Rice Engineering Magazine 2015

MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN

The Three Ships…

There was a time when engineering educators needed only to equip engineering students with a good grounding in the basics of math, physics, chemistry and computing, along with specialized courses in the discipline of the student’s choice.

Education was mostly defined in terms of what went on in the classroom and the lab. That is certainly not the case now, where the co-curricular/experiential activities take up much more of students’ time and energy. Students in engineering today are preparing to take on the challenges of an ever-more complex world and need to learn as they go at a pace that keeps up with changes in technology and with how society views and implements technology. And students need to be adept at working in teams, at leading teams. They need to be creative yet disciplined, highly technical yet always grounded in the basics, and experienced but still able to look at problems from fresh angles.

How does an engineering school prepare its students to be all these things? Our approach can be summarized in the Three Ships: Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Internships.

Since I became the dean of engineering at Rice, I’ve worked to focus our efforts on these three “ships.” In this issue, you can read about what they mean to our students and how they help them get ready for life after graduation, whether they’re going to graduate school, taking a job as a professor or in the public or private sector, or as we increasingly notice, launching their own companies.

I hope you enjoy this edition of Rice Engineering magazine.

Please engage with us either by staying in touch, visiting campus, mentoring a capstone design team or advising a startup. I’d love to hear your thoughts on our activities.

Edwin L. “Ned” Thomas William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Engineering

CONTENT Rice Engineering Magazine is a production of the George R. Brown School of Engineering Office of Communications at Rice University.

Dean Edwin L. “Ned� Thomas Associate Deans Janice Bordeaux Walter Chapman Keith Cooper Gary Marfin Ann Saterbak Bart Sinclair Editor Ann Lugg Writers Patrick Kurp Holly Beretto Graphic Design Donald Soward Tracy Ngo

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New Fa cul t y

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New Depa rt m ent Cha i rs Na m ed

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Retirements

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Ina ugura l Tea chi ng a nd R es ea rch Excel le n c e Aw a r ds R ES EAR CH

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N EWT Re s e a r c h C e n t e r Fu n d e d

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Ro o m w i t h a ( N a n o ) V i e w

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Br i n g i n g To g e t h e r An a l ys i s a n d Bi g D a t a

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Exp e r i m e n t a l + C o m p u t a t i o n a l = I n s p i r e d M a t e r i a l s

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Wh e n M o r e i s Be t t e r

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L o w - Te c h Ta k e o n H i g h - Te c h I n s t r u m e n t s

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D a t a a s Bi g a s t h e U n i ve r s e

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Cooling, from the Macro to the Micro

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An En d u r i n g Eq u a t i o n

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Au t o c o m p l e t e f o r P r o g r a m m e r s

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Excha ngi ng S t udent s /Com bi ni ng Cul t ure s

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The Three S hi ps

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R ea chi ng for t he S ub-O rbi t a l

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Ma s t eri ng G l oba l M edi ca l Innova t i on

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News B ri efs

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G a m e O n!

J.T. Hilton

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S t udent Awa rds

photo of John and Ann Doerr

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Fa cul t y Awa rds

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Alumnus Spotlight: Christof Spieler

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O ut s t a ndi ng Al um ni Awa rds

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Di s t i ngui s hed S er vi ce M eda l

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Al um ni Cha l l enged t o G et Invol ved

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R EA S pons ors hi p Enri ches S t udent Exp e r i e n c e s

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Engi neeri ng Cel ebra t es End-O f-Yea r P i c n i c

Contributors Jade Boyd Mike Williams Photography Jeff Fitlow Tommy Lavergne Donald Soward An Le Marilee Dizon Le Brandon Martin photo of Marissa Konicke

Lisa Deneffe

Send comments or letters to the editor: Rice Engineering Magazine Rice University MS 364 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, Texas 77251 or email: engrnews@rice.edu

NEW FACULTY

Nine new faculty members in seven departments have joined the George R. Brown School of Engineering.

Gang Bao

Maarten de Hoop

Matthew G. Knepley

Marie Lynn Miranda

Andrew J. Schaefer

Gang Bao is the Foyt Family Professor in Bioengineering, director of the National Institutes of Health-funded Nanomedicine Center for Nucleoprotein Machines, and principal investigator for the Laboratory of Biomolecular Engineering and Nanomedicine. Bao earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Lehigh University in 1987.

He previously served as the Robert A. Milton Chair in Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. He brought with him to Rice nine colleagues whose wide-ranging research is linked by an interest in the genetic roots of cancer and other diseases and the promise of nanotechnology and biomolecular approaches to treat them. Bao is the Senior Scholar in Cancer Research with the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

Marie Lynn Miranda is professor of statistics and provost of Rice University. Since 2012 she had served as the Samuel A. Graham Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan. For 21 years before that, Miranda was on the faculty at Duke University, where she was initially in the Department of Public Policy. With her growing interest in environmental health, she became a professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Department of Pediatrics and a faculty member in the Integrated Toxicology and Environmental Health Program and the Duke Global Health Institute.

Miranda’s research focuses on environmental health, especially how the environment shapes health and well-being among children. She is a pioneer in the evolving field of geospatial health informatics. She is the founding director of the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative.

Maarten de Hoop is the Simons Chair in Computational and Applied Mathematics and Earth Science, a position established with a grant from the Simons Foundation’s Math+X Program. Previously, de Hoop was a professor of mathematics and earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University, where he spent the past 10 years developing an industryuniversity research consortium. He earned his Ph.D. in technical sciences from Delft University of Technology.

De Hoop worked in industry for both Shell and Schlumberger prior to pursuing an academic career. His research focuses on inverse problems, in which researchers begin with a set of observations and work backward to calculate the causal factors that produced them. His research group exploits seismic waves and integrates inverse source problems to help identify seismic features.

Andrew J. Schaefer, who earned his Ph.D. in industrial and systems engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2000, has joined CAAM as a Noah Harding Professor. In 1994, he earned a B.A. in CAAM and mathematical economic analysis, and a master’s degree in CAAM, from Rice. He is the former John A. Swanson Chair in Engineering in the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, where he joined the faculty in 2000.

Schaefer’s research has focused on integrating industrial engineering, operations research and medicine, helping physicians utilize clinical data to make optimal decisions in patient treatment and care. In 2013, Schaefer was named the Outstanding Young Engineering Alumnus by the Rice Engineering Alumni.

Matthew G. Knepley joined the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM) as an assistant professor.

He earned his Ph.D. in computer science (CS) from Purdue University in 2000, and since 2009 has worked as a senior research associate with Computation Institute at the University of Chicago.

From 2006 to 2014, Knepley served as a visiting assistant professor in molecular biophysics and physiology at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. For four years he was an assistant computational mathematician at the Argonne National Laboratory. His research focuses on scientific computation, including fast methods, parallel computing, software development, numerical analysis and multicore architectures.

Laura A. Schaefer, former professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the University of Pittsburgh, has joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MECH) as the Burton J. and Ann M. McMurtry Chair in Engineering, professor of mechanical engineering and department chair. Schaefer graduated from Rice in 1995 with a B.S. in mechanical engineering and a B.A. in English. She went on to earn a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1997 and 2000, respectively.

Schaefer joined the University of Pittsburgh faculty in 2000. Her research has focused on the analysis, design and optimization of energy systems. She has addressed such topics as cogeneration system heat and mass transfer modeling, increased efficiency in energy conversion and utilization, and the multiphase, multicomponent lattice Boltzmann method.

2 RICE ENGINEERING

All officially joined the Rice faculty earlier this year, except Stadler who begins Jan. 1, 2016.

Laura A. Schaefer

Anshumali Shrivastava

Lauren Stadler

Ming Tang

Anshumali Shrivastava, who joined the Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor, this year earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University. He earned integrated bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics and computing from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, West Bengal.

In 2014, Shrivastava was a research intern with Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. From 2008 to 2010, he worked in the FICO Core Research Team in Bangalore. His research interests include large-scale machine learning, randomized algorithms for big data, and graphs and social networks mining.

Lauren Stadler, who earned a Ph.D. in environmental engineering this year from the University of Michigan, will join the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as an assistant professor. Stadler earned a B.S. in engineering from Swarthmore College in 2006 and a master’s degree in environmental engineering from the University of Michigan in 2012.

Her research focuses on sustainable biological wastewater treatment processes. Her dissertation research focused on microbial community characteristics and micropollutant fate in low-oxygen wastewater treatment systems. From 2011 to 2014, Stadler was a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow.

Ming Tang is an assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering who earned his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008.

From there he went to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow and later became a staff scientist.

In 2013, Tang moved to Houston and worked as a materials and corrosion research engineer for Shell. His research focuses oh grain-boundary engineering and mesoscale modeling, with applications in the oil and gas industry, renewable energy and electronics.

RICE ENGINEERING 3

NEW CHAIRS

Rob Griffin

Béatrice Rivière

Laura A. Schaefer

On July 1, new chairs assumed leadership of three departments in the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University.

Two previous faculty members, Rob Griffin, professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE), and Béatrice Rivière, professor of computational and applied mathematics (CAAM), are chairing their respective departments.

Laura A. Schaefer, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the University of Pittsburgh, joined Rice over the summer and now chairs the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MECH).

Griffin earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2000 and joined the Rice faculty in 2008.

His research focuses on understanding physical and chemical phenomena that affect air quality and its impact on climate and human health.

After graduating from Tufts University in 1993 with a B.S. in chemical engineering, Griffin worked as a research assistant with Arthur D. Little Inc., a global management and technology consulting firm. From 2000 to 2002, he was an assistant professor in the CEE department at Duke University.

Before coming to Rice, Griffin was an associate professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of New Hampshire, with joint appointments in the Department of Earth Sciences and the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space. Griffin, who describes himself as an atmospheric chemist, was promoted to full professor at Rice in 2013.

“Our department has built a reputation around issues of sustainability, infrastructure and natural hazards. We approach these issues from many directions. My goal is to increase the breadth and depth of our faculty so we can go after the big center-type grants and bring our program into the top 10 or 15 in the country,” Griffin said.

Rivière earned her Ph.D. in computational and applied mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. Her other degrees include a master’s in mathematics in 1996 from Pennsylvania State University and an engineering diploma in 1995 from École Centrale in France.

Before joining the Rice faculty in 2008, Rivière served as an associate professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh. She was promoted to full professor at Rice in 2013. She is an associate editor for the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis and a member of the editorial board for Advances in Water Resources.

Much of Rivière’s research involves developing accurate and efficient algorithms to model flow and transport in porous media, as well as studying aspects of numerical analysis, partial differential equations, discontinuous Galerkin methods, computational fluid dynamics and mathematical biology.

“CAAM is a core discipline that serves as the backbone for many fields in engineering and science. Our faculty is actively engaged with Houston research such as the Texas Medical Center and the oil and gas industry. It is an honor to represent the CAAM department.

As chair, I am committed to the department’s improved growth and ongoing excellence in research and in education,” Rivière said.

4 RICE ENGINEERING

Schaefer, graduated from Rice in 1995 with a B.S. in mechanical engineering and a B.A. in English. She went on to earn a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1997 and 2000, respectively.

She joined the University of Pittsburgh faculty in 2000 and was promoted to full professor in 2013. Since 2006, she has served as deputy director of the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation at Pittsburgh.

“My undergraduate training in mechanical engineering at Rice was the best preparation possible for my time in graduate school and my professional career,” Schaefer said. “I’m excited about returning ‘home’ and contributing to the MECH department’s strengths in research and education. Over the next few years, our faculty size will be growing, which will allow us to increase our personal interactions with the students, both in the classroom and the laboratory, and to target big, collaborative grants, thereby boosting our reputation and expertise still further.”

Schaefer’s research has focused on the analysis, design and optimization of energy systems. With a reliance on thermofluids modeling, she has addressed such topics as cogeneration system heat and mass transfer modeling, increased efficiency in energy conversion and utilization, design and characterization of thermoacoustic Stirling engines, and the multiphase, multicomponent lattice Boltzmann method.

Schaefer was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2011. She serves as editor-in-chief of Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments and as associate editor of the Journal of Energy Resources Technology, and is a member of the Society of Women Engineers, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, and the American Society for Engineering Education.

The outgoing chairs were Pedro Alvarez (CEE), Matthias Heinkenschloss (CAAM) and Andrew Meade (MECH).

RETIREMENTS

Michael Carroll After half a century as a pioneer researcher in the field of continuum mechanics, including 27 years at Rice University, a decade of which was spent as the dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering, Michael Carroll has retired.

Carroll was the Burton J. and Ann M. McMurtry Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (MEMS), and professor in Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM).

He was born in Thurles, Ireland, in County Tipperary, in 1936. He earned his B.A. and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from University College, Galway in 1958 and 1959, respectively, and his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1965.

