FAC U LTY
PROMOTIONS
Christopher Jermaine
Luay Nakhleh
Six faculty members in four departments in the George R. Brown School of Engineering have been promoted with tenure. Christopher Jermaine, Luay Nakhleh and T.S. Eugene Ng in computer science, and Lin Zhong in electrical and computer engineering, were promoted to full professor. Ilinca Stanciulescu in civil and environmental engineering and Rafael Verduzco in chemical and biomolecular engineering were promoted to associate professor. The promotions took effect July 1.
T.S. Eugene Ng
Lin Zhong
Ilinca Stanciulescu
Rafael Verduzco
SORENSON, THOMPSON RETIRE “I was often amazed by the magic and elegant equations that Danny came up with, but he was also a fun person to be with. As many of us remember, his wild laughter could be heard from the opposite of end of the building.” So says a grateful former student, Chao Yang, of his recently-retired friend and mentor, Danny Danny Sorensen C. Sorensen, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM). Last Jan. 1, after 26 years at Rice, Sorensen retired from his tenured position but remains as a research professor and a Noah Harding Professor Emeritus. Sorensen was thesis adviser to Yang, who earned his Ph.D. in CAAM in 1998. Since 2000, Yang has worked as a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Danny is certainly a well-known and wellrespected teacher and scholar,” he said. “But he also strikes me as someone who really knows how to enjoy life.” Sorensen’s research interests include numerical linear algebra, numerical analysis, model order reduction, control of dynamical systems, numerical optimization and parallel numerical algorithms. In 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and in 2013 was elected chair of SIAM’s activity group on Numerical Linear Algebra. Sorensen earned a B.S. from the University of California, Davis in 1972, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1975 and 1977, respectively. He was an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky from 1977 to 1980, when he became a computer scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Sorensen joined the Rice faculty in 1989, and served twice as CAAM department chair, from 1995 to 1998, and 2005 to 2009.
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R ICE E N GIN EERIN G
“We are very empirical,” said James R. Thompson, Noah Harding Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics at Rice University. “We have always been data-oriented. We deal with the real world.” Thompson, who retired July 1 after 46 years, was a statistician at Rice before there was a statistics department. When he joined the faculty in 1970, after three years teaching mathematics at Indiana University and three Jim Thompson years at Vanderbilt, it was as a member of the Mathematical Sciences Department in the School of Natural Sciences. Only in 1987 did statistics become a separate department, within the School of Social Sciences, with Thompson as the founding chair. It moved to the George R. Brown School of Engineering in 1990. “Jim was part of the great recruiting class in mathematical sciences that saw the arrival of Richard Tapia and Ken Kennedy. He organized a statistics steering committee that recommended creation of a stand-alone department,” said David Scott, the Noah Harding Professor of Statistics and a student of Thompson’s when working for his master’s degree and Ph.D. at Rice. Thompson earned a B.S. in chemical engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1960, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1963 and 1965, respectively. In recent years, his research has focused on statistical model building, biomathematics, quality control and computational finance. Thompson developed the SIMEST algorithm for creating multiple replicates of computer-generated pseudo-realities, which is used to estimate the parameters of the underlying model. With his student Marc Elliot he has also developed the MaxMean algorithm that permits the finding of the underlying structures of high-dimensional data sets. Thompson is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the International Statistical Institute. He has directed 17 doctoral students and authored or co-authored 14 books.