Rice Magazine | Spring 2019

NATASHA BOWDOIN’S CREATIVITY BLOOMS

RICE MAGAZINE

SPRING 2019

NATASHA BOWDOIN: “SIDEWAYS TO THE SUN,” 2019 Jan. 25– May 18, 2019

Commissioned

by Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts

NATURE’S LANGUAGE

By Lynn Gosnell

I

n the massive Central Gallery at Rice’s Moody Center for the Arts, gigantic fun house images of flowers, leaves and vines entwine visitors within a landscape that seems barely natural. Garish greens, yellows and reds splash across the walls, stretch toward the two-story ceiling or escape the space into the nearby halls. Some of the painted and cut out drawings are mounted on stage carts, ready to be rolled away and reoriented to performances inspired by artist Natasha Bowdoin’s creations.

For a visitor, the effect is one of being dwarfed by an overgrown, beautiful and somewhat menacing tangle. If nature is a language, as a line in a song by The Smiths goes, the language employed by Bowdoin shouts, entices and warns.

“It’s a kind of positive way to think about human insignificance in relation to nature,” said Bowdoin, an assistant professor in visual and dramatic arts at Rice, whose collagebased works have been exhibited widely over the past decade. “The scale is meant to overpower the viewer, reorienting them to my natural world.” The bold colors she employs

2 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

A BOV E PHOTO A ND COV ER PHOTO BY N A SH B A K ER

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 3

PHOTO BY ALESE PICKERING

THIS PARTICULAR PIECE GREW OUT OF HER INTEREST IN THE “LANGUAGE OF THE FLOWERS,” A VICTORIAN PRACTICE THAT USED FLORAL ARRANGEMENTS AS A SECRET LANGUAGE.

at large scale are “playful and fun, but also a little bit too much, almost poisonous.”

Bowdoin was invited to create this site-specific work for the Moody

by Alison Weaver, the Suzanne Deal Booth Executive Director of the Moody, as part of a curatorial focus on ecology and the environment.

Bowdoin’s installations draw from myriad inspirations — cartoons, 19th-century scientific illustrations, the language of transcendentalism, textile prints and, intriguingly, lo-fi special effects in films such as the endearing “A Trip to the Moon” by French film director Georges Méliès.

While Bowdoin’s current work interrogates the relationship between people and nature, this particular piece grew out of her interest in the “language of the flowers,” a Victorian practice that used floral arrangements as a secret language.

“Flowers had specific meanings assigned to them, and floral dictionaries were produced so that one could become fluent in the vocabulary.

You would arrange your bouquet to convey a particular message your recipient would then read in the flowers themselves,” Bowdoin said. “Often these messages expressed sentiments not deemed socially acceptable to speak out loud at the time, hence why they needed a floral disguise.” So Bowdoin set out to create her version of a less-thansubtle “decoder bouquet.”

“There’s a long symbolic tradition of the feminine and the floral being framed as representative of one another. I think

that degrades both of those things — both nature and the feminine,” Bowdoin said. In these “loud,” larger-than-life landscapes, Bowdoin subverts conventional and historic ideas about the feminine and the floral in efforts to disentangle them from old meanings.

At an artist talk this spring, Bowdoin was asked about what secret message she may have included in her flowers. She thought about it for a while. “I think my message is ‘don’t mess with me,’” she laughed.

“Sideways to the Sun” not only subverts the relationship between the feminine and the floral, it also references writings by transcendentalists, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay on nature. “The whole notion of transcendentalism is the idea that the divine, however you choose to define it, is readable in nature,” Bowdoin said.

One of the most visionary ideas in Emerson’s essay is called the “transparent eyeball.” It’s a concept and an image that resonates deeply with Bowdoin.

“He was arguing for permeability with the world,” Bowdoin said.

“Nature is you and you are nature. There’s not such a distinct separation between the two,” she said.

Bowdoin, who grew up in rural Maine, connects with transcendentalist thinkers through her New England roots as well. “My family members are all fishermen or stonemasons.

They learned an intimate understanding of nature, its beauty and its threat, pretty early,” she said.

“Even when I try to get away from nature in my work, it always creeps its way back in.”

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 5

FEATURES

1

28

42

Natasha Bowdoin’s installation explores the relationship between humans and nature.

Imagine this! Here are 13 ways creativity can be taught, tested, earned and practiced.

Go back to school by completing this homework exercise. We won’t even charge tuition!

Sideways to the Sun

6 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

Looking at Creativity

Your Turn

PHOTO BY VOLODYMYR MELNYK / 123RF

CONTENTS

RICE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT, PHOTOS BY TOMMY LAVERGNE, JEFF FITLOW, BRANDON MARTIN, TODD SPOTH

RICE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019

DEPARTMENTS Sallyport

11

Nina Pitts ’20 and Yo-Yo Ma, Greek Tragedy class, Owls on wheels, women’s basketball, vegan cooking

Wisdom

19

Bacterial resistance, Carlos Jimenez, Paul Hester, dark matter, automated cars, planetary collision, books

Alumni

43

New Orleans chef, women inspiring women, Classnotes highlights, club rugby, life in NYC, books

Last Look

50

A tender moment is captured under an Asian pear tree near the Anderson Biological Laboratories.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 7

FEEDBACK Dear Editor: I found the latest Rice Magazine most interesting. I was particularly interested in the extensive article about the Baker Institute. I have admired Mr. Baker’s many contributions to our nation’s foreign policy and his fine model to young people. I was fortunate to hear him talk here in Lake Jackson many years ago. His contributions do not seem to diminish.

— EMILY B. OSBORN ’47

RICE MAGAZINE Spring 2019 PUBLISHER

Office of Public Affairs Linda Thrane, vice president EDITOR

Lynn Gosnell ART DIRECTOR

Alese Pickering CREATIVE SERVICES

We use an email survey and Google Analytics to gauge what our readers are paying attention to. Here are some reader favorites and comments about the Winter 2019 issue.

Most-read feature “A Bold Step”: The Rice Investment, a plan to make college more affordable for students from middleand lower-income families, builds on the legacy of Rice’s founding vision.

“Rice Institute had no tuition when I matriculated in 1959, and that was a factor in choosing Rice over MIT or Caltech. I am extremely happy about the new financial aid policy.”

“A good article, which was not an overblown, selfcongratulatory, ‘Look how good we are.’”

“One of the highestimpact actions Rice has taken in years!”

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Tracey Rhoades ASSISTANT EDITOR

Most-read department

Kyndall Krist

Abstract: A roundup of research findings and scholarly endeavors

Tommy LaVergne Jeff Fitlow

“My favorite section. It’s fascinating to read about research happening around campus.

Favorite reader comment Night Owl: “On the Mat” “Rice experience shows up in the strangest places!”

PHOTOGRAPHERS

PROOFREADER

Jenny Rozelle ’00 RICE CONTRIBUTORS

Most-read stories “The Teachers’ Teacher” shares an interview with Josh Eyler, the director of Rice’s Center for Teaching Excellence.

“The Education of Ben Rhodes” is a story about Rhodes ’00 and his new book, “The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House.”

If you missed any of these stories, go to magazine.rice.edu to catch up.

8 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

Jeff Cox, senior director

Jade Boyd, James Costanzo, Jon-Paul Estrada, Jeff Falk, Sarah Brenner Jones, Jennifer Latson, Brandon Martin, Amy McCaig, Kendall Schoemann, Katharine Shilcutt, Hallie Trial ’22, Mike Williams INTERNS

Bryan Najera Demoraes ’21 Mariana Najera ’21 Rice Magazine is published four times a year and is sent to university alumni, faculty, staff, parents of undergraduates and friends of the university. © May 2019, Rice University

FROM THE EDITOR THE RICE UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Robert B. Tudor III, chairman; Edward B. “Teddy” Adams Jr.; J.D. Bucky Allshouse; Donald Bowers; Bart Broadman; Nancy Packer Carlson; Albert Chao; Mark D. Dankberg; Ann Doerr; Douglas Lee Foshee; Terrence Gee; Lawrence H. Guffey; James T. Hackett; Tommy Huie; Patti Lipoma Kraft; Robert T. Ladd; Holli Ladhani; L. Charles Landgraf; Brian Patterson; David Rhodes; Jeffery A. Smisek; Gloria Meckel Tarpley; Guillermo Treviño; Scott Wise; Huda Y. Zoghbi.

ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERS

David W. Leebron, president; Marie Lynn Miranda, provost; Kathy Collins, vice president for Finance; Klara Jelinkova, vice president for International Operations and IT and chief information officer; Kevin Kirby, vice president for Administration; Caroline Levander, vice president for Global and Digital Strategy; Yvonne Romero Da Silva, vice president for Enrollment; Allison Kendrick Thacker, vice president for Investments and treasurer; Linda Thrane, vice president for Public Affairs; Richard A. Zansitis, vice president and general counsel; Darrow Zeidenstein, vice president for Development and Alumni Relations.

POSTMASTER

Send address changes to: Rice University Development Services–MS 80 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 EDITORIAL OFFICES

Creative Services–MS 95 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 Phone: 713-348-6768 ricemagazine@rice.edu

IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y PA DDY MIL L S

HELLO, RICE MAGAZINE NOTICE ANYTHING different?

Just over a year ago, we embarked on a project to reimagine the design and editorial structure of our university magazine. To get started, we created some lofty goals. We wanted to capture the vibrancy of today’s student learning environment, the curiosity that drives our faculty’s research and creative pursuits, and the always interesting lives of Rice alumni.

And we wanted to align this editorial strategy with a bold, new design.

But first, we had to understand more about you — our readers. Formally, we emailed a 26-question survey to several thousand alumni, faculty and staff, which more than 11 percent of you returned — thank you! More informally, we sat down with students, faculty, staff and alumni to discuss life at Rice — then and now. With data in hand, we went searching for inspiration in stories and images.

Several mood boards, font families and page grids later, art director Alese Pickering began to prototype a new layout. Stories and art streamed in, and our feature theme, “13 Ways of Looking at Creativity,” took shape. (Yes, our title is inspired by a favorite Wallace Stevens poem.) Ideas were auditioned, refined, tossed or kept. In the words of Rice engineer Matthew Wettergreen ’08, whose story about prototyping as a creative act appears on Page 33,

“One of the things you need to bring to prototyping is that there are no wrong answers. … Everything you build is a stepping stone to the next idea.”

So here’s our next idea — aka prototype No. 6. We hope some of the pages will feel familiar. We’ve simplified our department structure: Sallyport covers campus news and student life; Wisdom highlights innovation in the lab, the

We wanted to capture the vibrancy of today’s student learning environment, the curiosity that drives our faculty’s research and creative pursuits, and the always interesting lives of Rice alumni. And we wanted to align this editorial strategy with a bold, new design. field and the classroom; and Alumni gathers profiles, books and stories about Rice’s history and traditions, as well as a sampling of Owlmanac’s Classnotes. In Last Look, our talented photographers capture a slice of campus life. There’s more of all our content online at magazine.rice.edu, which will soon get its own redesign treatment.

Let us know what you think by emailing lynngosnell@rice.edu.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 9

PRESIDENT LEEBRON ing to respond to surging interest in creative writing, significantly fueled by students in science and engineering.