David McStravick

At Brown, Carroll studied under Ronald Rivlin, the pre-eminent authority in non-linear elasticity and non-Newtonian fluids.

In 1965, Carroll joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Berkeley as an assistant professor. He became a full professor in 1975 and held the title of Shell Distinguished Chair from 1983 to 1988.

In 1988 he became dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice, with faculty appointments in MEMS and CAAM. During Carroll’s 10 years as dean, the engineering faculty grew from 74 to 92, and the proportion of female engineering undergraduates rose from 17 percent to 30 percent. He spearheaded the establishment of a new department at Rice, bioengineering, in 1997.

In 2011, in honor of his 75th birthday, three monthly issues of the journal Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids were dedicated to Carroll.

They included 25 papers written by 42 scholars in his academic field, with an emphasis on finite elasticity. The issues were guest-edited by James Casey, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who first met Carroll at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1971. In his preface, Casey wrote that Carroll is “universally loved and admired by friends and colleagues, and by the students and staff,” and continued: “He is a joy to be with, whether in the classroom, at the café, on the golf course, or around the dinner table. His friendship is cherished by those who are close to him. His advice on difficult decisions is often sought, where in addition to the power of his reason and the depth of his wisdom, one can always depend on his sublime sense of fairness and justice.”

Carroll became a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1984 and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the International Napoleonic Society.

Near the end of his preface, Casey writes: “Michael continues to be fascinated by mechanics. On behalf of all members of the mechanics community, I wish Michael many happy and productive years to come. We all look forward to continuing to benefit from his brilliant insights.”

David McStravick, who earned three degrees in mechanical engineering from Rice University, worked for decades in the oil and gas industry, and returned to Rice as a member of the faculty, has retired.

Maria Oden, professor in the practice of engineering education and director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK), credits McStravick with helping locate and plan the 18,000-square-foot design space for undergraduates on the Rice campus.

“Dave was part of the faculty committee that pushed for a collaborative space for capstone design way at the beginning. As a Rice alum he knew the Hicks Central Kitchen and knew that it was relatively unused. He took Sallie Keller, who was then the engineering dean, to the kitchen space and described his vision to her. He started the ball rolling for the OEDK,” Oden said.

McStravick returned to Rice as a lecturer in mechanical engineering in 1996, and became a professor in the practice in 2001. Before joining the faculty, McStravick had worked for more than 20 years in research, developing new products for the oil industry, resulting in 15 U.S. patents.

He was employed by the company now called ExxonMobil, and later was a research manager for Baker Packers, a division of Baker Hughes, supplying equipment for major oil companies.

From Rice, McStravick earned a B.S. in 1965, a master’s degree in 1968 and a Ph.D. in 1972, all in mechanical engineering. In 1993, he founded Lynes Inc., a Houston consulting firm. For 11 years he was the company president, and since 2004 has served as vice president. He is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Society of Petroleum Engineers and the American Society for Engineering Education.

Oden praised McStravick for his willingness to serve as an adviser and mentor for undergraduates working on design projects. “Since we opened,” she said, “Dave has mentored freshmen and senior design teams, sharing his wisdom from years in industry and as a professor. In addition, he brings many friends over to see the facility and talk to students, and provide ideas for improving the OEDK.” RICE ENGINEERING 5

RECOGNIZING EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING AND RESEARCH This year, the George R. Brown School of Engineering presented its first Teaching and Research Excellence Awards to Richard G. Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and founder of the open-education initiatives OpenStax College and Connexions, and Luay Nakhleh, associate professor of computer science, and of biochemistry and cell biology.

Each received a $10,000 award, with half the sum going directly to the faculty member and half deposited in a fund of the winner’s choice for use in “enhancing teaching and research.”

“Some people think holding a piece of chalk in front of a room is teaching. That’s not teaching. Teaching is about passion and it goes hand in hand with research.

We set up the Excellence Awards because we wanted to reward great teaching and great research, and show people that one depends on the other,” said Edwin L. “Ned” Thomas, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Engineering.

Thomas said he hopes the annual prize will encourage others to be “awesome in both teaching and research. A little passion goes a long way.”

Richard G. Baraniuk earned his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign in 1992, and joined the Rice faculty the following year. In 1999 he founded Connexions, now called OpenStax, one of the largest open-education platforms, making available more than 20,000 modules (textbooks, lessons) used by more than 2 million people each month.

Much of Baraniuk’s research has focused on development of digital signal processing and image processing systems.

He has made numerous contributions to the theory of wavelets and compressive sensing.

He is the recipient of the 2015 IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal, the Rice Presidential Mentoring Award and the NSF Young Investigator Award.

t

Richard Baraniuk ECE

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WHAT MAKES AN EXCELLENT TEACHER AND RESEARCHER?

Luay Nakhleh CS

Luay Nakhleh earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Texas in 2004, and joined the Rice faculty that year.

Nakhleh develops mathematical models and computational methods for evolutionary analyses of genomes and interactomes. In his research, he adapts techniques from phylogenetics and population genetics to analyze problems in evolutionary genomics, and devises algorithms for ancestral network reconstruction.

In 2012, Nakhleh was awarded a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; in 2010, a research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; and in 2009, a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. In 2009, he also received the Phi Beta Kappa of Rice Teaching Prize.

“My experience with Rich began in an undergraduate classroom. His passion for both teaching and the subject matter were contagious, and . . . for the first time I found myself seriously considering a future career in scientific research.

Rich then gave me the opportunity to work with him over the summer on an undergraduate research project. This experience finally helped me to decide to attend graduate school. Under his guidance, I applied and was accepted to many of the top graduate programs around the world. After visiting many of these programs, I ultimately decided to stay at Rice for my Ph.D, and it was clearly one of the smartest decisions I ever made. . . . I will remember my years as one of Rich’s graduate students as among the best of my life. It certainly wasn’t always easy—I had to work harder than I ever had before—but Rich had created an amazing culture where learning and research were also incredibly fun. As I begin my own career in academia, I can only hope to create an environment for my students that can be as fun, rewarding, and productive.”—Mark Davenport, Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology “Rich has clearly established himself as an outstanding teacher and researcher. He mentors both undergraduate and graduate students, and encourages participation in the research process as early in their careers as possible. His doctoral students are highly sought out in both academia and industry for their strengths in both research and teaching.”—Edward W. Knightly, professor and chair of ECE “I took Algorithmic Thinking my first year at Rice.

Luay was one of the professors for the course, and . . . his teaching style was much different than other professors I’d had previously: He constantly wanted a dialogue about the problems we were solving. While this was very different from other courses, it was extremely effective in forcing us to think through things on our own and really understand the material and problem solving methods. Algorithmic Thinking is widely considered one of the most difficult courses in the computer science department; the material is challenging, and students are forced to think about problems much differently than they ever have before. In addition, there are many different ways to solve every problem. Luay encourages us to find many methods of solving a problem, forcing us to think in different ways . . . Though this is difficult at first, every student leaves the class better off for it, because . . . it gives them a wide range of tools for tackling difficult problems.”—Kyle Adams ’15, Program manager at Microsoft “The development of completely new computational algorithms to examine biological questions is imperative and Luay is the person who is developing such algorithms. I would like to emphasize that his work is deeply computational and although his focus is answering questions in biology, he is at the same time contributing a set of fundamental methodologies and computational paradigms that carry to other fields of computer science.”—Lydia Kavraki, Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Bioengineering

RICE ENGINEERING 7

RESEARCH

Qilin Li CEE

Pedro Alvarez CEE

“We envision using technology and advanced materials to provide clean water to millions of people who lack it and to enable energy production in the U.S. to be more cost-effective and sustainable in regard to its water footprint.”

—Pedro Alvarez

ENGINEERING RESEARCH CENTER TO ENABLE MOBILE WATER TREATMENT A Rice University-led consortium of industry, university and government partners has been chosen to establish one of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) prestigious Engineering Research Centers in Houston to develop compact, mobile, off-grid water-treatment systems that can provide clean water to millions and make U.S. energy production more sustainable and cost-effective.

Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment Systems, or NEWT, is Houston’s first NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) and only the third in Texas in nearly 30 years. It is funded by a five-year, $18.5 million NSF grant that can be renewed for up to 10 years. NEWT brings together experts from Rice, Arizona State University, Yale University and the University of Texas at El Paso to work with more than 30 partners, including Shell, Baker Hughes, UNESCO, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and NASA. ERCs are interdisciplinary, multi-institutional centers that join academia, industry and government in partnership to produce transformational technology and engineering graduates primed to lead the global economy. ERCs often become self-sustaining and typically leverage more than $40 million in federal and industry research funding during their first decade.

“The importance of clean water to global health and economic development cannot be overstated,” said NEWT director Pedro Alvarez, the principal investigator. “We envision using technology and advanced materials to provide clean water to millions of people who lack it and to enable energy production in the U.S. to be more cost-effective and sustainable in regard to its water footprint.”

Alvarez, Rice’s George R. Brown Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and professor of chemistry and materials science and nanoengineering, said treated water is often unavailable in rural areas and low-resource communities that cannot afford large treatment plants or the miles of underground pipes to deliver water. Also, large-scale treatment and distribution consumes much energy. “About 25 percent of the energy bill for a typical city is associated with the cost of moving water,” he said.

8 RICE ENGINEERING

Co-principal investigator and NEWT associate director for research Qilin Li, the leader of NEWT’s advanced treatment test beds at Rice, said the system’s technology will be useful in places where water and power infrastructure do not exist.

“The NEWT system will be able to produce drinking water from any source, including pond water, seawater and floodwater, using solar energy and even under cloudy conditions,” said Li, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, chemical and biomolecular engineering, and of materials science and nanoengineering.

NEWT will focus on applications for humanitarian emergency response, rural water systems and wastewater treatment and reuse at remote sites, including both onshore and offshore drilling platforms for oil and gas exploration.

Alvarez said another significant research thrust in nanophotonics will be headed by Rice co-principal investigator Naomi Halas, the inventor of “solar steam” technology.

“More than half of the cost associated with desalination of water comes from energy,” said Halas, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and professor of chemistry, bioengineering, physics and astronomy, and materials science and nanoengineering. “We are working to develop several supporting technologies for NEWT, including nanophotonics-enabled direct solar membrane distillation for low-energy desalination.”

Michael Wong, professor and chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering and professor of chemistry, will collaborate in efforts to develop novel multifunctional materials such as superior sorbents and catalysts. University Professor and bioengineer Rebecca RichardsKortum will lead an innovative educational program that incorporates some of the “experiential learning” techniques she developed for the award-winning undergraduate research programs at Rice 360º: Institute for Global Health, and chemistry Faculty Fellow Carolyn Nichol will lead the K-12 education efforts.

Over the summer, Rice installed two microscopes that will permit researchers to peer deeper than ever into the fabric of the universe.

The Titan Themis scanning/transmission electron microscope, one of the most powerful in the United States, will enable scientists from Rice as well as academic and industrial partners to view and analyze materials smaller than a nanometer—a billionth of a meter—with startling clarity.

The microscope, with an estimated cost of $10 million, has the ability to take images of materials at angstrom-scale (one-tenth of a nanometer) resolution, about the size of a single hydrogen atom.

Images will be captured with a variety of detectors, including X-ray, optical and multiple electron detectors and a 4K-resolution camera, equivalent to the number of pixels in the most modern high-resolution televisions. The microscope gives researchers the ability to create three-dimensional structural reconstructions and carry out electric field mapping of subnanoscale materials.

“Seeing single atoms is exciting, of course, and it’s beautiful,” said Emilie Ringe, assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering and of chemistry. “But scientists saw single atoms in the ’90s, and even before. Now, the real breakthrough is that we can identify the composition of those atoms, and do it easily and reliably.” Ringe’s research group will operate the Titan Themis and a companion microscope that will image larger samples.

Electron microscopes use beams of electrons rather than rays of light to illuminate objects of interest. Because the wavelength of electrons is so much smaller than that of photons, the microscopes are able to capture images of much smaller things with greater detail than even the highestresolution optical microscope.

The second instrument, a Helios NanoLab 600 DualBeam microscope, will be used for three-dimensional imaging, analysis of larger samples and preparation of thin slices of samples for the more powerful Titan next door.

Both tools reside in the university’s Brockman Hall for Physics, which opened in 2011 and features sophisticated vibration-dampening capabilities. The microscopes require the best possible isolation from vibration, electric fields and acoustic noise to produce the best images, Ringe said.

Edwin Thomas, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering, expects the new instruments to ignite the already strong research culture at the university. “This is going to influence the kind of people who will be attracted to apply to and then come to Rice.” said Thomas, a materials scientist. “I’m sure there will be people on campus who, once they find out the capabilities, are going to shift their compasses and take advantage of these machines.

