Rice Magazine Issue 6

| SafeClear

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| Stellar Jets

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| Nanodragsters

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| Organismality

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| Student Blogs

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The Magazine of Rice University

Global Reach

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No. 6 | 2010

From South America to Africa and Asia, the best and brightest students are coming to Rice.

30 COLLISION POINT 34 RENAISSANCE MAN 42 MAGNIFICENT SEVEN 46 NEW ATHLETICS DIRECTOR

It Must Be Spring!

Despite the coldest winter in recent history, the university groundskeepers have done a super job of giving Rice its own taste of spring.

Contents View the slideshow:

›› › ricemagazine.info/spring

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Anything that can improve the state of Houston’s freeways is probably a good thing.

How does the SafeClear traffic management program score?

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Physicians are on the front line of professionals who often face issues of spirituality when dealing with the people they serve.

This year, the buckyball turns 25, and Rice is celebrating with the Year of Nano.

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Negotiators offer concrete recommendations on the territorial component of an Israeli–Palestinian peace settlement.

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You could call James Tour the CEO of America’s smallest automobile manufacturer — as in the really tiny nanodragster.

With trillions of watts contained in one brief burst of a powerful laser, the universe became a little less mysterious.

It’s time to Face(book) the facts: Social networking is a powerful marketing tool.

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What is the meaning of “organismality”?

When the Earth was young, it exhaled the atmosphere, but, puzzlingly, not all of it.

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Rice’s Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning busts the crooks with its interactive CSI game.

Students

Students

Features

18 As public conversation moves from town halls and newspapers to computer screens and Facebook walls, Rice students have taken to the Internet to share their research.

19 When student Meltem Demirors challenged her class to rebel for a good grade, they obliged — ’60s style.

20 Houston Mayor ’78 Rice brought Houston’s new mayor, Annise Parker ’78, back to the city of her birth, and she’s been making her mark on the area ever since.

Arts

By Mike Williams

40 Shepherd School of Music productions sing volumes about Rice’s Opera Program.

24 Global Reach As Rice reaches out to embrace the best and brightest students from around the world, more and more are calling the university home.

41 Rice helps the Actors From the London Stage turn high school students into lovers of Shakespeare.

By Merin Porter

42 Seven strange biomorphic shapes have sprouted around campus.

30 Collision Point Catching the ultrasmall and ultrafast isn’t a problem for the Rice physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider.

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By Don Lincoln

Bookshelf

34 Renaissance Man Jacques Sagot isn’t just an international student — he’s more like a force of nature.

44 Your hand may be your most important tool, but just how much do you know about it?

By David Medina

44 If there is an issue, there is a science behind it. But can we trust what we’re being told?

38 Learning From Difference The Office of Diversity and Inclusion focuses on the unconventional in all of us.

43 An installation at the Rice Gallery raises the curtain.

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45 Conventional wisdom says the economy is the paramount issue for voters, but is it true?

45 How the voyages of enslaved and free blacks shaped migrant society

Sports 46 Rice welcomes its new athletics director.

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47 Walk softly, but carry a big talent.

Rice Magazine

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No. 6

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Rice Magazine

F O R E W O R D

Vol. 65, No. 6

Many snapshots come readily to mind when you mention Rice University.

Groundbreaking research, innovative faculty and bright students are a just few you often see portrayed in the pages of Rice Magazine. But the university’s official tag line — Unconventional Wisdom — says it best. That phrase encompasses all of the above and more. New knowledge and solutions to enduring problems generally elude prescribed formulas or the path most taken; their discovery requires approaches that are not just creative and intelligent, but that also explore territory outside established boundaries. Wisdom is the product of what we do at Rice; unconventional is often how we achieve it.

Rice itself was founded on the unconventional wisdom of William Marsh Rice, who endowed the first institution of higher education in what was then the modest but growing city of Houston. Since then, Rice has benefitted from the ideas put forth by President Edgar Odell Lovett, who saw “no upper limit” to this small university’s ability to achieve greatness.

Our researchers are, perhaps, the most obvious example of how Rice is advancing new ways of thinking, and you can read about some of them in this issue. One example is Cin-Ty Lee, who has been making extraordinary findings in the geophysical sciences. Lee recently turned conventional wisdom on its head to discover the reason that the primordial Earth did not release all the gases that make up our atmosphere but instead retained some deep beneath the mantle.

Another example is Patrick Hartigan, who wanted to learn more about the behavior of the massive jets of energy that erupt from newborn stars. Since he could not travel into interstellar space to directly observe the phenomenon, which often takes thousands of years to unfold, he found a way to create a laboratory simulation that provides valuable clues to the behavior of these immense pulses of energy. Or take Joan Strassmann and David Queller, whose research has led them to a new definition of “organismality.”

Rice’s unconventional wisdom also illuminates other aspects of our university. One is the makeup of the student body. At a time when many universities are hedging their international enrollments, Rice has opened its hedges to international students, who now hail from 89 countries outside the U.S. — 13 more than last year. Check out the feature “Going Global” for profiles of several of these talented students who bring fresh ideas and different life experiences to Rice.

And for the truly out of the ordinary, read about Jacques Sagot, the subject of “Renaissance Man.” Sagot, who earned two doctorates at Rice — one in musical arts in piano and the other in French studies — is an internationally acclaimed pianist, author and UNESCO ambassador for his native country, Costa Rica.

From scholars at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy who are seeking ways to help resolve long-standing international conflicts and inform public policy to Rice scientists, students and alumni who are working on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, Rice is making its unconventional wisdom felt around the world. And let’s not forget that Rice has a profound effect on its home city, too. In this issue, you can learn about a group of architecture students who are proposing innovative solutions to problems along Houston’s waterways, and you also can read about how Rice shared its recent annual visit by the Actors From the London Stage with local high schools.

One of the best examples of Rice’s effect on its home city is Annise Parker, Houston’s recently elected mayor. Parker returned to the city of her birth specifically to attend Rice, and she stayed in Houston to have a major influence on city government during the past 12 years.

For this issue, she sat down with one of our reporters to answer questions about the impact Rice had on her life, her rise from council member to mayor and some of her plans for the future of Houston.

Whether you’re talking about life on campus, Rice’s influence on the surrounding community and the world at large, or its contributions to the breadth and depth of human knowledge, you can be sure that everyone at Rice strives to make sure that there is nothing commonplace about this small powerhouse of a university in Houston.

That’s unconventional wisdom.

Christopher Dow cloud@rice.edu

Published by the Office of Public Affairs Linda Thrane, vice president Editor Christopher Dow Editorial Director Tracey Rhoades Creative Director Jeff Cox Art Director Chuck Thurmon Editorial Staff B.J. Almond, staff writer Jade Boyd, staff writer Franz Brotzen, staff writer Jenny West Rozelle, assistant editor David Ruth, staff writer Jessica Stark, staff writer Mike Williams, staff writer Photographers Tommy LaVergne, photographer Jeff Fitlow, assistant photographer The Rice University Board of Trustees James W. Crownover, chair man; J.D. Bucky Allshouse; D. Kent Anderson; Keith T. Anderson; Subha Viswanathan Barry; Suzanne Deal Booth; Alfredo Brener; Robert T. Brockman; Nancy P. Carlson; Robert L. Clarke; Bruce W. Dunlevie; Lynn Laverty Elsenhans; Douglas Lee Foshee; Susanne Morris Glasscock; Robert R. Maxfield; M. Kenneth Oshman; Jeffery O. Rose; Lee H. Rosenthal; Hector de J. Ruiz; Marc Shapiro; L. E. Simmons; Robert B. Tudor III; James S. Turley; Randa Duncan Williams.

Administrative Officers David W. Leebron, president; George McLendon, provost; Kathy Collins, vice president for Finance; Kevin Kirby, vice president for Administration; Chris Muñoz, vice president for Enrollment; Linda Thrane, vice president for Public Affairs; Scott W. Wise, vice president for Investments and trea sur er; Richard A. Zansitis, general counsel; Darrow Zeidenstein, vice president for Resource Development.

Rice Magazine is published by the Office of Public Affairs of Rice University and is sent to university alumni, faculty, staff, graduate students, parents of undergraduates and friends of the university.

Editorial Offices Creative Services–MS 95 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, T TX X 77251-1892 Fax: 713-348-6757 E-mail: ricemagazine@rice.edu Postmaster Send address changes to: Rice University Development Services–MS 80 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 © MAY 2 0 1 0 RICE UNIVE RSIT Y

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THROUGH THE

Richard Smalley and Robert Curl

Year of Nano

A quarter-century ago, Rice University found itself at the epicenter of a worldwide revolution in science and technology when the “Aha!” moment of three scientists and a pair of graduate students gave birth to the field of nanotechnology.

Their discovery of buckminsterfullerene in 1985 — a soccer ball-shaped molecule of 60 carbon atoms nicknamed the buckyball — kicked off a transformation in chemistry and materials science and earned a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for Rice professors Richard Smalley and Robert Curl and their colleague, Sir Harold Kroto, then of the University of Sussex.

Throughout 2010, Rice is recognizing their achievement with the Year of Nano, presented by Lockheed Martin. The series of events will be capped by a three-day symposium in October that will bring to campus some of the biggest names in carbon nanotechnology research.

That week — on 10/10/10, to be exact — Rice’s Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology will host a fundraising gala to commemorate the history of nanotechnology at Rice and support the future of a field that has the potential to remake the energy industry, medical care, materials science and more.

The following evening, the institute will celebrate with a Bucky “Ball” to commemorate the fullerene discovery and highlight a wide range of nanotechnology research at Rice, which now incorporates 14 departments and 150 faculty members.

All of the events will honor the five men whose brainstorming session led to the original discovery: professors Smalley, Curl and Kroto and then-graduate students James Heath ’88 and Sean O’Brien ’88.

Sallyport

Smalley died in 2005, but the surviving four will speak at the symposium. Today, Curl is University Professor Emeritus and the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor Emeritus of Natural Sciences at Rice. Kroto is the Francis Eppes Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Florida State University.

Heath is the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. yy. And O’Brien is vice president of process engineering at MEMtronics.

prominent nano researchers in the world.”

Throughout the year, the Smalley Institute will hold a series of short courses in nanotechnology, and it plans to celebrate the anniversary in more fanciful ways as well. The institute will enter a nano-themed vehicle in Houston’s famous Art Car Parade in May, and the institute’s TunaFest, one of the best campus networking parties of the year, will return on July 2.

The Year of Nano also will honor the legacy of Smalley, whose series of advances in bulk nanotube production made possible the widespread use of nanotechnology by researchers and industry. His vision of an energy-efficient future continues to drive scientists at Rice.

”This will be a gathering of the thought leaders in carbon nanotechnology. It will showcase not only the Nobel team, but also eight of the most prominent nano researchers in the world.”

—Wade Adams

They will talk about their discovery on Oct. 11, the first day of the three-day symposium, which will include sessions on nanotechnology’s history as well as stateof-the-art nanotech applications in medicine, energy, photonics, electronics, aerospace, materials science, the environment and quantum research. Nanotechnology’s implications for business and policymakers also will be discussed.

“This will be a gathering of the thought leaders in carbon nanotechnology,” said Wade Adams, director of the Smalley Institute. “It will showcase not only the Nobel team, but also eight of the most

“This is going to be a happy, joyful and exciting event that’s only dampened by the fact that one of the most prominent people in this field is missing,” Adams said. “It was Rick who advocated for and led an international revolution in thinking about nanotechnology. It was Rick who had the great vision of nanotechnology as the key to solving the most pressing problems for humanity, especially for medicine and energy. We’ll celebrate this occasion in Rick’s honor. It’ll be a party he would have loved to attend.”

—Mike Williams

Learn more about the Year of Nano:

›› › buckyball.smalley.rice.edu

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Houston SafeClear Reduces Collisions and Saves Money

If there’s one thing most of us can agree on, it’s that anything that can improve the state of Houston freeway traffic is probably a good thing.

SafeClear, Houston’s traffic incident management program launched in 2005, was designed to alleviate many of the problems that arose from the free-for-all that occurred as tow-truck operators raced to service disabled vehicles on area freeways. Policymakers believed that by improving tow operator response by dividing Houston freeways into segments with assigned operators responsible for specific sections, crash scenes and disabled vehicles could be cleared more rapidly, cutting traffic congestion and reducing the overall number of collisions.

But does it work? A 2006 analysis that looked at the program’s first year concluded that it had been largely successful. To find out if that was still the case, Robert Stein, the Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Science; Rice research assistants Robert Dahnke and Ben Stevenson; and Tim Lomax of the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University conducted a study of the most recent year of SafeClear for which complete data was available.

Titled “SafeClear Performance Report 2008,” the study confirmed that the SafeClear program works and that nearly all of its goals have been met.

In 2008, 89.8 percent of tow calls received a response within six minutes, just short of the 90 percent goal. How fast a tow operator arrives at a disabled vehicle correlates to the total volume of collisions: A one-minute decrease in average response time results in approximately 80 fewer collisions per month. The report found that SafeClear worked better than that. In 2008, the quick response time led to a reduction of approximately 120 collisions per month.

At an estimated cost of $34,000 per collision, the SafeClear program saved Houston $4,080,000 per month, which adds up to nearly $49 million per year.

There is a kink, however. The researchers found evidence illustrating that when the price of fuel increases — and with it, the cost of doing business — tow operators patrol the freeways less, leading to lengthier response times.

—Franz Brotzen

Download a PDF file of the study: › ›› ricemagazine.info/ 50

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Marketing Via Facebook Companies that use the popular social media site Facebook and its fan page module to market themselves to customers can increase sales, word-of-mouth marketing and customer loyalty significantly among a subset of their customers, according to new research from Rice University’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business.

The research was conducted by Utpal Dholakia, the Mackey/Simons Distinguished Associate Professor of Management, and Emily Hoffman Durham ’99, a Jones School alumna and founder of Restaurant Connections, a Houston-based restaurant consultancy.

Dholakia and Durham surveyed customers of Dessert Gallery (DG), a popular Houston-based café chain. Prior to the study, DG did not have a Facebook presence.

The study, based on surveys of more than 1,700 respondents over a three-month period, found that compared with typical DG customers, the company’s Facebook fans: • Made 36 percent more visits to DG’s stores each month.

• Spent 45 percent more of their eating-out dollars at DG. • Spent 33 percent more at DG’s stores.

• Had 14 percent higher emotional attachment to the DG brand.

• Had 41 percent greater psychological loyalty to DG. The results indicate that Facebook fan pages offer an effective and low-cost way of social-media marketing. “We must be cautious in interpreting the study’s results,” Dholakia said. “The fact that only about 5 percent of the firm’s 13,000 customers became Facebook fans within three months indicates that Facebook fan pages may work best as niche marketing programs targeted to customers who regularly use Facebook.

Social-media marketing must be employed judiciously with other types of marketing programs.”

Dholakia said Facebook marketing programs may be especially effective for iconic brands, which appear to attract a higher percentage of their customer base as Facebook fans.

The study — “How Effective Is Facebook Marketing?” — was featured in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review.

—David Ruth

Read the article: › › › ricemagazine.info/ 51

THROUGH THE

Sallyport Rice astronomer Patrick Hartigan displays a souvenir: one of the targets from his series of experiments to simulate stellar jets. Powerful lasers blasted a tiny plug of titanium inside the gold-coated cone, shooting the atomized material into a ball of foam-covered plastic on the other side to see how the jet would be deflected.

Star Power

For help, he turned to the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics and its OMEGA laser, one of the most powerful in the world. The experiment involved focusing a dozen fine laser beams at a plug of titanium nested in a gold-covered, half-dollar-sized cone.