A major effort of the Department of BioSciences has creation at its core: synthetic biology. There, the goal is “writing new DNA programs to program cells with the goal of creating technologies that transform” a wide array of areas, including medicine, energy, agriculture and manufacturing. This is radically different from the traditional study of biology, which has emphasized description

CREATIVITY: THE FOUNDATION OF HUMAN PROGRESS MUCH OF THIS ISSUE is dedicated to creativity. What may be striking to some readers, but not surprising to those of us inside the university, is how central creativity is to work across the entire university. I recently visited with the faculties of the departments of BioSciences and English, whose nature of work and field of endeavor couldn’t be more different. And yet out of those visits emerged in clear and strong terms a common theme: creativity.

The English department emphasized two things in its overall goals, namely both creative and critical capacity. The critical capacity to break things down underlies the creative capability of putting them together in new ways. As the department broadly stated, “Reading literature changes how you think and who you can be.” Literature gives you the opportunity to see the human experience through someone else’s eyes or even just to see an alternative human experience. Creativity is enhanced when we break away from our own experiences and opportunities and our own ways of looking at things around us. The same is true when we are challenged to communicate in new ways. The English department is seek-

10 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

Creativity flourishes most in environments of liberty, in part because liberty serves the curiosity and experimentation likely to lead to new and different insights and discoveries. and understanding of the living world.

In the new realm of biology, it’s critical that our researchers can imagine new possibilities for using living organisms to solve a wide variety of problems. Science progresses not with a passive approach to observing and learning, but with an active creative approach of imagining what we do not know, how we might go about learning it and how we could use new knowledge to create new possibilities.

Here’s what a student had to say about a course in experimental synthetic biology, “The thinking that guided this course was immensely empowering; it not only inspired me to think creatively about biological solutions to the real-world problems that matter to me, but also showed me that I can have an active role in achieving the solution.” Or, regarding BIOC 333: BioInnovation Studio, “BIOC 333 was a great chance to understand the bridge

between investigative biology and inventive entrepreneurship …” And in another course on cellular and animal physiology, student teams were asked to create biologically designed fictional animals and assess whether they could survive in a radically changed future environment. Such creativity by our faculty helps instill creativity in our students. Similarly, a course at the Moody Center for the Arts combined learning the science of coral reefs with environmental art theory and practice.

Universities have sometimes been described as places where the future is invented. Creativity is not the only attribute required, of course. Accumulated human knowledge and skills, incorporated in part in technologies of discovery, are essential ingredients. Equally important is our optimism — an optimism that our creativity, our knowledge and our skills can make a difference in solving the needs of humanity, and even more broadly of life and our planet. Creativity flourishes most in environments of liberty, in part because liberty serves the curiosity and experimentation likely to lead to new and different insights and discoveries. That is certainly one of the reasons the United States has led in the creation of new technologies. But we see creativity in virtually every environment as an essential human quality.

I vividly remember visiting one of the cave sites in southern France where creative animal drawings survive from 15,000 years ago.

Some years ago, I wrote a column under the heading “You Can’t Teach That.” When it comes to creativity, we beg to differ, and believe the years of both undergraduate and graduate education are critically important years in developing creative capability and inclination. And universities must put that at the center of their educational goals. Creativity is not simply one option for the success of human society; it is the foundation of human progress.

IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y PA DDY MIL L S

SALLYPORT

CAMPUS NEWS AND STUDENT LIFE

STUDY ABROAD

Time and Tempo A master class with cellist Yo-Yo Ma in Guangdong, China, leads Nina Pitts down a path of professional and personal discovery.

BY AMY MCCAIG

PHOTO BY TOMM Y L AV ERGNE

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 11

SALLYPORT

I think it’s funny that Beethoven and Mozart used the same 12 notes that Rihanna and Taylor Swift do — depending on how you put them in order, you get something completely different.

Below: Pitts with her father in China on her adoption day

B

AKER COLLEGE junior Nina Pitts has been playing the cello since the age of 5, but never received advice like what she heard from famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma at a master class last January. It had nothing to do with tone or technique, but rather how to approach performing. “[Ma] said that when you’re the host at the party, it’s your job to make your guests feel special,” Pitts recalled. “And the same principle applies to performances.” Pitts and 75 other musicians from around the world trained under Ma for 10 days at Youth Music Culture Guangdong, his prestigious music festival in Guangdong, China, an experience Pitts called “eye-opening.”

“The way he thinks about music is insightful, yet the way he verbalizes his thoughts is remarkably simple and easy

12 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

to comprehend,” she said of Ma, whom she described as a natural teacher and lovely person. “He commits to his musical decisions and his role as an artist with everything he has.”

Long before Pitts was learning under Ma, she was inspired by her parents, Timothy Pitts and Kathleen Winkler, who teach double bass and violin, respectively, at Rice. Playing a string instrument was a given — but which one? “I told my parents I wanted an instrument where I could sit down,” Pitts laughed. “That was very important to 5-year-old me.”

In addition to the peak experience of studying with top international musicians and Ma himself, the festival’s location carried an especially personal meaning for Pitts. It returned her to the town from where her parents adopted her two decades before. Pitts visited the

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE PITTS FAMILY

Above: Nina Pitts with Yo-Yo Ma last year

hotel where the adoption was finalized and life with her parents began.

“You know when time slows down? It was like that,” she said of the visit. “I had time to think about how lucky I was to be there. I don’t know who chose me for my parents, but it was definitely luck.”

Back at Rice this spring, Pitts played in the Shepherd School Opera’s production of “Susannah” and is laying the groundwork for her senior year. She plans to pursue graduate school in Europe and eventually wants to perform in opera orchestras or a chamber music ensemble. “I hope I can show people who haven’t experienced classical music how great it is in its own right — right up there with the greatest pop songs,” she said. “I think it’s funny that Beethoven and Mozart used the same 12 notes that Rihanna and Taylor Swift do — depending on how you put them in order, you get something completely different. But it’s all music and hopefully can make their lives richer.” Keeping the lessons from Ma in mind, wherever in the world she plays, she’ll make her listeners feel special.

SALLYPORT

EDUCATION FOR ALL At the President’s Lecture Series, Salman Khan, the founder of online education platform Khan Academy, spoke about creating a nonprofit that delivers free education to millions of people across the world.

Challenging the Narrative A new student group advocates for greater African presence on campus.

LAST FEBRUARY, Rice students on the newly formed Increasing African Presence in Academia committee organized a wide-ranging and well-attended discussion on Western misconceptions about Africa.

“There’s often not much focus on Africa in Western education in general,” said co-organizer Zubaidat Agboola, a kinesiology major and Wiess College sophomore whose family comes from Nigeria. “Usually it starts and stops at the trans-Atlantic slave trade. And being from an African background, I see these false narratives propagated on TV shows, in movies, in literature even.” The event also helped

IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y M O NIC A O B AG A

raise awareness of Rice’s African studies minor.

Some students shared their own perspectives as African-born students, with focus on the uniqueness of the African versus the black experience in America. “I like being in an environment where I can hear what my fellow classmates have to say,” said Jones College junior Azalech Hinton.

Fellow Jones College student Chidera Ezuma-Igwe, a senior studying sociology, said she doesn’t get to discuss Africa much in her own studies. This made the diversity dialogue a mustattend event for her. “I’m Nigerian and I take a lot of pride in my culture, so I wanted to be here and talk about it but also hear perspectives from different countries as well,” she said.

“Within [the Rice African Student Association], we often examine and discuss these topics, but only in our community,” said Axel Ntamatungiro, a Duncan College sophomore. “We want to foster dialogue with the rest of Rice.”

— KATHARINE SHILCUTT

His advice: “You have to start with delusional optimism.” You also need solid financial backing and encouragement at critical moments. At one such time, a key source of support was Ann Doerr ’75.

While Khan’s mission to provide a “worldclass education for anyone, anywhere” was never intended to replace traditional classrooms, it offers students a personalized way to remedy gaps in learning and to “tap into their potential.”

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 13

SALLYPORT

SYLLABUS

Greek Tragedy Harvey Yunis has been teaching Rice students about ancient Greece since 1987. For the first time in more than 10 years, he’s teaching a class on Greek tragedy, introducing a new generation of students to classical Greek literature and the ways these iconic works influence our society today.

Inspiration for the class comes from the timeless and influential nature of Greek tragedy. Not only do works of modern fiction draw from these classics, but the classics themselves are being constantly renewed on stages and screens. (Think of “Elektra,” with music by Richard Strauss, staged in 2018 by the Houston Grand Opera.) Although only 30 or so of these texts have survived intact, their stories have inspired countless adaptations and introduced quintessential tropes, motifs and literary devices into Western culture.

“Tragedy originally meant the theatrical production of a certain kind of play,” said Harvey Yunis. “Now we use the word to refer to bad things that happen in life. There’s obviously a connection between tragedy, drama and life.”

Students read one or two major works per week in preparation for class discussions led by Yunis. “I want [them] to learn to read closely and understand difficult texts ... to talk about

14 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

CLAS 302 Greek Tragedy DEPARTMENT Classical and European Studies

them informatively, authoritatively, spontaneously and creatively,” Yunis said. He gives context to the tragedies and helps his students develop a better understanding of plots, characters and shared motifs.

Yunis’ teaching style reflects his desire to both instruct students and help them learn to think critically and independently. “If we have a question during our lecture, not only does he answer the question, but he has all of us jump in,” explained Sam Fowler, a McMurtry College sophomore. “Treating Greek tragedy as he does, there’s not just one way of looking at each work.

Everyone has different opinions, and he respects that while also not being afraid to tell you if you’re way off the mark or even entirely wrong.”

Interpretations of Greek tragedies are as numerous as those who have read them throughout the ages. Yet, as Yunis shows the students in his class, many aspects of these works appeal to every-

DESCRIPTION Students read tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides as well as criticism of tragedy by Aristophanes, Plato and Aristotle. They learn how ancient tragedies were staged, how they influenced later dramatic arts and how they continue to stimulate thinking about the human situation.

one. As Aristotle wrote in the “Poetics,” history may accurately depict the particular, but poetry tends to express the universal — and it is there that we find the reason behind Greek tragedy’s timeless allure. — MARIANA NAJERA ’21

STUDENT LIFE

Round & Round Getting across campus doesn’t have to be conventional.

PHOTOS BY JEFF FITLOW

Clockwise from top: Cailey Renken (left) and Brittany Bui (right) on their tandem bike, “Eugene”; Landon Mabe with his scooter, “Scarlett”; Josh Sorge rides the Rice Bikes unicycle; Soohyun Yoon rides the Rice Bikes “tall bike”; Ashish Kulkarni glides on his hoverboard

MAGAZINE.RICE.EDU 15

SCOREBOARD

Win by Win

The women’s basketball team racked up records and accolades on the way to a championship season.

HEAD COACH TINA LANGLEY began her pregame speech with a familiar mantra: “Do not make this game bigger than it is.” It’s a sentiment she had repeated countless times this season, but now, moments before the conference tournament championship against Middle Tennessee, the game had never been bigger.

“We make every game the biggest game of the year, so when you get to these moments, it’s just another game.”

Langley’s coaching philosophy isn’t particularly flashy. It doesn’t leave room for grand pronouncements or juicy sound bites. Even when media members go fishing for one — “Do you like being the underdog?” — Langley doesn’t bite.