The whole point is to have an impact on science and society.”

ROOM WITH A (NANO)VIEW

2nm

2nm

TITAN THEMIS SCANNING/TRANSMISSION MICROSCOPE: WHAT YOU SEE Produce 3-D images by shooting very high energy (3000KeV) electrons through a thin material Magnifies images up to 100 million times Can take structural images of materials at the Angstromscale (one-tenth of a nanometer) Has the capability to determine the composition of the material atom-by-atom

RICE ENGINEERING 9

RESEARCH

Maarten de Hoop CAAM

BRINGING TOGETHER ANALYSIS AND BIG DATA Applied mathematician and seismologist Maarten de Hoop has joined the faculty at Rice University in a newly created position set up with a substantial grant from the Simons Foundation’s Math+X Program.

De Hoop joined Rice as the Simons Chair in Computational and Applied Mathematics and Earth Science on July 1. Previously he was professor of mathematics and of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University, where he spent the past 10 years developing an industryuniversity research consortium with federal and industrial support. He worked in industry for Shell and Schlumberger before entering academia.

“Moving to Rice is a tremendous opportunity because it is in the heart of Houston, which is both the world’s energy capital and the epicenter of the seismic industry,” de Hoop said. “Rice has all of the resources in place to help bring together the analytical side of exploration and global seismology with the ‘big data’ side. I believe this represents the future of the field.”

De Hoop’s research focuses on inverse problems, a field in applied mathematics in which researchers begin with a set of observations and work backward to calculate the causal factors that produced them.

De Hoop noted that Rice is already a leading center for inversion in geosciences, thanks to The Rice Inversion Project, an industry-academic consortium launched by Rice applied mathematician Bill Symes in 1992.

De Hoop expects to collaborate closely with Symes and other faculty in CAAM and earth science on geophysical inverse problems, imaging and geodynamics research.

De Hoop said he also looks forward to working with collaborators at Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology on the challenges in computational seismology and inverse problems. He said the Kennedy Institute’s annual Oil and Gas High-Performance Computing Workshop, which has tripled its attendance over the past seven years, signifies the energy industry’s reliance on computational science and comprehensive, predictive models of Earth’s subsurface.

“Accurate imaging and characterization of shallow-and deepmantle structures will facilitate integrated geological and geophysical studies and lead to the further construction of comprehensive mathematical models of Earth’s dynamic interior,” he said.

De Hoop earned his Ph.D. in technical sciences from Delft University of Technology. He worked as a research geophysicist at Shell and as a senior research scientist at Schlumberger Cambridge Research prior to beginning his academic career at the Colorado School of Mines in 1995.

“Moving to Rice is a tremendous opportunity because it is in the heart of Houston, which is both the world’s energy capital and the epicenter of the seismic industry,” de Hoop said. “Rice has all of the resources in place to help bring together the analytical side of exploration and global seismology with the ‘big data’ side. I believe this represents the future of the field.”

10 RICE ENGINEERING

Fiber network structure generated by the random walk algorithm, crosslinks are formed to connect fiber chains.

Experimental + Computational = Inspired Materials The unlikely collaboration of a civil engineer and a bioengineer at Rice University aims at designing and building not bridges and roads but replacement parts for the human body.

“We want to understand the microstructures so we can make the desired biomechanical behavior possible. What is it about a heart valve, for instance, that permits it to open and close every second for a person’s lifetime?” asked Ilinca Stanciulescu, an assistant professor of civil engineering whose specialty is computational mechanics. “How can we reproduce the same properties using bio-inspired materials?”

With Jane Grande-Allen, the Isabel C. Cameron Professor of Bioengineering, Stanciulescu has received a three-year, $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Titled “Iterative ExperimentalComputational Design of Hydrogel Systems for Biomedical Applications,” the grant will permit the researchers to design bio-inspired materials to replace the tissues found in the trachea, intervertebral disks and heart valves.

Hydrogels are webs of hydrophilic polymer chains. Because they are highly absorbent, containing up to 90 percent water, they possess a flexibility resembling natural tissue.

Stanciulescu’s job will be to take the biomechanical data provided

by Grande-Allen and turn it into computational models of, for instance, the scaffolding used in tissue engineering. In her lab, Grande-Allen will test Stanciulescu’s models and the lessons she learns experimentally will be returned to Stanciulescu, with the new data integrated into the next generation of models.

“We will integrate the manufacturing processes and combine the experimental with my computational characterization of the hydrogel systems. We want bio-inspired materials that mimic the body’s connective tissues. Each is different. The trachea has fibrous reinforcements, the intervertebral disks have a concentric layered structure, and the heart-valve tissue is both patterned and layered,” said Stanciulescu, who earned her Ph.D. in civil engineering from Duke University in 2005 and joined the Rice faculty in 2009.

Ilinca Stanciulescu CEE

Jane Grande-Allen BIOE

Molecular weights for the layers and fiber patterns will be chosen to approximate the stiffness of the body’s actual tissue in its most common state—compression for the intervertebral disks, for instance.

Grande-Allen’s lab will use photolithography and staged crosslinking to manufacture the bio-inspired materials, and the samples will be mechanically tested in tension, compression and bending.

“This experimental-computational collaboration will accelerate development of novel hydrogel-based structures that can mimic the mechanical behavior of complex biological tissues. Once we have generated data from a broad range of experiments to build the computer model, we should be able to test a large number of possible designs in silico, and then make recommendations about the best designs for us to test in the lab,” said Grande-Allen, director of the Integrative Matrix Mechanics Lab in the BioScience Research Collaborative at Rice.

RICE ENGINEERING 11

RESEARCH

WHEN MORE IS BETTER “Why did a mobile system guy get interested in massive MIMO?” asked the mobile system guy in question.

Lin Zhong, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE), and of computer science at Rice, and director of the Rice Efficient Computing Group, answered himself: “It gives you the best spatial reuse, the best power efficiency and reduced inter-cell interference—that’s interference with other transmissions.”

By massive MIMO, Zhong means base stations using a large number of antennas to implement the multiple-input, multiple-output technology.

In the office across from his in Duncan Hall is such an array, bristling like a cactus with 108 antennas. “The hardware is cheap and getting cheaper. If you’ve got a site for a base station, better use as many antennas as you can,” said Zhong, who directs the Argos project at Rice, dedicated to “pushing MU-MIMO to its limits.”

In the past, the capacity of conventional single-user wireless systems was limited by the available spectrum and transmission power. Recent work in the field of information theory has suggested that such limits on capacity can be overcome by improving the spatial reuse efficiency through multi-user (MU) MIMO technology, or a special case known as multi-user beamforming (MUBF). With MUBF, a base station employs multiple antennas to simultaneously send independent data streams to multiple users, increasing the aggregated network capacity by several degrees.

“Wireless consumes a lot of power. Wi-Fi is more efficient than cellular. You can’t really fit a lot of antennas in a mobile device,” Zhong said.

Among the students Zhong advises is Clayton W. Shepard, who earned a B.S. in 2008 and an M.S. in 2012, both in ECE from Rice. Now he works on his Ph.D., exploring the possibilities of MU-MIMO. He assembled the multipleantenna station in Duncan Hall and since 2011 has coauthored 20 papers with Zhong.

“With Prof. Zhong I’m working on some novel wireless networking techniques that we think will leverage large-scale antenna systems for multi-user beamforming. With enough base station antennas, the network capacity can be scalably grown to accommodate even more users. Naturally, this motivates us to put as many antennas as possible on the base station,” said Shepard, who dreams of 400 antennas.

Challenges remain, Zhong emphasized, including a mechanism for ensuring “non-trivial baseband processing” and accurate clock and transmission synchronization for correcting phase and symbol alignment when signals are sent from the multiple antennas.

“Our work isn’t done,” Zhong said, “but our research demonstrates the feasibility of manyantenna base stations. We hope to motivate industry adoption of this promising technology in the near future.”

To fund Zhong’s ongoing research, the National Science Foundation has awarded him and his colleagues a four-year, $2.4-million grant for “Practical Foundations for Networking with Many-Antenna Base Stations.”

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Clayton Shepard ECE

Lin Zhong ECE

For almost half a century, Rice University has remained close to the epicenter of developments in digital signal processing. From the earliest theoretical work in electrical engineering, to creation of a single-pixel camera, to wireless data delivery over active TV channels, Rice and the DSP Group have pioneered the technology the world has come to depend on.

DSP TIMELINE 1968 1969

Sidney Burrus and Tom Parks* begin research at Rice in DSP Burrus and Parks teach ELEC 531, graduate level course in DSP research, now called “Statistical Signal Processing,” one of the first DSP courses taught at a university

1973

Parks and Jim McClellan** develop their FIR (finite impulse response) filter design method, based on the Remez exchange algorithm

1977

Don Johnson joins the ECE faculty from MIT Lincoln Labs

1985

Burrus and Parks publish Fast Fourier Transform

1987 1988 1992

Parks and Burrus publish Digital Filter Design

1993

Johnson publishes Array Signal Processing: Concepts and Techniques

1996

Johnson becomes president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society

Work on wavelet-based signal processing begins Richard Baraniuk joins ECE faculty from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Texas Instruments makes a $7 million gift to Rice in recognition of its “leadership in DSP solutions”

1997

Texas Instruments establishes the “TI Visiting Professor” position at Rice to attract experts for a semester or year of collaboration

1999

Connexions project begins as a tool for DSP education, including several DSP books

2000

Texas Instruments Elite DSP Laboratory established at Rice ELEC 434, “Digital Signal Processing Laboratory,” taught for the first time

2001

Rice competes in the 2000 Texas Instruments DSP and Analog Challenge and is named finalist in worldwide competition

2006

Baraniuk and Kevin Kelly announce development of a single-pixel camera using compressive sensing

2013

Johnson develops, teaches Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on “Introduction to Electrical Engineering”

2014

Baraniuk develops, teaches MOOC on signals and systems using machine learning (a DSP technique) *Tom Parks is Professor Emeritus of ECE at Cornell University **James McClellan ’72, ’73, is the Byers Professor of Signal Processing at Georgia Tech

RICE ENGINEERING 13

RESEARCH

““We are designing these devices to provide ease of use in difficult locations that often offer little access to adequate health care and are even without electricity.”

—Tomasz Tkaczyk

LOW-TECH TAKE ON HIGH-TECH INSTRUMENTS The Modern Optical Instrumentation and Bioimaging Laboratory, housed in the BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC), is a veritable assembly line for the design and manufacture of innovative imaging technologies.

“We do all of the work here, designing and fabricating. We have become almost self-sufficient. We are able to develop designs capable of high performance at a low cost and producible in high volumes,” said Tomasz Tkaczyk, associate professor of bioengineering and of electrical and computer engineering, and director of the lab.

Among its ongoing projects are efforts to Tomasz Tkaczyk develop inexpensive platforms for diagnosing BIOE health problems in under-served and underresourced parts of the world. These include devices for allowing complete blood count, including red and white blood cells, and differential, at an affordable cost at the point of care.

“We are designing these devices to provide ease of use in difficult locations that often offer little access to adequate health care and are even without electricity,” Tkaczyk said.

The white blood cell differential is a standard feature of a complete blood count, an evaluation performed for blood work-ups. It’s important for doctors to know the level of white-blood cells when screening for abnormalities in otherwise morphologically normal white-blood cell populations. This condition occurs with such infectious diseases as Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne illness that kills some 25,000 annually.

“We use low-cost components like LEDs, reflectors and USB detectors, combined with all-plastic housing and lenses,” he said. “In this way, we’re confident the prototype will soon be mass-produced.”

Tkaczyk works closely with Rebecca Richards-Kortum, the Malcolm Gillis University Professor, director of 360°: Institute for Global Health and of the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering, and founder of Beyond Traditional Borders.

“We regularly discuss design requirements, environmental conditions and implementation constraints to make the most impact in the field,” Tkaczyk said. “We’re also working on an automated algorithm for cellinfection identification, and comparing our results to those obtained with commercial benchtop lab analyzers.”

Tkaczyk, Richards-Kortum and their colleagues have designed a 3D printed miniature fluorescence microscope for “point-of-care readout of bead-based bioassays.” That means quick, reliable and inexpensive tests for such illnesses as HIV/AIDS, malaria, respiratory infections, perinatal conditions and diarrheal diseases.

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“The cost of the prototype is estimated at 1.5 orders of magnitude less than the commercial systems available. Mass production of the lenses and opto-mechanical components using injection molding, and of some specialized electronic components, could lower the manufacturing costs dramatically,” Tkaczyk said, adding: “The goal is to make testing platforms for imaging and spectroscopy that provide wide access for infectious disease screening.”