Behind the cone was a tiny ball of foam-covered plastic that served as a cloud of interstellar material.

If Hartigan went to Rochester anticipating a bit of Star Wars-style dazzle, he was in for a disappointment. “You watch the image of the target on a TV screen as they count down,” he said, “and suddenly the Newborn stars are meat and potatoes to an astrophysicist like Patrick target disappears.”

Hartigan, who is particularly interested in the fiery jets that burst from But the event can be caught by high-speed photography, and the retheir poles and the effects those jets have on their surroundings. Last sults are a stunning series of images of the shock waves as the atomized year, Hartigan spent time at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona titanium blasted into the foam and deflected into swirling clouds that observing and photographing Herbig-Haro 110. Herbig-Haro objects are look remarkably like the streamers of shocked gas strewn about space by patches of nebulosity formed when gas ejected by young stars collides stellar winds. They also bear close with nearby clouds of gas and dust similarities to three-dimensional at speeds of several hundred miles computer models of deflected per second. jets developed by researchers at “A jet traveling that fast should Los Alamos National Laboratory move in a straight line forever,” and the United Kingdom’s Atomic said Hartigan, professor of physics Weapons Establishment. and astronomy at Rice. “But the asThe images are confirmation tronomical images we took at Kitt Peak showed something different.” The images above, taken in a few billionths of a second, detail experiments at the Laboratory for that it’s possible to recreate analogs of stellar jets here on Earth, Those photos showed a series of Laser Energetics meant to simulate stellar jets and their effects on interstellar materials. which will aid in understanding shock waves as well as material bestellar formation. “This phenomenon is a primary way that young stars ing dragged out from a dense obstacle along the path of the jet. “It was affect their surroundings,” Hartigan said, “which, in turn, determines apparent,” Hartigan explained, “that the jet was impacting a dense cloud whether or not other stars may form in the same region.” and deflecting from it.”

Hartigan’s team included Rice graduate student Robert Carver and But the photos also illustrated the limitations of telescopic obsercollaborators from Los Alamos, the Atomic Weapons Establishment, vation, giving only a two-dimensional image of the phenomenon. In the University of Rochester, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory addition, Herbig-Haro objects can last a few thousand years. That may and General Atomics in San Diego. The research was funded by the be transient on a universal scale, but it’s a long time for human observaDepartment of Energy, the National Science Foundation and NASA, and tion. Those factors led Hartigan and his team of researchers to devise a the results appeared in the Astrophysical Journal. way to simulate these jets in the laboratory, where the time scale could be sped up and the observations made in three dimensions. One of the —Mike Williams few ways to simulate a stellar jet is to heat something very fast, atomize Read the paper: it and direct the plasma that results. “We realized we could construct an › › › ricemagazine.info/42 experiment with a laser that would do the same thing,” Hartigan said.

With trillions of watts contained in one brief burst of a powerful laser, the universe became a bit less mysterious.

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Mapping the Contours of an Israeli–Palestinian Peace Settlement No one knows if Israel and Palestine will ever come to a peaceful accord, but a report recently issued by Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy offers U.S. negotiators concrete recommendations on the territorial component of a settlement to the long-standing enmity.

Titled “Getting to the Territorial Endgame of an Israeli–Palestinian Peace Settlement,” the report draws on nearly two years of discussions between a working group of Israelis and Palestinians convened under the aegis of the institute’s Conflict Resolution Forum and chaired by Baker Institute Founding Director Edward P. Djerejian.

The findings provide policymakers in Washington, Jerusalem and Ramallah with a bottom-up approach that highlights differences and areas of possible agreement between the Israeli and Palestinian positions on the key territorial issues. A primary assumption underlying the report is that the territorial component of peace cannot be negotiated and addressed in isolation of other issues, including Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees and security.

“No agreement will please every constituency on either side,” said Djerejian, who is a former U.S. ambassador to Syria and to Israel, as well as former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. “But this report provides the respective governments with a heads-up on significant problems and contentious issues that they most likely will encounter in actual negotiations and, at the same time, provides insights into where differences could be narrowed and agreements reached.”

A primary assumption underlying the report is that the territorial component of peace cannot be negotiated and addressed in isolation of other issues, including Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees and security.

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The Israeli and Palestinian participants in the workshop supplied narratives and submitted different maps containing territorial scenarios for the West Bank. Although they did not reach a consensus, the two teams narrowed their differences in some areas and established certain common criteria and guidelines for assessing the territorial issues.

Eleven specific settlements in the West Bank were discussed in detail.

The issue of Jerusalem was not directly addressed in the report, but the most contentious settlements in the vicinity of the city were deliberated on, and major obstacles to an agreement were acknowledged and identified.

The report finds that a United States bridging proposal on the territorial component of peace based on the line of June 4, 1967, with agreed-upon swaps and modifications, could be introduced at the right time and, depending on actual political circumstances, serve as a guide to enable gradual progress. The contours of this territorial bridging proposal are outlined in the report, as well as the need to prepare the necessary planning tools to achieve a successful outcome. The phasing of the relocation and dismantlement of settlements over a period of time was underscored as an important part in any compromise.

“In actual negotiations, strong political will on the part of the leadership of all the parties — and a viable and ongoing negotiating framework — will be necessary to help bring the parties to a final agreement,” Djerejian said. “And no real progress will be made without the direct and sustained involvement of President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Special Envoy for Middle East Peace George Mitchell.”

The Israeli and Palestinian participants in the discussions were former civilian and military officials, academics, experts from various organizations and individuals from the private sector.

—David Ruth

Download the PDF report: › › › ricemagazine.info/4 3

THROUGH THE

Sallyport

ZEROW HOUSE Comes Home ZEROW HOUSE, the 800-square-foot dwelling designed and built by Rice University students for the 2009 Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C., has come back to Houston.

Upside-down Answer for Deep Earth Mystery

The unconventional solar-powered house took eighth place overall in the competition, and it placed second in both architecture and market viability. The Rice team was the only one from Texas to participate and had the lowest budget among the 20 competitors. Donated to Project Row Houses through a collaboration with Rice Building Workshop, ZEROW HOUSE is now at its permanent address in Houston’s Third Ward.

—Jessica Stark

ZEROW HOUSE virtual tour: › › › ricemagazine.info/45

When Earth was young and undergoing intense volcanic activity, it exhaled the atmosphere. But before all the lightest elements from the molten interior were released into the sky, the Earth held its breath, and therein lies a mystery that has long puzzled earth scientists.

For some time, scientists have known that a large cache of light elements like helium and argon still reside within the planet. This is perplexing because such elements tend to escape into the atmosphere during volcanism, and indeed, these elements are depleted in the Earth’s upper mantle. But why would some gases be retained while others are released? The dominant view has held that the lowermost mantle has been largely isolated from the upper mantle and therefore retains its primordial composition, but now, a Rice University-based team of scientists is offering a new answer to the mystery.

“When something melts, we expect the gas to get out, and for that reason people have suggested that the trapped elements must be in a primordial reservoir that never melted,” said lead author Cin-Ty Lee, associate professor of earth science at Rice. “But recent evidence suggests that all the mantle should have melted at least once. What we are proposing is a mechanism where things could have melted but where the gas did not escape because the melted material never rose to the surface.”

The researchers theorize that a particular set of geophysical conditions that existed about 3.5 billion years ago — when Earth’s interior was much warmer — led to the formation of a “density trap” about 400 kilometers below the planet’s surface. In the trap, a precise combination of heat and pressure led to a geophysical rarity: an area where liquids are denser than solids. Instead of rising to the surface to form volcanoes, the dense liquids stalled, crystallized and eventually sank to the bottom of the mantle.

Melted material rising from the Earth’s interior is the process that created the Earth’s crust, so the idea that melted material might sink instead literally turns conventional wisdom on its head. But the upside-down model can explain several geochemical and geophysical oddities in addition to the trapped gases, which reinforces its plausibility.

Lee hopes the hypothesis will generate interest. “There are seismic methods that can be used to test our idea,” he said. “Even if we turn out to be wrong, the tests would generate a lot of new information.”

The research appeared in Nature, and the paper’s co-authors include Peter Luffi, Tobias Höink and Rajdeep Dasgupta, all of Rice; Jie Li of the University of Michigan; and John Hernlund of the University of California at Berkeley. The research was supported by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

—Jade Boyd

Read the paper: ››› ricemagazine.info/4 4

Who Scribd to Issuu? YUDU. Now there are three fun new online publication sites — Scribd, Issuu and YUDU — that let you flip through the pages of Rice Magazine just as you would the paper version. Even better, the issues can be printed, downloaded, sent to mobile devices or embedded in other Web sites so you can share them with others interested in all the exciting research and inspiring ideas coming from Rice University.

Read Rice Magazine at: I S S U U › › › issuu.com/riceuniversity S CRI BD › › › scribd.com/riceuniversity Y U D U › › › ricemagazine.info/yudu

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Centennial Challenge to Young Alumni WHY I GIVE

“My experiences at Rice were some of the best of my life, and I hope it stays that way for future classes.”

— Shay Har-Noy

Over the years, Shay Har-Noy ’04 has identified himself as a Sunnyvalian, Manhattanite, Tel Avivan, Las Vegan and Bostonian, but one of his all-time favorites is Rice Owl. Shay is one of more than 950 recent Rice graduates who have risen to the challenge with a gift to the Rice Annual Fund. At a time when schools across the country are tightening their belts and cutting scholarships and programs, he and his fellow alumni are helping to give every Rice student — regardless of where they’re from — the best possible experience every year.

One Gift, Twice the Impact

From now until June 30, every gift from young alumni will be matched dollar-for-dollar.

Physicians View Religion and Spirituality as Both a Barrier and a Bridge to Medical Care Many professionals, especially those in social services, teaching, law and even coaching, often face situations in which they must decide whether religion and spirituality, in various forms, are within their jurisdiction or relevant to it. Members of the medical profession are no exception and are, perhaps, most often on the front line of this issue, particularly when dealing with serious illness or the impending death of a patient.

T learn how religion and spirituality impact physicians, Elaine Howard Ecklund, To assistant professor of sociology and associate director of the Institute for Urban Research, co-authored a study based on in-depth interviews with 30 randomly selected pediatricians and pediatric oncologists who practice and teach at elite medical centers around the United States.

The study, titled “Religion and Spirituality: A Barrier and a Bridge in the Everyday Professional Work of Pediatric Physicians,” asked how the physicians gather information about religion and spirituality in their work with patients and families and when, if at all, that information is relevant to their professional work.

It also questioned whether the physicians perceive these subjects as a barrier or a bridge to medical care.

The researchers found that physicians receive very little training in religion and spirituality in medical school, which suggests, they reported, “that medical educators view the topics as outside the jurisdiction of physicians.” As a result, most doctors avoid asking patients and families about their religious or spiritual backgrounds.

Instead, they adopt the attitude that such topics are personal and that any inquiry would be viewed as prying.

The research found, however, that pediatric oncologists are more likely than pediatricians to see a patient’s spirituality as relevant to their work with patients.

Moreover, the majority of the physicians interviewed saw religion and spirituality as “most relevant in difficult medical decision-making situations, in particular those made about end-of-life care.”

The researchers concluded that overall, the physicians in the survey view religion and spirituality as a barrier when it impedes their work or ability to care for children, especially those who are memMost doctors avoid asking bers of religious traditions that exist in patients and families about some tension with biomedicine. But it can their religious or spiritual be “a bridge when it helps patients and backgrounds. Instead, they families make sense of illness, adjust to adopt the attitude that such difficult news and answer questions that topics are personal and medicine inherently cannot.” that any inquiry would be The study, co-authored by Wendy Cadge of Brandeis University and Nicholas viewed as prying.

Short of Baylor College of Medicine, appeared in the journal Social Problems. The work was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program and the John Templeton Foundation.

rice.edu/centennialchallenge

—Franz Brotzen

Read the study: ›› › ricemagazine.info/49 8

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THROUGH THE

Sallyport

Nanodragsters Hit the Street The larger wheels are C60 atoms, or buckyballs, and the front wheels are smaller p-carborane molecules, which don’t grip the surface as tightly as the rear, making the car far more agile than previous Rice nanocars.

You could call James Tour the CEO of America’s smallest automobile manufacturer. Since 2005, Tour — the T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, and professor of computer science — has created a series of molecular machines that resemble cars and trucks on America’s streets. Now, Tour and Kevin Kelly, associate professor in electrical and computer engineering, have revealed their latest breakthrough: the nanodragster.

The nanodragster, named for its characteristic hot-rod shape, with small wheels on a short axle in the front and large wheels on a long axle in the back, is another step toward functional nanomachines that can be custom-built and set to work in microelectronics and other applications.

The composition of those wheels is important. Early nanocars rolled on simple carbon 60 molecules (buckyballs). But they were a drag, literally, as they would only turn on a gold surface in high heat, about 200 degrees Celsius.

The key to better mobility was putting wheels of p-carborane — a cluster of carbon and boron atoms, which operate at much lower temperatures — in the front and buckyballs in the back for greater traction. The result is a vehicle that can operate at a much lower temperature than previous models.

The tiny hot rod, 1/25,000th the width of a human hair, has a chassis that rotates freely and allows the car to turn when one front wheel or the other is lifted, a behavior not seen in previous nanocars. Much to the researchers’ amusement, in several of the images the nanodragsters appear to be “popping wheelies” with both front wheels raised off the surface, just like real dragsters at the start of a race. Obtaining greater control of their motion and giving them the ability to operate on surfaces other than gold are subjects of ongoing research.

Guillaume Vives, a former postdoctoral research associate in Tour’s lab, and JungHo Kang, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, coauthored the research paper, which was reported in the American Chemical Society journal Organic Letters.

Tour Named a Top-10 Chemist James Tour, the Rice researcher behind a dealershipful of nanoscale vehicles, advances in molecular electronics, nanoparticles for oil extraction, a Web site to facilitate advances in pharmaceutical synthesis and even video games to teach scientific concepts to children, has been named one of the world’s top 10 chemists for the past decade.

The accolade comes from Times Higher Education, a United Kingdom publication for professionals in education and research, which judged the researchers on the number of papers published in journals from January 1999 to June 2009 and, critically, the number of citations per paper. Tour published 135 papers in that time, with an average of 62.76 citations per paper.

—Mike Williams

—Mike Williams

Read the research paper: ›› › ricemagazine.info/52 Know More: ››› ricewhoknew.info/2 Rice Magazine

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Rice Alliance Named One of World’s Best Entrepreneurship Centers

“Part of our mission was to correct misconceptions of what people see on television — to get them to appreciate that forensic specialists are scientists.”

— Leslie Miller

No.1 With a Bullet Rice’s Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning (CTTL) has a new notch in its gun.

Te c h n o l o g y and ntrepreneurship E for

The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship has been named one of the world’s best entrepreneurship centers by the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers, the premier global organization for university-based entrepreneurship programs.

The consortium, which recognized entrepreneurship centers in seven areas for their outstanding contributions to entrepreneurship teaching, bestowed two of the seven awards on the Rice Alliance: Excellence in Specialty Entrepreneurship Education and Outstanding Center of Entrepreneurial Leadership.

The awards were presented at the consortium’s recent annual conference, hosted by the Rice Alliance and the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business. More than 340 university entrepreneurship educators and center directors attended the three-day event.

—Mary Lynn Fernau

›› › alliance.rice.edu

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The center focuses on the power of games to enhance learning and motivate better health behaviors, and its latest in a series of “Web Adventures” has earned an outstanding achievement award from the Interactive Media Council, a nonprofit organization of Web professionals.