“I don’t really think about it,” she says.

16 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

Erica Ogwumike was named C-USA Player of the Year.

“Are they a higher seed? Are we a higher seed? They’re just the next person in front of us on our schedule.”

It’s a mentality that — game by game, win by win — helped build the greatest season in program history, one in which Rice finished with a programbest 28 wins and made its first NCAA Tournament appearance in over a decade. Rice nearly pulled off the upset too, falling in overtime to No. 5-ranked Marquette in the first round.

The Owls became the first team in Conference USA (C-USA) history to go undefeated in league play and then win the conference tournament — a comeback victory over Middle Tennessee, 6954. They went on a record 21-game win streak that extended into the postseason

and, in the process, now own the Tudor Fieldhouse attendance record (2,606).

In addition to their many team achievements, the Owls also racked up individual honors. Senior Erica Ogwumike was named the C-USA Player of the Year; junior Nancy Mulkey was named Defensive Player of the Year; and senior Lauren Grigsby was named Sixth Player of the Year. Langley was named C-USA Coach of the Year.

Ogwumike, who averaged a doubledouble on the season, says the team never had trouble embracing Langley’s “one game at a time” mentality. As if they had a choice. “You’ve met Coach Langley,” Ogwumike says with a smile. “We know if she believes it, we should believe it.”

And they did.

— JAMES COSTANZO

PHOTO BY TOMM Y L AV ERGNE

SALLYPORT THAT’S SO RICE

All Night Long

A Night of Philosophy and Ideas at the Moody Center for the Arts in late January brought together philosophically minded members of the public with artists, authors and thinkers. The theme of the conversations, film screenings, exhibitions, dance and musical performances was ecology. Here, we plot a few of the evening’s most fascinating facets in a playful matrix of our own invention.

BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT

LAURIE ANDERSON

Open Dance Project

Climate Elvis

“Planet ∞” VR experience

Tim Morton’s documentary “Living in the Future’s Past”

Michel Blazy’s “We Were the Robots”

Natasha Bowdoin’s “Sideways to the Sun”

Infinity burial suit

ART

SCIENCE Anne C. Klein’s “Our Unbounded Wholeness”

The Moody “Not OK: (A Little Movie About a Small Glacier at the End of the World)”

Dale Jamieson’s “(Almost) All You Need is Love”

Bayou City Swing

Café Philosophes

Is there a moral obligation to go to Mars?

DAVID LEEBRON

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 17

SALLYPORT

I’M A NERD ABOUT ...

Plant-Based Cooking

Elana Margosis shares her passion for food through pop-up dinners.

ELANA MARGOSIS ’19 dreams of flan. But her reveries feature no milk or eggs. Margosis is working out the recipe for a vegan dessert in her sleep. Strangest of all? She’s not a vegetarian herself.

She is, however, a vegan chef. Since September 2018, Margosis has been preparing pop-up dinners in her apartment as Magnolia City Speakeasy.

Since the beginning, making a delicate dessert that’s just right has been a particular challenge. With a base of coconut milk, silken tofu and agar give the agave-sweetened dessert a lascivious jiggle. “This one is flan-adjacent,” she declares at her February Tex-Mex dinner. It’s better than that. It’s enough to fool even the pickiest sweet lover.

Margosis’ love story with food began in her mother’s kitchen. Though it didn’t stick, she became a vegetarian when she was 7 or 8 years old. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, meat comes from animals,’” she recalls with a chuckle.

Margosis credits her mother for instilling a passion for cooking, but also a flair for dietary substitutions. The family kept kosher, but that wasn’t as much of a challenge as cooking for Margosis’ two brothers, who both have celiac disease.

“There was a lot of creativity in making food that worked for all of us,” she says. She’s worked in professional kitchens, but it was last summer, spent doing the work trade program at Hana Farms in Hawaii, that truly opened Margosis’ eyes to vegetarian cooking. Her job was to cook lunch for her fellow farmers, using the products of their labor.

However, it was a science class that made the policy studies major think

18 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

YES, YOU FLAN

differently about cuisine. “It’s been the most useful class I took at Rice,” she says of Chemistry of Cooking. “It had a huge impact on how I think about food.” The skills she learned in that class are what inspire her to constantly improve her wares, like the flan, which has appeared in some form on nearly every Magnolia City menu.

The future is uncertain for the 13-guest pop-ups after Margosis graduates. Ideally, she’ll combine her public health education with her flair for whipping up local produce into covetable meals. “I really believe in plantbased eating being the way forward,” she says. One way or another, she’s confident that she’ll continue on a path of sharing food that’s as delicious as it is healthy for the planet. — ALICE LEVITT

Elana Margosis in Rice’s new Chemistry of Cooking kitchen at Martel College

“My vegan flan recipe is simple, delicious and highly adaptable.

I prefer to add flavors of oranges and vanilla.

The flan gets its structure from agar, a virtually flavorless powder made from algae, and silken tofu.”

Get the recipe at magazine. rice.edu.

PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW

WISDOM

INNOVATION IN THE LAB, THE FIELD AND THE CLASSROOM

PUBLIC HEALTH

Real-Time Evolution

Bacteria’s growing resistance to antibiotics is a looming public health crisis.

Rice researchers in Yousif Shamoo’s lab are conducting experiments to discover how to slow the rapid evolution of bacterial resistance.

BY HALLIE TRIAL ’22

PHOTO BY JEF F F I T LOW

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 19

MOTHER OF INVENTION Global health pioneer Rebecca Richards-Kortum, a Rice bioengineering professor whose work has improved medical care for millions of newborn babies and saved lives in lowincome countries, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in a May 2 ceremony held in Washington, D.C. Doctoral student Amy Prater in the Shamoo lab

20 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

like penicillin that attack their cell walls. Prater looks at how these unusually tough bacteria adapt to the “last resort” drug, daptomycin.

Prater’s experiments start with growing mucuslike biofilms of E. faecium in a container called a bioreactor. Each day, she adds just enough daptomycin to make cells with resistance traits much more likely to survive and reproduce than other cells. She takes samples from her bioreactor each day to see which bacterial genes contain mutations and how common they are. This “bacterial evolution” takes 10–30 days.

“If we can understand how that resistance is evolved [and] identify the molecular and physical mechanisms that confer that resistance, eventually we could develop tandem co-drugs that could be administered along with antibiotics to delay the onset of that resistance,” Prater said. Essentially, this means sick patients might one day take a combination of an antibiotic and a “resistance inhibitor” that would keep the bacteria in their body from adapting so quickly. This way, the lifetimes of current antibiotics may be extended.

Richards-Kortum’s fellow honorees this year include the inventors of fluoride toothpaste, the portable electric drill, the Unix operating system and the first drugs for treating high blood pressure.

She is one of two women in the 2019 class, which will be featured in a yearlong exhibit at the hall’s Smithsonianaffiliated museum at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Va. Fewer than 600 inventors have been inducted in the hall, founded in 1973 in partnership with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to recognize inventors and invention, promote creativity, and advance the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship.

PHOTO BY TOMMY LAVERGNE

A

CCORDING TO the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 2 million people in the United States fall ill due to antibioticresistant infections each year. Of those people, at least 23,000 die.

Amy Prater, a doctoral student in biochemistry and cell biology, is researching ways to address this growing health care challenge by revealing the underlying biological pathways that enable bacteria to evolve resistance. This, in turn, could lead to the development of new treatments to delay the emergence of resistance. She’s part of a group of postdocs and graduate and undergraduate students in the lab of Yousif Shamoo, professor of biochemistry and cell biology and vice provost for research.

Prater works with a species of bacteria called Enterococcus faecium, which naturally inhabits the gut and mouth of humans. “But if you have a weakened immune system, like if you have HIV/AIDS or are undergoing chemotherapy, those bacteria can become very dangerous,” she said. This and similar bacterial species are naturally less susceptible to antibiotics

WISDOM

The Blue Studio The studio happened very serendipitously. I just had this sense that I needed to do this. I love to build. I love what it does. It creates an environment — a condition of time. When I bought the lot, I remember bursting to get up the next day so I could work on my studio. I would visit every evening to organize the materials, sweep, paint, lay the floor. I loved being involved in the process. It was my place and I wanted the ownership, but it wasn’t about owning something — it was about being involved in its making.

I built a small studio where I lived for three years, and that became a sort of generative force. Slowly, this single cell of a studio started to grow, and it has grown across the street and next door. It has had many lives and mutations. I always opted for the basic features of architecture to allow me more opportunity to transform the architecture in time.

TEACHING

The Builder in the Blue Studio Carlos Jimenez in his own words.

INTERVIEW BY KENDALL SCHOEMANN

IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y A DA M C R U F T

AS A PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE, Carlos Jimenez has collected an impressive list of accolades, including Rice’s 2013 George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching, DesignIntelligence’s 2013 Most Admired Educator and AIA Houston’s 2009 Educator of the Year. But to truly understand Jimenez is to understand his studio — a work/home hybrid tucked away in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood that serves as both laboratory and sanctuary. A serial traveler, Jimenez says no matter where he goes, he can’t wait to get back — his favorite trip is still to his studio.

Houston’s Sky Because I grew up in Costa Rica where the landscape was always clouded, I was fascinated by the purity of the blue skies of Houston. I found them so moving and powerful that I set out to paint my studio the same blue — one that could blend in. There are moments during parts of the year when I feel it disappears into the sky. That might sound like an odd idea when buildings

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 21

WISDOM

Naivety Is Bliss I remember the sense of accomplishment I felt after I graduated and how it motivated me. I think to retain a certain level of naivety is a healthy thing sometimes, and it instilled in me the confidence to open my own studio.

It was a bit precocious, perhaps, but I really didn’t know many things at the time. I just wanted to see for myself what I learned at school. And I wanted to build it. I thought that’s what architects did.

I didn’t know how to start a career in architecture. I just felt this really powerful feeling compelling me to build. I spent years building my studio, involved in every part of the process. I eventually got larger work and didn’t have to be the contractor anymore, even though I loved being on the job site and seeing the process of transformation. Starting my own studio didn’t feel like a risk at the time.

22 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

I am always fascinated by this capacity that architecture has to create moments of pause and reflection. I’m not interested in an architecture that is always asking for attention. I like when the work is just the experience itself.

A Conversation With the Future Teaching was not something that I had prepared for in any way. A former professor invited me to give a talk in his class about my studio, which had gained a sort of notoriety. I remember the pleasure I derived from talking about what I was doing. Soon after, I began teaching formally at Rice. I realized that teaching for me became a conversation with the future, because students always represent the future.

And it’s important for me to teach because it’s a marvelous equation of learning from your students as much as you teach. I refer to my studio as an academic practice. I love to build, discuss ideas and take students to see buildings, to understand cities and talk to them about phenomena of the world.

The Anachronistic Art In a world that is so immediate and so enthralled with speed and velocity, I believe that architecture is a type of anachronistic art. It still compels you to stop because it offers so many opportunities for reflection, for awareness and for living. Architecture gives enormous pleasure when it succeeds.

It enriches your life. I’ve always thought that architecture needs to be present as an aspiration. It comes from a desire to make the lives of those who inhabit your works better somehow.

