder and chair emeritus Ahmad Durrani, professor of civil and environmental engineering. “Too often, risk management has relied on the gut feeling of a senior management person. Our goal is to quantify risk, using the expertise of an accomplished researcher like Professor Ensor.”
Ensor will use the funding to develop a robust risk-assessment strategy for industry decision-makers. From a statistical perspective, the basic research addresses the reality that information comes in many forms and usually with some degree of uncertainty. During the next year, a team of graduate and undergraduate students assembled by Ensor and Durrani will assess technical, legal, financial, and geopolitical risks, among others, supported by the $20,000 award.
Rice’s Kecht Earns Rave Reviews for Summer Institute
For centuries, Vienna, Austria, has been the melting pot of Europe, a mecca for artists, musicians, philosophers, and scientists whose rich mix of cultures has made tremendous contributions to modern European societies. Last summer, associate professor of German Maria-Regina Kecht explored those contributions in a four-week summer institute titled “Melting Pot Vienna: Then and Now,” co-directed with Helga Schreckenberger of the University of Vermont. The summer institute was one of only 11 funded nationwide by a highly competitive grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
“Melting Pot Vienna” explored the multiethnic, socio-economic, and political-ideological diversity of Vienna and its evolution over a 100-year period, starting with the last decades of the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, when the city saw itself changing from the capital of a multistate empire with 52 million inhabitants to present-day Austria, where the city is the capital of a small country of 8 million people. “It’s an interesting examination, particularly now, considering the immigration issues in our headlines,” Kecht says. “Imagine if the Austrians had practiced a policy of exclusion in turn-of-the-century Vienna. There would have been no Sigmund Freud, no Joseph Roth, no Elias Canetti, or Ernst Mach.”
The institute’s 25 participants, drawn from a range of backgrounds, including philosophy, media, women’s studies, history, and social sciences, were immersed in a tapestry of readings and discussions; lectures by Austrian experts in demography, geography, history, political science, architecture, and music history; and excursions to architectural sites and cultural events. Kecht hopes the participants left with an understanding of the diverse population of Vienna and the urban culture created through the last century and will be able to reorient their academic perceptions of a city that is too often ignored by those teaching German studies.
Participants quickly returned glowing evaluations of the experience, which many described as “impressive,” “motivating,” “moving,” and “beyond expectation.” As a result, the Modern Language Association has invited Kecht to publish a volume on Vienna in its series, Teaching Language, Literature, and Culture.
Earth Science’s Levander Receives Esteemed Humboldt Award
Alan Levander, the Carey Croneis Professor of Earth Science and chair of the Department of Earth Science, considers his recent Humboldt Research Award a professional and personal honor. The prestigious award is granted by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany to internationally recognized scientists and scholars working outside the country. Recipients must be nominated by established researchers within Germany. The award carries a cash prize, travel expenses, and the opportunity to conduct self-directed, independent research in Germany in cooperation with colleagues.
While in Germany, Levander collaborated on research about orogenic-plateau formation, seismicity distribution, and geodynamic problems associated with plate–tectonic interactions. Orogeny is the building of mountain belts—several mountain ranges that run parallel to one another, such as the Andes and Rockies—and orogenic plateaus are the high, flat features often found in the interior of these mountain belts. “It’s a great opportunity to work with an outstanding group of scientists that has been investigating the tectonic evolution of the Andean orogenic plateau and the Himalayan plateau for the past 20 years,” Levander says. “They have taken an integrated approach to studying mountain building and have found a number of surprising things about the formation of high plateaus like the Altiplano and the formation of the mountains and volcanoes around them.”
Mikos Receives Top Honor from Biomedical Engineering Society
Antonios G. Mikos, the John W. Cox Professor in Bioengineering and professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice, has received the prestigious Distinguished Scientist and Lecturer Award for 2007 from the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES). The annual award recognizes outstanding achievements and leadership in the science and practice of biomedical engineering and is one of the highest honors bestowed on a BMES member.
Mikos’s research interests include biomaterials, drug delivery, gene therapy, and tissue engineering. Among other projects being investigated by Mikos and his colleagues are bone regeneration and repair using a biodegradable polymer scaffold and the synthesis of new materials that simulate the mechanical responsiveness and biochemical processing abilities of living cells and tissues.
Mikos, who also is director of the Center for Excellence in Tissue Engineering at Rice, holds 16 patents, has authored more than 300 articles, and is a founding editor of the journal Tissue Engineering.