“My intellectual interest has long been in developing mathematical approaches to squeezing essential information from complex, noisy, real-world data.”

When asked to pinpoint her field of research, Erzsébet Merényi, a research professor in statistics and in electrical and computer engineering at Rice, avoids the phrase “big data” as vague and vogueish. “The real challenge for identifying significant knowledge from data is in the complexity,” she said.

Merényi earned her master’s degree in mathematics and Ph.D. in computational science from Szeged University in her native Hungary, and describes herself as a data analyst.

Her research focuses on brain-like self-organized neural computation for manifold learning, pattern recognition, clustering, classification, variable selection and other aspects of high-dimensional data with complex structures.

“The brain funnels immense amounts of data to optimally summarized and organized representations on the cerebral cortex, and refines them by continual learning,” she said. “This enables fast and precise recognition of complex patterns, including discovery of the small and unusual.”

Erzsébet Merényi Merényi turned to brain-like STAT information processing in the early 90’s after encountering the “jump” in complexity seen in hyperspectral imagery—millions of data samples, each with hundreds of variables. Traditional methods failed to fully exploit the intricate features recorded by advanced sensors, aimed at capturing relevant physical and chemical processes.

Tracing one theme—astronomy and space science— suggests the broad applicability of her research. In a SovietHungarian-French-U.S. collaboration, it was Merényi’s mathematical restorations of severely degraded, once-in-alifetime spacecraft images from a 1986 rendezvous with Comet Halley that enabled the first three-dimensional kinematic model of a comet nucleus. Her comprehensive neural classifications of the 1997 panoramic spectral imagery from the Mars Pathfinder revealed Martian geologic trends that eluded conventional approaches.

Merényi’s work helped develop a new asteroid taxonomy and aided in the prediction of water in asteroids. Her hyperspectral applications characterized the surfaces of Mars, the Moon, Earth and Pluto. Ongoing collaboration with the Methodist Hospital utilizes similar techniques to produce detailed brain maps from fMRI data.

Most recently Merényi has started working with “ultraspectral” data cubes from ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) in Chile, the most advanced radio astronomy telescope array on the planet, in operation since 2013. It is a single telescope composed of 66 high-precision antennas.

“This is the most powerful radio-telescope in the world.

With it we hope to answer some of the biggest astrophysical questions, from star and planet formation to the formation of the universe. Big data,” she said.

DATA AS BIG AS THE UNIVERSE

“This is the most powerful radiotelescope in the world. With it we hope to answer some of the biggest astrophysical questions, from star and planet formation to the formation of the universe.”

RICE ENGINEERING 15

RESEARCH “The questions we have to answer are how can we minimize the devices that consume energy, how can we increase their efficiency, and how can we improve the environmental impact of power generation?”

COOLING, FROM THE MACRO TO THE MICRO The scale of energy efficiency addressed by the research of Laura A. Schaefer, Burton and Ann McMurtry Chair in Engineering and professor and chair of mechanical engineering, ranges from houses and factories, to the design of refrigerators, to the optimal means for cooling a computer chip.

“When a chip becomes hotter, it becomes less efficient. We end up consuming more energy and using it less efficiently. My research area is the analysis, design and optimization of energy systems, and it relies on a solid basis of computational thermal/fluids modeling,” said Schaefer, who joined the Rice faculty on July 1.

Schaefer has moved her Energy Systems Lab to Rice from the University of Pittsburgh, where she was a member of the mechanical engineering and materials science faculty since 2000. At Pittsburgh she was deputy director of the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation and associate director of the Center for Energy. Her research has received more than $11 million in funding from such sources as the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the U.S. Department of Energy.

With an emphasis on thermofluids modeling, her research addresses such topics as cogeneration system heat and mass transfer modeling, increased efficiency in energy conversion and utilization, design and characterization of thermoacoustic Stirling engines, and the multiphase, multicomponent lattice Boltzmann method (LBM).

LBM is a recent simulation technique for complex fluid systems in computational fluid dynamics, and much of Schaefer’s recent research has relied on it. “It’s a useful way to simulate fluid flows and model complex physics in fluids, and we can modify it to solve general nonlinear partial differential equations. When we’re working on the very small scale, or across length and time scales, we’ve come to rely on it,” she said.

Schaefer emphasizes that she works from a “fundamentals viewpoint” while keeping in mind the “societal/environmental context.” Her research focuses on absorption cycles, solid oxide fuel-cell heat and mass transfer modeling, hybrid fuel-cell/turbine power generation assessment and optimization, two-phase microchannel flow, multi-junction solar cells, hydrokinetics and thermoacoustics. She has worked on operational property prediction for alternative refrigerants, mandated by the phase-out of chlorofluorocarbons.

“What these applications have in common is the application of rigorous thermofluid modeling techniques, including the lattice Boltzmann method, on both the small scale and at the continuum level,” she said, and added: “The questions we have to answer are how can we minimize the devices that consume energy, how can we increase their efficiency, and how can we improve the environmental impact of power generation?”

Laura Schaefer MECH

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“SAFT (Statistical Associating Fluid Theory) helps us understand how materials behave, which helps engineers design new products and processes. It’s a lot like Legos, really,”

AN ENDURING EQUATION Sooner or later, engineers get around to likening their research to kids playing with Legos. It took Walter Chapman about 10 minutes.

“SAFT (Statistical Associating Fluid Theory) helps us understand how materials behave, which helps engineers design new products and processes. It’s a lot like Legos, really,” said Chapman, the William W. Akers Professor in Chemical Engineering and associate dean for energy research at Rice University. “Molecules are made of different functional groups and their properties depend on how these groups are put together. The SAFT approach gives engineers and scientists a tool to predict the relationship between structure and function.”

SAFT is the equation Chapman and three colleagues published in a series of highly cited articles, including those in the journals Fluid Phase Equlibria (1989) and Industrial and Engineering Chemical Research (1990). The SAFT articles are the most-cited published in these journals—780 and 1,240 times, respectively. SAFT 2015, a conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of the equation, was held in May at Rice. It was the fifth international SAFT conference and the first held in the United States.

“The SAFT equation is widely used in numerous industrial applications. In oil and gas, it provides the most accurate predictions of the properties of crude oil systems at high temperatures and pressures, and is even able to predict the complex behavior of asphaltenes. Asphaltene deposition causes severe production problems, and its accurate prediction is key to continuous production,” said Francisco Vargas, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice, who spoke at the conference.

More than 75 representatives of business, industry and academia attended. Twenty-five speakers from seven countries gave talks on applications and refinements to the SAFT model. Chapman and his co-authors of the original article—Keith E. Gubbins, North Carolina State University; George Jackson, Imperial College, London; and Maciej Radosz, University of Wyoming—all spoke at the conference.

Walter Chapman CHBE

“SAFT is the premier equation of state used in the energy, petrochemical and performance polymers industries, and in academia by both engineers and condensed matter physicists,” said Chapman, whose 1988 doctoral thesis at Cornell University, with Gubbins as his adviser, was the genesis of the SAFT article. Chapman joined the Rice faculty in 1990.

SAFT has proven to be useful in the oil, gas and polymer industries where it predicts phase behavior, meso-scale structure, and interfacial properties for associating fluids to polymers. More recently, the model has enabled the design of molecules for chemical processes to maximize profit while minimizing environmental impact. Other recent applications include drug-delivery system design, characterization of lipid bilayers, and predicting self-assembly of patchy colloids.

The SAFT conference was sponsored by Rice University, Baker Hughes, Elsevier and Shell.

RICE ENGINEERING 17

RESEARCH

AUTOCOMPLETE FOR PROGRAMMERS Writing computer programs could become as easy as searching the Internet, according to a Rice University-led team of software experts.

The computer scientists have launched an $11-million effort to create a sophisticated tool known as PLINY that will both “autocomplete” and “autocorrect” code for programmers, much like the software that completes search queries and corrects spelling on today’s Web browsers and smartphones.

“Imagine the power of having all the code that has ever been written in the past available to programmers at their fingertips as they write new code or fix old code,” said Vivek Sarkar, Rice’s E.D. Butcher Chair in Engineering, chair of the Department of Computer Science and the principal investigator (PI) on the PLINY project. “You can think of this as autocomplete for code, but in a far more sophisticated way.”

Sarkar said the four-year effort is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). PLINY, which takes its name from Pliny the Elder, the first-century A.D. Roman naturalist who authored the first encyclopedia, will involve more than two dozen computer scientists from Rice, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of WisconsinMadison and the Ithaca, N.Y.-based software development company GrammaTech.

PLINY is part of DARPA’s Mining and Understanding Software Enclaves (MUSE) program, an initiative that seeks to gather hundreds of billions of lines of publicly available open-source computer code and to mine that 18 RICE ENGINEERING

code to create a searchable database of properties, behaviors and vulnerabilities. Rice team members say the effort will represent a significant advance in the way software is created, verified and debugged.

“Software today is far more complex than it was 20 years ago, yet it is still largely created by hand, one line of code at a time,” said co-PI Swarat Chaudhuri, assistant professor of computer science at Rice. “We envision a system where the programmer writes a few of lines of code, hits a button and the rest of the code appears. And not only that, the rest of the code should work seamlessly with the code that has already been written.”

He said PLINY will need to be sophisticated enough to recognize and match similar patterns regardless of differences in programming languages and code specifications. The system will have to explore different ways of interweaving code retrieved through search into a programmer’s partially completed draft program and analyze the resulting code to make sure that it does not have bugs or security flaws.

The core of the system will be a datamining engine that continuously scans the massive repository of open-source code. The engine will leverage the latest techniques in deep program analyses and big-data analytics to populate and refine a database that can be queried whenever a programmer needs help in finishing or debugging a piece of code.

PLINY will not have access to every line of code ever written. Because it is limited to open-source code, it will not be able to build from proprietary software created by such tech companies as Apple, Google and Microsoft.

Many of those companies, however, rely on open-source code, and this could help improve and speed development of those underlying projects.

“The engine will formulate answers using Bayesian statistics,” said co-PI Chris Jermaine, associate professor of computer science at Rice. “Much like today’s spell-correction algorithms, it will deliver the most probable solution first, but programmers will be able to cycle through possible solutions if the first answer is incorrect.”

Sarkar, Chaudhuri and Jermaine will be joined on the PLINY project by Rice co-PIs Keith Cooper, the L. John and Ann H. Doerr Professor of Computational Engineering and associate dean for research, and Moshe Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology, both at Rice.

“This is a dream team that combines Rice’s traditional strengths in programming language research with our new capabilities in big-data analytics,” Sarkar said. “Add to that our world-class experts from U. Wisconsin, UT Austin and GrammaTech and we have an exciting four years ahead of us as we embark on addressing this DARPA hard challenge.”

STUDENT OUTREACH

EXCHANGING STUDENTS Before they started building one together, Eckhaire Beluah had never seen a 3-D printer and Elizabeth Peacock had never used one.

“In my country, we don’t have many of the things you have in the United States. We have a good education. We learn the theory but we don’t have the machines, the technology, to use it,” said Beluah, a fourth-year student in electrical engineering at the University of Malawi Polytechnic.

“This has been fun. Studying to be an engineer is about finding solutions to problems. Together, we figured out how to build a 3-D printer, something I didn’t know how to do before,” said Peacock, a sophomore in mechanical engineering at Rice.

From two continents, two cultures, Beluah, Peacock and their fellow student interns spent much of the summer in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) learning to become engineers and entrepreneurs. The exchange program was supported by the Lemelson Foundation, the OEDK and Rice 360° Institute for Global Health.

“We are so pleased to have engineering students from Rice and Malawi working together to invent solutions to real-world challenges.

They’re learning a lot from each other and are adding to the work of the OEDK and Rice 360° in a significant way,” said Maria Oden, professor in the practice of bioengineering and director of the OEDK. Since 2007, Rice 360° has worked with physicians and nurses in Malawi to implement innovative health technologies for improving patient care. Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Malcolm Gillis University Professor of Bioengineering and founder of Rice 360°’s Beyond Traditional Borders; Ann Saterbak, professor in the practice of bioengineering education and associate dean for engineering education; and Oden are leading a collaboration with colleagues at the University of Malawi Polytechnic’s new biomedical engineering degree program, the University of Malawi Medical School and at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi.

The education director for Rice 360°, Veronica Leautaud, traveled to Malawi last March and interviewed 25 internship applicants. “What impressed me was how ambitious these young people are. They want to learn. They want to be entrepreneurs. They want to help their country,” she said.

The Malawian students arrived May 31 and returned home July 24. They spent 40 hours a week working in the OEDK alongside their Rice counterparts, learning such skills as laser and plasma cutting, 2-D and 3-D design and finishing. After learning these tools and building 3D printers, the students worked together to solve engineering design challenges in global health. Much of the instruction was done by Matthew Wettergreen, a lecturer at the OEDK. “Here we help all the students move from theory to application.