It begins in those desires to try to build better through technology, knowledge, culture and ideas.

Observing, Not Looking There’s nothing more powerful than traveling to different cultures. I think it’s a fantastic opportunity to expose students to how architects must negotiate different cultures.

We learn about architecture through lessons and images at school, but architecture is not one-dimensional. It’s a multidimensional involvement that requires us to visit not only the works, but also the surrounding places to understand how they influence the public. For me, it brings a particular felicity to see young people suddenly becoming captivated by something they’ve never seen before. You see their learning instantly.

A lot of the education of an architect is to teach someone how to observe, not to look.

To look is too facile, but to observe — to see deeply into how cultures come together through agencies of urbanism, architecture, food, literature and all the things that make up a culture.

The Joy of Getting Lost in a City When we travel, we also learn about the places we’re traveling to. I don’t surrender to this idea that the world is one single airport. The world becomes even more mysterious to me the moment I arrive in a different place.

Nothing gives me more pleasure, personally, than getting lost in a city I don’t know. By that I mean, I feel safe in that abandonment, the pleasure that travel brings about. It’s very edifying.

ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM CRUFT

of course have a presence that you cannot negate, but my aspiration was for the building to almost not be there. I wanted the work of architecture to be an interior reflection. We live a life so saturated with all kinds of demands — time, money, all the things that overwhelm our lives — and I am always fascinated by this capacity that architecture has to create moments of pause and reflection. I’m not interested in an architecture that is always asking for attention.

I like when the work is just the experience itself.

WISDOM HOW I GOT HERE

Picturing Life

In photography, Paul Hester ’71 finds the tools to question, connect and investigate the world.

PAUL HESTER’S LIGHT BLUE 1992 VOLVO has a license plate that says “LOOK.” It’s the philosophy Hester, now professor emeritus of photography, has been following since he fell in love with photography as a Rice undergrad.

“For me, photography is a tool,” he says. “You get to investigate people’s lives; you get to know people. It’s kind of like a license to poke your nose into places and be curious.”

In January, when a collection of his work went on exhibit at the Rice Media Center, the opening party nearly overflowed with Hester’s former students, colleagues, friends and fans, all elbowing past each other to celebrate his career. We sat down with Hester to find out a few lessons he’s learned from peering at the world through his camera lens.

Photography is a way of connecting to the world.

Hester came to Rice as an architecture major, but he switched to art when he fell in love with photography. And he has made a career with his camera: Besides teaching at Rice from 2003 to 2018, Hester has roamed the state as an architectural photographer and worked on books with his wife and business partner, Lisa Hardaway ’81.

“Photography has kept me sane because it gives me an outlet for questioning, connecting and looking,” he says. “Those are important things to me. As I’ve matured spiritually and psychologically and visually, my pictures have gotten better because I’m clearer about what I’m interested in.”

The “rule of thirds” was made to be broken.

Many of his students had been taught the “rule of thirds,” a basic rule of composition that dictates where the focal point should be placed for an eye-pleasing, calming image.

“I would tell students: To be an artist, you have to break the rules,” Hester says.

“You don’t want to do just what other people have done before. And besides, calm and pleasing is not what our time is.

To be of our time, [photographs] should be fragmented and chopped off, and they should be energized.”

Teaching means helping students build a life.

Former Dean of Undergraduates John Hutchinson gave a speech in 2017 that resonated with Hester. “He said he had learned that the most important thing we are doing is helping students find out how to make their way in the world — how to make their lives,” Hester says. “For me, photography has been that all along. There are things you’re interested in.

You explore it, investigate it, take pictures of it,” he says. “See what you find.”

— ALYSON WARD

PHOTOS BY PAUL HE S T ER

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 2 3

WISDOM

WE DON’T KNOW ...

What the Universe Is Made of

Paul Padley, professor of physics and astronomy, pursues clues to unmask the ultimate identity of dark matter.

WHAT’S THE UNIVERSE MADE of? That’s the overarching question to everything I do. We know from astrophysical observations that it’s mostly made up of dark matter and dark energy, but we don’t really understand what those are.

Dark matter seems to be like some sort of fundamental particle — something that interacts weakly, if at all, with ordinary matter, but still has mass. If you look at the gravitational attraction of big astrophysical objects — galaxies like the Milky Way — they can’t hang together and behave the way they do without having significantly more mass than we can see associated with them. You can’t

24 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

explain the structures you see in the universe without some dark matter there.

Dark energy, on the other hand, is even more slippery. It could just be an artifact of general relativity, or it could be something new — nobody knows.

It was originally postulated because astrophysicists discovered that the universe is not just expanding, but the rate of that expansion is actually accelerating, so there must be some source of energy blowing it apart. By definition, that’s dark energy — but we have no idea what it means.

Now is a great time to be a physicist, because we know with certainty that we don’t know what we’re doing. That means there’s no shortage of opportunities for discovery. What will probably happen in the future is what has historically happened in science: We’ll find something weird nobody predicted.

My hope is that there will be a weird anomaly that shows up in the data we collect at the Large Hadron Collider, [a massive physics instrument that straddles the French-Swiss border], and we’ll say, “What on earth is that?”

Then theorists will look at it, and we’ll get a little more direction.

To put it in very human terms, though, I’m 60 now. If I die and don’t know what dark matter is, I’ll be really pissed off. It really bugs me that we don’t know what it is.

— AS TOLD TO DAVID LEVIN

At the annual Rice Business Plan Competition in April, Vita Inclinata Technologies from Mitchell Hamline Law School in St. Paul, Minn., emerged as the top startup.

Their goal is to develop a load stability system for helicopters that makes hoisting and transporting heavy loads safer and more efficient. Selected by 300 judges as representing the best investment opportunity and taking home nearly $700,000 in cash and prizes, Vita bested 41 other competitors from universities around the world. This year’s award total was a record $2.9 million for the competition, which is sponsored by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship and the Jones Graduate School of Business.

IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y A L E X EB EN ME Y ER

PHOTO BY VICTOR GRABARCZYK / UNSPLASH

STARTUP WINS BIG

WISDOM

PSYCHOLOGY

Attention, Drivers!

PHOTO BY UNSPLASH

Humans may become complacent in automated vehicles, adding risk to the ride.

AUTOMATED CARS are becoming more common, but they still require drivers to react to dangers that aren’t detected by an automated system. New research from Rice and Texas Tech University found that drivers often fail to spot hazards missed by automated vehicles, and it only gets worse the longer drivers ride in them.

The researchers examined the behavior of 60 licensed drivers operating an automated car in a simulator.

Participants were told that due to the automation, they would not need to operate the steering wheel, brake pedal or accelerator pedal. They were instructed to monitor the roadway for vehicles that were stopped dangerously at intersections and intruding into the

driver’s lane, which constituted a hazard that automated vehicles could not detect. Participants also had to distinguish between vehicles that were safely stopped and dangerously stopped at intersections.

The drivers’ accuracy dropped between 7 and 21 percent over the 40minute simulation. Even in the first 10 minutes, the success rate was, at best, close to 88 percent, suggesting that all drivers missed at least some hazards.

So why did this happen?

Pat DeLucia, a professor of psychological sciences at Rice and the study’s co-author, said one possibility is that people get used to cars doing the driving and become complacent. Coupled with previous research that indicated

people are terrible at monitoring for hazards that only happen every once in a while, and that over time their ability to respond decreases, the new study “suggests that this phenomenon of difficulty monitoring effectively over time extends to monitoring an automated car,” DeLucia said.

“The bottom line is, until automated driving systems are completely reliable and can respond in all situations, the driver must stay alert and be prepared to take over,” said Eric Greenlee, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at Texas Tech and the study’s lead author. “These vehicles have a lot to offer, but we’re a long way from being able to detect everything going on,” the researchers wrote.

— AMY MCCAIG

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 2 5

EARTH SCIENCE

Elementary Collision

The planetary collision that formed the moon made life possible on Earth.

26 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

MOST OF EARTH’S ESSENTIAL elements for life — including most of the carbon and nitrogen in you — probably came from another planet. Earth most likely received the bulk of its carbon, nitrogen and other life-essential volatile elements from the planetary collision that created the moon more than 4.4 billion years ago, according to a recent study by Rice petrologists.

“From the study of primitive meteorites, scientists have long known that Earth and other rocky planets in the inner solar system are volatile-depleted,” said Rajdeep Dasgupta, professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences. “But the timing and mechanism of volatile delivery has been hotly debated. Ours is the first scenario that can explain the timing and delivery in a way that is consistent with all of the geochemical evidence.”

Dasgupta’s lab specializes in studying geochemical reactions that take place deep within a planet under intense heat and pressure. Dasgupta, graduate student Damanveer Grewal and postdoctoral researcher Chenguang Sun used data from high-temperature, high-pressure experiments and a computer simulation to find the most likely scenario that produced Earth’s volatiles.

Finding the answer involved varying the simulation’s starting conditions, running approximately 1 billion scenarios and comparing them against the known conditions in the solar system today.

“What we found is that all the evidence — isotopic signatures, the carbonnitrogen ratio and the overall amounts of carbon, nitrogen and sulfur in the bulk silicate Earth — are consistent with a moon-forming impact involving a volatile-bearing, Mars-sized planet with a sulfur-rich core,” Grewal said.

Dasgupta, the principal investigator on a NASA-funded effort called CLEVER Planets that is exploring how lifeessential elements might come together on distant rocky planets, said better understanding the origin of Earth’s life-essential elements has implications beyond our solar system.

“This suggests that a rocky, Earth-like planet gets more chances to acquire lifeessential elements if it forms and grows from giant impacts with planets that have sampled different building blocks, perhaps from different parts of a protoplanetary disk,” he said. “That means we can broaden our search for pathways that lead to volatile elements coming together on a planet to support life as we know it.”

— JADE BOYD

PHOTO BY 123RF

WISDOM

WISDOM NOW READING

Faculty Books

BY JENNIFER LATSON

Energy Kingdoms

Oil and Political Survival in the Persian Gulf Jim Krane (Columbia University Press, 2019)

The Flip

PHOTOS BY JEFF FITLOW

Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge Jeffrey J. Kripal

The Persian Gulf monarchies are some of the world’s greatest producers of oil — and some of its biggest consumers.

At a time when the rest of the world is becoming increasingly energy-efficient, they maintain a culture in which office workers prop lobby doors open during cigarette breaks so they can enjoy al fresco air conditioning, reports Jim Krane, the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow for Energy Studies at Rice’s Baker Institute.

Can the ruling sheikhs, who’ve paid for the loyalty of their subjects with cheap energy, curb unsustainable consumption without destabilizing their realms?

In “Energy Kingdoms,” Krane investigates the political possibilities and considers what the future will hold for countries like Saudia Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar.

Trains, Buses, People

(Bellevue Literary Press, 2019)

An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit Christof Spieler

In 1858, Mark Twain had a vivid dream that his brother Henry was dead. A few weeks later, Henry died for real — in circumstances that so eerily resembled those of his dream, Twain became convinced that he was capable of what he called “mental telegraphy.” In “The Flip,” Jeffrey J. Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought, examines the kinds of anomalous experiences scientists tend to dismiss as coincidence — what we often call paranormal events, such as visions of the future and out-of-body experiences. Although religious scholars can find meaning in such events, other academics have no framework to even consider them, Kripal says. But they should.