The new teen-oriented game — “CSI: The Experience” — entertains as it educates players about the reality of a career in forensics. Its story lines and characters are based on the long-running CBS drama that follows investigators who use scientific methods to solve crimes.

The game, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, is a collaboration with the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, which approached CTTL to create an Internet component for its traveling “CSI”-themed exhibit.

Leslie Miller, a senior research scholar at CTTL, had to become a bit of a gumshoe herself as she and her team at the center dove into the world of forensic science. It helped that Miller, whose background is in the use of technology in education, was already a fan of “CSI.” “Though most of my colleagues don’t watch the show,” she said, “we all had fun coming up with story lines.”

CBS provided access to character images, fonts and other artwork, and Miller’s team worked closely with the director of the Fort Worth Police Department Crime Lab and toxicologists from the Harris County Medical Examiner’s office to make

sure that the game was realistic. The team also sought the advice of professionals from the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and utilized studies conducted by Rice’s Department of Psychology.

Though the cases on “CSI: The Experience” are fictitious, much of the evidence — bullets, fingerprints and other clues — are real, provided by forensic professionals. “We want to teach accurate science,” Miller said.

“Part of our mission was to correct misconceptions of what people see on television — to get them to appreciate that forensic specialists are scientists.

You don’t just walk off the street and start investigating crimes.”

The award is ample evidence that “CSI: The Experience” is a quality production, but Miller said comments posted on the Web site prove the game has found its target. “It really seems to be accomplishing what we thought it would — it’s a virtual apprenticeship, and kids can actually try out what it’s like to be a toxicologist, medical examiner or a DNA analyst.”

The game is the fourth in a series of science “Web Adventures”; others deal with drug abuse (“Reconstructors”), alcohol abuse (“The N-Squad”) and infectious diseases (“MedMyst”).

Another game that focuses on juvenile arthritis and the immune system is under development with pediatric rheumatologists at Texas Children’s Hospital.

—Mike Williams

Play the games: ›› › webadventures.rice.edu

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Sallyport

Teachers as Historians During the next three years, 90 American history teachers from the Fort Bend and Spring Branch independent school districts will work with Rice historians to improve their content knowledge and help raise student achievement by bettering their teaching techniques. The program, Teachers as Historians, is supported by a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education and is administered through the Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies.

Rice Named to President’s Honor Roll Students work hard to make the honor roll, and so do universities. In their case, it’s the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll — the highest federal recognition a university can receive for its commitment to volunteering, academic community service and civic engagement. When the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency that leads President Barack Obama’s national call to service, announced the 2009 list in February, Rice found itself cited for its volunteer efforts to deal with such social issues as poverty and illiteracy.

Mac Griswold, director of Rice’s Community Involvement Center, estimated that Rice students contributed more than 21,000 hours of community service last year with more than 175 nonprofit partners throughout Houston, the United States and the world.

“Rice’s placement on this honor roll is a reflection of both the community volunteer work done by our students and the projects and course work completed in classes having community-based research components,” Griswold said.

On Rice’s application for the honor roll, the Community Involvement Center highlighted several programs, including: • Urban Immersion: A weeklong summer program that introduces Rice students to Houston and volunteer opportunities, such as spending time with kids at Casa de Esperanza de los Niños, which provides residential, medical and psychological care for children in crisis due to abuse, neglect or the effects of HIV. • Alternative Spring Break: Student-led trips to locations around the United States during spring break to perform service,

projects learn about social issues and participate in group reflection activities on the experience, such as building houses in New Orleans. More than 140 Rice students, faculty and staff participated in this year’s Alternative Spring Break projects.

• America Reads Tutoring Program, which matches Rice students with local atrisk youths.

The Community Involvement Center is one of three components of the Center for Civic Engagement (CCE), led

by Executive Director Stephanie Shirley Post. The CCE identifies and cultivates opportunities for Rice students, faculty and staff to engage the Houston community and the world through scholarship, service and leadership.

—B.J. Almond

Download a PDF of the complete 2009 President’s Honor Roll: › ›› ricemagazine.info/46

Each year, 30 teachers will focus on a particular period in American history: “A Nation is Born: 1492–1815,” “Transformation of the Republic: 1801–1920” and “Modern America and the Global Community: 1914–present.” The intensive training will include seminars, experiential field studies and workshops. The teachers will develop curricula that will be published and stored in a digital archive that can be accessed and utilized by American history instructors around the world.

Rice history faculty members John Boles, the William Pettus Hobby Professor of History; Alexander Byrd, associate professor of history; Edward Cox, associate professor of history; and Allen Matusow, the William Gaines Twyman Professor of History and academic affairs director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, will serve as advisers and content lecturers and help connect the teachers to other university faculty, resources and research.

The Bill of Rights Institute; Law Focused Education Inc.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum; George Bush Presidential Library and Museum; and Colonial Williamsburg also will be involved in the program.

—Jessica Stark

Learn more about the Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies: ›› › gscs.rice.edu Discover what Rice is doing for its surrounding communities: ›› › explore.rice.edu

Know More: › ›› ricewhoknew.info/1

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Willy’s 80th

A piece of cake — and a whole lot of cupcakes Hundreds in the Rice community came out March 18 for a sweet treat to celebrate the 80th birthday of Willy, the statue of university founder William Marsh Rice.

A birthday-capped Willy watched over the proceedings as Rice historian John Boles, the William Pettus Hobby Professor of History, sliced into a cake that featured

a chocolate replica of the statue. As he cut, the crowd was treated to a surprise jack in miniature when the replica began rotating in homage to the elaborate and notorious 1988 prank when a group of students turned Willy 180 degrees in the dead of night. The cake statue’s rotation was made possible by a mechanical device built at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen.

The 100-Year Mark Rice’s Centennial Celebration has a new mark that features a fun take on the Athenian owl. The brainchild of Rice President David Leebron, who has a well-known affinity for the university’s official mascot, the emblem will identify 100th anniversary activities and events from Willy Week through the Centennial Celebration weekend Oct. 10–14, 2012.

“Our passion for Rice University is reflected in our passion for its symbols,” Leebron wrote in a recent Rice Magazine article about his collection of owl paraphernalia, “and no symbol has endured longer or endeared itself more to the Rice community than the owl.”

The Office of Public Affairs’ Creative Services team helped turn Leebron’s concept into the new mark, which is distinct from the close-up photograph of an owl’s face adopted in 2008 as the symbol of the Centennial Campaign, Rice’s $1 billion fundraising initiative.

The newly formed Centeninal Commission provided input.

Centennial Director Kathleen Boyd Fossi said the mark embodies Rice’s quirky personality while being rooted in Rice’s history. “We hope you agree it sets the expectation for the Centennial Celebration to be fun,” she said.

—Arie Wilson Passwaters

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T h e fe s t i v i t i e s — p a r t o f R i c e ’s Centennial Celebration — included screenings of the documentary “180: The Spin on Willy’s Statue,” introduced by fi lmmaker Theresa Bujnoch ’88. Among those contributing to the group effort were the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, Rice Robotics Club, Baylor College of Medicine, Rice Chorale and Office of Public Affairs.

THROUGH THE

Rice Remains Among Top Five Best-Value Schools

Collecting College China Old dinner china is something we don’t often think about. It gets broken, and partial sets are discarded or put into boxes and quickly forgotten.

That may be why the china formerly used in the residential colleges, once some of the most common on campus, now is the most difficult to find.

During its history, Rice has commissioned many sets of dinner china — some for daily use and some for special purposes. The first on campus was the Rice Institute china, which was white with blue bands around it and bore the institute seal.

“We have plenty of that,” said Lee Pecht, head of special collections housed in the Woodson Research Center, the university’s archives. Pecht and his fellow archivists are collecting samples from all the different china sets that have existed at Rice. “People find pieces in antique shops and flea markets and bring it to Woodson all the time.”

Other campus china sets include those used

by Cohen House and the Baker Society.

Of more historical interest are the sets commissioned for special events, such as four Wedgwood plates created for Rice’s semicentennial. “Each depicts one of the buildings on campus,” Pecht said.

“They’re amusing because the images on the plates don’t match reality. The Lovett Hall plate shows wings extending off the building and a reflection pool.”

Special china may have been used in the residence halls before the college system was instituted, but no sign of it remains. “We believe they began using the special china after 1957,” Pecht said. “The pieces from the different colleges all had the same basic look — white with blue banding — but the individual sets were marked with the college crest or seal.”

Sallyport

If the college china once was so ubiquitous, what happened to it? Some was broken during the decades it was in use, but the end came in the late 1980s, when the colleges adopted paper and plastic dinnerware for a short time before moving to more generic china. “We thought it was all gone,” Pecht said.

Thanks to the recent campus renovations, though, some of the college china was discovered in the old Baker College basement.

“It’s an uneven collection,” Pecht said. “There might be four coffee cups and saucers from one college and a creamer and sugar from another.

Mostly we found coffee cups and saucers. Apparently the students then didn’t drink a lot of coffee.

We also have a dinner plate from each of the colleges except Baker.”

There are a few strange pieces, too. “Baker had little pieces that I think were for smoking,” Pecht said. “They had a place on top to put a box of matches.”

As the university approaches the Centennial Celebration, the archivists are looking for pieces that might round out the collection.

“We’d like to have a full serving set from each college,” Pecht said, “and we appreciate donations from anyone who has pieces.”

—Christopher Dow

To donate college china or other items of historical interest to Rice, contact the Woodson Research Center:

Rice continues its long-running presence at the top of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance list of the 50 best values in private universities, taking the No. 4 spot for the second year in a row.

The 2009–10 ranking, which features schools that offer both exceptional education and economic value, is based on the percentage of applicants offered admission, the percentage of the 2008–09 freshman class that scored 600 or higher on the verbal and math SATs or 24 or higher on the ACT, the student–faculty ratio, and the percentage of freshmen who earned a bachelor’s degree within four or five years. Financial measures include the total cost to students for academic year 2009–10, the cost after financial aid is subtracted, the percentage of the average financial aid package that came from grants or scholarships, the percentage of all undergraduates who received non-need-based aid, and the average debt at graduation for graduates who took out education loans.

The only other private university in Texas to make the list was Trinity University, which ranked 31st.

See the complete rankings: ›› › ricemagazine.info/48

› ›› woodson@rice.edu

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What Is the Meaning of “One?” “I think, therefore I am,” René Descartes famously said, but David Queller and Joan Strassmann, the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professors of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, might put it a little differently: “We work together, therefore I am.”

Some of the traits scientists have used to describe an organism, such as individuality or even membership in the same species, may not be the true definers of “organismality,” Queller and Strassmann argued in a new paper. Instead, commonality of interest, high cooperation and low conflict between components, from the genetic level on up, give a living thing its organismality and provide an optimum level of adaptation, whether But unlike that thing is a bacteria, a plant or an animal — or even a colony. a honeybee In “Beyond Society: The Evolution colony, a city is of Organismality,” published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal not organismal.

Society Biological Sciences, Queller and Though the Strassmann addressed what they call the truly central questions about the orhuman colony ganization of life. “This is more than a requires a semantic game of deciding that X is an organism and Y is not,” they wrote. “The great deal of scientific community could choose any cooperation to name they want for entities with extensive cooperation and very little conflict, keep it running, but the existence of such entities is one of it is, the the striking features of life, and explaining how they evolve should therefore be authors said, an important task.” “far too full of The idea that a high degree of cooperation and low level of conflict — even conflicts.” when the potential for conflict is there — is a primary trait of an organism has been bubbling just below the surface of the authors’ extensive research into the conflicts and cooperation that drive Dictyostelium amoebas (slime molds) and social insects. By the authors’ definition, an organism need not share a single body — a colony of honeybees is an organism because of its sense of shared purpose.

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The researchers’ scheme centers on charts that separate living things into four groups based on observed levels of cooperation and conflict. “The opposite of high cooperation is not conflict,” Strassmann said. “It’s absence of cooperation. That idea allows us to put conflict on a different axis from cooperation and divide the social space into organisms, societies, competitors and simple groups.”

Queller and Strassmann analyzed cooperation and conflict in dozens of species in three distinct classes to determine where they land on the organismal charts. On the cellular level, whales, mice, redwoods, Dictyostelium and the malarial parasite Plasmodium in mosquitoes rank high on the organismality scale for their levels of cooperation with little conflict.

Humans obviously are organismal: All the body parts, from the micro level — cells — to the macro level — arms and legs — work nicely together with very little conflict. But unlike a honeybee colony, a city is not organismal. Though the human colony requires a great deal of cooperation to keep it running, it is, the authors said, “far too full of conflicts.”

On the level of groups of multicellular individuals, the Portuguese man-of-war is a paragon of organismality. Although a man-of-war is technically a colony of sea-going polyps, each polyp seems to know its place, taking on a specialized duty that contributes to the survival of the whole. In this case, Queller and Strassmann wrote, “The cooperators have become so close as to blur their boundaries.”

The third grouping is of two-species pairings that may seem simply symbiotic in that each species fi nds that close cooperation without conflict often is necessary for the survival of both parties.

The relationship between mitochondria and the host cells they power is one example; bobtail squid and the bacteria that allow them to light up in return for sustenance is another. The authors put the relationship between lions and gazelles at the opposite end of the scale for obvious reasons.

—Mike Williams

Read the paper: ›› › ricemagazine.info/41

THROUGH THE

Sallyport

Brays Anatomy It’s not unusual for members of the Rice community to build bridges to Greater Houston and its citizens. That commitment now extends to designing real bridges.

The future of Brays Bayou, which runs for 31 miles through the city and its suburbs and is one of the nation’s most heavily populated watersheds, is very much on the minds of third-year students at the Rice School of Architecture. They are thinking about how to make a significant piece of the bayou into a showcase for Houston that will draw people to it and provide a valuable ecological function.

As part of a project for Christopher Hight, associate professor of architecture, and Michael Robinson, visiting lecturer, students formed 12 twoperson teams to redesign the Main and Braeswood bridges as well as a vacant, triangle-shaped 13-acre parcel on Brays Bayou’s south bank.

The parcel — bounded by the concrete-lined bayou, Greenbriar Street and South Braeswood Boulevard — is owned by the Methodist Hospital. The professors saw an opportunity for the students to transform the area, at least on paper, into an oasis that also would serve a vital function in helping protect Houston from flooding. Having spent considerable time and effort on the ongoing Project Brays, the students had a good idea of the parameters of their assignment.

Project Brays is a 15-year, $413 million collaboration between the Harris County Flood Control District and the Army Corps of Engineers to reduce the risks associated with flooding around Brays. The project is widening the bayou in many places, replacing bridges and adding storm-water detention basins where necessary. Part of the plan is a linear park that will bring recreational amenities to many residents along its 31-mile length. The student projects explore how remediation and detention parks could become urban nodes that tie this long park to the diverse communities along its banks.

Each of the student plans transformed the vacant 13-acre parcel into an ecologically friendly landscape. At their core is a three-stage remediation pond that would filter water from a massive Reliant Park parking lot, whose runoff now flows straight into the bayou. “This water is polluted from residues on the streets and parking lots,” Hight said.

“Chemical fertilizers from lawns end up in it, and rainwater even picks up pollutants as it falls through the air. All of this causes real problems farther downstream when the water flows into Galveston Bay.” Plants surrounding the rivulets and pools would absorb toxins and release clear water into the bayou over the course of days or weeks.

Raouf Farid, the Project Brays program manager, took Hight’s students on a tour of the Main/Braeswood site earlier in the semester and praised their efforts. “The students have done a fantastic job,” he said, noting that civil engineers and designers don’t always take an architectural perspective on the functionality of a project.