The Malawian students have the academic skills. They just need the opportunity and the technology to put them into practice,” Wettergreen said.

The Rice undergraduate interns at the OEDK were Hanna Anderson, senior in biochemistry and cell biology; Harrison Lin, sophomore mechanical engineer; Whitney Orji, senior bioengineer; and Leah Sherman, sophomore undecided engineer. The other Malawian students were Nehuwa Namuthuwa, in mechanical engineering, and James Fungulani and Florence Sadyalunda, both in electrical engineering.

While working with Fungulani to assemble a 3-D printer, Orji said, “I’ve learned as much from him as he’s learned from me, maybe more.

He knows more about the electronics than I do. We formed a pretty good partnership.”

Three other Rice undergraduates spent 10 weeks over the summer at Malawi Polytechnic: Sarah Hooper, senior in electrical and computer engineering; Catherine Dunaway, a sophomore undecided engineer; and Emily Johnson, senior bioengineer. They worked with four Malawian students on health technologies developed by both groups over the past year.

COMBINING CULTURES

“We had to be mindful of the way we communicated with Malawians because sometimes the American style of interaction comes off as domineering, brusque or rude, when really we were just trying to be confident, efficient and direct. This shift was especially important when asking for opinions or feedback. Often, the best way to frame questions was to be more general and vague. Being too specific results in people simply agreeing with you out of respect,” Dunaway said.

Hooper, too, noticed subtle cultural distinctions: “The Malawian interns adapt quicker than the average Rice student does. When the Polytechnic students run into a roadblock in the design process, they don’t put all their energy into knocking it down in order to continue down the same path. They find a quicker way around the obstacle. It’s a more efficient way of working that requires fewer resources, and they never get discouraged by things not working out as expected.”

With funding from the Lemelson Foundation, Rice is working with Malawi Polytechnic to develop its own version of the OEDK. Rice hired Matthew J. Petney, who worked for the Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design at Johns Hopkins University, to help with the initial set-up.

All four of the young Malawians in the OEDK used the same word to characterize their hoped-for futures: entrepreneurship. “I know the theory,” Sadyalunda said, “but this is nice working with all the equipment you have here. I can return to my country as an engineer and as an entrepreneur.”

Namuthuwa added: “There is something magical and empowering about being an entrepreneur. That’s what I want to take home with me.”

RICE ENGINEERING 19

What differentiates a Rice engineer? Historically it has been rigorous coursework with a solid grounding in engineering principles and enough creativity and tenacity to successfully tackle some really tough problems. These days, those essential elements are still in the foundation, but there’s more: the three ships— Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Internships.

STUDENT RESEARCH

R E A C H I N G F O R T H E S U B - O R B I TA L Despite multiple name changes, abrupt shifts in design strategy and a perpetual scrambling after funds — in other words, trouble getting off the ground — Rice Eclipse is alive and well, and resolved to successfully build and launch a rocket this academic year.

“Last year we were inexperienced. We never had enough money and we took too long getting started. The good news is, we learned a lot from the experience,” said Josh Kaye, a junior in mechanical engineering (MECH), and the design lead and vice president of Rice Eclipse.

Formerly known as the Rice Space Exploration and Propulsion Group, and then as RiceX, Rice Eclipse is the university’s aerospace engineering club and its student affiliate of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Kaye and other team members sought to revive the once active club.

With some 30 active members, it started last year with audacious ambitions—building a small-scale hybrid rocket aimed at an altitude of 10,000 feet with an ultimate goal of reaching suborbital space (about 100 kilometers). The first step was developing a functional hybrid rocket motor, a feat accomplished at the amateur level only five times.

“I guess you could say we were kind of naïve. Nobody realized how complicated a project like this is. We have to get serious about raising money, too,” Kaye said.

Through most of the year, the team planned to enter the 10th Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition held in June in Logan, Utah. The goal was to build a custom hybrid motor that would use nitrous oxide as its oxidizer and either HTPB (hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene) or paraffin wax, or a mixture of the two, as the fuel component.

26 RICE ENGINEERING

“We focus heavily on education,” said Andrew Gatherer, a sophomore in MECH and head of the club’s propulsion team.

“We build all the parts ourselves. So, we’ve been working in the ODEK to make custom parts, and training people how to work on the machines.”

In March, they completed a hot-fire motor test of their scale hybrid motor, preceded by all-nighters spent designing and printing a circuit board, and soldering it together for the test. Team members divided avionics into hardware and software, interfaced with sensors to collect temperature, pressure, and force data from the test stand, and updated at a rate of 100 times per second. They used control devices to remotely ignite the motor and control the oxidizer flow. The control platform was an NI myRIO programmed in LabVIEW. Gatherer is encouraged: “We’ve seen good results. A lot of our members are freshmen and sophomores, so we’ll have a firm foundation to build on. Even if we don’t raise the kind of money we need, we’ll keep working on our design for the next four years.”

The group is advised by Christopher Harris, director of Rice’s Advanced Development Center, located in the Space Science and Technology Building, and president of LumaDyne, an emerging technology product development company. He is a Level 3-certified high-power rocket flyer in the Houston chapter of the Tripoli Rocketry Association.

“The year was definitely not a disappointment,” Harris said. “They built a hybrid rocket motor from scratch, built a test stand from scratch and safely tested the motor that ultimately produced thrust without major failures, and did it all safely. They did it on a shoestring budget. For the first year, I call that a major success.”

PROFESSIONAL MASTER’S PROGRAM

MASTERING GLOBAL MEDICAL INNOVATION

“I’m interested in learning on the job.

I like the idea of learning while not necessarily sitting in the classroom.”

While in high school, Hannelle Fares injured herself twice playing soccer, underwent two complicated knee surgeries and spent eight months on crutches, an ordeal she’s grateful for today because it helped her decide to pursue a career in designing medical devices.

“I was in all this pain and depression, and I thought: I’m really lucky.

Think of all the people who can’t walk, from birth or because of an accident or disease. For me it was more of a humiliation thing and it was temporary.

Some people live with it every day of their lives,” said Fares, who graduated in May with a B.S. in bioengineering from Rice University.

Now Fares, pursuing a professional master’s degree in bioengineering at Rice, is one of the first six students enrolled in its Global Medical Innovation (GMI) track, designed for bioengineers wishing to pursue a career in the global medical technology industry.

“We’re starting with a one-year program with the understanding it will develop into a two-year program. We’re looking for a different kind of student, one with excellent grades, of course, but also with the soft skills like an interest in business and industry, good design aptitude and social skills, and cross-cultural interests,” said Eric Richardson, a lecturer in bioengineering and director of the new GMI track.

Richardson earned a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2009 and spent four years as a research and development engineer at Medtronic Heart Valves. There he was part of the team working on CoreValve, a pioneering trans-catheter aortic valve implanted in more than 40,000 patients.

Richardson’s background in both academia and industry should prove advantageous. The GMI track is designed with the emerging markets for medical devices in China, India and Latin America in mind.

Study started over the summer when Richardson and the students spent two months in Costa Rica for their 2015 Global Industry Internship.

More than 60 medical device companies have operations there. Among them is Boston Scientific, where the Rice students attended a two-week introductory course on medical product development, followed by a fiveweek internship.

“I’m interested in learning on the job. I like the idea of learning while not necessarily sitting in the classroom,” Fares said.

Like the already existing Applied Bioengineering master’s degree track at Rice, GMI requires 30 credit hours of study. Enrollment is exclusively fulltime. Students are required to complete two emerging-market design projects; a graduate-level course in mathematics, computational and applied mathematics or statistics; and an elective graduate-level bioengineering course.

“I think pretty strategically. I’m a focused person. This program is designed for someone like me,” said Fares, who aims at a design job in industry after graduation.

RICE ENGINEERING 27

NEWS BRIEFS

WHEN IT RAINS . . .

“They can shut the whole medical center down like a castle, and they did that early on.”

—Phil Bedient

The Rice University and Texas Medical Center Flood Alert System 3 exceeded expectations during the storm that flooded parts of Houston May 25-26, says its designer, Phil Bedient, the Herman Brown Professor of Engineering and director of Rice’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center. Established in 1997 and upgraded since, the system gives advance warning of floods in the medical center. It also monitors Brays Bayou, which runs through the Center, in real time with flow charts and webcams. The Memorial Day storm dropped 8.4 inches of rain in 24 hours and pushed Brays to the limit.

MAKING MAKERS “Fab Shops,” short for “fabrication workshops,” are thriving at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. The hands-on, student-organized, often student-taught sessions are devoted to “foundational physical prototyping techniques.”

Popular fab shops include sessions devoted to 3D printers, lasers cutters, woodworking and finishing techniques, and such industry-taught workshops as introduction to data acquisition using National Instruments software, and use of 32-bit microcontrollers and sensors by Freescale.

Attendance is voluntary though students enrolled in ENGI 120, “Introduction to Engineering Design,” are encouraged to participate.

The George R. Brown School of Engineering is among the 120 U.S. engineering schools leading a transformative movement in engineering education. The schools pledged to establish educational programs preparing undergraduates to solve the National Academy of Engineering’s “Grand Challenges,” complex yet achievable accomplishments that improve national and international health, security, sustainability and quality of life in the 21st century. Together, the schools plan to graduate more than 20,000 formally recognized “Grand Challenge Engineers” in the coming decade. Rice expects to graduate 20 Grand Challenge Engineers per year.

28 RICE ENGINEERING

THAT’S GRAND!

MOVING UP! Jeffrey Jacot

Jun Lou

Junghae Suh

TOP-NOTCH INTERNSHIPS

Swarat Chaudhuri

Marcia O’Malley

Five faculty members in four departments in the George R. Brown School of Engineering have been promoted with tenure. In bioengineering, Jeffrey Jacot and Junghae Suh were promoted from assistant professor to associate professor. In computer science, Swarat Chaudhuri was promoted from assistant professor to associate professor. In materials science and nanoengineering, Jun Lou was promoted from associate professor to professor. Marcia O’Malley was promoted from associate professor to professor of mechanical engineering, as of Jan. 1, 2015.

The other promotions took effect July 1.

UPPING THEIR GAME

Ann Saterbak, a professor in the practice of bioengineering education and associate dean for undergraduate education, and Matthew Wettergreen, a lecturer at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, spent 10 days in Ethiopia this summer. The pair worked with Jimma University and its biomedical engineering program. Saterbak was part of the team from Rice and Texas Children’s Hospital awarded a three-year, $200,000 grant from the American International Health Alliance. As recipients, their charge is to “advance appropriate heath technology design and problem-based learning for bioengineers and biomedical technicians.”

Two Rice University juniors spent 12 weeks this summer working with tech entrepreneurs in California, courtesy of the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Engineering Fellows program.

Kathy Li and Linda Zheng, computer science majors, were selected to work at startups that are part of the venture capital firm’s portfolio. They were among the 60 students selected from more than 2,500 who applied for the program, now in its fourth year. Zheng worked at Shape Security, which develops Internet security systems. Li went to Flipboard, a Palo Alto company that started with an iPad “personal magazine” app in 2010 and has expanded to other platforms.

Twenty-seven engineering graduate students at Rice shared their research in 90-second bursts at the 2014 Screech Competition, sponsored by the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership. Taking first place and a prize of $500 in the highly competitive event was Jason Gaspar of civil and environmental engineering, whose screech was titled “Ending Aging.” An audience of some 200 attended the Screech, which was judged by 12 Rice faculty members, staff and alumni, as well as industry representatives. The event was established by and is organized by engineering graduate students. Screech 2015 was held October 29. See rcel.rice.edu for results.

It’s no secret that Rice students have exceptional abilities to multi-task: they take demanding classes, they sometimes teach courses in the residential colleges, and they participate in a dizzying array of extra-curricular activities. For a long time, the stereotype of the Rice engineer has been that of an overworked student, grinding through problem sets and spending late nights in research labs.

The reality is quite different. Rice engineers are engaged in a number of activities—many of them are student athletes. Although engineers traditionally take part in individual sports, such as swimming or track and field, a number of engineers play team sports. Last year, there were nine engineers on the Rice Owls football team, winner of the 2014 Hawaii Bowl in Honolulu.

Upping the game of Rice’s sports culture has been a priority for Joe Karlgaard, director of athletics. And central to his plan has been an emphasis on the idea that Rice is a place where students excel on and off the field.

“Our ambition is to recruit the best scholars and athletes we can,” he said. “And when they get here, we look to show them a great experience.”

He said that Rice’s size allows athletes to have more playing time than they might at a larger school. And he pointed out that the residential college system means that players interact with a diverse group of students. He said that the University’s professors also work with student athletes to help them achieve success in and outside the classroom.