Biochemistry’s Olson Honored by the Biophysical Society
Rice biochemist John Olson is the winner of this year’s Emily M. Gray Award from the Biophysical Society. The award is the international professional organization’s top award for education and outreach. Olson, the Ralph and Dorothy Looney Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, has won five teaching awards at Rice, including three George R. Brown awards. He has taught one of Rice’s largest biosciences courses—the junior-level BIOS 301—every fall since 1975, except for the three years he served as department chair in the mid-1980s. The course is required for all biosciences majors and has a current annual enrollment of about 200. Olson also has taught BIOS 352, physical chemistry for biosciences, each spring since 1988, the year that many of 2006’s incoming freshmen were born.
Olson also was recognized for his mentoring. Since arriving at Rice in 1973, he has advised 22 PhD students and currently is mentoring four more doctoral candidates. In addition, 28 graduate students from Rice and other leading universities around the world have carried out significant portions of their thesis work in his laboratory. He has mentored 40 undergraduate researchers and interns—all but three of whom have gone on to pursue careers in science or medicine.
“I was both surprised and humbled to be selected for the 2007 Emily M. Gray Award,” Olson says. “It is nice to be recognized for being in the trenches, teaching the hard-core courses in biochemistry and physical chemistry, and running predoctoral training programs.”
Olson says his service as director of large National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored graduate student training programs—like the Houston Area Molecular Biophysics Predoctoral (HAMBP) Training Grant program—likely played a role in his winning the Gray Award. HAMBP provides fellowships for students from Rice, Baylor College of Medicine, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the University of Houston, the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
“Part of this award should be shared with the others who started the HAMBP Training Grant program in 1986, including Graham Palmer and Kathy Matthews at Rice, the late Finn Wold at UT Medical School at Houston, Flo Quiocho at Baylor College of Medicine, Monte Pettitt at the University of Houston, and many others,” Olson says. “HAMBP was one of the first—if not the first—successful interinstitutional graduate training grant programs in the United States. It has served as a model for many other NIH- and National Science Foundation-sponsored predoctoral fellowship programs, and it is still going strong after 20 years.”
Linguist Shibatani Awarded NSF Grant to Study Dying Languages
Masayoshi “Matt” Shibatani’s work studying languages on the brink of extinction has netted a nearly $300,000 National Science Foundation grant—the largest grant for linguistic research in the history of the School of Humanities.
With the three-year grant, Shibatani, the Deedee McMurtry Professor of Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics, will lead an international team of linguists from New Zealand, Australia, and Indonesia to study the languages of eastern Indonesia. Two Rice graduate students and two postgraduate students from Indonesia also will participate in the project.
The researchers will document the deterioration of these languages’ complex voice systems. Western languages like English have a two-voice system—active and passive—that can be distinguished by the placement of the subject and object. But the eastern Indonesian languages, part of the large Austronesian language family, originally had a four-way contrast, defying the grammatical rules of Western languages. Through its fieldwork in eastern Indonesia, Shibatani’s team hopes to understand the nature of these complex voice systems, which deteriorate into more simple systems as one moves from east to west along the archipelago stretching from Flores Island to Bali. Shibatani says the findings from this research will challenge many basic grammatical concepts and assumptions of Western linguistics, including the universal use of the subject and object, the opposition of the active–passive voice, and the distinction between nouns and verbs.
Nanotech Publication Names Rice Chemist Innovator of the Year
Rice University chemist and nanocar inventor James Tour has been selected Innovator of the Year in Small Times magazine’s Best of Small Tech Research Awards competition. The awards recognize the best people, products, and companies in nanotechnology, microelectromechanical systems, and microsystems. Tour, the Chao Professor of Chemistry, professor in mechanical engineering and materials science, and professor of computer science, also has been awarded a coveted Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society, which recognizes and encourages excellence in organic chemistry. Only 10 of the awards, sponsored by the Arthur C. Cope Fund, are given annually and consist of a $5,000 prize and a $40,000 unrestricted research grant.
Small Times recognized Tour, director of the Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory in Rice’s Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology, for his pioneering research in molecular self-assembly, including the development of single-molecule nanocars. Tour’s group unveiled its ultrasmall nanocars in 2005. Measuring just three-by-four nanometers, nanocars have four wheels, a rigid chassis, and axles that spin freely and swivel independently of one another. About 20,000 nanocars can be parked side-by-side across the diameter of a human hair. The nanocars were imaged in action in collaboration with Tour’s colleague Kevin Kelly, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Tour designed nanocars as a test system for new methods of molecular self-assembly. During the past year, his research team has extended the original concept, rolling out a motorized nanocar; a nanotruck with a cargo bay; a six-wheeled, three-axled nanocaterpillar; a nanotrain; a nanobackhoe, complete with flexible extension arm; and an ultrasmall version of the nanocar, dubbed “the NanoCooper.” The team currently is working on a high-performance version of the motorized nanocar that contains twin solar-powered motors.
“We want to build things from the bottom-up, one molecule at a time, and to do that, we need to transport molecules from place to place,” Tour says. “Just as cells use enzymes to assemble proteins and large molecules, we want to design synthetic transporters that are capable of doing much the same thing in nonbiological environments.”