“Houston doesn’t have big rivers or mountains, and the beach is more than 40 miles away,” Hight said. “The bayous could be an amazing amenity and a chance to rethink the relationship between nature and the city in the 21st century. Instead of building right up to their edges and turning our backs on them, we should explore how they could be developed to help transform Houston.”

“If we did this along the length of Brays Bayou, we could alleviate some of the flooding problems while raising understanding of the role of these natural and infrastructural systems in the everyday lives of Houstonians.”

—Christopher Hight

—Mike Williams

Explore bayou design work by Rice architecture faculty: ›› › hydraulicity.org Explore Project Brays: ›› › projectbrays.org

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By Franz Brotzen

30 Years of

Social Sciences at Rice It’s hard to believe that 30 years ago the school that now graduates the largest group of Rice students each spring didn’t exist.

In 1979, President Norman Hackerman announced the separation of the social and behavioral sciences from the humanities, creating Rice’s School of Social Sciences. “The new school represents an attempt to provide a smaller administrative unit with more shared interests than was possible in the former Division of Humanities and Social Sciences,” Hackerman said at the time. The new school began with 38 full-time faculty who taught anthropology, behavioral science, economics, political science, psychology and sociology.

“The separation was not a revolt,” explained Lyn Ragsdale, the Radoslav A. Tsanoff Chair of Political Affairs, professor of political science and dean of the School of Social Sciences since 2006, “but instead a historic recognition that the study of human behavior had come of age at Rice.”

Joseph Cooper, the first dean of social sciences and currently a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, praised Hackerman’s backing of the new school. “The social sciences, though quite new to Rice in the 1960s, were an important part of any university, and they needed to flourish and gain in reputation and accomplishment if Rice was to realize its high ambitions,” he said. “President Hackerman offered Rice social scientists the opportunity to make their own way, the freedom to flexibly administer their resources, and perhaps most important of all, warm and strong encouragement and support.”

That had not always been the case for the nascent social sciences during Rice’s early years.

Although the first economics major graduated in 1931, the department did not award a Ph.D. until 1963 — the same year the psychology department was founded. Anthropology graduated its first majors in 1964. Political science, which began as part of the history department, became a department in its own right in 1967, and sociology formally separated from anthropology in 1971.

John Ambler, professor emeritus of political science, who was “present at the creation,” emphasized President Kenneth Pitzer’s role

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in expanding and strengthening the social sciences during his tenure from 1961 to 1968. “Pitzer pressed for the development of Rice into a genuinely national university,” Ambler wrote. “He noted that while Rice had a number of strong departments in science and engineering, as well as a few in the humanities, the social sciences were poorly developed.”

Pitzer recruited several faculty members who made a lasting imprint on the social sciences at Rice and helped lay the groundwork for an independent school of social sciences, including Gilbert Cuthbertson, professor of political science; Ambler; Chandler Davidson, research professor and the Radoslav A. Tsanoff Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs and Sociology; and William Martin, professor emeritus of sociology and of religion and public policy and the Harry and Hazel Chavanne Senior Fellow in Religion and Public Policy at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

William Howell, who was lured to Rice by Pitzer and served as chairman of the psychology department for 17 years, said that, at the time, the unprecedented flow of federal and foundation money into the expansion of university programs, facilities and faculties contributed to the rise of the social sciences at Rice. Howell, now an adjunct professor of psychology, cited large development grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation in building the university’s social and behavioral science programs.

The School of Social Sciences has experienced dramatic growth in the 30 years since its creation. In addition to the five departments that currently fall under its jurisdiction — anthropology, economics, political science, psychology and sociology — there are three interdisciplinary programs.

Students in cognitive sciences are engaged in the multidisciplinary study of the mind. Managerial studies provides an understanding of the environment in which business and other organizations exist and of the tools used by managers.

Policy studies students learn to analyze and evaluate public policy and gain an understanding of the policymaking process.

When Davidson arrived at Rice in 1966, most of the departments that later formed the School of Social Sciences were quite small. Together, they offered an interdisciplinary doctoral program that was modeled on Harvard’s Department of Social Relations. “Any of the social scientists at Rice could oversee a doctoral dissertation in our department,” Davidson said, “and the rest of the dissertation committee typically consisted of people both from that department and other areas of the social sciences.” Eventually, most of the departments were given enough

Lyn Ragsdale rice.edu/ricemagazine

THROUGH THE

faculty members to sustain their own doctoral programs, helping set the stage for a separate school of social sciences.

Martin, who came to Rice in 1968, remembered thinking, “The social sciences would be better off in a separate school, headed by a social scientist.” This did not signify a lack of confidence in Virgil Topazio, then dean of humanities, Martin said. “Rather, it was just a desire to arrange things more as they are in other universities.”

James Pomerantz, professor of psychology who served as dean of social sciences from 1988 to 1995, said that when he took the reins all of the departments were housed in Sewall Hall — a space they shared with the Shepherd School of Music. “We had music students serenading us in the stairwells at all hours,” he recalled. He praised Rice’s presidents and provosts during that period, particularly on the key component of faculty support, which “allowed us to recruit top-caliber researchers and teachers and to expand both in numbers and in quality.”

“The School of Social Sciences experienced its greatest expansion during the last 15 years,” said Robert Stein, the Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Science who served as interim dean of Social Sciences in 1995 and dean from 1996 to 2006. During his latter tenure, the number of full-time social science faculty increased by 18 percent. “This growth in faculty and students — both graduate and undergraduate — enabled the School of Social Sciences to emerge as a major intellectual force on the Rice campus and achieve national recognition for its research productivity,” he said.

As the new school grew, it added five research institutes and centers. The Douglas S. Harlan Program in State Elections, Campaigns and Politics focuses on the practice of politics and policymaking on the state level in the U.S. Its three components — an archive collection, research, and outreach and training — bring together scholars from various disciplines. The Hobby Center for the Study of Texas seeks to advance understanding of the causes and consequences of demographic, economic, geographic, social, service and fiscal conditions affecting the current and future conditions in Texas and other parts of the nation.

The Shell Center for Sustainability supports the efforts of Rice’s faculty, staff and students to improve our planet’s environment and economy. The Social Sciences Research Institute acts as an interdisciplinary think tank to bring together Rice social scientists and provides seed money for cutting-edge research.

And the recently-established Institute for Urban Research conducts research, sponsors educational programs, and engages in public outreach that advances understanding of pressing urban issues and fosters the development of more humane and sustainable cities. It also

is the new permanent home of the Houston Area Survey, which has tracked Houston-area residents’ experiences and perceptions of life in the Houston area since 1982.

Another recent initiative of the School of Social Sciences that has met with wide success is Project Gateway, which is made up of three elements. The Social Sciences Undergraduate Research Enterprise funds independent research projects for students and provides course credit. Social sciences internships offer course credit for internships at various businesses, hospitals and government agencies, both in the United States and abroad. And the Social Sciences International Ambassador Program awards stipends to social sciences students who are selected to conduct interviews with leaders while studying abroad.

Cuthbertson, affectionately known as Doc C to decades of Rice students since he arrived on campus in 1963, believes that the School of Social Sciences has enhanced Rice by making national and international resources available to students. It’s an astonishing accomplishment, he said, for a group that, in the beginning, was made up of “foundlings and experimenters.”

Today, with more than 800 undergraduate students and 142 graduate students, the experimenting continues unabated, but the School of Social Sciences is no longer a group of foundlings. Every year since 1995, more students have graduated from Rice with degrees in fields within the social sciences than in the fields of engineering, humanities or science — a fact that Ragsdale said is “perhaps Rice’s best-kept secret.”

Ragsdale is just the fourth dean in the school’s history. Hired in 2006 from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she was head of the political science department, Ragsdale champions her faculty’s dedication to cutting-edge research that challenges old assumptions and finds answers to tough problems, including facilitating access to health care, minimizing international conflict and promoting global economic stability. “Our prestigious faculty and students,” she said, “engage in research that affects everyone in their everyday lives and generate solutions that make lives better.”

As they address society’s challenges, members of the school see the benefit of an innovative policy campus that ties together researchers in social sciences, the Baker Institute and the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business. With aspirations for a new building to house the School of Social Sciences, Ragsdale wants the world to appreciate how each of the social sciences has something to say about virtually everything people do.

Sallyport Society Needs Doctors, Too Population change, economic growth and social issues are at the heart of the world’s urban centers.

How do racial and ethnic diversity shape a city and its schools, churches and government offices? Do city leaders address 21st-century problems head on, or do they leave those problems for future generations? How does a city’s commitment to the environment affect the health of its citizens, regardless of their economic status or neighborhood? Urban centers throughout the world face these and other questions.

While the answers differ significantly from city to city, the one common factor is that urban centers have become living laboratories for considering how particular solutions to urban problems succeed in some settings and fail in others.

Beginning in 2011, Rice’s Department of Sociology will take its place at the forefront of these discussions, thanks to a $6.4 million grant from the Houston Endowment that will establish the first Ph.D. program in sociology in Houston. The doctoral program will utilize the faculty’s expertise on race and ethnicity, health and environmentalism, economic class, religion, and demography to create an innovative focus on Houston in the context of a broader exploration of major urban settings. At its heart will be a mentorship/ apprenticeship experience that will permit students to work closely with individual faculty members on ongoing research.

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Window on the World As conversation has become a hodgepodge of e-mails, tweets and tags, public discourse has moved from town halls and newspapers to computer screens and Facebook walls.

It’s not surprising, then, that Rice students have taken to the World Wide Web to share their research.

The class blog “Gendered Presence, Gendered Futures” helped lead the way. Created by course instructors and postdoctoral research fellows Melissa Forbis and Christine Labuski for their Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality 101 class, the blog provided a venue in which students shared their ideas with the world and kept a finger on the pulse of the public opinion.

“Because the class itself was about analyzing public discourse, thinking and opinion, it was important for students to be out there and involved in it,” Labuski said. “You have to be a part of the discourse to truly understand it.”

The class of approximately 40 was divided into groups that chose various current topics, including maternity leave, gender-neutral housing, Proposition 8 and circumcision. The groups were asked to research and then, taking a stance one way or another, to blog about their topics.

“We wanted to break down the walls of the classroom and put our students into the world,” Forbis said. “We wanted to show them that what they’re learning here matters.”

Nothing conveyed that notion better than the comments that appeared on students’ first postings.

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“I don’t think a lot of our students expected that people would be reading what they wrote,” Forbis said. “When we called the blog up during class one day, I said, ‘Look, you have comments,’ and their eyes got wide.

Then we talked about the comments and how to answer them.”

Layo Obamehinti, a Brown College freshman, got a lot out of the process. She said the blog pushed her beyond her comfort zone and made her question her previously held beliefs.

“When someone commented on our blog,” she said, “it was interesting to see whether he or she had a totally conflicting view. It opened my eyes to the smorgasbord of views that are present in the world.”

Jones College sophomore Claire Taylor said that the blog format made her even more conscientious about her work. “It’s strange to

From left: Layo Obamehinti, Christine Labuski, Claire Bernice Taylor and Melissa Forbis

think that people I do not know have been reading my thoughts and opinions and comparing them to their own,” Taylor said. “It definitely increased my attention to detail and made me think through my opinions and supporting reasons.”

Her group usually met to discuss a topic then divvied up the research and sent their sections and thoughts to Taylor. She compiled the various analyses and critiques into one coherent post. “The most rewarding and didactic part of this blog project was to demonstrate in a public forum my own ideas and perceptions,” Taylor said. “It was empowering.”

That’s exactly what her instructors wanted to hear. One goal of the class blog project was to help students find their voices and place in the information age. With more and more people presenting ideas, facts and ideas disguised as facts on the Internet, it has become increasingly important to analyze such information. Labuski hopes that the project showed the students not only what goes into a blog post, but also a way to think critically about what they read.

Forbis added that whether their students go into the field of gender studies or not, they learned important lessons through the blog project. “More than anything, we’re giving our students the skills they need to communicate in the world,” she said. “We’re helping them develop their cultural literacy — how to evaluate what they’re reading and watching, how to question, and how to answer.”

—Jessica Stark

Read the blog: › › › swgs101.blogs.rice.edu

Students

In a Class All Their Own For an expert on a counterculture whose motto was “peace,” Meltem Demirors ’09 sure knows how to drop a bombshell. On the last day of her Hippies: American Counterculture in the 1960s class, the then-senior walked into the classroom where she was leading the student-taught course (STC) and put the writing on the wall.

“I’m disappointed in you,” she told the 33 students enrolled in the one-credit-hour class offered through Wiess College. “You’ve failed to participate actively in the class and the content, so you will all be receiving a grade of ‘unsatisfactory.’” Demirors paused for effect. “Can you prove me wrong? You have 10 minutes to try.”

She then turned and left the room. When she returned, she found her students seated on the floor in protest, waving signs that said “Peace” and “Free Love.” They also had written messages on the whiteboard that were related to course content.

Turns out, it was exactly the kind of response Demirors was looking for.

“After we discussed the Vietnam War protests and the various student-led protests at college campuses across the U.S. during the late ’60s, my class didn’t seem very inspired or moved by the power students have to challenge social and artistic norms and conventions,” she said. “I wanted to see if I could get them to feel passionately enough about something to actually fight back against the establishment.”

Like all STC leaders, Demirors had been assigned a faculty adviser — Michael Gustin, professor of biochemistry and cell biology and master of Wiess College — and was able to consult with him about her dilemma. Gustin helped bring the program to Rice after learning about it from his daughter, whose alma mater offers similar courses. He suggested that Demirors do something drastic to get a reaction out of her students, and the two of them brainstormed and came up with the unsatisfactory-grades idea.

“In the end, I thought the students’ response was pretty cool,” Demirors said.

“They had to come together as a class to plan it out, so I felt it was an effective — though unconventional — exercise that got them excited about the class.”

They’re not the only ones who are excited about the university’s STCs, which give Rice undergrads hands-on experience as teachers and address topics from the typical to the bizarre. Course enrollment averages 15 to 20, and students who have attended an STC often are inspired to lead courses of their own. This snowball effect has increased the number of STCs from three in fall 2007 to nearly 50 in spring 2010, and they now are offered by eight other residential colleges in addition to Wiess.

“The classes have been hugely popular, and there have been many inspirational moments,” Gustin said. “For example, after taking a course on Bollywood, a student from Montana wanted to do an internship in India. And an astrophysics major, now in grad school, wrote a variety of programs to run robust simulations of game shows on his computer for his class on the subject.”

In addition to classes on Bollywood and game shows, students across campus have been able to teach and take STCs with titles like Zombies in Fiction and Film, Philosophy and the Simpsons, the Mathematics of Gambling, and An Introduction to Backpacking: A Naturalist’s Exploration of the Gila Wilderness.

Though most of the classes meet weekly for about an hour, the Introduction to Backpacking class actually left the classroom behind on several occasions in favor of local hiking trips. Taught last spring by Jeremy Caves ’09 and Blake Dyer ’10, the class culminated with a seven-day backpacking excursion to the Gila Wilderness in southwest New Mexico, where students hiked 41 miles, crossed the Gila River 150 times and even joined a sing-along with a group of cowboy dentists.

One of the goals of STCs is to give student leaders an opportunity to share their passion for often unconventional subjects with their fellow students, and the experience proved the perfect example for Caves.

“Most of the students had never been backpacking, and one student had never been outside Houston except for a trip to the Hill Country,” he said, “so it was a real joy to introduce them to an activity that I have always enjoyed and that I think can be incredibly peaceful, joyful and replenishing.”

