Rice Magazine Winter 2006

Page 50

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W H O ' S

W H O

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— Vicki Whamond Bretthauer — Janice Suber McNair — Robert McNair — David Alexander — Eva Haverkamp — Caroline Levander — Randi Martin — Richard Tapia — Michael Deem — Rebekah Drezek — Marcia O’Malley — Sidney Burrus — Robert Curl — Joyce Farwell — Graham Glass — Werner Kelber — William Leeman — Ronald Sass — Gale Stokes — Sandra Gilbert — Greg Williams — Cynthia Wilson — Ronda Platt

In the News

48

Alumna Bretthauer Joins Board as ARA Representative

Jones School Building Named for McNairs

Vicki Whamond Bretthauer ’79 was named to the Rice University Board of Trustees as the representative of the Association of Rice Alumni (ARA). She will serve a four-year term. A 22-year veteran of the airline industry, Bretthauer is a consultant with DLS Associates, a transportation consulting firm specializing in resource planning, scheduling, and operations management. She also is an advisor/investor with Waverly Capital on an airline startup in China. An active alumna, she is a member of the alumni board, past president of the ARA, and chairs the Rice alumni group in Chicago. She also serves on the Council of Overseers for the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management and has served on the Rice board committee on resource development and alumni affairs. Bretthauer, who lives in Florida and Chicago, has an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University in marketing and operations. She is a member of the business advisory committee for the transportation center at Northwestern and is a frequent lecturer at the center.

The newest building on the Rice campus, the 167,000-squarefoot home of the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, has been officially named Janice and Robert McNair Hall by the Rice Board of Trustees. Robert McNair, chair and chief executive officer of the McNair Group and majority owner of the Houston Texans, served on the Rice Board of Trustees from 1994 to 2002 and as honorary co-chair of the Rice: The Next Century Campaign, which concluded last year. He and his wife, Janice, who serves with him as a Rice Associate and member of the William Marsh Rice Society, made the largest gift to the $502.7 million campaign in support of the Jones School.Through the Houston Texans, the McNairs also helped to underwrite a sports management program at the Jones School. McNair is perhaps best known in the business community as the founder of CogenTechnologies, one of the world’s largest cogeneration companies, which was sold in 1999. The McNair Group oversees an investment portfolio that includes cogeneration assets in the eastern United States.

Rice Sallyport

Active in the Houston community, McNair is a current or past member of the boards of trustees of a number of institutions in addition to Rice, including Baylor College of Medicine; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Houston Grand Opera; Greater Houston Partnership; Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau; the Free Enterprise Institute; and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Janice Suber McNair also is well known in the Houston community for her philanthropic and civic commitment. With her husband, she established the Robert and Janice McNair Foundation, which provides significant support to a wide variety of charitable, scientific, literary, educational, and religious organizations. She also is a strong supporter of the Houston Zoo, where the Janice Suber McNair Asian Elephant Habitat has been open since 1994. The McNairs’ past gifts to Rice include funding to endow the chair of the director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

Astrophysics’ Alexander Earns White House Honor Rice University astrophysicist

David Alexander has been named a recipient of the 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, one of the nation’s foremost honors for professionals at the outset of their independent research careers. Alexander, the Andrew Hayes Buchanan Associate Professor of Astrophysics and associate professor of physics and astronomy, was one of 58 researchers honored in a White House ceremony June 13. A member of the Rice faculty since 2003, Alexander specializes in the study of the sun. His work in the fields of solar and solar terrestrial physics spans theory, modeling, simulation, and data analysis. He has helped develop models of solar flares and worked on a range of other problems, including coronal heating, 3-D simulations of the corona, large-scale eruptions, coronal mass ejections, and magnetic reconnection. Throughout his career, Alexander has been active in the areas of education and public outreach. He works regularly with NASA’s Sun–Earth Connections Education Forum, and he created the successful Solar Week educational program, which offers teachers a weeklong series of web-based


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