In “Trains, Buses, People,” Christof Spieler, a senior lecturer in architecture and engineering, examines the good, the bad and the ugliest mistakes in mass transit design in 47 U.S. cities.

He finds that when cities lose track of the goal of public transit — getting people from where they are to where they want to go — the whole system goes off the rails. Many metropolitan areas have trains to nowhere, with no one on them, while others have dense populations of people who can’t catch a train — or a bus — to anywhere, because there aren’t any. “The measure of success in transit is not miles of track or ribbon cuttings, it is whether transit makes people’s lives better,” he writes.

(Island Press, 2018)

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 27

I.

BEND, BREA K, BLEND If you know where to

13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT CREATIVITY Every day, we see the spark of imagination and invention in Rice’s classrooms, labs, studios and galleries — crossing disciplinary boundaries and generating new ideas and solutions. This year, creativity is a theme of lively classroom conversations and lecture series. We picked 13 ways that Rice faculty and scholarly guests are studying, teaching, expressing or nurturing the creative force that is available, surprisingly, to us all.

28 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

listen, you can hear the creative process unfold right before your ears. That’s especially so if you have a guide like Anthony Brandt, a professor of composition and theory at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music.

Along with neuroscientist David Eagleman ’93, a former Rice colleague who is now at Stanford, Brandt researched and published a book about the neuroscience of creativity called “The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World.” Charmingly illustrated, the book is full of head-spinning examples of humans’ drive to create and the cognitive strategies underlying the creative impulse.

In fact, one of the basic tenets of their research is that imaginative leaps do not spring from eureka moments, but are “the latest branches on the family tree of invention,” they wrote.

“Humans are continually creative: Whether the raw material is words or sounds or sights, we are food processors into which the world is fed, and out of which something new emerges.”

This year, Brandt has served as a maestro of creativity in classrooms at the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies and the Moody Center for the Arts, as well as through planning

PHOTO BY TOMMY LAVERGNE

and participating in the annual Scientia Lecture Series. In fact, in Scientia’s kickoff lecture, Brandt took his audience through a tour de force explanation of how humans imagine and create new ideas.

“Imagination can be thought of as predicting something that has never happened before and creativity as making it come true,” he said to a packed auditorium. So where do new ideas come from? “They evolve from prior experience,” Brandt said. “Creativity is a process of derivation and extrapolation. We remodel what we know.”

Brandt and Eagleman propose an elegant framework for how the brain evolves new ideas — in just three basic cognitive strategies: bending, breaking and blending. In bending what we know, “an original is twisted out of shape or transformed in some way.” A simple example: fonts. In breaking, “a whole is taken apart and something new is made out of some or all of the pieces,” Brandt said. Imagine Julian Schnabel’s plate paintings. And in blending, “two or more sources are merged,” like in the imaginative superhero, the Wasp.

To more fully illustrate “the three B’s” of cognitive strategies, Brandt enlisted musical accompaniment — and a fourth “B.” In Beethoven’s genius, Brandt explained, we can see and hear the strategies of bending, breaking and blending. “And that’s where his creativity is most exposed — and we can all hear it.”

The radical notion of this theory is that the same elements available to Beethoven are available to everyone. Creativity can be taught and learned — or at least practiced.

This has become a core tenet of Brandt’s teaching, especially in courses like MUSI 379: Creativity Up Close, which he taught this spring in both the Glasscock School and for Rice undergraduates. To help Brandt explore creativity as a “universal feature of human cognition,” guest lecturers from engineering, history, business, psychology and the arts brought their own examples of imagination at work to the classrooms.

Back to music, and Brandt’s home turf. “We all have a bit of Beethoven in us. In our daily lives, we bend, break and blend what we say and do, to engage each other and keep ourselves alert,” Brandt reminded the audience.

“Beethoven’s music is a distilled version of all that. That’s one of the reasons why we feel we get wisdom or insight from listening to it.

It helps us understand ourselves and how we relate to the world.”

— LYNN GOSNELL

Hear Brandt talk through these strategies in the first movement of Beethoven’s Opus 59, No. 1. at magazine.rice.edu.

THAT’S GENIUS What do geniuses

have in common? Is the mind of an artistic genius the same as a scientific genius? Can you (or I) learn to be a genius? These are some of the questions that drive the decadeslong research of Dean Keith Simonton.

30 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

ILLUSTRATION BY GETTY IMAGES

II.

A distinguished professor emeritus of psychology at University of California, Davis, Simonton has written extensively on the subject of identifying creative genius, sifting through theories, data and lore to pinpoint the common features of the gifted mind.

His work seeks to explain how the creative genius produces a seminal work, and he argues that “while such breakthroughs often seem to appear in a flash,

the underlying mechanisms are likely to be much more orderly.” In April, Simonton came to the Moody Center to talk about his research.

Building upon the work of psychologist Donald Campbell, Simonton developed a theory that explains the process of highly creative thought. It was Campbell who named the theory blind variation and selective retention (BVSR), but Simonton spent 25 years testing and expanding the central premise — that the creator repeatedly engages in a trial-and-error process before the breakthrough moment.

The theory highlights two specific ways of thinking: superfluity and backtracking.

Superfluity simply means generating a variety of ideas without concern about their eventual usefulness. Backtracking, then, refers to the process of returning to an earlier idea or approach after an unsuccessful creative attempt.

According to Simonton, the significance of BVSR is the ability to attribute specific personality traits, modes of thinking and developmental experiences to the creative genius. His research sugests that an openness to new ideas and participation in a range of interests is necessary to produce the variety of ideas required for superfluity.

Looking forward, Simonton’s research asks if these characteristics can be cultivated or translated into predictive models of genius.

— SARAH BRENNER JONES

III.

PHOTO BY TOMMY LAVERGNE

MIXING IT UP What makes a painting by 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer distinctly recognizable? The intimate settings? The natural light and shadows? The exquisite details? Most people would probably not answer, “the painter’s use of technology.” But art historians surmise that Vermeer employed an early version of the camera — called the camera obscura — to achieve some of these thrilling effects.

Alison Weaver, the Suzanne Deal Booth Executive Director of the Moody Center, recently shared stories about Vermeer’s use of the pinhole camera, Leonardo da Vinci’s engineering drawings and Edgar Degas’ groundbreaking compositions to illuminate the catalytic nature of the arts. As one of the guest speakers in the 2018–2019 Scientia Lecture Series, Weaver brought her expertise as an art historian, administrator and advocate for cross-disciplinary exploration to the topic of creativity.

At the Moody Center, Weaver is leading a robust program that fosters creative conversations and experiences that step across the lines of traditional academic boundaries.

“We’re actively engaged in such questions as, How do art, science and technology relate to each other? ” Now entering its third year, the Moody Center’s programming is leaning hard into that intersection. Through exhibitions, university classes, artists-in-residence programs, theater and dance performances, student workshops and other experiments, Weaver and her staff are creating opportunities for different fields to come together and be inspired to think differently.

For example, in their inaugural season, the center hosted German photographer Thomas Struth. His large-scale images of particle colliders, chemistry labs and NASA’s Johnson Space Center are both familiar and inscrutable. Struth’s image of the “Z-Pinch Plasma Lab,” a device that generates magnetic fields by producing fusion power through compressing plasma, is dazzling in its complexity, with elements of the familiar. “This is an example of how an artist’s vision of our technological university is feeding back into the cultural conversation about the dialogue between the man-made and the natural world,” Weaver added.

While heady topics such as plasma physics, space science and ecology are right at home on Rice’s campus, this robust connectivity with the world of art and humanities is something new. “We want to be a lab for creativity,” Weaver said. Like the groundbreaking artists of the past, these connections help us see the world more clearly — and with thrilling effects.

— L.G.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 31

IV.

PLAYS WITH FOOD

a culinary sense of adventure to fuel the mind of Cesar Tovar, chef de cuisine at Rice’s Seibel Servery.

Tovar, who has worked in Rice Dining for 11 years, grew up watching his mother and grandmother prepare traditional Mexican staples like corn tortillas, fresh salsas and flautas topped with shredded lettuce.

They allowed him access to the kitchen from a very young age, and like many chefs, this early exposure to ingredients and their loving preparation would inspire his own cooking journey.

“I wanted to play with different flavors,” he said of some of his earliest kitchen experiments. “One of my favorite snacks when I was growing up was a tomato. It was sweet, but tart. ‘Let me add some sugar to it.’ It was one of the best things ever — like candy,” he recalled.

Tovar’s culinary education progressed via watching countless episodes of “Yan Can Cook,” the popular 1980s-era show. “Martin Yan was one of my idols,” he said. Formal training at San Jacinto College sealed his career direction and got him to Rice, where he currently oversees meals for students living at Will Rice and Lovett colleges: that’s 1,000–1,300 meals each day. The servery’s menus often include produce from Rice’s half-acre garden, located behind the Rice Media Center.

“Ingredients are first, then recipes,” Tovar said.

“A few weeks ago, we were preparing beets to cook.

Instead of throwing away the juice, I added it to water, along with sugar, pomegranate juice and lemon for an agua fresca. It was very refreshing, and the students really went for it.”

Just like in his mother’s kitchen, some recipes are meant to be followed to a T (like cakes and breads) and some are meant to be played with. “We experiment a lot here, testing and tasting,” he said. “It’s all about trial and error.” While Seibel is known for its healthful dishes and plant-based foods, there’s also room for inventive indulgence — like the birthday cake crepe. “It has a vanilla buttercream icing and sour cream and is topped with whipped cream and sprinkles,” said Tovar of the popular treat.

“It’s everyone’s birthday when we serve that specialty.” — L.G.

PHOTO BY TOMMY LAVERGNE

Local and seasonal ingredients combine with

V.

FAILING BETTER

PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW

What do a giraffe feeder,

an IV drip and a robotic arm have in common? They’re all recent Rice engineering design projects that were tested and refined using a process of rapid or low-fidelity prototyping.

In Rice’s bustling 20,000-square-foot Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK), students work in teams to find solutions to a wide range of clientsponsored engineering challenges.

“The definition of prototyping is solving problems by creating physical or digital artifacts,” said Matthew Wettergreen ’08, who teaches ENGI 120: Introduction to Engineering Design.

Last year more than 140 teams and clubs used the OEDK’s resources. “Rapid

or low-fidelity prototyping is the best place to start when you have a physical idea you need to realize, because it’s low cost, the materials are readily available and it simulates the conditions that exist in places outside the U.S. where resources may not be as abundant.”

Wettergreen sees the seeds of innovation in materials commonly found in a kindergarten classroom — cardboard, tape, scissors and Play-Doh. “You can combine them in fascinating ways to represent objects, tell stories or even achieve function,” Wettergreen said. For the new engineering student who may not be proficient with a lathe or laser cutter, such materials present a low barrier for design.

“One of the things you need to bring to prototyping is that there are no wrong answers,” Wettergreen said. “Everything you build is a stepping stone to the next

idea. Discarded solutions help you to arrive at the selected solution.”

This year, for example, a freshman team was working on a way to identify when hearing protection is recommended around the OEDK machines.