—Merin Porter

Casey Michel ‘10 led a spring 2010 STC titled The Cape and the Cowl: The Literary, Televised and Film History of Batman.

“They had to come together as a class to plan it out, so I felt it was an effective — though unconventional — exercise that got them excited about the class.”

— Meltem Demirors

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HoustonMayor ’78 B Y

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In conversation, Annise Parker ’78 looks you straight in the eye with the practiced ease of a veteran politician.

That first impression is right on the mark. Parker has been on the Houston stage for a dozen years, half as a city council member and half as the city’s elected controller. But when her bid for mayor last fall, which culminated in a runoff win against a fellow Democrat, bumped her onto the national stage, it was less for her political acumen than for her sexual orientation.

The Jones College alumna took the helm of the nation’s fourth-largest city in early January. Two weeks into her term, when she sat down with Rice Magazine, she already was busy staring down issues that confront all big-city mayors, in addition to such unique-to-Houston problems as flood control.

Parker earned her Rice degree as a triple major in psychology, sociology and anthropology then spent two decades as a software analyst in the oil and gas industry, most of it at Mosbacher Energy Co. Along the way, she co-owned a bookstore and an incometax company, and in 1993, she made her first run for Houston City Council. She was elected on her third try in 1997, becoming the city’s first openly gay elected official, and was re-elected twice before winning the first of three terms as city controller in 2003.

Though she was an activist for gay issues at Rice, she didn’t make being a lesbian part of her campaign narrative. Others, however, made it part of theirs. During the mayoral runoff, supporters of her foe, Houston attorney Gene Locke, sent thousands of postcards picturing Parker and her partner of 20 years, Kathy Hubbard, with the headline: “Is this the image Houston wants to portray?” That Parker chose to keep her campaign focused on fiscal matters showed considerable political savvy, and her strategy paid off with 53.6 percent of the vote.

Houston-born, Parker spent several of her teen years overseas when her father’s job with the Red Cross took the family to Germany. But Rice was always on her radar.

Rice Magazine: Did Rice bring you back to Houston?

Parker: It was Rice, specifically, that brought me back to the city. I was born and reared in Houston, but in middle school, we started moving around, and I went to three different junior highs and three different high schools and actually graduated out of state.

I came back to go to Rice. I will tell you that this was the only school to which I applied, and I expected to get in. I came back to go to college and did not leave. I wanted to come home.

Probably one of the reasons I decided to apply to Rice is that, when I was growing up, one of my favorite places was the Houston Zoo, and every trip to the zoo involved either a walk or drive through the grounds of Rice University. My parents would say, “When you grow up, if you’re smart, you might go to Rice.” And then they’d laugh — not in a mean way, but teasing. In fact, my parents met at the University of Houston, but I was imprinted at a very early age — I had to go to Rice.

Rice Magazine: What experiences stand out from your Rice years?

Parker: I had a good four years, but please don’t go and look up my academic record. It wasn’t particularly distinguished. I got a good education, and I have many fond memories of my time at Rice.

Rice Magazine: Were things different at the time? Was the university more of a closed society?

Parker: I graduated from Rice a long time ago, and the idea of being “inside the hedges” was very real. I did not, as a student, interact very much with the larger city, and other than direct class assignments that might take me elsewhere — and those were few — I really didn’t do much off campus.

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“The No. 1 job of the mayor of Houston is to make sure the city runs. The best city is the one you never notice — the one that you never see.”

— Annise Parker

Rice Magazine: How did your studies influence your career?

Rice Magazine: You were a student of Stephen Klineberg?

Parker: The best things you can get from a college education are good, basic academics and the abilities to think through problems and write well. At Rice, I greatly improved my ability to synthesize information and to convey that in written form. It was just a good education across the board.

I never worked in any field where I utilized what I studied directly at Rice. I was a triple major in the social sciences and went to work in the oil and gas industry. But the ability to articulate ideas verbally and to write effectively is extremely helpful.

Parker: I was. This was prior to his creation of the Houston Area Survey, however.

Rice Magazine: Sociology and psychology are certainly helpful now, though, aren’t they?

Parker: I quip a lot that child psychology is particularly helpful in dealing with council members. That is a joke!

A study of why and how people do things can be helpful, and in fact, one of my experiences off campus as an undergraduate had to do with a class assignment in criminology with the Houston Police Department. From then through my time in the oil industry, I was an active community volunteer with the police department, and that did spark some of my interest there.

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Rice Magazine: That kind of comprehensive sociological data on your city must be a great tool for any mayor to have.

Parker: The Houston Area Survey is a phenomenal resource not only for me as mayor, but also for the citizens of Houston, for the Greater Houston Partnership and for anyone who wants to track demographic trends across the city. It shows how attitudes are a product of what happens to the city and also how attitudes drive what the city does.

Rice Magazine: Speaking of attitudes: Houston has always had a public relations problem.

Outsiders see us as cowboys, oilmen and Enron. What do you do to counter that?

Parker: I’ve said this before: I believe Houston is better known across our U.S. borders than across our state lines. The image persists of Houston as a redneck wasteland. But if you go to any of the world capitals, particularly those that are affiliated in any way with the oil and gas industry, you get a completely different impression of Houston as a place of commerce.

We were founded for business, and we are a business city. Instead of trying to live down our image, I think we ought to live up to it. And I absolutely want to work to expand our international business ties.

Rice Magazine: What would you like your major accomplishments to be?

Parker: The No. 1 job of the mayor of Houston is to make sure the city runs. The best city is the one you never notice — the one that you never see. You enjoy the amenities, but you don’t worry about the pothole or the broken traffic light or that your trash will get picked up because things get done. I would like to leave a legacy of very efficient administration.

During the campaign, I articulated my desire to have a comprehensive, long-term flooding and drainage program, knowing that we probably won’t even start any of those projects during my tenure as mayor but that we have to put the program in place if we’re going to continue to grow as a city.

The ancillary benefit of a very aggressive flood and drainage program — something we have to do — is that it also opens up green space. I think we have a green, beautiful city, but I would like to see it greener, with a lot more open space and opportunities for people to get out and enjoy that green space. Those two things

Photos: flickr.com/photos/anniseparker

“It is nice to feel that I know who I am and know what is achievable. I also know when to stretch myself as I contemplate doing a job that I’m eager and excited to tackle.”

— Annise Parker

go hand in hand, so there has to be some connectivity there.

Thirdly, I am going to spend a lot of time and energy moving our Houston Police Department forward, because it is, by itself, one-third of our city budget. It’s a very expensive piece of what we do and a critical piece of what we do in terms of our quality of life.

We also face tremendous challenges in air quality, as any major metropolitan area does. But Houston has been a nonattainment area in certain sectors for years now, and with potentially increased air standards, we’re going to have some serious challenges to meet. Again, it’s another opportunity for collaboration and sharing of information.

Rice Magazine: We have a building full of architecture students at Rice who are continually talking and thinking about how to create those connections within the city. Is this a resource you can use?

Rice Magazine: You’ve been an activist pretty much your entire life.

Parker: Absolutely. I know the city’s already working with schools of architecture on opportunities for innovations in housing. We spend a lot of money on affordable housing, trying to put it back into the inner city of Houston as the development pressures increase there. So there are lots of chances for the Rice architecture school to shine. And there are opportunities for engineering students to work on some of those flooding and drainage issues I mentioned.

Parker: I like the word “activist.” During the campaign, my campaign brain trust would tell me not to use the word “activist” because they said it conjures up images of picket lines and protest in the streets, but “activist” is active. You are doing something affirmative to change things. And that’s not a negative thing.

Rice Magazine: Your many years on Houston’s political front lines must be a benefit to you in that you know how to put it out there: “Here’s what I want to do, and here’s how I’m going to do it.”

Parker: It’s a blessing at my age and stage of my career. It is nice to feel that I know who I am and know what is achievable.

I also know when to stretch myself as I contemplate doing a job that I’m eager and excited to tackle.

For 12 years, I’ve been excited to go to work every day for Houston, and I’ve enjoyed my time in city government. I know there are some very serious challenges ahead for the city, but challenges also are opportunities.

Rice Magazine: Has anything surprised you about the job so far?

Parker: It really is like drinking water from a fire hose. The last two weeks have given me new respect for some of my predecessors in this office, and I’m very, very grateful that I didn’t come into it cold. I would hate to have taken on this job without the on-the-job training I had as a council member and controller. I’m juggling a lot of balls right now, and there are a lot of challenges, but the job is pushing, stretching me in good ways, and I’m enjoying it.

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Global

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hen the Rice community embraced President David Leebron’s Vision for the Second Century in 2006, the university embarked on a journey toward greater internationalization.

One of its aims in becoming a global university included increasing the number of international students in Rice’s undergraduate student body, and the Office of International Students and Scholars has been hard at work to realize that goal.

In fact, this year academic, the number of international students at Rice passed the 1,000-student benchmark for the first time in university history to reach a total of 1,051 — or nearly 19 percent of Rice’s student population. Among them are citizens of 88 countries or regions and all six habitable continents. They study in every academic school and include undergrads, grads, athletes and students in professional programs. Here, we introduce five of them. From bioengineers to economists and political scientists, they demonstrate the diversity at Rice that both strengthens the university and helps make it truly great.

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“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam vel urna dui. Nam accumsan commodo dictum. Proin et lorem turpis. Meo interdum lectus, eget fringilla quam augue venenatis ante. Integer ut convallis risus. Vivamus porttitor interdum turpis, et tempor nibh ultricies nec. Suspendisse.”

“Close contact with professors is something about Rice that I think is really amazing.”

—Leticia Camara

LETICIA CAMARA • BRAZIL Bachelor of Arts in Political Science

Although Camara began her undergraduate education in her native country, she transferred to Rice after two years in search of a broader general knowledge base, a selfscheduled course load and an internationally oriented political science program. She never looked back.

“My boyfriend was at Rice, and I kept hearing about how fabulous the university was,” she said. “I came to visit and fell in love with the campus.”

She was also impressed with how invested the faculty were in their students.

“When I visited as a prospective student, a poli-sci professor sat down with me and got really excited when he heard that I was from Brazil,” she said. “After I enrolled here more than a year later, he ended up being one of my professors, and he remembered me from my visit. That kind

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of close contact with professors is something about Rice that I think is really amazing.”

With her graduation from Rice rapidly approaching, Camara is hoping to stay in the U.S. and work in the field of human capital consulting, which helps companies align their business and personnel strategies. Problemsolving abilities are a must for success in that field, and Camara credits Rice with helping her to cultivate those skills.

“I used to think that I wasn’t an analytical person and that I hated numbers, but Rice has helped me see that problem-solving isn’t necessarily about liking numbers — it’s more about the way you approach the problem and manage to solve it,” she said. “I think Rice is especially good at making you realize you can do that, even if you don’t consider yourself to be an analytical person.”

“I had been at a big university, so I wanted one that was more focused on the research direction I was interested in.”

—Jan Zimak

SUMAN KHATIWADA • NEPAL Pursuit: Doctorate in Materials Science

Almost every day, Suman Khatiwada finds himself educating people about his South Asian homeland, describing the political strife, poverty and stunning geography of Nepal, a tiny nation landlocked between China and India.

“The most refreshing thing about being at Rice is the friendliness of the people,” he said. “They want to understand the world and really value people from other nations. My experience here has generated my great respect for the vision of America.”

While Nepal has worked in recent years to develop its tourist economy, it remains among the least-developed countries in the world, and as much as a third of its population lives in poverty. Khatiwada knows he is among a fortunate few from Nepal who get the chance to study abroad, and with that knowledge come responsibilities.

“An underdeveloped country like mine desperately needs educated and experienced people to do what I am doing and return to help shape progress and development in their motherland,” he said. “I believe doing that can really make a huge difference in the lives of my people.”

Khatiwada remains close to his family through phone calls and e-mail. “I have to call my mother at least twice a week or she worries,” he said, flashing an engaging smile. “Yes, it’s frustrating to be away from my family for such a long time.

I’ve missed lots of festivals, celebrations and weddings, but I know the sacrifice will be worth it.”

JAN ZIMAK • AUSTRALIA

“The most refreshing thing about being at Rice is the friendliness of the people.”

—Suman Khatiwada

Pursuit: Doctorate in Bioengineering

Challenged. Busy. Definitely not bored. That’s how Zimak describes himself since enrolling in Rice’s bioengineering doctoral program.

“I chose Rice because I thought it best fit the priorities I had for grad school,” he said. “I wanted a program that had a good reputation and would challenge me in the right way.”

Rice’s highly ranked bioengineering program fit the bill, and the university’s small size was also an attraction. After completing two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s at the 40,000-student University of Melbourne, Zimak knew it was time for a change. “I had been at a big university, so I wanted one that was more focused on the research direction I was interested in,” he said.

Depending on the job market when he graduates, Zimak plans to go into industry, whether at a research institute or a biotech startup, or into academia if the option arises.

But for now, he’s content to enjoy life at Rice, which is a lot easier for international students thanks to the administrative help the Office of International Students and Scholars provides — and a lot more fun for Zimak since he started bartending at Valhalla.

“It definitely helped me make a lot of friends much more quickly than I expected,” he said.

Suman Khatiwada

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“Most students in Japanese universities come from Japan, but at Rice, there are students from more than 80 different countries.”

— Satoshi Mizutani

SATOSHI MIZUTANI • JAPAN Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Managerial Studies

For Mizutani, the opportunity to learn and study in English was only one reason to choose Rice. He also appreciates the university’s beautiful campus, friendly people and excellent undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio.

“I really feel that the opportunities Rice gives me to develop personal relationships through the residential college system, to receive help from my professors and peers, and to experience the university’s great atmosphere will allow me to reach my full potential,” Mizutani said. “The classes are challenging, but also informative and interesting. I can get in touch with the professors easily if I need some help. And Rice students are extremely studious and always looking to improve, which motivates me to work harder.”

Mizutani also cites the university’s diversity as a key reason he chose to attend Rice.

“Most students in Japanese universities come from Japan, but at Rice, there are students from more than 80 different countries,” he said. “That greater diversity allows me to gain a broader perspective on many issues, and interactions between international students and American students allow each of us to develop a better understanding of the world.”

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“The classes are challenging, but also informative and interesting.

I can get in touch with the professors easily if I need some help.”

— Satoshi Mizutani

“My dad was a tailor, and my parents worked hard to put their five children through school, which is not free in my country.”

— Onja Razafindratsima

ONJA RAZAFINDRATSIMA • MADAGASCAR Doctorate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

The first student from Madagascar (“the real country, not the movie”) to study at Rice University, Razafindratsima comes from a family that puts a premium on education.

“My dad was a tailor,” she said, “and my parents worked hard to put their five children through school, which is not free in my country.”

After completing her undergraduate studies and diplôme d’études approfondies at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar, Razafindratsima decided to pursue her graduate education at Rice due to the expertise of the university’s faculty members.

“Amy Dunham [assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology] conducts research in Madagascar, and I started to read some of her publications,” she said. “I found that we share the same research interests, so I knew she would be a great adviser throughout my graduate studies.”

For her dissertation, Razafindratsima plans to return to Madagascar to research the role of lemurs in forest regeneration and seed dispersal. She expects her experiences in Rice’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology to train her well not only for her dissertational research, but also for a career in conservation biology, where she hopes to use her knowledge and experiences to help prevent the extinction of lemurs in Madagascar.

“I would like to assist in the creation and management of protected areas and help establish new governmental policies for biodiversity protection in Madagascar,” she said. “In addition, I hope to teach at the University of Antananarivo or at other local institutions so that I can share my knowledge with future researchers and enhance the scientific capacity of women in my home country.”