Chemical Engineering Dynamo
Michael Wong, an assistant professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering and in chemistry, garnered an impressive array of awards last year for his groundbreaking work in several areas of nanotechnology.
Wong was named to the 2006 list of the world’s 35 Top Young Innovators by Technology Review magazine. The annual TR35 list recognizes individuals under age 35 whose innovative research in technology has a profound impact on today’s world. Nominees are recognized for their contributions in transforming the nature of technology and business in industries such as biotechnology and medicine, computing, and nanotechnology.
Wong also was recognized with the Young Investigator Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum. AIChE is an international organization for chemical engineering professionals, with more than 40,000 members in 93 countries. The honor acknowledges interdisciplinary research in nanoscale science and engineering by an engineer or scientist under the age of 35.
In addition, Wong garnered two other honors: the Best Applied Paper Award, with co-authors Michael Nutt and Joseph Hughes, from the South Texas Section of AIChE and Rice’s 2006 Hershel M. Rich Invention Award, presented annually to a faculty member or student who has developed an original invention.
The various awards recognized Wong for his use of nanoparticles to develop new catalysts for the chemical industry, a new class of microcapsules for biomedical applications, and palladium-coated gold nanoparticles for the purification of water contaminated by chlorinated compounds. Wong has found, for example, ways to incorporate nanoparticle-supported metal oxides into new catalysts for the chemical industry, which spends more than $11 billion annually on catalysts. Wong’s catalysts, which make use of nanoparticles rather than microparticles, could allow industry to reduce energy costs and waste chemicals and to produce gasoline, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals more efficiently. His catalysts also could be used in more effective smog-reduction devices and in new chemical technologies, such as those needed to produce hydrogen.
In a separate area of research, Wong and his group are making advances in understanding nanoparticle synthesis and scale-up. They have discovered a fundamentally new approach for synthesizing microcapsules by mixing together a polymer-salt solution and a nanoparticle suspension. This room-temperature, mild-pH, spontaneous self-assembly process has been used to create microcapsules that can be used in drug delivery, improved medical diagnostics, and other biomedical applications.
NSF Awards Will Support Development of Three Faculty Members
Assistant professors Eugene Zubarev, Mark Embree, and Scott Rixner have won Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program Awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF). CAREER grants support early career development of junior faculty and are among the most competitive grants awarded by the NSF, which gives only about 400 of the five-year grants annually across all disciplines. CAREER grants typically range from $400,000 to $500,000 and are designed to support the early career-development activities of scholars who are likely to become academic leaders in their field.
Zubarev, the Norman Hackerman-Welch Young Investigator and assistant professor in chemistry, won support for his efforts to create new nanoparticles and nanostructures using the hydrophobic effect—the tendency of some materials to repel water molecules.
Some of the most basic building blocks in biology—including the membranes that encase all living cells—are amphiphiles, compounds that consist of ordered arrangements of both water-repelling and water-attracting components. Zubarev already has pioneered a range of techniques to create an entirely new class of synthetic amphiphiles that can be useful in both molecular electronics and biomedical science. The CAREER funding will pay for continued investigations and for a comprehensive K–12 outreach program.
Embree, assistant professor of computational and applied mathematics, seeks to answer fundamental questions about some of the most important algorithms used to solve large-scale linear algebra problems. Solving such problems is necessary in a number of applications, like understanding the complex fluid dynamics associated with systems as diverse as artificial hearts, chemical-process containers, or jet aircraft. Though the efficient solution of such problems is essential to high-fidelity mathematical modeling, and the nation’s fastest computers devote many cycles to this challenge, several of the most important algorithms are unreliable and not fully understood. Embree hopes to gain insights that will lead to more rapid and reliable algorithms. His research program will be complemented with educational efforts that include mentorship programs for graduate students and undergraduates, as well as the development of a new graduate course and the broad public dissemination of educational material for numerical analysis through Rice’s Connexions project.
Rixner, assistant professor of computer science and in electrical and computer engineering, will use his CAREER funding to develop new architectures for computer networking that make efficient use of next-generation multiprocessor technology. Modern operating systems rely largely on increasing processor performance to keep pace with the rising demand for network communication. To date, exponential gains in microprocessor performance always have allowed processing power to keep pace with increasing networking demands. However, the complexity of modern microprocessors will prevent such continued performance growth. Instead, chip manufacturers have begun to provide multiple processors on a single chip to make up for the loss in performance growth of individual processors. Rixner hopes to find ways to restructure the interfaces between computer hardware and software within the network subsystem to allow networking performance to continue to scale with these new single-chip multiprocessors. He also intends to use the project to expose undergraduate and graduate students to system-level networking issues in computer systems and architecture courses.