They developed a series of prototypes that would alert users with colors and lights when a machine was too loud.

They went through four or five different versions of these prototypes before settling on a simple geometric design for the case and a series of flashing lights to alert the user to use ear protection.

“The reason that prototyping is an effective strategy to solve problems in a team is that it brings the ideas that people have in their heads into a physical space, allowing them to be discussed, compared and explored,” Wettergreen said. In team projects, getting on the same page is crucial to success. The proof is in the prototype. — L.G.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 33

VI.

CRAWL, WALK, RUN. college, artist Christopher Sperandio contends. They’re educational, artful and powerful vehicles of cultural criticism — not to mention entertaining. An associate professor in the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts, Sperandio embraces comics both as mass culture consumable and as works of artistic integrity.

In his popular course, ARTS 230: Comics and Sequential Art, Rice students learn the history of comic books — “one of the few truly American art forms” — while also producing their own sequential stories. The students who are drawn to the course are generally familiar with superherothemed comic books from the DC and Marvel universes, popular graphic novels like “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale” and Japanese manga — but few have tried their hand at creating their own.

Over the course of the semester, students explore

narrative topics in gradually more complex formats: from simple three-panel forms to three pages and then to a final project — a 16-page original comic. This “crawl, walk, run” approach helps develop the creative process, especially for students who’ve been told they are not creative, Sperandio said.

Some work in digital software, but most are inclined to pick up a pencil and pen to draw their creations.

Freshman Catherine Hettler explored social justice advocacy in her first hand-drawn panel comic, which she described as sort of a PSA about the Women’s March. “It encourages people to look into the march and take a stand.” This class was one of her favorite first-year

34 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

experiences at Rice. “Because we had so much freedom in what we could write about in our comics, it was open to whatever your interests are outside of art. I definitely learned a lot about art and composition, but also storytelling,” Hettler said.

A key teaching resource for the class, Sperandio said, is the Comic Art Teaching and Study Workshop, a repository of comics, original comic art and books on com-

ics located in a former conference room in Sewall Hall.

“Having this comics resource at hand is crucial in teaching as it opens the subject to the students. In closely analyzing the original art, students can unlock how the things were made,” he said.

“I try and get them to think about how do we do this.”

— L.G.

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPHER SPERANDIO

Comics belong in

VII.

PHOTO BY TOMMY LAVERGNE

IMPROV & TRADITION As in daily life, improvisation in jazz means the spontaneous invention of something new. To the audience, this think-on-your-feet creativity may sound effortless — a talent channeled from some mysterious source.

Think of the dazzling solos of jazz giants like alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, singer Ella Fitzgerald or pianist Thelonious Monk, to name just a few.

At Rice, students learn and practice the art of improvisation as well as arranging and composing from jazz instructor and saxophonist Danny Kamins. A Houston native and graduate of the Houston School for the Performing and Visual Arts, Kamins directs the Rice Jazz Ensemble and Jazz Combo (sometimes called Jazz Lab).

Students of any major can sign up for these band classes. “Just about my whole saxophone section is engineering, computer science and poli-sci majors,” Kamins said, noting one exception. “One of the saxophonists is a Shepherd School of Music pianist.”

Like the MOB, the Rice jazz bands are open to Rice alumni and to community members as well.

Improvisation, while wholly original, takes place within a musical context — no matter the musical instrument, the notes build on existing themes and structures. The students steep themselves in jazz tradition by listening to classics, and Kamins introduces them to artists who play the same instrument they do. “Larry Slezak did that for me,” recalled Kamins, who spent his freshman year at Rice before transferring to Oberlin College. Slezak was an instructor in jazz studies at Rice from 1980 to 2016 and a widely respected musician and teacher. “I was a baritone sax player, and I knew nothing about bari sax players. He had me listen to Gerry Mulligan, Pepper Adams and Harry Carney.

It educated me and gave me a historical context on how the instrument worked,” said Kamins, who works to pass along the lesson. To develop students’ confidence and skill in improvisation requires practice and practice — playing with the bands, with Kamins or with the help of accompaniment software.

In the combo band, “everybody has to solo,” he said. Kamins works to create an atmosphere that is a change of pace from their main academic work.

— L.G.

VIII.

BORDER LINES Rice architecture graduate. While designing her master’s thesis, she studied the history, people, natural terrain, and political and social issues of the Mexico-United States border.

She then funneled her findings into a series of designs that reflect the complex dynamic along the border. Her starting point was a piece titled “Claiming the Line,” a foldout, 14-foot-long stitched canvas map that details border infrastructure, historical changes, ongoing transactions and even the interactions necessitated by daily living along the divide.

“I am from Mexico, so this topic naturally interests me,” Gomez explained. Like her adviser, Dawn Finley, a Rice associate professor and director of graduate studies, Gomez is particularly interested in fabrics. One striking feature of the canvas map is its ability to compress and expand. When opened, the viewer sees the border as a whole, but the compressed map zooms into specific instances of border life.

Gomez came to see the border “as a region rather than two countries divided,” and in response she designed a second piece, a building that would “embody the dual character of the border.”

Adorned with different facades facing each country, the building would be a space for humane communication between individuals living on either side and a repository for oral histories of border life.

While Gomez’s designs begin with a thorough examination of her subject, creative progress comes through translating her knowledge into a series of diagrams — often lines and circles that are comprehensible only to Gomez herself. “I identified specific spots along the border and created diagrams that captured the minimal essence or idea of these spaces,” Gomez explained.

“This process helps me to understand how things work. From the diagrams, I can then reshape or extrapolate new designs.” — S.B.J.

36 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

DIAGRAM BY VERONICA GOMEZ

“My creative process always starts with research,” said Veronica Gomez ’19, a recent

IX.

A FAMILY STORY

PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW

How do you distill and

communicate the essence of a person? As a guest lecturer in Anthony Brandt’s Creativity Up Close class, Anne Chao ’05 challenges students to inject creativity into the work of oral history.

Chao, co-founder of the Houston Asian American Archive, is engaged in the work of collecting oral histories that detail the contribution Asian-Americans have made to the Greater Houston area. So far, the archive has amassed more than 200 stories. The assignment for Brandt’s students was to choose a subject, conduct a five- to six- minute interview, and make a presentation that succinctly and creatively

conveys the substance of the individual. “We were pushing the students to think outside of the box while staying true to the idea and purpose of oral history,” Chao explained.

Chao’s favorite project depicted an interview with Christine Hà, a best-selling author and blind chef who took home top honors in season three of the MasterChef competition.

“The team dimmed the lights in the classroom to simulate blindness,” Chao remembered. “Then they gave us

three food samples that corresponded with important moments in her journey.” The sample foods were a peanut butter and jelly sandwich — one of the first “meals” she made after losing her sight; an apple pie — a symbol of a pivotal moment on MasterChef; and a cup of Vietnamese coffee — which represented her heritage.

“In just a few minutes,” said Chao, “they communicated the story and spirit of Christine.”

Chao’s own work at Rice often focuses on amassing

the historical creative output of individuals or groups.

She oversees students who are collecting recipes alongside geographic and familial details from oral history subjects. Chao is also interested in tracing the growth of the civic organizations of immigrant communities, identifying ways these populations banded together to ensure mutual success. “Pulling together different elements of history into functional forms,” Chao said, “is in itself a creative endeavor.”

— S.B.J.

X.

PLIÉ & LEAD

38 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

PHOTO BY 123RF

In the downtown

studios of the Houston Ballet, young dancers spend their days leaping and stretching, bending and spinning. In the ballet’s professional training program, they learn to discipline their bodies to speak the graceful language of dance. Soon the dancers, ages 14–19, will have another muscle to train: They’ll receive lessons in leadership in collaboration with the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice.

But what does leadership have to do with the elegant agility of dance? Everything, if you ask Tom Kolditz, the institute’s founding director. “The arts, to me, are really in need of enhanced leadership,” he said, and that’s because creativity and leadership are often put in separate silos.

Jim Nelson, executive director of the Houston Ballet, met with Kolditz last year and learned about the Doerr Institute.

“It got me thinking: How fantastic would that be, if we at Houston Ballet could expose our younger dancers in the professional track of our school to leadership training, so we are also playing a role in developing the dance leaders of the next generation?”

The dancers will likely receive training much like what’s provided for Rice students: one-on-one or group coaching to help the dancers improve their personal effectiveness, from resolving conflicts to inspiring others.

“Most people in leadership roles in the arts got there by being good artists, not good leaders,” Kolditz said. Society encourages people who excel in creative fields — dance, music, writing, the visual arts — to be independent and somewhat solitary. When they’re faced with leading a group or an organization, they often don’t have the background they need.

While it’s important for artists to have leadership skills, it’s just as important for leaders to have expressive, artistic skills, Kolditz said. Good leaders can see beyond the day to day and develop a vision for the future.

“Creating a vision is an important leader ability, and it’s very artistic,” he said. Like those young dancers in Houston, leaders have discipline, flexibility and a sense of the extraordinary — and they can inspire others to help them make it come alive.

XI.

INTRINSIC REWARDS

PHOTO BY 123RF

The internet

is packed with artful pictures superimposed with concise, insightful quotes about creativity from Teresa Amabile, a creativity scholar at Harvard Business School.

One of the best — “One day’s happiness often predicts the next day’s creativity” — seems like foolproof advice for both managers and creatives.

Amabile, a guest lecturer in the “Creativity Up Close” lecture series this spring, has dissected workplace creativity and constructed a model for ideal creative conditions. Her theory of creativity includes three components internal to the individual that are necessary for creative work. The first two, expertise and creative thinking skills, encompass the knowledge, experience, talent and perspective necessary to generate new ideas,

theories or products. But it’s Amabile’s third component — motivation — that is her biggest contribution to creativity theory. “What I’ve discovered in my research,” Amabile explained, “is that intrinsic motivation is essential for high levels of creativity.” Intrinsic motivation is the drive to do something because of interest, enjoyment or a personal sense of challenge. The opposite form of motivation is extrinsic, which denotes taking action because you have to, you are being forced or because you are working for a reward.

Focusing on workplace culture and team dynamics, Amabile also identified a list of “creativity killers.”

These include expected evaluations, feelings of being watched, working only for a reward, competition, tight restrictions on how work can be performed and an undue focus on extrinsic motivators. “What I’ve tried to do in my research is look at what business organizations and managers can do to relieve the work environment of these extrinsic constraints to allow people’s intrinsic motivation and creativity to blossom.”

— S.B.J.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 39

XII.

MAKING MEANING A playwright, lyricist and

psychologist, James C. Kaufman’s professional and creative work explains why creativity matters — particularly why we should care about it, measure it and nurture it. For Kaufman, the prac-

40 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

tice and presence of creativity make life immeasurably sweeter.

Kaufman, a professor of educational psychology at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut, theorizes that creativity is both a widespread phenomenon and critical to human development.

Rather than reserving the term “creative” for the favored few who produce globally acclaimed works of art or world-changing discoveries, he said, creativity is a label just as easily applied to the prosaic activities of everyday life — learning, problemsolving or making a junior high art project. In February, Kaufman kicked off the “Creativity Up Close” lecture series organized by Anthony Brandt.