“I would like to assist in the creation and management of protected areas and help establish new governmental policies for biodiversity protection in Madagascar.”

— Onja Razafindratsima

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Catching the ultrasmall and ultrafast isn’t a problem for the Rice physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider.

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Every spring for more than 50 years, Rice University’s infamous Beer Bike race has featured cyclists hurtling around the track at breakneck speeds. But it would be hard for Beer Bike to compete with a new race going on in Europe at speeds impossible on any normal racetrack. This race is taking place just outside Geneva, Switzerland, and the track, built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), is called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC is a particle accelerator that shoots two beams of protons at close to the speed of light in opposite directions around a track 17 miles in circumference. The protons — reaching energies that are higher than humans have ever achieved — collide and break apart inside four huge detectors, whose sole purpose is to record the details of the collisions. The goals of these experiments are ambitious: to explore the deepest levels of reality and to study the instant of creation itself.

Everything you’ve ever seen is composed of an intricate mixture of the atoms of about 100 chemical elements. Over the past century, scientists have peered deeply inside the structure of atoms, which consist of a nucleus at the center and electrons swirling around it.

The nuclei contain protons and neutrons that, in turn, are made up of even smaller particles called quarks. As Jay Roberts, Rice professor of physics and astronomy, put it, “Through the right combination of quarks and electrons, we can assemble the matter that composes the universe. A handful of tiny subatomic particles forms the basis of everything.”

In addition to these small building blocks of matter, there are forces that make sure that all the particles behave in an orderly manner. Scientists have identified four distinct forces, two of which are familiar in everyday life: gravity, which keeps us firmly planted on the Earth, and electromagnetism, which governs the behavior of static electricity, magnets and light and holds together all atoms. Two others are less well known: the strong nuclear force, which holds the nuclei of atoms together, and the weak nuclear force, which governs some forms of radioactivity.

These four forces are not of equal strength. For instance, think of a little magnet holding up a paper clip. The force of the small magnet pulling upward overcomes the gravitational force of the entire Earth pulling downward. This illustrates that gravity is much weaker than electromagnetism.

Why these forces have different strengths is a mystery, and just as intriguing is why there are the number of quarks that there are.

Indeed, the reason objects have mass at all is perhaps the most pressing topic being studied by physicists at the LHC.

RACE FOR THE HIGGS BOSON

During the past several decades, the crowning achievement of particle physics has been the construction of the Standard Model, which incorporates the entirety of what is known about the subatomic realm and how the pieces are knitted together. All of the bits and pieces have been discovered — except one. That missing component is the Higgs boson, an elusive particle thought to be the source of mass of all fundamental subatomic particles.

While scientists at the LHC are searching for this prize, so, too, are researchers at Fermilab’s Tevatron in Batavia, Ill. The Rice University particle physics group has a strong presence at both accelerators — if the Higgs boson is found over the next few years, Rice physicists will be involved.

Roberts, Associate Professor Paul Padley, Assistant Professor Franciscus Geurts and Assistant Professor Karl Ecklund, all of Rice’s physics and astronomy department, are heavily involved in research at the LHC. They’ve recently been joined by Andrew Askew ’01, now an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University. Along with several postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and undergraduates, these Rice-related scientists are members of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration. This collaboration consists of 3,000 physicists from four continents, 38 countries and more than 180 institutions. The detector itself is composed of 100 million individual detector elements, from the precise silicon pixel detector at the heart of the apparatus to the much larger muon detection system that forms the detector’s final layer. Muons are rare subatomic particles that often are observed in collisions in which new physical phenomena might occur.

The muon detector is where the Rice group made its first important contribution to the experimental hardware. The group was responsible for a key bit of electronics, called the muon trigger system, that helps to decide which specific particle collisions are recorded. When the proton beams are operating at full intensity, there are about 40 million opportunities to record data every second, although the CMS detector can record only about 100 collisions per second to computer tape. “Given that the most interesting collisions are incredibly rare, selecting the right ones is crucial,” Padley said. “Rice’s electronic system is an integral component in accomplishing this.” Looking to the future, Rice also is involved in an upgrade of the silicon pixel detector.

BEYOND THE DETECTOR

Rice scientists and students may be making crucial contributions to the CMS detector and the analysis of the data coming from it, but Rice’s influence on the LHC is broader than that. Many other postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and undergraduates who are alumni of Rice’s Bonner Nuclear Lab are making a big impact at the LHC. One example is Ken Johns ’81, associate department head and professor of physics at the University of Arizona. Johns is a wellrespected scientist working on the ATLAS experiment, a competitor particle physics detector which functions similarly to the CMS but with different design choices.

The Rice expatriates with perhaps the largest impact on the LHC are the husband and wife team of Marzio Nessi and Francesca Nessi-Tedaldi, both Rice postdoctoral researchers in the late 1980s.

Francesca, a research scientist at ETH-Zürich, has been heavily involved in the design and testing of one of CMS’s energy-measuring

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The tunnel for CERN's LHC is located near Geneva and Lac Leman. The French Alps with Mont Blanc can be seen in the background.

This computer-generated image shows the site of the 27-kilometer LHC tunnel (in blue) on the Switzerland–France border. The four main experiments (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb) are located in underground caverns connected to the surface by 50-meter to 150-meter pits. Part of the preacceleration chain is shown in grey.

“The ATLAS detector is half a football field long and five stories tall and consists of countless pieces. It was assembled by lowering the pieces through a tiny tunnel and fitting them together like a ship in a bottle.”

—Marzio Nessi

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Down a Black Hole?

Will the Large Hadron Collider create a black hole that will swallow the Earth?

Don Lincoln, a senior researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and a collaborator on the CMS experiment, received his M.A. in 1990 and Ph.D. in 1994, both in physics from Rice University. He is the author of two popular science books: “The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider” and “Understanding the Universe: From Quarks to the Cosmos.”

calorimeters. This device, made of a pure form of lead glass, weighs as much as 24 adult elephants and is supported by an intricate honeycombed material with walls half a millimeter thick.

Marzio, a CERN senior scientist, serves as a technical coordinator on the ATLAS experiment. He had the challenging job of making sure all the pieces fit together perfectly. “The ATLAS detector is half a football field long and five stories tall and consists of countless pieces,” he said. “It was assembled by lowering the pieces through a tiny tunnel and fitting them together like a ship in a bottle.”

Rice postdoctoral research associate Vesna Cuplov and the husband and wife team of research scientist Chaouki Boulahouache and postdoctoral research associate Laria Redjimi also are stationed at CERN. “I’m very happy to be here,” Redjimi said. “Being with Rice has allowed me to make a big impact on CMS. We supplied the electronics, the programming and the expertise to make sure our system is working. It’s hard to imagine having more fun. And it’s only going to get better.”

Boulahouache is working on physics analysis in addition to doing detector work, and he also is exploring new ways to comb through the data to look for something entirely new.

“This is a great time to be at CERN,” he said.

“As we better understand our equipment and the beam delivered by the LHC, the horizons are wide open. We have not explored an entirely new energy regime for more than 25 years. Anything can happen.”

These researchers spent some time in summer 2009 working with Rice undergraduate physics students Robert Brockman, Diego

Caballero and Patrick El-Hage and graduate student James Zabel, who were sent to CERN to gain real-world research experience. “The students were a great help during their time at CERN,” Ecklund said. “We had them writing code and working with the postdocs to make sure our electronics would be ready for future experiments.”

NEW FRONTIERS

For a time, hoping to perform experiments in the future was all that scientists at the LHC could do. In 2008, when the collider was started for the first time, an electrical arc in a magnet caused significant damage. After more than a year of repairs and corrective engineering, the LHC again began operating.

During two weeks of trials in 2009, it collided protons at energies higher than those possible at Fermilab’s Tevatron, the prior world champion. While recording these collisions, LHC scientists rediscovered particles known about for decades. Although these observations are not true discoveries, they are helpful in testing the equipment by allowing researchers to verify known phenomena before pushing forward into the unknown.

In the very near future, chances are good that the LHC will be reliably delivering beams at energies 3 ½ times higher than ever before possible. With that extra energy comes fresh opportunities, with bragging rights and possibly a Nobel Prize on the horizon. The frontier is wide open, and Rice University physicists are there, helping blaze the new trail.

Consider a black hole. In popular media, it is depicted as a ravenous monster that sucks in all the matter surrounding it, rips it apart and swallows it. It’s the ultimate destroyer. To a considerable extent, this vision is correct, so it’s unsurprising that the prospect of creating microscopic black holes at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) makes some members of the public nervous. They envision an LHC-spawned black hole eating the detector, then the accelerator, then Switzerland, Europe and finally the Earth.

Physicists know this isn’t going to happen. First, if black holes are made at the LHC — and this is by no means certain — they will be microscopic and not the monsters generated by the death throes of stars. Second, if black holes can be made, they’ve already been made on Earth countless times.

Our planet is constantly bombarded from space by cosmic rays, which usually are protons. These cosmic rays collide with protons in the atoms that make up the atmosphere, often at energies that are much higher than the collision energy in the LHC. In fact, you’d have to run the LHC for 100,000 years to make as many high-energy collisions between two protons as have happened in the atmosphere since the Earth was formed. Because the Earth has not yet disappeared into a black hole, the evidence strongly suggests that microscopic black holes either don’t exist or won’t grow large enough to swallow the Earth.

—Don Lincoln

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B Y

D AV I D

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M E D I N A

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B Y

T O M M Y

L AV E R G N E

RenaissanceMan

You could call Jacques Sagot an international student, but he’s more like a force of nature.

Jacques Sagot prides himself on being the eternal student. He has four degrees, including a Doctor of Musical Arts in piano, which he received in 2000 from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. This year, he will acquire yet another doctorate from Rice, this one in French studies.

“Being a student is my favorite activity,” Sagot said in measured English. “I have always been a student and will remain so as long as I can.”

But Sagot is more than an eager student. He is a prolific writer and book translator; an accomplished concert pianist; and ambassador to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for Costa Rica, his native country.

“He’s kind of a renaissance man,” said Rice Professor of Piano Robert Roux, who called Sagot one of his strongest students ever.

“He is a deep thinker and a great conversationalist. He has read everything and knows everything.”

Since 1987, Sagot has toured the world with the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Costa Rica and played some of the most difficult and beautiful piano concertos ever written, including concertos of Beethoven, Tch ai kovsk y, R ach m a n i nof f, Prokofiev and Gershwin. He has recorded five CDs of classical music and won the award for best musician of the year in Costa Rica in both 1998 and 2009. Among his many performances were special concerts for Nobel Prize in Literature winner Gabriel García Márquez, former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II. As a writer, Sagot has published 11 books, among them his book of short stories, “Cuentos de Plenilunio,” which won the top national literary prize in his country. “The Dictionary of Central American Literature” devotes an entire page to Sagot, saying his stories embody “characters of great interior complexity, of tormented existence.” His prose, the dictionary goes on to state, is guided by a musical quality that is present in the rhythm and harmony of his phrases. For the past 21 years, Sagot also has been a regular contributor to Costa Rica’s most important newspaper, La Nación. In addition, he produced several educational TV and radio programs,

and for his efforts, he was awarded the Joaquín García Monge Prize for best pedagogue in the field of arts in 2009.

Sagot has been recognized by his government for his many accomplishments and for disseminating his country’s culture. In 2008, Costa Rican President Óscar Arias appointed Sagot ambassador to UNESCO, which promotes peace and international co-operation.

UNESCO is headquartered in Paris, where Sagot has lived for the past couple of years and has put to use his lifelong study of the French language and culture.

Born in Costa Rica in 1962, Sagot began studying French in the first grade at the Lycée FrancoCostaricien, where he remained through high school. A teacher there sparked in Sagot a passion for French poetry that eventually led him to pursue a doctorate in the language, but his talents as a writer and pianist developed as much out of adversity as out of joy. Born a hemophiliac, Sagot could not play outside with his friends, much less participate in sports.

“My parents had the excellent idea of redirecting all my energies to artistic interests,” he said. “I could not play soccer, so I was the kid who played the piano.” The countless hours he spent in bed recovering from illness became an opportunity to read and write. “All my talents were conditioned by a health problem,” Sagot said. “It made for a very atypical childhood: very reserved, very self-contained, very cautious.”

Sagot was 9 years old and had been practicing the piano for two years when he had “the great revelation” that he wanted to be a concert pianist. He clearly remembers that day in 1972, when his father took him to a concert featuring the great Hungarian pianist, György Sándor. “When we left the theater,” Sagot said, “I told my father I wanted to be exactly like Sándor.”

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Determined to accomplish his dream, Sagot graduated from Sagot’s dissertation focused on four French poets: Charles the Universidad de Costa Rica with a music degree in 1988 and Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. received a master’s in piano from Arizona State University in 1991.

Sagot chose these poets because they are very close to his heart Soon after, Sagot arrived at Rice to pursue a doctorate, and he studand because he has been reading them since his days at the Lycée ied for several years with Roux, a teacher Sagot admires immensely.

Franco-Costaricien.

“Roux is the kind of pianist for whom there are no secrets on the “It is the best dissertation I have ever directed,” Wood said. “His keyboard,” Sagot said. “And he is generous enough to share that analyses of well-known poems are remarkable for their exceptional knowledge with you.” acuity and frequent originality of the first order. It is very difficult to Roux, who is known as demanding teacher, achieve the latter in a field that has been worked worked diligently with Sagot to make sure he over by countless writers.” would be at his best when performing. His Aresu said that Sagot reacted to poetry unstudent was equally demanding. “Sagot has a like other students. “He is a man of profound wonderful sense of rhythm and very solid techoriginality and incredible imagination with an nique,” Roux said. “He holds very high profesinstinct for the aesthetic of poetry,” Aresu said. sional standards for himself and was one of the Rather than giving standard answers about hardest-working students I have ever had.” poetic symbolism, Sagot talked about how the Sagot had a reputation at Rice for spendmusicality of language — its physical nature ing hours in the practice room. Before he and acoustic quality — amplify the meaning went on a tour of Spain with the Orquesta of the words.

Sinfónica Nacional de Costa Rica to perform “Writing and music are like oxygen and waRachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, one of ter to me,” Sagot said. “If you take one from me, the most difficult concertos in the piano reperI will die immediately.” For Sagot, the two arts toire, he practiced daily for three months, from complement and enrich each other. Both prose 8 a.m. until the building closed at midnight. and poetry exhibit rhythm, melody and euWhile Sagot pursued his doctorate at phony, and Sagot frequently utilizes musical eleRice, he also performed concertos around the ments gleaned from piano. At the same time, he world. Irwin Hoffman, the artistic director applies the equivalent of punctuation techniques of the Costa Rican symphony, was a severe to create phrasing in his music. “Musicians need and difficult person, according to Sagot. But better phrasing, which means you need punche pushed Sagot into playing concertos that tuation: periods, commas, colons,” he said. “A were increasingly more challenging, and he good musician should observe them and breathe became, as Sagot put it, “a very significant them. Otherwise you get a continuous, monotofigure in my life.” nous, nonmusical discourse.”

—Jacques Sagot During this period, Sagot wrote furiously, Sagot doesn’t write poetry, but he describes often going home at midnight to write for his writing as “prose irrigated with poetry.” A a couple of hours before catching only a meticulous writer, he cares tremendously few hours of sleep. “That was about form. “I chisel every single exhausting,” Sagot admitphrase, and I will not go on until ted. “But I was young back I am satisfied with it.” then. I could take it better.”