Engineering students who play intercollegiate sports concur.

Casey Clark, ’15 Civil Engineering Swiming

Ciara Simmons-Pino, ’16 Civil Engineering Manager, Women’s Basketball

Brian Nordstrom, ’15 Civil Engineering Football

“The team practices two hours a day, with games on Thursday and Saturday. I set up the practices, making sure everything is where it needs to be, I’ll run the scoreboard. It’s a juggling act. If the team is watching game videos at practice, I’ll use that time to study. You’ve got to have great time management, it’s so demanding.”

“I loved that Rice emphasized being a student first but offered great athletic opportunities. I found a great study group to work with and both my professors and my coaches understood if I needed to miss a class or practice because I had exams or a meet.”

Marissa Konicke, ’15

Mechanical Engineering Swimming

Veronica Gough, ’16 Bioengineering Rice Owls Dance Team

“We perform at all the home games for football and men’s and women’s basketball, practicing five hours a week. And we do a show in the spring. I’ve become really good at time management.”

“I played football during my four years at Rice. It came down to time management and work ethic. For me, the number one thing I tried to do was work hard—in classes, in practice, in the game.

It was demanding, but I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t fun.”

Jayson Carter, ’15

Computer Science Football

Aneesh Sampath, ’15 Electrical Engineering Cross Country/Track and Field

“The hardest thing to juggle was when I had a lab in the afternoon and it conflicted with spring practices. But I run every day. You have to. You can’t skip a run. So, finding time to do that in my own schedule worked out well.”

STUDENT AWARDS Goldwater Scholars

Kenny Groszman and Eric Sung were among three Rice students and 260 undergraduates from across the country to be named Goldwater Scholars for the 2015-16 academic year. They will receive up to $7,500 toward tuition, fees, books and room and board. The scholarship encourages outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, natural sciences and engineering.

Kenny Groszman

Groszman is a Hanszen College junior majoring in bioengineering and minoring in computational and applied mathematics. He plans to obtain a Ph.D. in bioengineering and specialize in synthetic biology, with the ultimate goal of conducting synthetic biology research and teaching at a university.

He was part of a student engineering team that designed a rack to transport three bikes at once via a city bus in Houston—a project that won the Texas Department of Transportation’s College Challenge.

He is currently external vice president, former secretary and Beer Bike coordinator for Hanszen College and a former peer academic adviser.

Eric Sung

Sung, a Lovett College senior, is majoring in computational and applied mathematics and mathematics, and minoring in neuroscience. He wants to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience and conduct research in neuroscience focusing on learning and memory from a computationally motivated perspective. He hopes to apply this research toward understanding the neural causes of neuropsychiatric disorders and how they manifest in patients.

Sung currently works in a lab at Baylor College of Medicine, where he’s studying a neuron found in locusts that helps mediate escape behavior.

The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency that honors the late Barry M. Goldwater, who represented Arizona in the U.S. Senate.

NSF GRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program has funded almost 50,000 graduate research fellowships out of more than 500,000 applications since it was founded in 1952. The purpose of the program is to “ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States and reinforce its diversity.” The program supports outstanding students pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees with a $32,000 annual stipend for three years plus $12,000 annual tuition reimbursement to the student’s institution. The Rice Engineering 2015 list of winners includes four seniors, six graduate students and three alumni. They are: Laura Blumenschein ’15, Mechanical Engineering Annicka Evans, Bioengineering graduate student Agustin Flores, Statistics graduate student Spencer Kent ’15, Electrical and Computer Engineering Christopher Metzler, Electrical and Computer Engineering graduate student Kamal Shah ’15, Bioengineering Ravi Sheth ’15, Bioengineering Rebecca Smith, Computer Science graduate student Eduardo Villarreal, Materials Science and NanoEngineering graduate student Ryan Warnick, Statistics graduate student

Engineering alumni who won the award: Joscelyn Mejias ’13, Georgia Institute of Technology Julie Walker ’14, Stanford University Alicia Allen ’09, University of Texas at Austin

32 RICE ENGINEERING

Hertz Foundation Fellowship Ravi Sheth Ravi Sheth, ’15 received a prestigious 2015 Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship Award for graduate education. The bioengineering major and former president of the Rice Student Association, worked for four years in the laboratory of Rice synthetic biologist Jeff Ravi Sheth Tabor in the Department of Bioengineering. Sheth plans to study systems biology at Columbia University.

Hertz Fellowships include five years of financial support for graduate school in the applied physical, biological and engineering sciences.

“The overarching question I want to explore is: What are the design rules for engineering communities of bacteria for useful purposes?” Sheth said. “The first real applications for this field are just beginning, and I’m deeply excited to have the freedom of the Hertz Fellowship to be creative and innovative in pushing it forward.”

Because of the work he’s done with Tabor, Sheth said he is interested in developing quantitative frameworks to better understand and engineer the probiotic bacteria that inhabit human bodies and help keep them healthy.

Sheth credits his work with Tabor for opening his mind to the possibility of graduate school and a career in academia.

“My research experience in Jeff Tabor’s lab has really convinced me that academia is the best environment to have lots of freedom, to be creative and to work on interesting and impactful problems.”

Tabor said Sheth has worked on and initiated a number of new lines of research, co-authored several peer-reviewed research publications, co-authored nine research grant proposals, including five that were funded, and has at times led graduate students and postdoctoral research fellows on research projects.

Tabor said Sheth is “a once-in-a-lifetime talent in terms of intelligence, potential for a successful research career, and leadership abilities. It is almost impossible to imagine that Ravi will not make transformative contributions to society in his life.”

Watson Fellowship Zach Bielak Zach Bielak, ’15 won a 2015 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship.

He is spending a year abroad working on research projects.

Bielak is studying how community affects what is designed sustainably and how sustainable design can build community by bringing people together, fostering social Zach Bielak sustainability and empowering marginalized groups. “It’s a complex idea, but that’s exactly why I decided to dedicate an entire year toward pursuing it,” Bielak said. “It’s the pinnacle of my three greatest passions—sustainability, design and community.”

He is conducting his research in Chile, Ghana, Sweden, India and Japan, all countries he cited as emerging leaders in different fields of sustainable design. “By immersing myself in their communities, I hope to explore the reasons behind their different perspectives of sustainability and experience firsthand how sustainable designs are unifying communities in turn,” Bielak said.

At Rice Bielak restarted the Rice University Biodiesel Initiative, volunteered as a committee leader for Engineers Without Borders, conducted research on sustainable organic batteries, served on the board of the former Rice Endowment for Sustainable Energy Technology, became the head EcoRep for the university and organized the 2015 Green Dorm Initiative, a competition that encourages students, staff, faculty and administrators to adopt sustainable lifestyles and implement them on campus.

RICE ENGINEERING 33

FACULTY AWARDS

NATIONAL ACADEMIES Moshe Y. Vardi

National Academy of Sciences Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematicians European Association for Theoretical Computer Science Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi has joined the small category of research scientists elected to both the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Vardi was also elected a 2015 fellow of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor of Computational Engineering and professor of computer science was among the 84 new members named to the NAS in 2015. He was elected to the NAE in 2002.

The academies are private, nonprofit organizations that elect the country’s leading scientists and engineers and work to advance research and knowledge. Fewer than five percent of National Academy members have belonged to multiple academies.

“Recognition by one’s peers is the goal of every scientist,” said Vardi, who also serves as director of Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology. “Getting elected to the National Academy of Sciences is the ultimate peer recognition.”

The author or co-author of more than 500 articles in the area of logic and computation, Vardi was honored by EATCS for his “fundamental and lasting contributions to the development of logic in computer science and exceptional services to the community of theoretical computer science.” SIAM recognized Vardi for contributions to “the development of logic as a unifying foundational framework and a tool for modeling computational systems.”

Vardi earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1981. After two stints as a scientist for IBM Research and continued work at Stanford University, Vardi joined the Rice faculty in 1993. He served as a consultant at Bell Labs and was a visiting faculty member at the Intel Design Center in Haifa, Israel.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea. He is a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery and the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Among his prior honors are the Southeastern Universities Research Association’s 2013 Distinguished Scientist Award, the 2011 IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Award, the 2008 Blaise Pascal Medal for Computer Science by the European Academy of Sciences and the 2000 Gödel Prize for outstanding papers in theoretical computer science.

Moshe Y. Vardi

Rebecca Richards-Kortum

Rebecca Richards-Kortum

American Academy of Arts and Sciences National Academy of Sciences For Rebecca Richards-Kortum, this has been a year of accumulating honors and awards.

In April, the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s foremost scholarly honors. Later that month, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), thus joining the elite group of scientists who have been elected to both the NAS and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

In June, President Barack Obama appointed Richards-Kortum to the President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science, which evaluates nominees for the nation’s highest honor for American scientists and engineers. She is one of 12 scientists and engineers on the committee. Established in 1959, the National Medal of Science has been awarded to 487 scientists and engineers.

Richards-Kortum earned her Ph.D. in medical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990, and from then until 2005 she was a member of the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. When she left in 2005 to join Rice, Richards-Kortum held the Cockrell Family Endowed Chair in Engineering.

At Rice, her laboratory translates nanotechnology, molecular imaging and microfabrication research to develop optical-imaging systems for the inexpensive and portable point-of-care diagnosis of such diseases as cancer and malaria. Her research has produced 29 patents, more than 230 research papers, 11 book chapters and the textbook Biomedical Engineering for Global Health.

Richards-Kortum was elected to the NAE in 2008. She is a fellow of the Optical Society of America, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Biomedical Engineering Society. She also served as an inaugural member of the National Advisory Council for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering for the National Institutes of Health.

Among her other previous honors are the 2013 Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation (co-recipient with Maria Oden, director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen), the 2014 Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award from the Optical Society of America and the 2007 Chester F. Carlson Award from the American Society for Engineering Education.

In addition, in December 2014, Richards-Kortum was named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). She was among the 170 inductees in that year’s class, representing more than 150 research universities and governmental and nonprofit research institutions.

NATIONAL ACADEMIES MEMBERS These George R. Brown School of Engineering faculty members have been elected to the National Academies.

National Academy of Engineering Naomi J. Halas Tony Mikos Rebecca Richards-Kortum Pol Spanos Richard Tapia Edwin L. Thomas Moshe Y. Vardi

National Academy of Sciences Naomi J. Halas Herbert Levine Rebecca Richards-Kortum Moshe Y. Vardi

National Academy of Medicine G. Anthony Gorry Lydia Kavraki Tony Mikos

DARPA Young Faculty Award Jacob Robinson With the aid of a DARPA grant, a Rice University assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering is pursuing a technology to speed the process of cell sorting, an essential task for synthetic biologists.

Jacob Robinson won a prestigious Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The awards go to untenured faculty members and are designed to encourage young scientists, engineers and mathematicians to focus research on defense and national security issues.

Robinson expects to help researchers gain new understanding of how neurons and brain circuits influence human behavior, thus enhancing the military’s efforts to improve soldier training and performance and to aid in recovery from traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder.

An important part of the process is the ability to evaluate the electrical properties of neural cells. The goal is to improve voltage-sensitive fluorescent proteins for imaging neural activity. The traditional sorting technique, fluorescenceactivated cell sorting (FACS), is effective for selecting cells based on protein expression, but it cannot measure how these proteins behave when they experience electrical activity similar to what occurs inside the brain.

Researchers perform the painstaking process of evaluating electrical properties of individual cells using patchclamp electrophysiology, a major bottleneck for developing new voltage-sensitive fluorescent proteins, Robinson said.

Researchers can process only 10 to 20 cells a day. His approach would seamlessly combine the two techniques.

“We want to find a way to quickly sort cells based on their electrical activity, so we call this electrophysiology-assisted cell sorting—E-phACS—as an homage to FACS.” Robinson and his colleagues have fabricated an assortment of microfluidic and nanowire technologies to quickly evaluate and sort cells. The DARPA grant will enable them to streamline the process with the immediate goal of evaluating and sorting up to 100 cells, and eventually thousands, per day.

National Academy of Inventors American Institute of Chemical Engineers Antonios Mikos Antonios Mikos, the Louis Calder Professor of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and director of the J.W. Cox Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Excellence in Tissue Engineering at Rice, has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE).

He was among the 170 NAI fellows inducted in 2014, representing more than 150 research universities and governmental and nonprofit research institutions.

The NAI, founded in 2010, has some 3,000 members and fellows.

Mikos’ research group specializes in the synthesis, processing and evaluation of new biomaterials for use as scaffolds for tissue engineering, as carriers for controlled drug delivery and as nonviral vectors for gene therapy. He is the author of more than 520 publications and holds 27 patents.

Mikos earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Purdue University in 1988. In 1990-91 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School, and he joined the Rice faculty in 1992.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine and the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas. He is a fellow of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the Biomedical Engineering Society, the Controlled Release Society and the International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science and Engineering.

Rebecca Richards-Kortum, the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering and a professor of electrical and computer engineering, was also named a fellow of the NAI. See the related story about her on the opposite page.

Jacob Robinson

Antonios Mikos

RICE ENGINEERING 35

FACULTY AWARDS Guggenheim Fellowship Krishna Palem Rice computer scientist Krishna Palem has won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to collaborate with colleagues in the United Kingdom in an effort to make the resolution of weather and climate models 10 times finer through supercomputing with an ultra-energy-efficient approach.

Palem is one of 175 scholars, artists and scientists— and one of only two computer scientists—chosen as 2015 Guggenheim Fellows. Funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the fellowships are awarded on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise to allow scholars to pursue their work with creative freedom.

“I am deeply honored to be recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, especially recognizing the future promise of this work by applying the energy-saving benefits of inexact computing to weather and forecasting and climate modeling,” said Rice’s Ken and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computing.

In a series of papers since 2003, Palem devised a new approach to computing that trades computational accuracy for energy consumption.

Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors Pedro Alvarez

He has demonstrated that specialized computing architectures can trade precision for energy savings.

Palem’s technique, known as “inexact computing” or “approximate computing,” can reduce energy significantly while delivering results that do not compromise the quality of the solution.

Palem collaborates with the group headed by physicist and atmospheric modeler Tim Palmer, the Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics at Oxford University. In recently published findings, Palem and Palmer demonstrated that inexact computing could potentially reduce by a factor of three the amount of energy needed to run weather models without compromising their quality.

Palem said the Guggenheim will allow him to study and learn weather and climate models in depth to significantly improve their quality. He and Palmer’s team will test approximate computing on the models used at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, England.

American Heart Association Jane Grande-Allen has been elected a fellow of the American Heart Association under the organization’s Council on Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology. She was selected for her contributions to the field of vascular biology through investigations into heart-valve physiology and disease.

Grande-Allen joined the Rice faculty in 2003, and was promoted to full professor of bioengineering in 2013.

Her Integrative Matrix Mechanics lab in the BioScience Research Collaborative investigates the biomechanics of heart valve tissue composition and behavior to pinpoint why, how and where cells come together and respond to disease.

Grande-Allen is director of Heart Valve Bioengineering at the Methodist Hospital Heart Valve Institute. She holds adjunct appointments with Baylor College of Medicine in surgery and molecular physiology, and with UTHealth in cardiology, graduate studies and biomedical science.

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

American Society of Mechanical Engineers

Joseph R. Cavallaro

Fathi H. Ghorbel

36 RICE ENGINEERING

Pedro Alvarez

Jane Grande-Allen

The Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) has named Pedro J. Alvarez, the George R. Brown Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University, one of its 2015 fellows.

Alvarez and eight others were chosen by the AEESP Board of Directors for their “accomplishments in environmental engineering research, teaching and professional service, with emphasis on service within the AEESP.” Alvarez earned his Ph.D. in environmental engineering in 1992 from the University of Michigan. For the next 10 years he was at the University of Iowa, where became a full professor in 2001. He joined the Rice faculty in 2004 and served as department chair from 2005 to 2015.

Alvarez is a recipient of the Clarke Prize for outstanding research in water science and technology, and a fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the International Water Association, and the Water Environment Federation.

Joseph R. Cavallaro, professor of electrical and computer engineering and of computer science at Rice, has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

The IEEE Board of Directors cited Cavallaro for his “contributions to VLSI architectures and algorithms for signal processing and wireless communications.” VLSI, “very-large-scale integration,” is the process by which integrated circuits are created by combining thousands of transistors into one chip.

Fellow designation is the highest grade of IEEE membership and is recognized by the technical community as an important career achievement. Cavallaro earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 1988 and joined the Rice faculty that year.

Cavallaro has published more than 50 journal articles and some 150 conference articles, book chapters, and technical reports. Cavallaro has been awarded 10 patents, with 11 more pending.

Krishna Palem

Fathi H. Ghorbel, professor of mechanical engineering, and of bioengineering, and director of the Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at Rice University, has been named a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

In his ASME citation, Ghorbel is singled out for “fundamental contributions to nonlinear control, robot locomotion, and sensor design,” resulting in five patents, more than 140 publications and two startup companies.

Ghorbel earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 1991 from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. From 1992 to 1994, he worked as a research associate at the Institut d’Automatique, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

He joined the Rice faculty in 1994. Ghorbel is the former president of the Tunisian Scientific Society and a founding member and vice president of the Arab Science and Technology Foundation (ASTF).

Jane Grande-Allen

Joseph R. Calallaro

Fathi H. Ghorbel

Optical Society of America

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Junichiro Kono

Ka-Yiu San

Junichiro Kono has been elected a 2015 fellow by the Optical Society of America (OSA), the leading professional association for optics and photonics, the sciences of light.

Kono is a professor of electrical and computer engineering, of physics and astronomy and of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice.

The OSA recognized Kono for the pioneering contributions he made to “fundamental optical studies of nanostructures and their optoelectric device applications.”

Kono earned his Ph.D. in physics from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1995. He was a postdoctoral research associate in condensed matter physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the W. W. Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory Fellow in the Department of Physics at Stanford University, before joining the Rice faculty in 2000. He serves as director of the Ricebased NanoJapan, a program that organizes international research experiences for undergraduates.

Ka-Yiu San, the E.D. Butcher Professor of Bioengineering, and of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice, was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

Fellows of the AAAS are elected by their peers. Less than one percent of its 127,000 members are chosen each year. The association selected 401 members in 2014 for their efforts to advance science or scientific applications.

San was recognized for his contributions to the field of metabolic engineering, particularly for new methods to control pathways, cofactor engineering and to engineer the production of valuable compounds.

San earned his B.S. in chemical engineering at Rice in 1978, and his master’s degree and Ph.D. in the same field from the California Institute of Technology in 1981 and 1984, respectively. He joined the faculty at Rice in 1984.

American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Ann Saterbak Ann Saterbak, professor in the practice of bioengineering education, has been elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering’s (AIMBE) College of Fellows for her contributions to the field.

The College of Fellows has more than 1,500 members, all nominated by their peers. They represent the top two percent of the most accomplished medical and biological engineers worldwide.

“Professor Saterbak’s vision for undergraduate education in bioengineering infuses science, medicine and engineering fundamentals with direct skill-building opportunities,” said Michael Deem, John W. Cox Professor of Biochemical and Genetic Engineering, and chair of Rice’s bioengineering program. “Her instructional techniques in experiential learning have spanned laboratory experimentation and engineering design, and have helped to elevate our undergraduate program to top five national rankings. This honor is a testament to her vision and leadership in higher engineering education.”

Saterbak is a fellow of the American Society of Engineering Educators and has served on its board of directors. She is also a fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society. In 2014, Saterbak was appointed associate dean of engineering education at Rice, and for 16 years she has developed and taught undergraduate laboratory courses.

In 2011, she developed and launched Introduction to Engineering Design (ENGI 120), a design course for freshman students that challenges them to devise practical solutions to real-world problems. AIMBE was founded in 1991. Fellows retain a lifelong membership in the college, and are experts in areas such as clinical practice, industrial practice and education.

International Society for Optics and Photonics

Junichiro Kono

Tomasz Tkaczyk

Ann Saterbak

Tomasz Tkaczyk has been elected a fellow of SPIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics. He was chosen for his achievements in optical instrumentation for bioimaging and for his service to the optics community and SPIE. Tkaczyk, an associate professor of bioengineering and of electrical and computer engineering, joined Rice in 2007. His research focuses on the development and clinical translation of instruments that combine miniature optics, opto-mechanics, electronics and software, and snapshot hyperspectral microscopy for rapid medical diagnostics and treatment at the point of care.

He has optimized several imaging platforms and systems for biomedical applications, including in-vivo cancer imaging, retinal imaging and cell signaling. The compact size and high-performance capabilities of many optical devices developed in his laboratory make them ideal for use in various clinical settings around the world.

Tkaczyk has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications and two book chapters. He has served on and chaired SPIE committees and has authored more than 40 SPIE publications, including journal and conference papers, along with the Field Guide to Microscopy, among the top five best-selling books by SPIE in 2010.

Ka-Yiu San

Tomasz Tkaczyk

International Society for Bayesian Analysis Marina Vannucci Marina Vannucci, professor and chair of statistics at Rice, has been elected a fellow of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA).

On the citation, Vannucci was praised for “outstanding research contributions to the theory and practice of Bayesian variable selection techniques, and to the development of wavelet-based statistical models and their application, and for her extensive service to ISBA, including service as executive editor of Bayesian Analysis.”

Fellows are chosen by the ISBA Committee on Fellows on the basis of their contributions to some aspect of statistical work, including publications, teaching and service.

Vannucci earned her Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Florence, Italy, in 1996. Two years later she joined the statistics department at Texas A&M University, where she became a full professor in 2005. She was elected to the American Statistical Association in 2006 and joined the Rice faculty the following year.

Marina Vannucci

RICE ENGINEERING 37

KEEPING HOUSTON MOVING Christof Spieler, ’97, ’99 might be one of the few people in Houston who loves his commute.

“It’s a 10-block walk from my loft to my office,” the civil engineer laughed.

In fact, commuting is something that’s become Spieler’s lifework. He sits on the board of Houston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (METRO), a post he was appointed to five years ago by Mayor Annise Parker ’78. Back in August, METRO made sweeping changes to its bus routes and rail lines, and Spieler was excited to be part of it.

“Every bus route in Houston changed,” he said. “And it all stemmed from the question: what would the network look like if you designed it from scratch? It’s an optimization problem—and that’s where being an engineer is useful.”

There are three engineers on METRO’s nine-member board, and Spieler said that one of the most valuable takeaways from his engineering education was learning how to approach problems, define them and determine the steps necessary to solve them.

“Engineers don’t design things to work, they design things to not break,” he said. “That’s an important distinction.”

That approach to problem solving has proven useful in his time at METRO. “We knew that we had limited resources, and we had to look at what was the most good we could do. We had two choices: we could carry as many people as possible, or we could go to as many places as possible. We couldn’t do both. Our solution increased the frequency of buses across the city, and frequency is freedom. It will now be easier for riders to go where they want to go, when they want to go there, rather than planning their lives around the bus schedules.”

The plan was the first massive overhaul of the system in 30 years, and is projected to increase bus ridership by 20 percent, in addition to making commute times on some routes 40 minutes faster.

“Three-quarters of our riders now will have seven-day frequent service; the service increases on the weekends are huge to me,” said Spieler. “I love being part of these important decisions.”

Spieler grew up outside San Francisco, and chose Rice because it had not only a great engineering school, but also a strong liberal arts program. Spieler liked the energy the students had. In becoming a civil engineer, he didn’t intend to work on transit issues, but he’s happy that’s how his working life has evolved.

Following graduation, he worked as a structural engineer, and began a transportation blog because he has always been interested in how cities evolve—and transportation is an important part of that.

“When I started that blog, it was just for me, and now it’s my full-time job,” he said.

“I spent a summer working in London while I was at Rice, and that was a transforming experience,” he said. “Not visiting as a tourist, but getting around as a commuter.”

He’s quick to point out that experiences like that one—and writing for the Thresher—played just as much of a role in shaping his career as did his Rice academics. Working on the student newspaper, he learned the importance of effective communication.

In addition to serving on METRO’s board, he is now a full-time urban planner, vice president and director of planning for Morris, a Huitt-Zollars company. He’s working on projects such as the new Marriott Marquis across from the George R. Brown Convention Center and a light rail operations facility in Seattle. He also teaches three classes at Rice, ARCH 207/507, Technology I – The Frame; ARCH-309/509, Technology II – The Shell; and CEVE 452, Urban Transportation Systems.

He said he encourages his students to consider how their skills and opinions can be used in real-world projects.

“I think engineers are used to thinking that they implement other people’s policies, and not that they have a voice in creating those policies. I want them to see engineers take a more active role.”

Spieler has one year left on his METRO board term, and admits he’s trying to do as much as he can in the time he has remaining.

(METRO board members serve at the pleasure of the Mayor.) No matter what happens after his term is over, though, he’ll continue using his engineering skills to help build the Houston of tomorrow.

“Houston is a really fun place to do planning right now,” he said.

“We’re right in this great moment where we’ve realized the whole world is changing, and we can change with it.”

“Engineers don’t design things to work, they design things to not break,” he said. “That’s an important distinction.”

38 RICE ENGINEERING

RICE ENGINEERING 39

OUTSTANDING ALUMNI

Jeff Taylor

Elle Anderson

Jeff Taylor

Elle Anderson

Outstanding Alumnus It was an event that made headlines all over the world in 1969: the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. A spark ignited an oil slick on the water, which had been polluted by decades of industrial waste dumping. The disaster made the Ohio city the poster child for environmental neglect.

“That made environmental pollution real for people,” said Jeff Taylor ’80, who today is a vice president for Freese Nichols, a multidisciplinary firm that helps municipalities and other public entities coordinate operations for energy, water and environmental systems.

“I was a kid and I thought, ‘The planet is dying.’”

The desire to do something to save the planet spurred Taylor to attend Rice—at the time one of only four universities in the country with an environmental sciences program. Following graduation, he stayed in Texas, working for cities and counties, almost exclusively in environmental infrastructure.

“Rice made that possible,” he said of his career. “Rice opened my eyes to an entire landscape of what environmental initiatives are all about. Rice taught me how to think.”

Over the years, Taylor said he’s come to a couple of realizations—first, that saving the planet is difficult. His second realization is that he’s had a front-row seat to see how environmental legislation works at the ground level. The passage of the Clean Water Act meant that cities and states needed to treat and clean water; Taylor’s work has made an impact on helping them do just that. His work has allowed industry and government entities to work together on processes and systems that improve the environment.

“My focus started on saving bullfrogs and trees,” he said. “But over the years, it’s shifted. And now, it’s about helping people improve the environment. So, when I think about whether we’ve accomplished the goal of saving the planet, I see the strides we’ve made and I say that yes, the environment is better today than in 1969. There’s a lot more to do, but we have come a long way.”

Outstanding Young Alumna When Elle Anderson graduated in 2001 with a B.S. in civil engineering, she had no idea that three years later she’d found her own company. In fact, when she came to Rice, she had no idea at all that she’d be a civil engineer.

“I came to Rice on a tennis scholarship,” she explained. “I picked Rice because of its small size and proximity to the Texas Medical Center. I thought I wanted to be a doctor.”

Anderson took several pre-med courses, but something was missing for her. On the advice of her advisor, she met with Phil Bedient, the Herman and George R. Brown Professor of Civil Engineering. Like Anderson, Bedient is originally from Florida and enjoys tennis, so they immediately had a connection.

“He told me, ‘I think you need to try civil and environmental engineering, because you’d be perfect for it.’”

She did, and the rest, as the saying goes, is history. She discovered her love of hydrology and hydraulics and, like her mentor, concentrated her career on these issues. One month after graduation, Tropical Storm Allison flooded the Houston area and presidential disaster funding brought her a once-in-a-lifetime project. As Deputy Project Manager for the Harris County Flood Control District, she led a team of more than 30 engineering consultants and surveyors in one of the most technologically advanced flood insurance studies in more than 30 years. Anderson and her team developed digital terrain data, hydrologic and hydraulic models and floodplain maps for all of Harris County, Texas.

Three years later, Anderson co-founded Grounds Anderson, LLC, a consulting firm specializing in civil engineering and water resources that was named one of the Fastest Growing Woman Owned Companies in Houston. It was recently acquired by LJA Engineering, Inc. “What I became was because of Rice,” said Anderson, who currently serves on the Advisory Board to the School of Engineering. “Rice gave me the strong academic background and engineering confidence to start my own company. I love seeing how the University has grown and is giving today’s students those same leadership skills through the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership and The Doerr Institute.”

Rice Engineering Alumni Honors Presentation Friday November 13th, 2015 3:30pm Anderson Clarke Center Auditorium

40 RICE ENGINEERING

REA DISTINGUISHED SERVICE MEDAL

In Rice engineering circles, it’s hard not to know the names John ’73, ’74 and Ann ’75, ’76 Doerr. Their influence on the University is profound.

Earlier this year, they gave a $50 million gift dedicated to leadership education through the Doerr Institute for New Leaders.

It was the largest single gift in Rice’s history, and established an institute offering each Rice student an innovative combination of proven, timeless techniques together with next-generation practices.

The strengths of each student will be assessed and their potential will be developed in a four-year comprehensive, custom-made plan of classroom instruction, hands-on, real-world experience and guidance from personal coaches.

The Doerr Institute will also focus on cultural and global diversity and inclusion as a critical component of leadership. The Doerrs will dedicate the center next spring.

It’s not the first time they’ve given so generously for student development at Rice. Their gift of $15 million was the foundation for the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL), which was established in 2010. As of last November, nearly 10 percent of engineering students had participated in RCEL in some way, whether through taking classes, enrolling in the RCEL Certificate in Engineering Leadership program, or working on outreach.

“John and Ann have always been passionate about the role of engineers as leaders, and the need to better prepare them, not just as engineers but also as people who can make an impact outside the bounds of traditional engineering practices” said Bart Sinclair, associate dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering, previous winner of the Distinguished Service Medal, and a classmate of John’s.

In recognition of their continued support of and service to Rice, the Rice Engineering Alumni association is awarding the Doerrs with its Distinguished Service Medal, its highest award for alumni service.

John received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering at Rice and is a leading venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He was an early champion of Google and Amazon, among other companies. Doerr’s interests as an entrepreneur and philanthropist extend to innovative green technology, urban public education and the advancement of women as leaders.

John and Ann Doerr

Ann also earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at Rice. She is an environmental activist, has been a trustee of the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund and was the first significant investor in Khan Academy.

Both John and Ann have also given generously of their time to Rice and its students, coming to campus and hosting talkback sessions with engineering students. They have endowed professorships at the University and been vocal in their enthusiasm of how Rice helped them reach their achievements.

The Distinguished Service Medal, established in 2012, recognizes Rice engineering alumni for extraordinary service to the George R. Brown School of Engineering and its alumni community. It is intended to recognize exceptionally meritorious service of a visionary, foundational, transformative or sustaining character, reflecting an unusually deep dedication to, or uncommon generosity of time or means in support of, the Rice engineering community.

“John and Ann so richly deserve this award,” said Sinclair. “Not only for their philanthropy, but also for their continued gifts of time and energy to Rice.”

RICE ENGINEERING 41

MESSAGE FROM THE REA PRESIDENT

Wendy Hoenig

REA PRESIDENT CHALLENGES ALUMNI TO GET INVOLVED For Wendy Hoenig ’86, materials science and engineering, being president of the Rice Engineering Alumni is less about leading the affinity group and more about being the hub around which a wheel of ideas, energy and skills can turn.

“This is really a group effort,” she said about the organization. “I think being president will be a great challenge, and I’m both excited and honored.”

This will be Hoenig’s third year on the REA Board, and she believes it’s a “coming of age” for the organization and for Rice.

“There’s so much that’s changed over the last five years at Rice. Engineering enrollment has increased, the OEDK (Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen) was built and is thriving, we launched RCEL (Rice Center for Engineering Leadership) and OwlSpark. There’s a whole different energy in engineering on campus right now.”

That’s an energy she’s looking forward to harnessing during the coming year. Recently retired from Dow Chemical Company after 25 years of working in plastics, coatings, and R&D and business ventures, Hoenig took over as the chief marketing officer and head of business development for an Austin nanotechnology start-up.

42 RICE ENGINEERING

She relishes a new challenge and knows she still has a great deal to contribute. That’s part of what led her to join the REA Board of Directors.

As president, she’s looking forward to leading REA efforts to sponsor and promote student projects. She would also like to work with the Association of Rice Alumni to foster better alumni engagement. Finally, she expects that the REA will deepen its partnerships with the OEDK and RCEL. “It’s cool to be an engineer now,” she said, noting that popular news outlets and various research studies show that the field is a solid career choice. “Engineering has always been a part of Rice. But the university’s strength in arts and letters is huge. There’s a great balance here, and our students have a holistic education.”

She said the thing she sees most in her fellow REA members is a passion for giving back to Rice. She notes that many members seek ways to be engaged, as mentors, as judges for engineering competitions, and as professionals who can offer real-world perspectives on their work. She sees her position as a facilitator, funneling members’ talents to appropriate projects. She said, “The entire REA membership, over 12,000 strong, will be key to the success of the next generation of engineers coming from Rice, so I would like to see everyone get involved.”

Anastasia Novinskaya at SCREECH

Students in their OwlSpark workspace

REA SPONSORSHIP ENRICHES STUDENT EXPERIENCES “Three years ago, the Rice Engineering Alumni (REA) board made the decision to move the association away from being primarily a social organization to being one where our involvement could have a direct connection to, and impact on, Rice students and the school of engineering,” said Wendy Hoenig, REA president.

The re-thinking of what the organization could be is bearing fruit. Last year, in partnership with the George R. Brown School of Engineering, the group distributed more than $150,000 in scholarships to engineering students, and brought in $67,000 in sponsorships, the bulk of which funded student awards and activities.

Among the projects sponsored was the OEDK’s Team Incubaby, a low-cost neonatal incubator for use in the developing world. REA sponsorships also funded the Design Showcase award for Best Freshman Project, won by the RiceX team (now called Eclipse). Through the REA grant program, students can apply for funding to support activities such as research, travel to competitions and team projects. Criteria and a list of opportunities available can be found on the REA website, alumni.rice.edu/rea.

“Through sponsorships, we’re enabling experiences that Rice students might not normally have,” said Hoenig. “Many of these projects are extracurricular, but they are examples of what engineers actually do in industry and they prepare students for what they’ll be doing after graduation.”

This year, the REA begins offering an additional travel grant, for graduate students to attend conferences and present research, and the group has committed to helping the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership build its own Leadership Reaction Course.

Hoenig said she’s thrilled to see how engineering alumni have increased their support for the school in recent years and she looks forward to continuing the upward trend. Last year, REA sponsors numbered 327, up from 246 sponsorships the previous year.

“This level of involvement has really fed on itself,” said Hoenig. “And it has helped students be successful.”

2014-2015 REA SPONSORSHIP HIGHLIGHTS OEDK support Team Incubaby: Novel Neonatal Incubator or Radiant Warmer for the Developing World Design Showcase Award for Best Freshman project RiceX Scholarship at Houston Science & Engineering Fair $5000 for Rice tuition Owl Spark Encouraging entrepreneurial start-ups SCREECH Graduate student 90-second research pitch competition RCEL Leadership Reaction Course Commitment for sponsoring a station on the course.

To be constructed by 2017.

RiceX RICE ENGINEERING 43

REA/SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING PICNIC 2015

Forty-six scholarships and awards, valued at more than $150,000 were given out on April 18 at the annual REA/School of Engineering End-of-Year Picnic.

The merit awards, grants and scholarships were presented to graduate and undergraduate engineering students, recognizing their scholastic, research, leadership, innovation and volunteering accomplishments.

Buckley Sartwelle Scholarship in Engineering

Bilan Yang, MECH Endowed by Jack Boyd Buckley, ’48 and Helen Sartwelle Buckley, ’44 in memory of their parents

Bob Dickson Endowed Prize

Sarah Hooper, ECE Endowed by H. deForest Ralph, ’55 and his wife Martha, with additional funding from Dale Dickson Johnson and others

Harrianna Butler Siebenhausen Award

Daniel Vecchiolla, ChBE Endowed by C.H. Siebenhausen,’50 in honor of his wife, Harrianna Butler

Ralph Budd Thesis Award

Jizhou Li, CAAM In memory of Ralph Budd

James S. Waters Creativity Award

Matthew Nojoomi, BIOE Endowed in 1968 by an anonymous donor in honor of James S. Waters,‘17

Hershel M. Rich Invention Award

Matthew Nojoomi, Nimish Mittal and Sergio Gonzalez, All BIOE Endowed by Hershel M. Rich, ’45, ’47 and his wife, Hilda

REA Outstanding Leadership Excellence Award

Adrian Bizzaro, MECH

REA Outstanding Research Excellence Award Peter Washington, CS

Outstanding Senior Kamal Shah, BIOE

Distinguished Seniors

Ravi Sheth and John Michael Frullo, both BIOE

Outstanding Junior

Michael Donatti, MECH

Distinguished Juniors

Junqing Zhao, CEE and Eric Sung, CAAM

For a complete list of recipients of 2015 REA awards and scholarships, see engr.rice.edu/REA_scholarships.

Be an REA Sponsor Support Engineering Design Last year, the REA gave more than $15,000 in support of engineering design at Rice, enabling teams like BoxyClean, who began work on a low-cost transportable medical instrument sterilization unit for use in low-resource parts of the world. The team’s concept is to compact existing sterilization systems into a 20-foot shipping container with the goal of minimizing energy costs and maintenance and maximizing affordability. BoxyClean will provide decontamination, steam sterilization and storage of general surgical tools.

Help students unleash their engineering potential!

Become an REA sponsor today!

For more information, see: http://alumni.rice.edu/rea/support-rea.