Kaufman’s “Four C Model of Creativity,” which he developed with colleague Ronald Beghetto, theorizes creativity as a trajectory. In doing so, his work effectively subdivides creativity into levels, intensities and magnitudes, and offers researchers a defined framework for situating creativity studies. The Four C’s range from minic, moments of meaningful insight, to little-c, which includes everyday creativity. At the higher end, pro-c creativity designates work at an expert level, like publishing a paper or developing a scientific theory, and big-c is reserved for individuals who have changed the field in which they work, whose creation stands the test of time and who can legitimately be called creative geniuses.

In his lecture at Rice, Kaufman spoke to students about the role of creativity in the process of making meaning — emphasizing that all four C’s can make significant contributions. Modern theories of meaning tend to revolve around concepts of coherence, significance and purpose, and Kaufman contends that “creativity can lead you on a path to all three.”

Engaging in expressive writing, losing oneself in a creative task or leaving a creative artifact as a legacy all facilitate the formation of a comprehensible and meaningful self. — S.B.J.

XIII.

SKILLS AT WORK Creativity is Jing Zhou’s

business. As the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, Zhou studies the ways managers can foster creativity and innovation among employees. But the factors that promote — and inhibit — creativity are often the opposite of what you’d expect.

PHOTO BY TOMMY LAVERGNE

A. CONSCIENTIOUS EMPLOYEES need permission to be creative. Managers value conscientious workers, and rightly so: they’re determined, driven and high-achieving. But they aren’t always creative, especially in workplaces where conformity and self-control are prized and risk-taking is frowned upon.

“Conscientious people are responsible, organized and they try hard, but we [Jennifer George, fellow Rice business professor, now retired] demonstrate that under certain conditions, those traits can be bad for creativity,” Zhou said. To liberate the creative impulses of highly conscientious employees, managers need to actively encourage flexibility and free thinking and to support them when they try something new.

B. DIVERSE TEAMS aren’t always more creative. While diverse teams have the potential to be more creative than homogenous groups, they depend on inspiring, motivating and unifying managers — what researchers call “transformational” leaders — to actually unlock that potential. “Team diversity itself does not result in team creativity,” Zhou said. “Rather, the leader needs to exhibit transformational leadership behaviors.”

C. EMBRACE BAD MOODS and dissatisfied employees. Don’t overlook disgruntled workers, Zhou warned: They can be the source of a company’s most groundbreaking innovations. In a 2002 study, Zhou and George found that bad moods often produced good ideas — and vice versa. The reasoning?

“Positive feelings serve as a signal that everything is going well,” they wrote.

“Negative moods signal that the status quo is problematic and that additional effort needs to be exerted to come up with new and useful ideas.”

D. A LITTLE UNDEREMPLOYMENT can be a good thing. When employees work beneath their capacity, they can get bored — but they can also get creative. Moderate underemployment can drive workers to redesign their jobs to better suit their skills, which can help both the worker and the company. (Large discrepancies between a worker’s ability and the work itself are bad for everyone, however.)

E. AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION can be the death of creativity. As Zhou’s research shows, managers can stifle employees’ creative impulses if they focus too much on preventing harm and not enough on promoting innovation.

Preventionfocused managers tend to be cautious toward new ideas, which they associate with danger. Managers are more likely to spot game-changing ideas if they have what Zhou calls “promotion focus”: a level of comfort with new experiences, which they approach with a sense of adventure. — JENNIFER LATSON

I.

Employ your creative license to vary the language and meaning of the poem.

II.

Make your changes vary even more from the original.

III.

This variation may barely resemble the original.

IV.

This variation should break the mold of the original poem in some way.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Go back to school by completing this creativity exercise.

Classical musicians have mined the form of

themes and variations to create enduring works of imagination. As a listener, think of Beethoven’s 33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, Op. 120 or Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. But riffing on a theme holds meaning for many musical styles as well as for the performing arts, literature, scientific research and daily life (as in recipes). Anthony Brandt has found that students respond to the idea of variations on a theme as a creative exercise. By using poems (instead of musical notes) as the source material, Brandt opens up the exercise to all.

We invite our readers to be students again by participating in the “Variations on a Theme” exercise. Here’s how it works.

Begin with a poem. We’ve reprinted “The Soul selects her own Society” by Emily Dickinson. Use this poem (or another of your choosing) as the source. Create four variations on the poem, with each one getting further and further way from the source.

Send your completed homework to ricemagazine@rice.edu, and we’ll select some to print or link to in a future issue.

42 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

The Soul selects her own Society (303) Emily Dickinson, 1830–1886 The Soul selects her own Society — Then — shuts the Door — To her divine Majority — Present no more — Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing — At her low Gate — Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling Upon her Mat — I’ve known her — from an ample nation — Choose One — Then — close the Valves of her attention — Like Stone — c. 1862 To see what some Rice students did with this assignment, go to magazine.rice.edu.

DAGUERREOTYPE TAKEN CIRCA 1848 FROM THE TODD-BINGHAM PICTURE COLLECTION AND FAMILY PAPERS, YALE UNIVERSITY MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES DIGITAL IMAGES DATABASE

TRY THIS AT HOME

Your variations are not limited to speech, but can involve multimedia such as images and video.

ALUMNI

PROFILES, HISTORY AND CLASSNOTES

NIGHT OWL

Bistro Love

Late nights, wine and good bar food are a specialty of William “Trey” Smith, chef and owner of New Orleans eatery Saint-Germain.

BY ALICE LEVITT

PHOTOS BY TODD SP OT H

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 4 3

ALUMNI

Y

OU MAY BE ABLE to thank Chapultepec Lupita, a popular Tex-Mex restaurant in Houston, for inspiring one of New Orleans’ top chefs. In his years at Rice, William “Trey” Smith ’06 recalls, “If you knew where to go [in Houston], there were some really good late-night places.” Now he has his own wine bar and restaurant, Saint-Germain in NOLA’s hip Bywater neighborhood, which is open until midnight during the week and 2 a.m. on weekends. “We’re serving bar food all night,” he says.

But don’t expect frozen mozzarella sticks. After Rice, Smith went on to law school but also worked at a brewery, where he learned to make beer and cooked under a Bavarian master chef.

He was inspired to leave law school with just a few credits left in order to study at The Culinary Institute of

44 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

In the style of his favorite Parisian eateries, which serve natural wines supplemented by sister wine bars across the street from the restaurants, SaintGermain is a hybrid, part wine bar, part destination eatery.

America in Hyde Park, N.Y. He did his externship at Restaurant August, where he fell in love with New Orleans. He joined chef Michael Gulotta as chef de cuisine at Asian-influenced MoPho, then Maypop. But before that, Gulotta also provided Smith the opportunity to work on the border of Germany’s Black Forest and Alsace, France.

Regular jaunts to Paris cemented a deep love for modern bistros like Frenchie and Septime. “It’s just so casual, and yet the food is as inspired and as good [as more formal restaurants],” he says.

So when it came time to open his own restaurant with co-chef Blake Aguillard and general manager Drew DeLaughter last year, it was clear that there was a hole to be filled in the New Orleans market for just such a casual French spot. In the style of his favorite Parisian eateries, which serve natural wines supplemented by sister wine bars across the street from the restaurants, Saint-Germain is a hybrid, part wine bar, part destination eatery.

But even the bar is a worthy stop for fans of great cuisine. “We joke that we want to serve the best food you can get wearing a T-shirt,” says Smith. That means a bar menu that includes homemade cheese and chicken liver pâté, both served with naturally leavened bread that Smith makes inhouse.

The byproducts of the bar food supply the finest dishes in the restaurant. Smith uses potato peels from the bar’s hand-cut fries to make the intense potato stock that flavors the sweetbread appetizer — playing on the classic dish of sweetbreads and pommes purées. The meat is poached in the whey left over from cheesemaking before it’s fried crisp. Fermented scraps from motley greens that local farmers bring to the kitchen top the dish.

Smith, wearing a Rice baseball cap, presents his dishes in the dining room with purposeful explanations of what he’s created.

It’s partly to keep his long hair in place in the kitchen, but also a nod to the place where he says he learned to make his entrepreneurial dreams a reality.

LIFE AFTER RICE

It Takes a Role Model to Know One With support from family and women in engineering, Brandi Bridges builds a ladder to success.

BRANDI BRIDGES ’07 doesn’t take the role models in her life lightly. “My dad was an engineer and my mom was a teacher — both were incredibly supportive of my undergrad and graduate education.” In addition, her cousin and her aunt went to Rice. “I was lucky enough to have two Rice alumnae in my family.”

She was also fortunate to feel supported as a female engineering student at Rice. “Of the eight students in the civil and environmental engineering program in my class, seven were female, which was rare at that time,” she said. “Throughout my career, I’ve participated in events like Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day and STEM camps. It’s on all of us to support girls and women pursuing science careers.”

Bridges also majored in Hispanic studies to continue her study of Spanish, which led to a semester in Madrid.

“Unsurprisingly, it was my favorite semester,” she said. “I still speak Spanish, and it has allowed me opportunities to work abroad in Mexico and Chile.”

After graduating from Rice, she began her career in production operations at ExxonMobil, a company she was familiar with after completing two internships there. Based in Houston, she traveled frequently. “Having the opportunity right out of college to get out of the office, travel and see where the real work was done was really neat,” she said.

Inspired by her father who pursued an MBA while working full time, Bridges always knew she would go back to school, and did so after four years at ExxonMo-

P H O T O B Y S A R A S TAT H A S

bil. She chose Harvard Business School because of its case method curriculum.

“Business school was very different from my engineering classes,” she said. “It focused on critical thinking, considering peer perspectives and thinking through an argument. While preparation was important, it was more about being in the moment, and it took me a second to get comfortable with that. It takes practice to hone those skills.”

After earning her MBA, Bridges joined the consulting world at McKinsey & Company in Chicago, where she’s been for more than five years. As a project manager, Bridges serves a variety of manufacturing companies as they work on improving their operations. “For each project, I get the chance to go into an organization and work alongside their employees toward the same goal,” she said. “There’s a lot of camaraderie that develops in my work, and it’s very

rewarding to see the transformations.”

Bridges’ greatest challenge — professionally and personally — is recognizing where she can make the biggest impact every day. “You’ll always have 100 things to get done and only enough time to get to 20,” she said. “You must focus on the highest-value opportunities, which is a critical skill to develop.”

While her career has taken her all over, Bridges finds ways to connect with her Rice roots. She serves as a board member for the Association of Rice University Black Alumni and was recently elected to the board of the Association of Rice Alumni. She enjoys hosting Rice alumni events in Chicago with her husband, Vasco Bridges ’03. With the arrival of her first child, Bridges is undoubtedly a role model to another girl, Joycie Serena, whose namesakes are Bridges’ grandmother and the greatest athlete of all time.