Rice holds a special place in The completion of his docSagot’s heart. Looking back at the torate in music in spring 2000 14 years he spent at the university, brought Sagot to a turning point Sagot becomes sentimental. “I spent in his life. He asked himself if some of my happiest years both at he wanted to work full time as the Shepherd School of Music and in a concert pianist, teach piano, do the French studies department,” he both — or remain a student. said. “The best years of my life have It didn’t take him long to debeen the ones I spent at Rice.” cide. The next fall, he entered the Presently Sagot is working on a doctoral program in French studies. book of short stories and another of He was attracted to Rice’s French literary criticism. When he finishes his department because of the “amazing teachers,” namely Bernard term at UNESCO later this year, however, he plans to leave the dipAresu, professor of French studies; Jean-Joseph Goux, the Laurence lomatic world behind and seek a position teaching French cultural H. Favrot Professor of French Studies; and Philip Wood, associate studies at a university. professor of French studies.

Does this mean that Sagot’s days as a student are over?

“These professors truly changed my life,” Sagot said. He is espe“I might go for a third doctorate degree — in philosophy. cially grateful to Wood for his guidance in writing his dissertation.

Nothing forbids me that, you know. I am seriously considering it.”

“He paid attention to the slightest detail and was very respectful of my style of writing. He is a man from whom I learned a lot, not only academically, but also humanly. He’s one of the most inspiring and lucid minds I have ever encountered.”

“I spent some of my happiest years both at the Shepherd School of Music and in the French studies department. The best years of my life have been the ones I spent at Rice.”

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“Writing and music are like oxygen and water to me.

If you take one from me, I will die immediately.”

—Jacques Sagot

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L E A R N I N G

F R O M

Difference

The Office of the Associate Provost, headed by Roland Smith Jr., has been renamed the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and given a broader scope. Smith also will chair a Council on Diversity and Inclusion that will build on and replace existing universitywide committees that are focused on diversity. Smith recently sat down with Rice Magazine to talk about cultivating equity and a diverse scholarly community across campus.

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Left to right: Gustavo Herrera, Roland Smith, Aurra Fellows and Courtney Ng.

Why is there a need for an Office of Diversity and Inclusion?

Most students at Rice have a highly satisfactory experience, but we learned some interesting things from focus groups that we conducted with African-American seniors in spring 2008 and with African-American freshmen in January 2009 and February 2010.

There was a sense of isolation and disconnectedness. We realized there is a need for better communication and coordination.

We also have learned that some students almost feel as if they’re invisible — that they’re not acknowledged on campus. This came up when we conducted focus groups with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning students earlier this year. Next we’ll be doing focus groups with Mexican-American and Native American students. What we’re learning from these different groups will help us monitor and assess current programs and coordinate all efforts that focus on diversity and inclusion across campus.

How are you approaching your expanded role?

We analyzed some of the models for diversity at other schools, but none of them really fit Rice well. So we borrowed some of their qualities and strategies and put them together with the things that have been successful at Rice. Our primary focus will be on students, but it will encompass faculty and staff as well.

We’re creating a core team of representatives from across campus that will focus on diversity issues and build on the many efforts already in place. The team will include representatives from Multicultural Affairs, EEO/Affirmative Action, Disability Support Services, Multicultural Community Relations in Public Affairs, Diversity Outreach and pipeline programs. We will also have liaisons appointed by each school, the Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, the NSF ADVANCE program, the Office of the Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, Human Resources, General Counsel, Athletics and the college masters. By having input from all these areas, we can coordinate all efforts that focus on diversity and inclusion. We will work with the Office of Institutional Research and the Office of Institutional Effectiveness to collect and analyze data related to campus climate and inclusiveness.

What are some additional goals you want to achieve?

We want to do more coordinated communication about activities on campus and the programs already in place. We want to maintain a consolidated calendar and Web presence. We plan to publish an e-newsletter several times a year to highlight best practices and current issues. And we hope to be a resource for anyone coming up with new ideas so we can put them into our network and consider them when we make policy recommendations to the provost and the president. We need to figure out how to fill in the gaps in our current programs. I would like to see more staff and faculty get involved in the lives of students as mentors and college associates. A number of alumni who came back for the 40th anniversary of the matriculation of the first African-

We’re creating a core team of representatives from across campus that will focus on diversity issues and build on the many efforts already in place.

Americans who earned bachelor’s degrees from Rice spoke passionately about how important black staff and faculty were to them during their college years.

How have attitudes toward diversity and inclusion changed on the Rice campus since you came here in the 1990s?

We have to work to learn from each other — not just in the classroom, but also informally.

Everyone needs to be comfortable with who they are in terms of background and tradition.

I’ve seen them change for the better. Admission has had a holistic approach for a long time, and that has worked well for Rice. We made a push to increase diversity.

Things would plateau and then fall off. We’re at a point now where we’re seeing real progress being sustained over the years in terms of more African-Americans in the student body. At this past year’s homecoming, it really warmed my heart to see the number of recent grads coming back. There seemed to be a greater connection, a desire to be connected to Rice, and that was very positive.

In what ways has Rice benefited from the substantial increase in international students?

I think the global diversity is great. It exposes other students to a variety of cultures. But diversity is only part of the equation. The other part is inclusion. We have to work to learn from each other — not just in the classroom, but also informally. Everyone needs to be comfortable with who they are in terms of background and tradition. That goes across the board. Students naturally want to find their comfort zone, but at the same time, we should encourage them to explore.

Besides race and ethnicity, what are some other issues that need to be considered?

We must make sure we don’t find ourselves in a situation where people are isolated and feeling excluded because of sexual orientation, nationality, disability or religion. In the fields of science and engineering, women may feel like they’re a minority. The main thing we need to do is find ways to make sure members of our community don’t create these silos for minorities or people who are different.

You recently attended the American Council on Education diversity officers conference. Based on your discussion with representatives of other universities, how do you think the diversity climate at Rice compares with that at other schools?

Thanks to the hard work of many people and offices, Rice is in a relatively good place. We’re not having to respond to any particular incident or ugliness like a few other campuses have had. We still have some of our past to overcome — there are still segments of our African-American community who remember when Rice was all white. Those things die hard. But we have a student body that is very diverse, so we’re operating from a position of strength.

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Music in the Aria Though the set for Richard Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos” has been struck from the stage of Alice Pratt Brown Hall’s Wortham Opera Theatre, the recent production continues to sing volumes about the Shepherd School Opera Program.

“I love that I’m a part of Rice’s opera program,” said Brent Ryan, a first-year graduate student. “With two fully staged productions each year, we have many opportunities to perform. That experience is invaluable. A singer can practice and practice, but some of the greatest learning happens on the stage.”

Ryan played Tanzmeister in “Ariadne auf Naxos,” and it was a role that challenged him to transform his nervous excitement into the air of confidence that surrounds his self-assured, smooth character. He developed the persona throughout the rehearsal process but also credited the ability of his classmates to propel him forward.

“Being a part of a high-level program such as the one here at Rice encourages us to be better artists,” he said. “If you play basketball with people who are far worse than you, you will not push yourself to play well, but if you play with people who are better than you, you will push yourself to levels you thought were unattainable.”

The same can be said for the Shepherd School of Music, which is pushing itself to new heights. Already world renowned for its orchestral training program, it is gaining distinction for its emerging opera program.

Under the leadership of Richard Bado, professor of opera and director of opera studies, the program has grown in size and scope but remains intimate, enrolling only 36 singers per year — an approach designed to ensure that each singer receives individual attention.

Students aren’t the only ones who appreciate the opportunities for close interactions and individualized lessons. Shepherd School instr uctors enjoy

Photos by Ted Washington

getting to know each student and helping them launch successful careers. In the opera program, that means encouraging students to stretch their imaginations while employing sharp technical skills.

“Our students are very inventive and willing to let their hair down,” said Debra Dickinson, artist teacher of opera studies.

“Creating the characters and discovering the well-timed action is always a great process. The thrilling part for me as a teacher is watching how much the students progress from project to project.”

In her role as director of “Ariadne auf Naxos” and its companion production, Gaetano Donizetti’s “Viva la Mamma!,” Dickinson was a case study of sorts for her students. Both operas are set backstage at an opera production and deal with the eccentricities of opera singers, composers, producers and, yes, directors.

“Debbie allowed all of us to explore,” Ryan said. “She would sketch an outline of direction and let us play and experiment, going off our natural impulses of the character and adding on layers.”

Working those characters into the music can present its own challenges for both the singers and the orchestra. Under the baton of Bado and staff conductor Cristian M˘acelaru, the students navigated those obstacles and others.

“For our first dress rehearsal, one of our cast members was feeling ‘under voice’ and couldn’t sing,” M˘acelaru said.

“It’s unfortunate, but these things happen all the time. All of a sudden you have a main solo character you don’t hear at all. The voice you’ve been following — clinging to — is gone. But what do you do? You still have to play.”

Those types of complications fit right in with the theme of the recent “backstage” operas and made them fun to present.

“Things may go wrong, but the feeling here isn’t so much about pressure as it is about excitement,” M˘acelaru said. “The singers are really good, and the orchestra is the best there is. Every student gets the opportunity to shine.”

—Jessica Stark

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Arts

Acting With Purpose Shakespeare is a standard figure in high school classrooms around the globe, but for a lucky group of Houston students, the Bard and his work have become a little more tangible thanks to Rice’s ongoing collaboration with Actors from the London Stage (AFTLS).

The group, now in its 35th year, tours universities to give lectures, workshops and seminars and provide students with the chance to engage in in-depth discussions on the art of theatre with talented artists from some of the most important theatre companies in the world. AFTLS has been visiting Rice since 2002.

This year, to add a special outreach component to the program, Christina Keefe, director of the Rice Theatre Program and lecturer in visual and dramatic arts, invited teachers from the Kinkaid School and the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts to bring their students to campus for a workshop with the professional actors.

“The very best universities share with the communities around them to celebrate learning with people of all ages and socioeconomic classes,” said Kate Lambert

a way we don’t often see in the classroom,” said Harrison Harvey, a senior at Kinkaid.

“It was tremendously helpful to learn about her approach to Shakespeare.”

Classmate Claire Gutermuth agreed.

“It was interesting to talk to someone who knew how to act Shakespeare,” she said.

“We’re used to reading it, but she made me see it differently.”

Shakespeare wasn’t the only thing that Higham taught the students. She also ran them through a litany of warm-up exercises to give the students a behind-the-scenes look at how professional actors prepare.

During one exercise, she had the students form a circle. She chose one of them to make eye contact with someone else in the circle and then walk toward that person.

Then she had them compare that to their actions when they walked over to some-

“It was interesting to talk to someone who knew how to act Shakespeare. We’re used to reading it, but she made me see it differently.”

— Claire Gutermuth

’93, the chair of the English department at Kinkaid who teaches a Shakespeare class for Advanced Placement seniors.

“Financially, we simply couldn’t support a group like AFTLS, so to have Rice generously share their actors with us is to make a few more students lovers of Shakespeare.”

Lambert was thrilled to take advantage of the opportunity presented by Rice because her students rarely get to see Shakespeare performed live. “It made all of the conversations we have had this year more real, more meaningful, more authentic,” Lambert said. “And it will continue to resonate as we tackle more of the Bard’s plays to come. Actors really do wrestle with every word, every mark of punctuation.

Acting is deliberate and time-intensive, and there is no right delivery of any line.”

Lambert’s class of about 30 worked with Jennifer Higham, a seasoned actress whose theater credits include “The Internationalist” for the Gate Theatre, “Alison’s House” and “The Linden Tree” for the Orange Tree, and “Rope” for the Watermill Theatre.

“She made the language come alive in

one and declared a purpose such as “I hug you,” “I kick you” or “I smile at you.”

“What does it do when we add purpose to our action — when we add an intention to what we’re doing or saying?” Higham asked the class. “It changes our inflection.

We talk and act differently. When you act with purpose, notice how your voices are a little higher and happier. As an actor, you have to have intention; otherwise your words and actions fall flat.”

Among Higham’s other advice was the importance of listening. “As an actor, you should be listening all the time,” she said.

“What someone else is saying shows you how to react and determines your next move, your feeling, your facial expression.”

The students’ workshop concluded with a visit to Rice’s Hamman Hall for a performance of “Romeo and Juliet” by the five-person AFTLS troupe.

The AFTLS residency at Rice is underwritten by the Alan and Shirley Grob Fund for Shakespeare in Performance, with additional support from Rice University and the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts.

—Jessica Stark

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Rice, known for its unconventional wisdom, is now the showcase for seven unconventional biomorphic sculptures by internationally recognized sculptor James Surls. The exhibit, titled “Magnificent Seven: Houston Celebrates Surls,” is presented by the Houston Arts Alliance and the Rice Public Art Program. The works, which suggest hybrids between machine and plant, are located strategically around campus and will remain on-site for about six months.

Learn more at Houston Arts Alliance: › › › ricemagazine.info/4 0

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Arts

Walls that Capture the World Sometimes, international stardom is just a chance event away. Such is the case with El Anatsui, an artist who says he is intrigued by “whatever the environment throws up.”

The story of Anatsui’s chance event has become something of a creation myth for people writing about the work of this longtime artist.

A native of Ghana, he has lived and taught in Nigeria for more than 30 years. One day, while driving through the Nigerian countryside, he

new art form was born.

According to a 2009 New York Times article, the same day that Gary Tinterow, the Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern and Contemporary

Anatsui appreciated their kindness, and although he is besieged by myriad exhibition opportunities, he agreed to do an installation for Rice Gallery.

For the installation, titled “Gli (Wall),” he created expansive yet delicate fishnet-like panels from the tiny rings of metal that break away when a bottle cap is unscrewed. Each ring was painstakingly wired to the next by a team of assistants in Nigeria. Although Anatsui usually hangs his massive curtains against a wall, for “Gli,” he moved them out into the room.

The panels led the way to a small rear gallery painted a rich peacock blue. There, on the back wall, was a gleaming cascade of shimmering metallic scales — the product of a bag of materials the artist brought with him from Nigeria. It felt strangely opulent despite its found-object origins. A visitor writing in the comment book summed it up best: “It’s wonderful to see something ordinary made extraordinary.”

“Gli” was a major coup for the Houston art world and the unassuming Rice Gallery.

If put on the market, this major new work

by Anatsui would sell in the seven figures.

The exhibit also was propitious for Anatsui.

In a recent e-mail to Davenport, the artist described “Gli” as “marking a new direction” in his work — one he would incorporate into a new piece destined for Berlin.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer

›› › ricegallery.org

For the installation, titled “Gli (Wall),” he created expansive yet delicate fishnet-like panels from the tiny rings of metal that break away when a bottle cap is unscrewed. Each ring was painstakingly wired to the next by a team of assistants in Nigeria.

spied a big white plastic bag lying beside the road. He stopped the car, retrieved the bag and peered inside. It was filled with thousands of aluminum tops and collars for liquor bottles — castoffs from a distillery.

Anatsui took the bag back to his studio and began to experiment with its contents.

The tops were printed with reds, yellows and blacks, but inside, they were still shiny metallic. Anatsui cut and flattened them into tiny metal tiles then used copper wire to stitch them together into panels that incorporated the shiny as well as the colored sides. He combined the panels into giant shimmering curtains that are visually similar to Kente cloth, a traditional fabric of the Ewe people, and a

Art, saw Anatsui’s work at the 2007 Venice Biennale, he set the wheels in motion for the museum to acquire one of the artist’s works.

At approximately the same time, Rice Gallery Director Kim Davenport saw a photograph of Anatsui’s Venice Biennale installation. She was intrigued and began researching and following the artist’s work.

The next year, Davenport and Rice Gallery Manager Jaye Anderton met with Anatsui while he was preparing a show at Sonsbeek International Sculpture Exhibition in the Netherlands. It happened that the artist didn’t have anyone to help him install his piece, and Davenport and Anderton, veterans of scores of installations, pitched in to help.

Next at Rice Gallery Get ready for a little lunacy at Rice Gallery when artist Andrea Dezsö turns the gallery’s glass façade into a series of life-size, three-dimensional scenes that portray an imaginary lunar world. The installation, titled “Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly,” will be on view until Aug. 8. Dezsö works in a variety of media, and her illustrations have appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, TIME and Newsweek.

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Using compelling stories drawn entirely from the public record, McGarity and Wagner reveal the range of sophisticated legal and financial tactics, including invented controversy, that political and corporate advocates employ to discredit or suppress research that threatens their financial interests.

Abusing Science A Handy Guide Throw a ball, write something down, scratch an itch, point to something, wield a fork and knife — these are just a few of the things that you do without thinking. But when things go wrong with your hands or the wrists and forearms that help them manipulate things, you’re apt to wonder how you ever took those appendages for granted.

Taking the hands for granted is something that Dr. Roy A. Meals ’67 has never done, and now, thanks to his book “The Hand Owner’s Manual: A Hand Surgeon’s Thirty-Year Collection of Important Information and Fascinating Facts” (Virtualbookworm.com, 2008), the rest of us can delve into the anatomy, history, mystery and mythos of these complex musculoskeletal systems.

Meals spends some time dealing with the many things that can go wrong with the hand. Most of us are familiar with breaks, sprains, carpal tunnel syndrome and tennis elbow, but most likely you’ve never heard of stockbroker’s elbow, the Celtic curse or Bible bumps. Meals also offers practical advice on maintaining hand health, including ways to prevent hand and arm injuries of all sorts. Will glucosamine and chondroitin help your arthritis? How do you treat frostbite? What are safe ways to pick up and hold various sorts of things?

“The Hand Owner’s Manual” can tell you.

Along with the advice, Meals also presents a generous handful of humorous hand-related facts and tips. How do you remove a ring stuck on a finger because it won’t go over the knuckle? Or why do identical twins have different fingerprints? Meals can even tell you what hand injuries are most common in any given month. If it’s related to the hand, Meals has the answers.

No matter what kind of hands you have — athletic hands, artistic hands or two left hands — after reading Meals’ book, you’ll finally know them like … well, the back of your hand.

—Christopher Dow

It seems that for every issue before the public today — be it climate change, environmental conditions or health care — there is a science behind it. That’s because many of us probably take comfort in the belief that science is the ultimate impartial arbiter that aids us, through the application of demonstrable facts and well-thought-out procedures, in determining the best course of action for a particular problem. What, then, can we make of the fact that public policy often is derived from scientific research that has been distorted, suppressed or ignored altogether?

That is the question that drives “Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research” (Harvard University Press, 2008), by Thomas O. McGarity ’71, the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Chair in Administrative Law, and Wendy E. Wagner, the Joe A. Worsham Centennial Professor in Law, both at the University of Texas at Austin. But for the authors, the question is a little like the Hydra’s head — chop it off, and two more grow in its place. Impressively well-documented and deeply disturbing, this book demonstrates that ideological or economic attacks on research — and on scientists themselves — are not isolated incidents but part of an extensive pattern of abuse.

Using compelling stories drawn entirely from the public record, McGarity and Wagner reveal the range of sophisticated legal and financial tactics, including invented controversy, that political and corporate advocates employ to discredit or suppress research that threatens their financial interests. It is unsettling enough that companies, attorneys, think tanks and even government agencies engage in manipulating research to mislead the public about safety and health hazards, but the authors delve even further to discover that bias and manipulation now permeate the scientific community itself.

In “Bending Science,” the authors aren’t content with merely revealing these astonishing patterns of corruption and misinformation.

They end on a more constructive note by making a case for reforms to safeguard public health by restoring the integrity of science and its place in reasoned argument.

—Christopher Dow

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ON THE

Voting Patterns and the Economy Conventional wisdom says the economy is the paramount issue for voters in any election. Randolph Stevenson, associate professor of political science, set out to determine if that perception is actually true.

In n “The Economic Vote: How Political and Economic Institutions Condition Election Results” (Cambridge University Press, 2008), Stevenson and co-author Raymond Duch, a professorial fellow at the University of Oxford, propose a theoretical model to account for how voters decide which candidates to support and how they integrate perceptions of the economy into their decisions.

Many political scientists have looked into individual countries’ electoral trends, but Stevenson and Duch examined data from 163 election studies in 18 countries in an attempt to draw broad conclusions from a wide array of political contexts. Their success in this endeavor was noted by the American Political Science Association, which awarded the book the 2009 Gregory Luebbert Book Award for the best book in comparative politics published in the preceding two years.

The answers are not necessarily straightforward. Some political systems grant more economic decision-making power to nonelected officials than others, which means that voters cannot express concerns about the economy at the ballot box in the same way in different countries. Moreover, economic voting patterns vary between systems with two parties and those with multiple parties.

In general, the authors discovered that voters are attentive to fluctuations in the economy and that economic voting is pervasive. The more responsibility a party has for economic policy, the more voters will punish — or reward — it for economic failure or success. Further, if voters perceive that an opposition party has a realistic chance to unseat incumbents, they are more likely to weigh the economy in their selection. However, the authors wrote, “When voters perceive any relevant differences between candidates in an election, it is rational for them to vote over those differences rather than to try to use their vote to discipline incumbents.”

Bookshelf

Voyage to a Top Prize In “Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants Across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World” (Louisiana State University Press, 2008), Associate Professor of History Alexander Byrd ’90 tells the story of British colonialism by examining the colonial world’s intersection with the African diaspora.

The book reveals how the departures, voyages and landings of enslaved and free blacks shaped migrant society and Britain’s Atlantic empire. More than just a study of where migrants landed and what they did, the book pays particular attention to the social and cultural effects the trans-Atlantic journey had on the voyagers. The book was awarded the 2009 Wesley-Logan Book Prize, sponsored by the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

—Jessica Stark

—Franz Brotzen

“Linguistic Fieldwork: A Practical Guide,” by Claire Bowern, adjunct assistant professor of linguistics at Rice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

“Crown’s Jewel,”

by Cynthia D. Toliver ’80 (iUniverse, 2008)

“Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization: From the Antebellum Era to the Computer Age,” edited by Michele Gillespie ’83 and Susanna Delfino (University of Missouri Press, 2008)

“Collision,” by Jeff Abbott ’85 (Dutton Adult, 2008)

“Bush v. Gore: Exposing the Hidden Crisis in American Democracy,” by Charles L. Zelden ’91 (University Press of Kansas, 2008)

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New Athletics Director Takes the Field Rick Greenspan, who has led successful athletics programs, facilities construction and fundraising campaigns as athletics director at Indiana University and West Point, has been named Rice University’s new athletics director.

For the past year, Greenspan has worked as a consultant to numerous Division I schools in search processes for coaching and administrative vacancies. He also has lectured for and consulted with the NCAA Division IA Athletic Directors Association, the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics and the National Association of Athletic Compliance Coordinators.

“Athletics at Rice comes with a set of values and expectations that is The Greenbelt, Md., native also has served as director of intercolboth rewarding and challenging,” President David Leebron said. “Rick legiate athletics at Illinois State University (1993–1999), senior associate Greenspan shares those expectations and values, and he brings a broad athletics director at University of Miami (1992–1993), associate athletand ambitious vision for intercollegiate athletics to Rice. We want to ics director at University of California at Berkeley (1983–1991), recreexcel in the classroom and on the field, and Rick ational athletics coordinator at University of New is exactly the right leader to make us even more Hampshire (1982–1983) and associate coordinator successful.” for the Klotsche Center at University of Wisconsin Greenspan has 30 years of administrative and at Milwaukee (1979–1982). managerial experience in intercollegiate athletics, Rice Dean of Undergraduates Robin Forman, physical education and recreation at public and who chaired the search committee for the new private universities. He said that experience has athletics director, said that the criteria for candimade him familiar with athletics programs across dates included honesty and integrity; the ability to the country, and he’s impressed with Rice. represent both the university and its athletics pro“Rice is world-class, with top-caliber student– grams well; the experience and leadership skills to athletes and coaches, great sports and recreational help Rice’s student–athletes succeed academically, facilities, a gorgeous campus, and a reputation as athletically, personally and professionally; and the one of the best research universities in the counpotential to foster a communitywide sense of entry,” he said. “I am thrilled by the opportunity to gagement with and excitement about athletics. The lead its athletics programs into even higher levels athletics director also oversees recreation and fitof accomplishment.” ness programs for the university.

Indiana captured eight individual or team na“Rice is world-class, “In my talks with many people, Rick was contional titles during Greenspan’s tenure from 2004 sistently referred to as a man of great integrity, a with top-caliber to 2008. He oversaw a 24-sport NCAA Division IA great family man and someone who at the core student–athletes and intercollegiate athletics program with a $53 milis just a really good person,” Forman said. “The lion operating budget, nearly 700 student–athletes, coaches, great sports and committee felt that Rick will be very effective in and a coaching and administrative staff of more leading Rice Athletics in a way we can be proud of recreational facilities, a than 175. He organized the university’s first comand enthusiastic about.” gorgeous campus, and a prehensive capital campaign, which increased anGreenspan has a master’s degree in physical nual giving by 41 percent and raised $65 million reputation as one of the education and athletic administration from Idaho toward the $80 million goal by the midpoint, and State University, where he graduated summa cum best research universities led the construction and renovation of numerous laude. He has a bachelor’s degree in behavioral in the country.” athletics facilities. science from the University of Maryland at College From 1999 to 2004, Greenspan served as director —Rick Greenspan Park, where he was a four-year letter winner in of intercollegiate athletics at the U.S. Military Academy baseball. at West Point, where he managed a 25-sport NCAA Greenspan and his wife, Jenny, have been Division IA intercollegiate athletics program with a $23 million budget and married 31 years. They have two grown children: Emily, 28, a graduate 800 student–athletes. His overhaul of the annual giving program resulted in of the University of Connecticut, and Ben, 26, a graduate of Indiana a 300 percent increase in gifts and a doubling of the average gift. Under his University. leadership, 34 percent of all student–athletes made the dean’s list. He also —B.J. Almond developed and funded an athletics facility master plan.

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Sports

Arsalan Kazemi walks softly but carries a big talent.

As a freshman starter for men’s basketball, the 6’7” forward put up respectable numbers in his rookie season, averaging 10.7 points per game — second on the team — and easily leading in blocks and rebounds at the end of regular-season play.

To Be a

Leader

“I found out this year how important leadership is.

That’s my goal for next year — to be a leader on this team.”

— Arsalan Kazemi

Those stats are worthy of notice, but Kazemi started bringing attention to Rice as the first Iranian to play Division 1 NCAA basketball long before he landed in Houston.

The best evidence: A feature story in Sports Illustrated last December detailed the young man’s journey from Iran to the United States. Along the way came a trying stop at U.S. Customs; after six hours of tough questions by suspicious agents, Kazemi admitted he was ready to get back on the plane.

“It was awful,” he remembered. “When you haven’t had any sleep for 17 hours, you’re at the airport for another six hours, your English is not that good and they start asking you crazy questions, all you can say is, ‘Just send me back home!’”

But Kazemi toughed it out, to Rice’s benefit. Following a year at a private school in North Carolina, he captained Iran’s junior national team last summer and then joined Rice, rooming alone at McMurtry College. “That was a mistake,” he said.

“But I was homesick.”

Eventually drawn out by his teammates — and their video games — Kazemi overcame his initial reserve — something that has never been a problem on the court. His aggressive play at both ends quickly won over Owl fans, and his season peaked with a 14-point, 14-rebound win over East Carolina University that earned him Conference USA Rookie of the Week honors in early February. In March, he was named to the Conference USA AllFreshman Team.

Rice coaches first learned of Kazemi through Houston travel agent Anthony Ibrahim, who had a sideline calling NBA games in Arabic for Alhurra, a U.S.-sponsored television channel that beams programming into Iran. As a teen, Kazemi eagerly watched the one NBA game a week broadcast by Alhurra, listening to Ibrahim make the calls. In 2007, Ibrahim saw Kazemi play in a junior tournament in Tehran, became a fan in return and made calls on the teen’s behalf to NCAA coaches of his acquaintance.

Kazemi dreams of playing in the NBA but admitted he knew next to nothing about the NCAA before coming to America. “I had heard of North Carolina and Memphis and Duke, but I didn’t know the NCAA was so big,” he said. “Not many people know about it in my country.”

Division 1 is tougher than he experienced in international play last summer. “I need to get some rest,” he said. “I’m really tired, and my whole body hurts.” He said he’s happy to dive back into his studies toward a degree in economics.

Kazemi redirected a question about tensions between Iran and the United States. “I’m not really into the politics,” he said. He often thinks of home, though, and while he’d love to accept his country’s invitation to play for its senior squad next summer, he has trepidations. “I’m scared I won’t get a visa to come back here,” he said.

Now that he feels at home at Rice, Kazemi is looking forward to his sophomore season and wants to step up his game. “I found out this year how important leadership is,” he said. “That’s my goal for next year — to be a leader on this team.”

—Mike Williams

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Sports

RICEOWLS.COM

Night of the

Iron Owl How do you blow off a little steam at the end of a season of vigorous workouts? With more workouts, of course — and maybe with a little competition thrown in. At least that’s what the Rice Owls football team does to celebrate the end of its winter conditioning. The third annual Night of the Iron Owl, which was open to the public, gave Owls fans a chance to cheer on the team members as they attempted to set personal and position records in the bench press, power clean and squat.

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Students

“Big things happen at Rice.

You don’t give to Rice — you invest in it.”

— Howard Leverett

Historian Looks to the Future “We’re simply doing something that the two of us believe in.”

For more than 40 years, Ira Gruber, the Harris Masterson Jr. Professor Emeritus of History, shared his passion for history with Rice students.

Known for his enthusiasm and skill in bringing historical events to life, he made a lasting impression on many students who remain in contact with him to this day.

After retirement, Ira and his wife, Pat, who also is an educator, have continued to make a difference in the lives of students. By leveraging their retirement assets and creatively planning their gift, the Grubers established the Ira and Patricia Gruber Research Fund in History to encourage original research by history students.

The endowment supports summer research toward an honor’s thesis and provides travel scholarships that allow students to examine primary sources in archives, attend scholarly meetings and conduct research interviews. Any remaining income from the endowment will be used to provide merit scholarships in history.

To learn more about including the university in your estate or retirement planning and making a commitment to the Centennial Campaign, please contact the Office of Gift Planning.

Phone: 713-348-4624

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E-mail: giftplan@rice.edu

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Web site: rice.planyourlegacy.org

Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Permit #7549 Houston, Texas

Rice University Creative Services–MS 95 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892

ColorCycle!

Colorful flowers are an expected element of spring, but this year, Rice’s blossoms had some competition when a fleet of brightly painted bicycles spread like a rainbow across campus. The project was conceived by graduate student Scott Chamberlain, who wanted to highlight the university’s diversity, and was directed by architecture major Sam Jacobson ’10. Jacobson secured an Envision Grant from Leadership Rice, collected unclaimed bikes from the Rice University Police Department and the surrounding communities, and organized the painting and distribution of the bikes, which can be used for free by members of the Rice community. › ›› ricemagazine.info/colorcycle