— KENDALL SCHOEMANN

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 4 5

ALUMNI CLASSNOTES

Owls With Friends Excerpts from Owlmanac

CLASS OF 1961 Jody Hanke Schwarz (Jones: BA) participated in the 1961 sit-in [at the Greyhound bus station lunch counter in Houston] and she sends the following: “I found a newspaper article about the sit-in and a letter I’d written to my parents about it. Being Rice students, we brought some books or assignments to work on in case we were arrested! To my knowledge, no one was arrested.” — contributed by class recorder Nancy Thornall Burch (Jones: BA)

CLASS OF 1981 This winter found George and me traveling on a Viking Cruise to Australia and New Zealand. Within hours of arriving on the ship (which carries only 930 passengers), I met four people with Rice connections — Owls are evidently traveling far and wide! One couple’s connection is to a current student, already delighted with the Rice experience. The second couple are alums — Emily Steinbis ’02

(Baker: BS), who studied bioengineering and is currently an OB-GYN, and her husband, Adam AufderHeide ’07 (PhD), who also studied bioengineering and is currently an eye surgeon. They live in Oregon. Both are very accomplished and were adding sailing skills on an America’s Cup class boat to their resume when we met.

— contributed by class recorder Gloria Meckel Tarpley (Brown: BA)

CLASS OF 1954 John Aronson (BA) writes to advise us of the interesting people he has met in the retirement home: The son of a man who won an Oscar for scenery design in “Gone with the Wind”; a French woman who lived in Beirut, Iran, etc. with her GE engineer husband; a 96-year-old retired soldier who is deaf in one ear, suffered when a Nazi V-1 blew up the building in Antwerp, Belgium, next door to his home; a woman who fled with her child during the Nazi invasion of Belgium; CLASS OF 2009 a multilingual wildlife veterinarian from “After graduating from Rice, I moved to Taiwan on a scholarship that allowed me pre-Mandela South Africa whose name to study Mandarin and earn an MBA at a local university. During that time, I met he cannot pronounce; a woman whose my husband, Leo, then a PhD student in electrical engineering, who provided art professor husband was at Kent State me with the knowledge base of one of Taiwan’s key industries, semiconductor during the terrible event there; and a remanufacturing. In 2015, I took a position as speechwriter to the executives at tired Army colonel who was shipped out Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., while my husband took a position as a one day before an atomic bomb explosion principal R&D engineer.” — contributed by Kelly Ramos (Baker: BA) that unfortunately caused cancer in many of his comrades. — contributed by class To create a Rice Portal account, go to alumni.rice.edu/connect. Once recorder Neil O’Brien (BA) registered, log in and click “Owlmanac Online.”

46 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y A L L I S O N K ER EK

ALUMNI TRADITIONS

Rough & Tumble

Rice’s club rugby team celebrated an improbable 50th anniversary last year.

STEWART MORRIS JR. ’71, founder of the Rice Rugby Football Club, pulls out a photo of himself and slides it across a conference room table in Herman Brown Hall. “I was in my mid-60s then,” he says, motioning to the image of him diving, head buried into the hip of a man barely half his age. “But I made that tackle.”

“Or did he fall down because he knew you were the one making it?” quips Ed Brown, a former Rice rugby coach, prompting an immediate retort.

“No! I took him down!” says Morris, as the group laughs.

For more than an hour, the men in the room — six in total, ranging from faculty sponsors to rugby alumni association presidents to former players and coaches — continue to swap stories. They’ve gathered on campus to reminisce about Rice rugby, and then maybe grab a beer at Valhalla to reminisce some more. Together they represent 50 years of rugby at Rice, which Morris, now 70 years old, founded on campus in 1968.

“I never left it,” he says. “Rugby is one of those things that gets in your blood and stays close to your heart.”

It’s not exactly common for a university club team to amass a tradition this long or this rich, especially not for a sport as niche as rugby. Historically popular in countries like New Zealand, Australia and England, rugby is only now gaining popularity in the United States. But Morris and Rice were ahead of the curve when they founded what was, at the time, just the second college rugby club in the state of Texas. Since then, the Owls have won nine Texas

Morris and Rice were ahead of the curve when they founded ... the second college rugby club in the state of Texas.

Since then, the Owls have won nine Texas State Championships, including a top 10 finish in the country in 2000.

State Championships, including a top 10 finish in the country in 2000.

“Rugby, especially at Rice, is a fraternity. It’s like their family away from home,” says Brown, who coached the team from 1996 to 2007. “These kids get so close that they have relationships for the rest of their lives. It’s more than a

game. It’s a fraternity, a way of life.”

“It’s a brotherhood and, now, a sisterhood,” adds Jabus Roberts, who is rugby’s faculty associate, resident scholar, and a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice.

The reason for such sustained success and camaraderie? “That’s easy,” says McMurtry senior and current team captain Lane Toungate. “It’s the alumni, no doubt.” Thanks to alumni support, the team sends two players to New Zealand each year and the whole team to Ireland every four years. They have also secured a lauded group of coaches over the years, including current head coach Mario Botha from South Africa. Morris throws a barbecue each year for alumni and current players, and then there’s the annual alumni game, which gives “originals” like Morris a chance to keep tackling well after graduation.

“There’s a thread of toughness that permeates through everyone on the field,” says Morris. “You may lose blood, lose skin, but that’s a small price to pay compared to the exhilaration of team play.”

— JAMES COSTANZO

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 47

I was completely out of my element, but despite the challenges of navigating a massive metropolis, I felt an immediate magnetic energy — one of empowerment and opportunity.

LETTER HOME

Greetings From NYC

Rahul Kothari ’17 finds an empire state of mind.

MY FIRST DAY OF WORK in New York City could have been the opening scene of a romantic comedy — I got on the uptown train instead of the downtown train, a taxi drove through a puddle and splashed me with muddy water, and I went on the worst Tinder date

48 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

I’ve ever been on later that evening.

Before my move, my friends kept telling me that living in New York City wasn’t going to be like the movies. As I sat in bed that night, glass of wine in hand, I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of how that first day played out.

Having spent my entire life up to that point in Texas, New York City felt like a whole new world. I traded in my car for a MetroCard and H-E-B for corner bodegas. I also consistently had to answer the question, “Is everything really bigger in Texas?” I was completely out of my element, but despite the challenges of navigating a massive metropolis, I felt an immediate magnetic energy — one of empowerment and opportunity. The drive and ambition of everyone around me was inspirational, and it didn’t take long for this concrete jungle to feel like home.

I work at BuzzFeed’s headquarters in New York City, heading up a division of our marketing team. In between munching on leftovers from the Tasty kitchen and being accidentally elbowed

by Stephen Colbert, I get to work in one of the world’s largest media hubs with some of the most creative minds in the industry to build our company’s marketing strategy. I also serve as one of the leads of Out@BuzzFeed, a culture and resource group for LGBTQ+ employees. Much like my time at Rice, I’m surrounded by a rich diversity of people, ideas and resources, all working toward a common set of goals.

My life has changed a great deal during these last few years in New York City. For starters, I figured out which train platform was uptown and which was downtown, I avoid waiting on the sidewalk near puddles, and I now have a long list of exit strategies to get out of bad dates. The only thing that remains from that first day is the magnetic energy that inspired me — the one that keeps me here.

PHOTO BY MICHAEL NAGIN

ALUMNI NOW READING

Alumni Books

BY JENNIFER LATSON AND MARIANA NAJERA ’21

Measure What Matters

How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs John Doerr ’73 (Portfolio, 2018)

A Fierce Glory

Antietam — The Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery Justin Martin ’87

PHOTOS BY JEFF FITLOW

(Da Capo Press, 2018)

The battle was a draw, but it marked a turning point in the Civil War — and in U.S. history. As Justin Martin demonstrates in “A Fierce Glory,” the Battle of Antietam was a pivotal moment that helped turn the tide for the Union, pave the way toward ending slavery and ultimately unite a nation on the brink of permanent division. In a narrative that cuts back and forth between the field where America’s bloodiest battle was fought and the Oval Office, where the fate of the nation rested on its outcome, Martin focuses on Abraham Lincoln’s offstage part in the drama and the role Antietam played in America’s evolution. — J.L.

John Doerr, chairman of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, reveals how strategic goal-setting systems, called objectives and key results (OKRs), have helped tech giants, nongovernmental organizations and other enterprises grow and evolve far beyond their expectations. Objectives, Doerr explains, are the “WHAT is to be achieved” and key results are “HOW to get to the objective,” meaning that OKRs channel company efforts and coordination, creating a sense of purpose. Featuring a broad range of case studies with narrators such as Bono and Bill Gates, this book explores the reasons behind the effectiveness of OKRs and also offers practical tips to enhance performance, retention and satisfaction in the workplace. — M.N.

A Necessary Hero G.W. Kennedy ’67 (Black Opal Books, 2018)

Set in the middle of World War II, “A Necessary Hero” tells the story of John Mackenzie “Mack” Simmons III, the one-eyed janitor and son of a powerful businessman. After his best friend, Tommy, dies in the war, Mack is drawn into the world of Chicago’s seedy underbelly as he discovers the criminal intrigues of Tommy’s family. While simultaneously trying to deal with his background of privilege, follow guntoting gangsters and chase the love of his life, Mack is an everyman protagonist who pulls the reader alongside him through his series of adventures in WWII-era Chicago. G.W. Kennedy is the pen name of author and Baker College alumnus William Kennedy. This is his fourth novel. — M.N.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 49

02.07.2019 // Veronica Zheng ’19 and Nicholas McMillan ’19 // Anderson Biological Laboratories

LAST LOOK 50 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 2019

PHOTO BY BR ANDON MARTIN

Rosemary Rodd ’63 struggled financially to put herself through college.

After spending one year at Rice, she left to work full time as a secretary, eventually taking night classes at another university. Most semesters, she could barely afford to take one class.

Above: Rosemary on Rice’s campus, 2018 Framed photo: Rosemary as a student, 1963

More than 50 years later, Rosemary returned to Rice to fund a scholarship, hoping to help students like her. “When I attended, I was impressed by the quality of Rice and very much wished I could have stayed and graduated,” she says. “Giving to schools and students is one of my favorite things. I just remember how hard I had to work and scrape to go to school.”

To learn more about To Rice Be True, the flagship initiative for gift planning at Rice, visit giftplan.rice.edu/toricebetrue.

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

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

ON THE WEB

magazine.rice.edu

NEXT UP

EXCLUSIVE

Recipes

Want to be a nerd about plant-based cooking? You totally flan. Elana Margosis ’19 shares a simple and highly adaptable vegan flan recipe online.

Also, Cesar Tovar, chef de cuisine at Seibel Servery, shares a cooling agua fresca recipe — just in time for summer.

VIDEO

Listening to Creativity

Our “13 Ways of Looking at Creativity” feature was inspired by the 2018–2019 Scientia Lecture Series and how the creative impulse unites us all. A link to the full series is online.

INTERACTIVE

OUR UPCOMING SUMMER ISSUE is all about life after Rice.

We’re sharing advice and stories for fledgling Owls and rolling out a practical guide to navigate the wave of unending postgraduate decisions. For our newest alums, we’re diving into your pressing questions: Should you stay in Houston or move to a new city? Should you go to grad school, and if so, when? We’ll explore the stages of job searching — and keeping — as well as ways to prioritize self-care and how to change career paths. We’re tapping into our resources to bring you some postgrad life hacks. No matter where life takes you after Rice, the support and camaraderie of your fellow Owls are never far.

Homework Help!

On Page 42, we gave you a homework assignment. Online, we show you examples of how students enrolled in Creativity Up Close completed the same assignment. Creativity Up Close was taught as both an undergraduate course and as a Community Learning and Engagement course through the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies.