Rice Magazine | Fall 2019

CRACKING COLD CASES WITH DNA

FALL 2019

THE DNA DETECTIVE

C

A lifelong love of science and fascination with family roots have served Colleen Fitzpatrick well as she works to unlock the mysteries of criminal cold cases.

By Dick Anderson

olleen Fitzpatrick ’76 grew up surrounded by living history. “I was very close to all of my grandparents,” the New Orleans native says. “I knew some of their brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles quite well, and my grandparents often spoke to me about the ones who had already passed.

As I got older, I was more formally researching, asking questions on my own and getting motivated to interview people in the family.” ¶ That precocious interest in family roots, combined with an inborn knack for scientific inquiry, developed into a career in forensic genealogy — or her popular talk. Using every resource at her disposal, from photographs and databases to DNA registries, Fitzpatrick made a name for herself working on some of the biggest genealogical mysteries in American history, from Abraham Lincoln’s DNA to Amelia Earhart’s whereabouts.

Illustrations by Lincoln Agnew

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Photo by Rozette Rago

COVER PHOTO OF COLLEEN FITZPATRICK BY JASON HENRY

“CSI Meets Roots,” to borrow the name of

Colleen Fitzpatrick at home in Fountain Valley, California M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 3

A BUDDING SCIENTIST

But it’s a different kind of mystery — of the John and Jane Doe variety — that has galvanized the efforts of scores of genealogical sleuths scattered across the landscape. Fitzpatrick is the co-founder, along with fellow genealogist Margaret Press, of the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit humanitarian initiative that aims to identify deceased persons whose fate is lost to their loved ones. It’s a team effort led by dedicated volunteers, all connected through the internet and social media and riding the wave of interest in genealogy made affordable by the likes of 23andMe and Ancestry.

Over the last 2 1/2 years, the project has solved 14 Doe cases — 10 Janes and four Johns — through the collective efforts of more than 80 volunteers using advances in DNA technology and an ever-expanding online DNA database to solve previously unsolv-

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able mysteries, many of which date back decades.

Working out of her home in Fountain Valley, California, Fitzpatrick spends her days tracking cases, sending DNA off for lab work, shepherding cases through the system, talking to the media and even doing a bit of genealogy herself. Since 2010, her for-profit enterprise, Identifinders International, has worked roughly 120 cold cases, helping to solve “about a dozen,” she says. “I hand leads to the detectives working the case, and they have to run with those leads.”

At any moment the phone might ring, adding to her caseload. “Somebody might call and say, ‘We found another woman in the ditch who has been strangled. We only have her hands and her torso. Can you do anything?’”

Upon reflection, she adds, “I may not bring that up at the next cocktail party.”

“I came from hardworking, smart people, but I really came from nowhere,” says Fitzpatrick, a descendant of Irish immigrants.

“My dad was a florist; my mom was president of the mothers’ club, and they had three kids to raise besides me. My parents wanted their kids to succeed but didn’t know what to do about me.”

Going to an all-girls Catholic school “where science was not emphasized,” Fitzpatrick nurtured her hunger for archaeology, astronomy and other sciences through different channels, including a National Science Foundation-sponsored summer program in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She won countless science awards growing up and was handed a box of trophies at her senior awards ceremony: “When they announced the science award, I stood up before they said my name.”

It was another science award that made her Rice education possible.

“I had been accepted by Rice, and my dad went there to see if he could get a scholarship for me because we were just really more than broke — my grandmother was ill and we had medical bills to pay. And they told him no.”

Then a telegram arrived, addressed to Fitzpatrick, that would change her life. “It said, ‘Congratulations, you won one of 10 top national prizes in the Tomorrow Scientists and Engineers Competition sponsored by Humble Oil. And your prize is a scholarship to the college of your choice,’” she recalls. The $6,000 prize “would not even pay for books these days, but that covered Rice tuition for four years.”

PHYSICS TO FORENSIC GENEALOGY After graduating from Rice with a B.A. in physics, Fitzpatrick went on to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Duke University. In 1989, she founded Rice Systems (named for her mother, the former Marilyn Rose Rice) in her garage. It was an optics company that specialized in high-resolution laser measurement techniques for the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Defense.

Her company moved to an office complex in Irvine, California, and employed a host of scientists and contractors before closing in 2005.

“As a small, woman-owned business,” she says, “it was hard to survive in the business and political environment at that time.”

As her company was winding down, Fitzpatrick found a welcome distraction in writing a book that combined her love for genealogical research with her background in the sciences. Together with her co-author and domestic partner, engineering and business management consultant Andrew Yeiser, Fitzpatrick opened a publishing company and released “Forensic Genealogy” in 2005 with an initial run of 500 copies. The weekend that her business was liquidating its office furniture, she attended her first genealogy conference in Portland, Maine, with her book in tow. “I shared a table with a DNA company we were working with, and I couldn’t stop selling books,” she says. “This was the start of a whole new career.” Over the next few years, “Forensic Genealogy” sold 20,000 copies.

In 2006, “Forensic Genealogy” attracted the attention of an investor working in unclaimed real estate. He was trying to locate a married couple in Taiwan to buy a house that had gone into escrow with the state of Florida because the owners had not paid their back taxes. Using her online research prowess, she quickly located the property’s former owners — in Taipei.

But in the interest of getting a bigger return on her effort, she told the investor, “‘Since Taiwan is so hard to research, I want to charge you an arm and a leg for this, but I will make you a

identified the remains of the “Unknown Child on the Titanic” as Sidney Leslie Goodwin, a 19-monthold English boy. Though Yeiser passed away in 2016, Fitzpatrick’s work with Identifinders still occupies about half of her research time.

A NEW CAREER

IN 2008, WORKING WITH THE ARMED FORCES DNA IDENTIFICATION LABORATORY, FITZPATRICK WAS A MEMBER OF THE TEAM THAT IDENTIFIED THE REMAINS OF THE “UNKNOWN CHILD ON THE TITANIC” AS SIDNEY LESLIE GOODWIN, A 19-MONTH-OLD ENGLISH BOY.

sporting deal. Give me four days to find these people, and I want the arm up front. If I can’t find them in four days, I’ll give you the arm back. But if I do find them, I want the leg to go with it.’

The hard part was waiting 3 1/2 days to tell him I had success,” Fitzpatrick says.

That work was the beginning of Identifinders International, the business she co-founded with Yeiser.

Over the last 14 years, Identifinders has tackled a wide scope of cases, from Baby Does and Holocaust survivors to murder suspects and military IDs. In 2008, working with the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, Fitzpatrick was a member of the team that

It was only after she met Margaret Press, a retired software developer and published mystery writer living in Sebastopol, California, that the DNA Doe Project came to be. Press took an interest in genealogy from her grandmother, a founding member of the Southern California Genealogical Society. “She lived in Long Beach, and she was always doing genealogy when I would go down and visit her,” says Press, who grew up in Los Angeles.

“Like a lot of people, I started out helping others who didn’t know who their parents were,” she says. “My family tree was very compelling, but not nearly as significant as helping a friend find out who their parents were.”

In 2017, about a year into her retirement, Press read “Q Is for Quarry,” Sue Grafton’s 2002 novel based on the real-life unsolved murder of a Jane Doe found near a quarry off California’s Highway 1 in 1969. Unable to shake her own interest in the case that inspired Grafton’s novel, Press reached out to Fitzpatrick, having stumbled onto her public Forensic Genealogy Facebook group some months earlier. As Fitzpatrick tells the story, “I had already worked about 100 cold cases when Margaret approached me, because there was a big discussion in the genealogy world about using ancestry.com in cold case work to identify John and Jane Does.”

Soon after their initial conversation, they learned of a genealogist who had been eager to test his late father’s DNA. After he recovered a tissue biopsy belonging to his father, he sent that tissue to an independent lab for a process called whole genome

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 5

TESTING THE THEORY Now they only needed some John Does to test their theory. Using her law enforcement contacts, Fitzpatrick

THE DNA DOE PROJECT CRACKED ITS SECOND CASE IN FIVE HOURS: THAT OF MARCIA KING, AKA “BUCKSKIN GIRL,” A 21-YEAR-OLD MURDER VICTIM WEARING A BUCKSKIN LEATHER JACKET WHEN SHE WAS DISCOVERED IN A DITCH OUTSIDE OF TROY, OHIO, IN 1981.

secured DNA samples from a couple of test cases that had long gone cold.

One was “Joseph Newton Chandler III.” Chandler’s suicide in 2002 led

authorities in Eastlake, Ohio, to discover that he had stolen the identity of a dead child 24 years earlier. The real Chandler perished in a car crash in Texas in 1945.

“Ninety percent of Chandler’s DNA had been degraded,” Fitzpatrick says.

But genetic genealogy tools were created for use with data generated from “fresh” DNA. So to test whether the tools worked with compromised DNA, Fitzpatrick degraded her own 23andMe results along with that of her late partner using software she created.

“I checked the list of matches I had for the data generated before and after I degraded our DNA results, and the two lists were almost the same.” The result told her that the tools could work with compromised DNA. Late one night, after six months and roughly 3,000 hours of work, a volunteer identified Chandler as Robert Ivan Nichols, originally from New Albany, Indiana.

It was March 6, 2018 — one year after U.S. Marshal Peter J. Elliott shared Chandler’s DNA sample with Fitzpatrick and Press. As Forensic Genealogy’s Facebook group lit up with the news, Fitzpatrick awoke Press with a voicemail. “I still have the voice message from Colleen,” Press says.

The next morning, Press and Fitzpatrick called Elliott with the news and filled him in on all the records they had found — where Nichols had lived and the names of his wife, sons and parents. “The marshal was completely floored at how much information we had about somebody he thought would absolutely never be identified,” Fitzpatrick adds.

It would be nearly 10 weeks before Elliott went public with the news. “We couldn’t say anything about it right away,” Fitzpatrick says. There was some suspicion that Nichols was the “Zodiac Killer,” the

Marcia King, aka “Buckskin Girl” 6 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2019

PHOTO VIA WIKIPEDIA/FAIR USE

sequencing at a cost of roughly $1,500.

Using the results, he was able to use bioinformatics software to replicate ancestry-like data that he uploaded to GEDmatch, an open data genomics database and genealogy website that Fitzpatrick calls a “watering hole” for genealogists.

“He had compared himself and his cousins and his brothers against his dead father’s manufactured, synthetic data” — the product of whole genome sequencing — “and it worked like a charm — like the guy was alive,” Fitzpatrick notes. “If we could do the same thing for the DNA from John and Jane Does, couldn’t we use the same techniques to identify them?” And the DNA Doe Project was born.

PHOTO BY SARA PRESS

Colleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press

serial murderer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s.

In the interim, the DNA Doe Project cracked its second case: that of Marcia King, aka “Buckskin Girl,” a 21-year-old murder victim wearing a buckskin leather jacket when she was discovered in a ditch outside of Troy, Ohio, in 1981.

“That one was easy. It took five hours,” Fitzpatrick says. Buckskin Girl was their first publicly announced case. She and Press flew out to Ohio in April 2018 for the press conference, but their names were mostly left out of the ensuing press coverage.

By the time Chandler’s real identity came to light at a June 21, 2018, press conference, their breakthrough was eclipsed by the arrest nearly two months earlier of 72-year-old Joseph DeAngelo in Citrus Heights, California. Working with police investigators, retired patent attorney turned genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter identified DeAngelo as the notorious “Golden State Killer” by running a recovered sample of crime scene DNA through

GEDmatch — the same methodology used by the DNA Doe Project.

“I give full credit to Barbara — she’s done some great work,” Fitzpatrick says. Even so, she admits that “it’s kind of disappointing” that the DNA Doe Project didn’t get its due for being first to use genetic genealogy to crack cold case mysteries. “We are among the real pioneers,” she says.

PRIVACY AND DNA CASES Although both Fitzpatrick and Press envision an unending stream of John and Jane Doe cases in the future — the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System estimates that 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered in the United States each year — the ethics of using a public genetic genealogy database have come under fire in the wake of the Golden State Killer case.

“If police can use genetic databases to catch killers — even those who are distant relatives of individuals who have submitted their DNA — then perhaps more people will sign up to share their

DNA,” read a May 2018 editorial in Nature. “But they should be told that this is a possibility, and be given the choice to opt out.”

In 2019, after police in Utah uploaded crime scene DNA from an assault case to GEDmatch — which had previously only allowed police to investigate homicides or rapes — GEDmatch changed its terms of service to accommodate a wider variety of crimes, including nonsexual assaults, while also requiring users to opt in to allow their results to be available for law enforcement searches.

“We have to find a balance between privacy and the need for public safety,” Fitzpatrick says. GEDmatch’s move “was the right thing to do,” she adds, “because this is a negotiation process between two groups that have traditionally never really worked well together. Law enforcement didn’t want genealogists to interfere with their investigations, and genealogists didn’t want law enforcement to use their DNA. So now there’s a reason to work together.”

Hollywood, meanwhile, wants to get in on the DNA detective business.

Hardly a week goes by when Fitzpatrick or Press doesn’t field a pitch from a producer eager to make a documentary series on the pair. “It would be such a distraction,” says Press, whose true crime book, “A Scream on the Water” — based on a 1991 murder in her own neighborhood — inspired a 1996 segment on the series “Unsolved Mysteries” and an episode of A&E’s “City Confidential” two years later.

A more plausible scenario would be working as technical consultants on a fictional series — think “CSI” meets “Murder, She Wrote.” “There could be a television show,” says Fitzpatrick.

But for now, she’s content focusing on the work they are doing: “Solving cases. Helping people. Bringing relief, information and release.” ■

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 7

R I C E M A G A Z I N E FA L L 2 0 1 9

CONTENTS FEATURES

1

32

38

Forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick ’76 unlocks the mysteries of criminal cold cases.

Aphasia researchers at Rice’s T.L.L. Temple Foundation neuroplasticity lab examine the nature of language.

When it comes to teaching leadership skills, the Doerr Institute for New Leaders takes a different path.

Lost and Found

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When Words Fail

Leadership Lessons

PHOTO BY TOMMY LAVERGNE

A 3D-printed model of aphasia patient Susan Hoffius’ brain

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PHOTO BY TOMMY LAVERGNE, ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM CRUFT, PHOTO BY BRANDON MARTIN, PHOTO BY LAURENCE YEUNG

R I C E M A G A Z I N E FA L L 2 0 1 9

DEPARTMENTS Sallyport

13

Cycling for a cancer cure, college construction, a cultural excursion to Atlanta, what freshmen brought from home

Wisdom

21

An interview with C. Sidney Burrus ’57, new tools for broken bones, measuring ozone, stinging pests, remembering Doc C

Alumni

43

Aubrey Ferguson Bergauer ’05 changes the symphony narrative, a letter from Austin, baseball history, books by alumni

Last Look

50

Fall means powderpuff practice at Founder’s Court.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 9

FEEDBACK Dear Editor: I’ve long been a space enthusiast. It probably began when my father took me out in our front yard one night when I was 7 years old. He showed me the Big Dipper and the North Star. Then he paused, found what he had been looking for, and pointed out one “star” that was slowly moving.

I wasn’t quite sure I saw the right one. He told me it was America’s first satellite (Explorer 1), and he said I should remember the date: Jan. 31, 1958. (I did remember the date, but I forgot the year until I looked it up much later.) I avidly followed the astronaut flights. In 1968–69, I saved many books and magazines about NASA going to the moon. The magazines are a little beat up, but 50 years later, I still have them. From 1993 until I retired in 2011, I worked as a software engineer at NASA/Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I’m sorry my dad didn’t live to see me working at JPL! — RODNEY HOFFMAN ’72

RICE MAGAZINE Fall 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 Summer 2019 issue.

Jeff Cox, senior director EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Tracey Rhoades ASSISTANT EDITOR

“Ripe for the Picking” “This was my favorite part of the magazine — the visuals and learning a bit more about the garden and its role in life at Rice.”

You enjoyed “A Guide to Life After Rice” A compilation of advice from fellow Owls, especially for recent graduates “Saving it to give to my granddaughter, a Rice junior, when she graduates. Lots of good, practical advice.”

“I loved this! It is great information that every graduate should have!”

“Startup Speculation” “This is awesome!

I love reading about innovative things that the students are doing.”

74%

of readers said reading the magazine strengthened their connection to Rice.

Most-read feature

PHOTOGRAPHERS

Tommy LaVergne Jeff Fitlow PROOFREADER

Jenny West Rozelle ’00 “And They’re Off” We asked 11 recent graduates to reflect on their time at Rice.

“Love to see an eager face!”

“Simple, clean and striking.”

67%

of readers said they learned something new about Rice from this edition.

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

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Kyndall Krist

RICE CONTRIBUTORS

Jade Boyd, Jon-Paul Estrada, Kendall Hebert, Jennifer Latson, Brandon Martin, Amy McCaig, Arie Wilson Passwaters, Katharine Shilcutt, Mike Williams INTERNS

Savannah Kuchar ’22 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. © October 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; Wanda Gass; Terrence Gee; James T. Hackett; Tommy Huie; Patti Lipoma Kraft; Robert T. Ladd; Holli Ladhani; L. Charles Landgraf; Brian Patterson; David Rhodes; Jeffery A. Smisek; Guillermo Treviño; James Whitehurst; Scott Wise; Huda Y. Zoghbi.

ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERS

David W. Leebron, president; Seiichi Matsuda, interim provost; Kathy Collins, vice president for Finance; Kathi Dantley Warren, vice president for Development and Alumni Relations; 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.

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

AN ISSUE WITH NO THEME IN THE PAST TWO ISSUES, we’ve featured themes of creativity (Spring 2019) and life after Rice (Summer 2019).

This issue does not follow suit. In fact, the issue’s features could not be more distinct in subject or scope. To bring these and other stories in this issue to your door and desktop required a variety of creative strategies.

In “When Words Fail” gifted science writer Rachel Fairbank brought a reporter’s ear and a biologist’s training to a story about aphasia research at Rice. Rice senior photographer Tommy Lavergne shot the beautiful and sensitive portraits that accompany Fairbank’s story. To report the complex story of The DNA Doe Project’s founding, challenges and successes, veteran journalist Dick Anderson (“The DNA Detective”) visited with forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick ’76 in Los Angeles. The feature’s combination of photography and illustration bring home the scientific and humanitarian aspects of solving criminal cold cases.

Our former colleague Alyson Ward (“Beyond the Buzzword”) interviewed key members of the Doerr Institute for New Leaders to deliver a portrait of leadership training for students. The bold lettering in the story emphasizes the Doerr’s energetic and studentfocused vision, and photographs by Jeff Fitlow convey the institute’s confident yet easy-going personality.

Wisdom, the most-read department in every issue, opens with a portrait of C. Sidney Burrus, the Maxfield and Osh-

man Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering. While the interview was conducted in-house, we turned to regular contributing illustrator Adam Cruft to capture the likeness of one of our favorite professors. Geochemist Laurence Yeung’s techniques for studying ozone trapped in polar ice presents a breakthrough in understanding how humans have changed the climate by altering the atmosphere’s chemistry. We had a little fun with the visual treatment of these findings.

The fall features could not be more distinct in subject or scope. To bring these and other stories in this issue to your door and desktop required a variety of creative strategies.

In Sallyport, we celebrate our newest students with a portrait of the class of 2023 in numbers — as well as a page of photos of sentimental items freshmen brought to campus. Our alumni section highlights a little-known link between Rice baseball history and the infamous 1919 World Series. October marks the 100th anniversary of the “Black Sox Scandal” in which eight team members on the Chicago White Sox team were convicted of losing the series against the Cincinnati Reds. Dickie Kerr, one of the White Sox pitchers who was not implicated in the scandal, briefly coached here in the 1920s and returned to campus in the late 1940s to assist for a season. You’ll find these stories and more in this issue of Rice Magazine.

Please send comments and feedback to lynn.gosnell@rice.edu.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 11

PRESIDENT LEEBRON

INVENTING THE FUTURE; ASSESSING THE PAST IN 1963, DENNIS GABOR, A Hungarian who had fled the Nazis and immigrated to Britain, published “Inventing the Future,” a book that contained his most famous quote: “The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.” I don’t completely agree with the first part of the quote, unless we take it to mean simply that all predictions are erroneous. But that does not mean that all predictions are either irrelevant or equal.

We see all around us the invention of the future. Much of that is in the creation of new technologies and possibilities. At Rice, Professor Jacob Robinson and his team of scientists are working toward the possibility of humans communicating thoughts directly from one human brain to another or from a human to a computer. Across the university, scientists are working on transforming the production of energy to eliminate harmful effects of hydrocarbons, whether by using alternative sources or completely reinventing the methods of utilizing hydrocarbons so that no CO2 is produced. New materials are being discovered and designed that will revolutionize the way we build and deliver health care, and one day restore sight and physical abilities to those who today would have no hope.

Professors Rich Baraniuk, Ruth Lopez Turley and others are pioneering

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improvement in education by using data to determine which tools and pedagogies are most effective.

The very best research universities are distinguished not only by their ability to advance technological frontiers, but also to think critically and broadly about the implications of technological advancement. We are learning more every day about the social consequences of new technologies of data collection and mining and artificial intelligence.

University Professor Moshe Vardi is leading a campus initiative on technology, culture and society to undertake a deeper examination of the implications of new technologies, particularly information technologies. Inventing the future is not solely a task, or challenge, for science and engineering. The problems we must address, from deeply rooted inequalities to climate change, require the very best solutions we can muster that take account of values, culture and history. We must learn from the past and take those lessons to heart as we seek to invent, not predict, a better future.

George Santayana famously wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Almost a half century later, William Faulkner manifested a somewhat different perspective when he wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Both reasons for studying history are compelling: to avoid repeating past mistakes and to truly understand our present.

As universities, we are not simply outside observers of the past, present or future. We have been, are and will be participants — and often very influential participants. We have an obligation to study our own past and present and to assess the contributions we have made. In some cases, we will find that our institutions have been at the forefront of progress and justice, but that has not always been the case.

One of our most difficult and controversial issues today is how we continue to be challenged by the role

of race and ethnicity in achieving a just society. As a university, we must think broadly about such an important question and look both inward and outward. We cannot invent the future without understanding the past, and we cannot cast a critical gaze on society outside our campus without also undertaking a careful examination of our own history and our own imperfections in providing access and opportunity in ways that build a more just and effective society.

These are some of the reasons underlying our recent decision to establish a task force on slavery, segregation and racial injustice. Such a task force can help us in two ways. First, understanding how the legacy of slavery, segregation and discrimination affects Rice today sheds light also on the broader issues confronting our society. Second, understanding the ongoing effects of that legacy can help us improve what we do at Rice, and bring us closer to being the dynamic engine of opportunity that we aspire to be for all segments of society.

The task force will be responsible for undertaking an examination of Rice’s history, fostering campus programming and dialogue and identifying suggestions for our future. This will of course not be the only effort to examine how we might more effectively make Rice an inclusive and welcoming environment for all our students. Efforts focusing explicitly and urgently on current issues, such as campus climate and opportunity for students who are first generation, low income and/or underrepresented minorities, will also be undertaken. We cannot expect any of these undertakings to be easy or to be without controversy.

But a university that does not turn its capabilities for examination and reflection on itself and its own past jeopardizes its broader role and credibility in creating a better future far beyond our campus. We look forward to working together toward that goal.

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

CAMPUS NEWS AND STUDENT LIFE

GRADUATE STUDENTS

Cycling for a Cure In just one month, Sudha Yellapantula went from being a reluctant cyclist to a champion cycling fundraiser for pediatric cancer research.

BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT

SALLYPORT

PHOTOS BY TOMM Y L AV ERGNE

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 13

SALLYPORT

It’s been more than three years since her young son, Vinay, was diagnosed with leukemia. In September, Vinay finally finished his chemotherapy treatments at Texas Children’s Hospital.

S

UDHA YELLAPANTULA didn’t even like riding bikes before she signed up to raise money for pediatric cancer research in the 2019 Great Cycle Challenge USA. “I never enjoyed biking, but I thought, childhood cancer research, I gotta do this.”

A few days after signing up for the challenge last May, she did the first 20mile ride of her life. Her modest initial goal was to raise $500 by biking 200 miles. But before the end of June, she’d biked more than 600 miles and raised more than $35,000. At one point, a giant Great Cycle Challenge billboard flashed her beaming face over Times Square.

Yellapantula did this as a full-time Ph.D. student in electrical engineering and a “cancer mom” herself. It’s been

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more than three years since her young son, Vinay, was diagnosed with leukemia.

In September, Vinay finally finished his chemotherapy treatments at Texas Children’s Hospital. “Just as I could never skip Vinay’s chemotherapy even for a single day, I did not skip riding in the great cycling challenge even for a single day in June,” Yellapantula wrote on her personal Great Cycle Challenge webpage, where she updated friends, family and colleagues.

She spent three hours a day riding her bike — which she often did late at night, with her two children in bed and her husband, Sudhakar, holding down the fort at home. “I decided I’d write a story for every day,” Yellapantula said. Most of the stories were about her own son, but some were about other

pediatric cancer patients she’d encountered over the years of taking Vinay to treatments — children just like her son whose lives would be directly impacted by the funds raised. She read dozens and dozens of clinical studies while writing the stories to make sure they were scientifically accurate.

“I heard from fellow grad students, ‘We’re waiting for your stories every day,’” Yellapantula recalled. “And I said, ‘But aren’t they sad?’ And they said, ‘We need to hear it.’” These blog posts and the support of the Rice community are just two of the things Yellapantula credits with helping her succeed beyond her wildest expectations.

As news of her cycling journey spread, Yellapantula soon became the No. 1 fundraiser in Texas. By the final day of the fundraiser in June, she and another cyclist were neck and neck for the top spot in the nation. Childhood friends in India, colleagues on LinkedIn and her husband’s co-workers all chipped in. So did one more donor: the man who was nipping at her heels in the fundraiser throughout June.

Sacrificing his own shot at being the No. 1 campaigner in the country, Jeff Mulder donated $2,000 in the final hours of donor match day, bringing the total Yellapantula raised in a single day to almost $6,000.

With goals exceeded and the fundraiser finished, Yellapantula was able to take some time off from biking. Over the summer, she and her family took a Make-A-Wish Foundation trip to the most classic of celebratory destinations — Disney World.

BY THE NUMBERS

Welcome, Owls!

In August, Rice welcomed its newest Owls — both first-time freshmen and transfer students. Of note, for the second academic year in a row, more new graduate students (1,092) than new undergraduates (1,004) enrolled at Rice. The stats below apply only to undergraduate enrollment.

27,087

41

transfer students

freshmen applicants

890

29%

U.S. students

increase in freshmen applicants over previous year

TOP STATES

Texas (402) California (89) Florida (41) New Jersey (28) New York (26)

9%

114

admit rate

international students

963

TOP COUNTRIES China (56) Canada (8) India (7)

first-time freshmen

Diversity

35%

FRESHMAN CLASS*

18%

5%

White

Latino or Hispanic

Two or more races, nonHispanic

32%

9%

1%

Asian

Black or African American

Unknown

*This graphic includes only domestic students and follows the federal methodology for reporting domestic ethnicity and race. Figures are rounded to nearest whole number.

SID RISES First opened in 1971, Sid Richardson College has been the tallest building on campus for almost 50 years. Plans for reconstructing Sid Rich have been in the works for years, and the team behind the project has unveiled a 12-story design that’s set to keep the college skyhigh. The new structure will be built in the South Colleges’ parking lot, standing between the new wing of Will Rice and the existing college.

According to Rice project manager Anzilla Gilmore, the tower will be able to house 300 students, making it one of the largest colleges.

The project broke ground in September.

Construction is projected to be completed in November 2020, meaning it will be ready for students in January 2021.

— MARIANA NAJERA ’21

Source: Rice’s Office of Enrollment and Office of Institutional Research M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 15

SALLYPORT SYLLABUS

Drama Is Life

Co-teachers Joseph Campana, the Alan Dugald McKillop Professor of English, and Christina Keefe, director of the Rice Theatre Program, are combining their complementary scholarly approaches to the wide world of theater to debut the School of Humanities’ new course series, “Big Questions.” Each course will take a multidisciplinary approach to some of the most compelling questions of our time.

HUMA 121 Is All the World a Stage?

DEPARTMENT Humanities DESCRIPTION This new course introduces students to the history of theatrical performance and the everyday drama of human interaction.

IS ALL THE WORLD A STAGE? focuses on how performance is part of our daily lives.

“Theater is everywhere,” said Keefe. “Instagram, Snapchat — all social media is a form of theater because it’s the mask you show the outside world.”

“This is an incredible opportunity to learn the history and practice of theater from two experts, while also getting the opportunity to view performances and art installations across Houston,” said graduate student Matt Southey, the class’s teaching assistant.

Throughout the semester, students read a wide range of dramas, including works by Euripides, Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, as well as modern plays by Moisés Kaufman and Qui Nguyen. Classes alternate between discussions led by Campana and acting workshops led

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by Keefe, all leading up to the final assignment — a scripted group project created, performed or recorded by the students themselves.

“I wanted to take this class because the intersection of drama analysis and physical theater represents an interesting change of pace,” said Zachary Verne ’20. “Right now we are focusing on building a chorus, which is a fun exercise since we have people with a variety of theater experiences. It’s different from anything else I’ve done in my theater education.”

An important focus of the class is how observing and interpreting real experiences is an essential part of making art. “The best way to understand the world around us is to use theatrical thinking,” Campana said. “When you start looking at the world that way, everything can look quite different.” — MARIANA NAJERA ’21

PHOTOS BY JEFF FITLOW

SALLYPORT like to remind them is that disability is part of the diversity of life. In any big population like Houston, there are going to be members who have a disability. What I tell students is that having accommodations is part of what makes the educational experience inclusive.

Can you give us an example of improved campus accessibility?

For many years, Herzstein Hall had a platform lift so people with mobility aids could get into that building. That worked fine up to a point until, as all mechanical things do, the lift failed. Instead of building a modern platform lift, I worked with the Office of Facilities, Engineering and Planning for a better alternative. We came up with a new ramp that would allow better access for people with disabilities and the public in general. I’m promoting a universal design approach for campus: Regardless of disability, let’s make the accessibility better for everybody. And let’s do this thoughtfully and respectfully of architecturally important buildings.

STUDENT LIFE

Resources for All

AS DIRECTOR OF THE UNIVERSITY’S DISABILITY RESOURCE Center (DRC), Alan Russell makes sure students, faculty and staff with disabilities receive accommodations and resources necessary to navigate campus and excel in the classroom. He and his wife, Rebecca, an archivist and special collections librarian at the Woodson Research Center, have lived on campus as resident associates at Hanszen College for seven years.

You’ve said being disabled on a college campus is easier now.

Why is that?

People are recognizing that permanent disabilities are not just medical issues, but social issues. There can be exceptions, but architectural and attitudinal barriers are the predominant factors that affect persons with disabilities’ quality of life more than medical conditions. Access to the physical environment is crucial, and we need to be able to

PHOTO BY TOMM Y L AV ERGNE

have architectural barriers removed or not implement them in the first place.

Are students more willing to reach out to the DRC? Absolutely. In the nine years I have been here, the demand has grown threefold. The vast majority of students I see do not have a visible disability.

Some students with invisible disabilities are very sensitive about their condition being known. And so what I

And in the classroom?

We’re doing a lot, including making assistive technologies available in the classroom. These can be anything from communication aids for those with hearing and vision issues to those with cognitive, learning and neurological issues. It’s all part of universal design, which includes things such as circulation space in a classroom so that someone who uses a cane or a wheelchair can get around. If you’re a wheelchair user, it’s very common to be put on the end of a row away from your peers. We would like to see the classes flexible enough where you can fit in seamlessly.

Having flexible classroom designs creates a positive environment for learning. Once again, it gives you that sense of belonging, which creates a more positive experience.

— ARIE WILSON PASSWATERS Read an extended version of this interview at magazine.rice.edu.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 17

STUDENT GROUPS

Transforming Experience

Last May, more than a dozen black male students traveled to Atlanta on a cultural excursion designed to foster conversations about campus, community and leadership.

STUDENTS FROM Rice’s Black Male Leadership Initiative (BMLI) ended their five-day cultural excursion to Atlanta this past May on an unexpected high note: A surprise encounter with Congressman John Lewis in a local restaurant one Sunday after church brought to life everything they’d learned about the civil rights era during their trip.

Organized by William Edmond, Rice’s assistant director of multicultural affairs, the BMLI trip was conceived in response to a

18 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2019

question Edmond had been considering since arriving at Rice in 2017 from The Ohio State University.

“What I asked myself at the beginning of planning this program was, ‘What experience can I create to increase the leadership development and persistence of black men at Rice University?’” His answer took 15 students and one faculty member — sociology professor Tony Brown — to Atlanta in hopes of accomplishing “one big goal: to foster a stronger sense of

belonging at the university,” Edmond said.

“My four objectives were to improve campus satisfaction, develop an understanding of self, build a support network and overcome all adversity.”

The trip explored parts of Atlanta that are crucial to the African American experience, including visits to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park, the APEX Museum and Morehouse College, the alma mater of MLK and the only all-male historically black college.

“Going on the trip

reinforced the need to create more spaces where young black men at Rice can bond and fully express themselves,” said BMLI President Tim Harrison ’20, a psychology major and forward on the men’s basketball team.

“Throughout the trip, I observed and engaged in meaningful conversations and exchanges about race and many other important topics that there simply isn’t a space for on campus,” Harrison said. As a result, BMLI is already addressing some of these issues by creating new programs and adapting existing ones, he said, “in order to generate more opportunities for these exchanges to happen.”

Edmond, too, is excited about the future good work that will come out of this and other BMLI excursions.

“I learned how transformative this experience was for all students who participated,” he said. “Everyone felt confident in their identity and spirit of brotherhood.

The Black Male Leadership Initiative strives to create a similar situation within our organization that will positively impact campus.”

“Going through the lunch counter exhibit at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, where I virtually experienced the hateful comments made and violent acts against the protestors, really shed a light on how challenging the call to ‘love your enemy’ is,” Harrison said. “It also helped me to see how far we have come and appreciate how much the previous generations sacrificed for mine.”

— KATHARINE SHILCUTT

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BLACK MALE LEADERSHIP INITIATIVE

SALLYPORT

CAMPUS LIFE

A Piece of Home

SALLYPORT

Packing for college wouldn’t be complete without some special items to remind these Owls of home.

Marcus Tierrablanca, Lovett College It’s a small plastic skeleton hand that was originally the top of a Halloween cupcake. My grandmother used it as a good luck charm in bingo. When she passed away, my mom gave it to my sister as a good luck charm when she went to college. Now that she’s graduated, I bring it with me every year to Rice.

Joshua Harper, Lovett College I brought a cross-stitched pillow that my grandma gave me before I left for Rice. It has a sailboat with my initials on its sail.

My grandma made a surprise visit for my high school graduation and gave me the pillow then, which was extra special because she doesn’t live in the U.S. and usually only visits during Christmas.

Noah Fons, Jones College I brought a sign saying “We Charge for Broken Paddles.” My parents own a campground, and the sign was left behind by the old owners in the game room in reference to ping pong paddles.

I saw it most days for the last eight years of my life, and it is now the only item I have directly related to the campground, but it’s a fun, unique thing on my wall.

Jack Bodnar, Martel College I brought a silver fleur-de-lis key chain that everyone in my class received during a high school retreat. I brought it with me because it reminds me of my home, St. Louis, as the symbol is on the city’s flag. More importantly, it acts as a personal connection to all my friends and everyone from my class who are now all across the country.

Jasmine Manansala, Brown College I brought my Build-A-Bear teddy bear, Petal, with me. She was a present for my sixth birthday. Since she’s wearing a set of my baby clothes, she truly reminds me of my childhood. I’ve held onto her since I got her, and she’s a great portal for reuniting with fond memories of my parents and my home.

— COMPILED BY MARIANA NAJERA ’21

Answers: 1-E; 2-F; 3-A; 4-D; 5-G; 6-B; 7-H; 8-C

PHOTOS BY JEF F F I T LOW

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 19

SALLYPORT

Left: Leenah Abojaib with her handmade creations — a knitted scarf and crocheted owl Right: Crocheting (top) and knitting (bottom) in action

I’M A NERD ABOUT ...

Yarn Crafts

Leenah Abojaib uses digital media to learn hands-on skills.

WITH THE GROWING availability of inexpensive, mass-produced items from big-box stores and online retailers, some might assume that handmade goods are falling by the wayside.

To the contrary — digital resources such as YouTube tutorials make learning new skills easier and more accessible than ever. In fact, that’s how sophomore biochemistry major Leenah Abojaib learned multiple crafts.

In 2014, while watching YouTube

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videos for a different do-it-yourself project, she was reminded of a tool — the crochet hook — that would spark a whole new passion. “My aunt gave me a crochet kit,” Abojaib recalled. “I forgot about it for a whole year. And then when I heard the word ‘crochet’ again, I thought I might as well try that in more depth.” She grabbed her supplies and began searching for tutorials on YouTube. “My first project was a super little, very uneven and asymmetrical flower,” she laughed.

The art of crochet uses a single hook to interlock loops of yarn, resulting in a fabric that can be used in different ways depending on the type of stitch and yarn chosen. Knitting, on the other hand, uses a pair of needles to manipulate yarn. There are different types of knitting needles, including straight,

circular and double-pointed needles.

In 2017, Abojaib expanded her fiber arts horizon even further. “My AP English teacher had an informal knitting club. I used to come there every Friday morning and crochet, but then I would see everybody else knitting,” she said. This sparked her crafty instincts and, once again, she turned to YouTube — but not without some creative flair.

“I had yarn already, but I didn’t have knitting needles, so I got two pencils and started using them as straight needles. It did the job.”

Abojaib has since upgraded her tools and actively enjoys both crafts. But crochet in particular, she said, holds a special place in her heart because she learned it first, but it’s also sentimental.

Originally from Syria, Abojaib grew up in Saudi Arabia and moved to Minneapolis in 2016 before coming to Rice. “In Saudi Arabia, we didn’t have a lot of outdoor activities because it was so hot. So whenever I wanted to do anything productive or interesting, I would just crochet and watch a movie. I have a lot of good memories with crochet.”

For Abojaib, yarn crafts provide an opportunity to take time for herself — but it’s about others, too. “This hobby brings me closer to family and other people,” she said. “When I make a gift for someone, they feel more appreciated.”

— KYNDALL KRIST

PHOTOS BY TOMM Y L AV ERGNE

WISDOM

INNOVATION IN THE LAB, THE FIELD AND THE CLASSROOM

TEACHING

The Philosopher Engineer

C. Sidney Burrus in his own words INTERVIEW BY LYNN GOSNELL

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

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 21

WISDOM

A

PIONEER IN THE FIELD OF DIGITAL signal processing, the recipient of multiple teaching awards and an early advocate for the use of technology in teaching and learning, C. Sidney Burrus ’57 has served Rice with distinction in these and many more ways throughout his career. A native of Abilene who grew up in the small farm community of McKinney, Texas, Burrus was interested in mathematics and science from an early age. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at Rice, serving in the Navy and getting his doctorate at Stanford, he and Mary Lee Burrus returned to Houston, at which point he joined Rice’s engineering department. Beginning in the late 1960s, Burrus and colleagues established Rice as a leader in the field of digital signal processing — the methods by which realworld, analog signals like sound, temperature and pressure are converted to digital formats for manipulation and interpretations. In addition to mentoring many young engineers, Burrus, along with Mary Lee, forged strong bonds with students as magisters of Lovett College. We sat down in Burrus’ Abercrombie office for a conversation centered around teaching, inspiration and philosophy. Burrus delivered his insights in a delightfully direct, humorous and generous manner — accented with an unmistakable central Texas twang.

A Little Bit of Wizardry Both electricity and chemistry fascinated me as a child and teenager. Both seemed to have an element of magic.

You could not directly experience them. Most people could not understand them.

The person who did understand them was a sort of wizard! A magician! They both required an ability to work with abstractions and models of reality rather than with reality itself. Electrical engineering required math and physics while chemical engineering required chemistry. I liked math better than chemistry, so I chose electrical engineering for my path.

A Teaching Family My family has a large number of teachers — my mother was a high school math teacher. My wife was a piano

22 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2019

teacher. My son is also a high school math teacher, and my daughter is a professor of history. We all seem to have education as the answer to almost any question or problem you have.

Pursuing Ideas In addition to my interest in electricity, I was always curious as to where ideas come from. Thomas Edison was fascinating to me. I enjoyed reading stories about inventors, people who seemed to create an idea out of nothing.

Some inventors were members of groups, others were loners. Some would modify an old idea so that it seemed to evolve into something new. Others would propose a totally different idea, almost as a revolution against the old. As an adult, I found a wonderful description of my dilemma: Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” where he described the evolutionary development in scientific research, which was punctuated occasionally by a revolutionary “paradigm shift.”

For example, if one takes a model of the solar system centered around the Earth and replaces it with a model centered around the sun, it’s a radical jump. It is resisted by the establishment. In edu-

cation, progress is basically evolutionary. But education should prepare a student to deal with a revolution that cannot be predicted.

Mentors and Role Models In my junior year at Rice, Paul Pfeiffer ’38 became my primary role model or mentor. [Note: Pfeiffer earned three degrees from Rice, two in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in mathematics, and was one of Rice’s longest serving and most beloved faculty members.] Pfeiffer was a mentor at a time in my life when I saw things that I could not have seen without him.

A Role Reversal Today, I have a mentor who is 30 years younger than me — Rich Baraniuk.* In effect, I was his mentor, and then we switched roles. The classical situation is that you have a mentor, then you have to have a break with a mentor. To prove your independence, you have to have some kind of a usually traumatic experience where you reject a mentor, or he/she rejects you. But with Rich, he became a person from whom I was learning. It is unusual, and I think both Rich and I chuckle about it.

The Personalization of Education What I can do is look at how you’re performing on your homework in math and see you’ve got matrix algebra down, but you’re not very good on polynomials. So I will present material to you on polynomials. Look, here’s your textbook. I want you to have a textbook that’s suited exactly to what you have, what you’re good at and where you want to go.

The Rise of Graduate Education at Rice The Rice that I went to was a much better undergraduate school than it was a graduate school. And what Rice has been doing for the past 40 or 50 years is building up its graduate program. My own personal feelings are that the undergraduate and graduate schools here should be about equal size. Rice has a balance and that is probably where they should be.

Lovett College Lessons Being a college magister was an experience I’m very glad I had. It allowed me to better understand that a student’s life is a great deal more than what you see in teaching.

They have an incredibly rich life outside of what you see that may dominate how they look. Every student has a story. They come out of all sorts of either privileged situations they’ve got to get over or horrible situations they’ve got to get over. But, growing up is a process. It is a lot more than doing calculus homework.

Just Lucky Plenty of people are interested in something in which it’s not possible to earn a living. I could earn a living from what I was truly interested in. And more than that, I could actually achieve something. That is luck.

PHOTO BY BRANDON MARTIN

C. Sidney Burrus is the Maxfield and Oshman Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering. *Rich Baraniuk is the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice and the founder and director of the open education initiatives OpenStax and Connexions.

Asps have tiny venomous spines that cause severe pain for humans who come in contact with them.

BIOSCIENCES

A Broken Cycle

Stinging asps make a home in urban trees netted to deter birds.

WHILE COLLECTING DATA from live oak trees in the world’s largest medical center, Rice evolutionary ecologists have discovered huge quantities of one of North America’s most venomous caterpillars.

Live oak trees lining sidewalks in the Texas Medical Center (TMC) are routinely netted to discourage pesky birds such as grackles and pigeons. Now Rice researchers have learned the netting has an unintended consequence: Chasing away birds that eat insects has created a haven for a flourishing population of Megalopyge opercularis — asps. The asps bristle with venomous spines that can cause severe pain for humans unlucky enough to come in contact with them. Symptoms include headaches, nausea, vomiting, fever, low blood pressure and, in severe cases, abdominal distress,

WISDOM

muscle spasms, convulsions and respiratory stress.

“When we saw such high numbers of asps in the TMC, we knew this was something we needed to look into,” said Scott Egan, an assistant professor of biosciences at Rice. Over a three-year span, Egan’s research team discovered that caterpillar abundance, on average, was more than 7,300% higher on netted versus non-netted trees. Their findings were recently published in the journal Biology Letters. “We thought this was a wonderful, natural, already occurring experiment that we could exploit to understand what happens when trophic interactions get disrupted,” Egan said.

“It’s very easy to say the birds are a problem and we can fix it by removing their nesting sites, but if you don’t think through the pipeline, you can ultimately create unintended downstream effects,” said Mattheau Comerford, an ecology and evolutionary biology graduate student at Rice. By spotlighting an unforeseen consequence of ecological disturbance, Egan and his team hope the study emphasizes the importance of considering ecology in urban planning. — KENDALL HEBERT

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 2 3

WISDOM

THE INDEX

WE DON’T KNOW ...

How to Add the Sense of Touch to Prosthetic Devices

Mechanical engineer Marcia O’Malley designs and builds better wearable prosthetic devices.

THERE ARE LOTS of sophisticated prosthetic devices on the market for people who have lost limbs, but no matter how well they replicate the intricate movements of the human hand, they can’t provide much feedback to an amputee. You can have a really nimble robotic hand that’s controlled by a person’s muscle and nerve impulses, but that person still won’t feel anything the hand touches. If they want to pick up a water bottle, they’ll need to look at the way the hand interacts with the bottle to know when to squeeze, or infer how

24 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2019

firmly they’re grasping it.

So how do we give them back the information they used to get from touching an object? One approach that has been proposed is to implant electrodes in an amputee and then stimulate their nerves electronically when sensors on their prosthetic limb detect contact with objects. It’s an invasive procedure, however, and it’s extremely expensive. Even if it was to become widely available, not everyone would want that sort of experience.

In my lab, we design and build wearable devices that fit on the wrist, forearm or upper arm. They can provide vibration, squeeze and other tactile sensations that give a user haptic — or touch — feedback from a prosthetic device without having to look at it. The problem is that we’re still not quite certain how to map what a prosthesis is “feeling” — its touch interactions with the environment — and turn it into information that’s useful and intuitive for an amputee.

Most of us are able to do this sort of thing without even thinking. We can easily sort objects or stack blocks just by using our sense of touch, but we have a long way to go before amputees can easily do the same thing, despite the engineering advances that have led to advanced prostheses.

— AS TOLD TO DAVID LEVIN Marcia O’Malley is the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business has launched a new podcast, “The Index,” which explores economics, psychology and the hidden business of everything. Hosted by journalist Saul Elbein, a contributor to the NPR radio show “This American Life,” the podcast’s halfhour episodes include insights from Rice

business professors Erik Dane, Anastasiya Zavyalova, Utpal Dholakia and Dean Peter Rodriguez, among others. “The Index” is the latest way the school is making its professors’ research accessible outside the halls of academia, in the hopes that their science-backed, peerreviewed insights will help spark the innovation needed to solve big problems, according to Rodriguez. Listen at magazine.rice.edu.

— JENNIFER LATSON

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

WISDOM GEOCHEMISTRY

YEUNG’S TEAM STUDIED the interstitial gas in “firn” — compressed snow that has not yet formed into ice — and glacial ice core samples from Antarctica and Greenland.

Ozone on the Rocks

In the lab of geochemist Laurence Yeung, Rice researchers are studying ancient gas bubbles trapped inside polar ice to measure preindustrialera ozone levels. The innovative technique marks a breakthrough in understanding how humans have changed the climate by altering the atmosphere’s chemistry.

OLD GAS

BY ANALYZING

molecular oxygen inside the trapped bubbles, the researchers were able to measure changes in “bad ozone” after the rise of the Industrial Revolution.

Gas bubbles trapped inside the ancient ice reveal the air’s composition within 200 to 250 years of the time the ice formed from snow.

— ALEXANDRA BECKER

ICE COLD

Yeung’s team looked at gas bubbles dating from the years

1590

Stored in the Ice Core Laboratory at Rice, the samples must be kept at minus 27 degrees Celsius to ensure the trapped gases don’t escape.

THE CREATION

THESE LAB-PRODUCED

of ozone changes the proportion of oxygen isotopes (variants of oxygen atoms) within oxygen molecules.

The researchers analyzed the oxygen to determine the amount of ozone present.

results match those of the most recent climate model simulations.

IT IS KNOWN

that air pollution changes atmospheric chemistry, but this is the first time the composition of ancient molecular oxygen has successfully been studied to determine the magnitude of that change.

PHOTO BY L AURENCE Y EUNG

to 2016.

O3 vs. O2 Ozone (O3) molecules are not stable in ice or snow, so in order to study the ancient atmosphere, Yeung and his team examined isotopic oxygen molecules (O2), which are related to ozone levels.

OZONE

Results from the study show that tropospheric ozone — the bad ozone associated with air pollution — has increased by an upper limit of 40% since 1850.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 2 5

ARTS & LETTERS

Lunar Inspiration The Moody Center for the Arts gathers rare and notable works of art in honor of Apollo 11’s moon landing.

RARE ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG lithographs from 1969 and an unfinished series by Andy Warhol will be among the pieces on exhibit at Rice’s Moody Center through Dec. 21. The fall exhibition, “Moon Shot,” features works that reflect on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, showing how artists past and present have responded to a moment that changed popular culture.

“Given this important anniversary as well as the interdisciplinary mission of the Moody, we’re featuring innovative works that respond to both the poetic and technical aspects of space travel,” said Alison Weaver, the Suzanne Deal Booth Executive Director of the Moody Center for the Arts.

26 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2019

WISDOM

Encompassing all three of the Moody Center’s galleries, the exhibit includes Rauschenberg’s “Stoned Moon” series of 34 lithographs, shown together as a group for the first time since their creation in 1969–1970, when the Port Arthur native and painter served as artist-in-residence at NASA. At the time of its printing, “Sky Garden (Stoned Moon)” (1969), at a height of more than 7 feet, was the largest lithograph ever made, requiring a technical innovation in printmaking concurrent with the historic advancements in space travel.

Warhol’s “Moonwalk” (1987) represents the Apollo 11 moon landing as an iconic moment in television history. Based on a photograph of Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin’s first steps on the moon taken by fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong, Warhol recognized the image’s iconic status and subjected it to his own silkscreen technique, adding bright hues of yellow and pink to the original black and white photograph. “Moonwalk” was part of an intended series of works representing seminal moments in television history but was not completed before Warhol’s untimely death later that year.

Like Rauschenberg, Laurie Anderson was also artist-in-residence at NASA. Her recent virtual reality work, “To the Moon” (2018), co-created with Taiwanese filmmaker Hsin-Chien Huang, will allow visitors to take their own experimental journey through space. Notable works by artists Siah Armajani, Nancy Graves, Rachel Rose, Katy Schimert and Michelle Stuart will also be featured.

Learn more about “Moon Shot” and related programming at moody.rice.edu.

Facing page, from top: Robert Rauschenberg, “Local Means (Stoned Moon)” (1970); Robert Rauschenberg, “Trust Zone (Stoned Moon)” (1969) This page: Robert Rauschenberg, “Sky Garden (Stoned Moon)” (1969) © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Gemini G.E.L.

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WISDOM

Fracture Fix

A student team’s magnetic design simplifies the surgical repair of broken bones.

LAST ACADEMIC YEAR, RICE seniors in the Brown School of Engineering set out to help doctors simplify the process of repairing fractured long bones in an arm or leg by inventing a mechanism that uses magnets to set things right. Their project took first place in the 2019 Engineering Design Showcase competition.

The students, who called themselves Drill Team Six, chose the project pitched by Ashvin Dewan ’05, an orthopedic surgeon at Houston Methodist Hospital. The goal was to simplify a procedure by which titanium rods are placed inside broken bones to make them functional once more.

The team — bioengineering majors Babs Ogunbanwo, Takanori Iida, Byunguk Kang and Hannah Jackson and mechanical engineering majors Will Yarinsky and Ian Frankel — learned from Dewan that surgeons require many X-rays to locate predrilled 5 millimeter holes in the rod. The holes allow them to secure the rod to the bone fragments and hold them together.

The surgery typically requires doctors to insert the long rod with a guide wire into the end of the bone, drilling through marrow to align the fragments. With that done, they depend on X-rays, their experience and, if necessary, a bit of trial and error to drill long surgical screws through one side of the bone, thread it through the rod and secure it to the other side.

The Rice team would make the wire adjacent to the holes magnetic, because neither skin nor bone hinder a magnetic field. “That way, the magnets hold their position and we can do the location process,” Frankel said. “Once we’ve found them and secured the rod, we remove the wire and the magnets with it.”

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The exterior mechanism is a brace that can be securely attached to the arm or leg with Velcro. A mounted sensor can then be moved along the 3D-printed carbon-fiber rods or around the limb until it locates the magnet. The angle of the sensor can be adjusted. As each of the three degrees of freedom come into alignment with the target, a “virtual LED” lights up on a graphic display wired to the sensor.

Then, the sensor is removed and a drill keyed to the mechanism inserted.

Working at Rice’s Oshman

Engineering Design Kitchen, the team tested its device on a mannequin leg and a “wooden leg,” a frame that allowed for mounting the rod with its magnetized wire and checking the accuracy of their system. Results are promising, but there’s much more development ahead before the device can be used by clinicians. A new team of Rice engineering students has taken over the project for the 2019–2020 academic year. Watch for more news about this invention from Team Sensorautomation. — MIKE WILLIAMS

PHOTO BY 123RF.COM

ENGINEERING

Myth, Power, Value

PHOTO BY LESLIE HOYT

Rice remembers Doc C ASIDE FROM SAMMY the Owl, Edgar Odell Lovett and William Marsh Rice himself, few names are more synonymous with Rice than Gilbert Cuthbertson. Affectionately known as “Doc C,” the longtime political science professor and beloved Will Rice College resident associate died July 21 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after a short illness, surrounded by his close friends. He was 81.

For more than 50 years, unlike his countless students who walked through

the Sallyport at graduation, Cuthbertson never left Rice, as ubiquitous a presence as the live oaks that grace the campus perimeter. “Doc C was both a mentor and a friend to thousands of Rice students,” said Brad Hoyt ’84. “He was a pillar of our Rice experience. We were all so lucky to know him.”

An expert on Texas politics and Texas political history, Cuthbertson began teaching at Rice in 1963 and was a founding member of Rice’s Department of Political Science. He taught political thought, constitutional law and Texas politics until the time of his death.

Cuthbertson’s passion for teaching was evident as he racked up teaching accolades over the years, including the prestigious George R. Brown Certificate of Highest Merit in 1993.

But for those who knew and loved him — including Patrick Quayle ’01

and Hoyt, two of Cuthbertson’s former students who were as close to him as family — he was much more than a Rice professor who loved teaching.

An only child who never married, he became family to countless students and members of the Rice community.

He was not only their teacher, but also a mentor, cheerleader, advocate, traveling companion and, most important, lifelong friend.

“He was a resident associate at Will Rice College for 55 years, a position he took on just one year after joining Rice as a faculty member in 1963,” said Dean of Undergraduates Bridget Gorman, a former magister at Will Rice College.

Cuthbertson’s longtime involvement reflected his “tremendous commitment” to Rice students and “a record of service that will likely never be duplicated.”

— AMY MCCAIG

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 29

WISDOM NOW READING

Faculty Books

food writing appeared in Tikkun, the Houston Chronicle, Spoon Magazine and the anthology “American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics.” “Paul’s extraordinary poetic talent made him a crucial member of the faculty and a key contributor to the creative and critical components of our curriculum,” said Rosemary Hennessy, the L.H. Favrot Professor of Humanities and English department chair. “His poetry courses were much sought after and he was especially beloved by the students in his advanced poetry classes. We will miss him intensely.”

— KATHARINE SHILCUTT

The Dance What should have been the vision

stretching before the curve?

What could I have done

for insight? It’s a tale

of dirt. Of things

unplanned for rising

from the stone planter.

I look in the mirror

and trace the scar—

a fallen shepherd’s crook,

a dropped question—

and my finger

makes a double seeing,

working along my skin.

What should the response have been?

Levee

Paul Otremba

Four Way Books, 2019

PAUL OTREMBA’S THIRD COLLECTION OF POEMS, “Levee,” was published posthumously in September. An assistant professor of creative writing at Rice, Otremba died of cancer in June at age 40. Otremba and his vivid poetry, too, were inspired by both Houston and Rice. “Living in Houston for the past 14 years, I have gone through three major hurricanes and two devastating floods,” he told New England Review poetry editor Rick Barot while discussing his poem “Like a Wide River” in an interview last year. The poems in “Levee” confront ecology, politics and illness, in what Otremba described to Barot as “what is owed, what is gathered, what is a flood of indignation, anger and grief.” Otremba also formerly served as the poetry editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. He published widely in journals, including Kenyon Review, New England Review, Literary Imagination and Southwest Review. His essays, poetry reviews and

30 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2019

Where does the fear fall

if the pit is pure

absence? I always suspected

intuition was the bowel’s game.

Feeling is a snake’s

skin, not a cup.

We danced in the living room

to Richie Havens’s “Follow,”

my eyes sloughing off

whatever self I had erected.

It was more like holding you

inside a tightening circle

while around us a circle moved.

“The Dance” from “Levee” © 2019 by Paul Otremba.

Appears with the permission of Four Way Books.

All rights reserved.

WISDOM

Eugenics in the Garden Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity Fabiola López-Durán University of Texas Press, 2018

FABIOLA LÓPEZ-DURÁN, an associate professor of art history, traces how the “science” of race improvement spread from medicine to architecture. She also details how Latin American elites pursued utopian urban modernization projects under the influence of eugenics at the turn of the 20th century. “The book focuses on the very clinical agenda that brought the human body to the center of modernist ideology, examining the complicity between science and aesthetics used to ‘normalize’ a so-called feeble population in Latin America,” she said in an interview published in Rice News. “In doing so, it reveals how eugenics, in its striving to create a new ‘human ideal,’ found in medical science a moral guidepost through which architecture, urbanism and landscape design became its primary technologies.”

Earlier this year, the book won the 2019 Robert Motherwell Book Award, which is awarded to the author of an outstanding publication on the history and criticism of modernism in the arts. “I hope people see the timely nature of this book and reflect on the key assertion that the book makes: Race constructs space, and space in turn constructs race. The global refugee crisis and other politically charged forms of segregation here and abroad makes it very clear that we are not living in a post-racial society, and that we need to understand the interactions of space and power by which race is instrumentalized.”

— K.S.

Modernity at Gunpoint

Firearms, Politics and Culture in Mexico and Central America Sophie Esch University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018

THINK OF THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION and you may picture the iconic image of Emiliano Zapata, his chest crossed with cartridge belts, defiantly holding a rifle aloft. There’s a reason firearms feature heavily in the revolutionary images, songs and writings of the time; even Zapata’s provocative pose would hardly make an impression without all the weaponry. As a symbol of power, Sophie Esch notes in “Modernity at Gunpoint,” guns are hard to beat.

“For decades, peasants had been marginalized within Mexico’s feudalcapitalist system and repressed by authoritarian elites,” writes Esch, an assistant professor of Mexican and Central American literature and culture. “But with rifles in their hands, they could no longer be ignored.” Esch’s cultural analysis of gun imagery in Latin American literature and arts extends from the Mexican Revolution to the Sandinista Revolution and the seemingly endless drug wars that plague these regions. While previous scholars of Latin American conflicts have largely ignored this imagery, Esch stares down the barrel of what she considers “the object that most clearly encapsulates the violence inherent in projects of modernity.” — JENNIFER LATSON

The Desert Speaks to the Dreamer

Deborah Barrett ’83 Finishing Line Press, 2019

THERE ARE ghosts in Deborah Barrett’s poetry. In this collection of poems linked by loss — through death, divorce, extinction and natural disaster — Barrett, a professor in the practice of professional communication, pays homage to those who are no longer with us and considers the way we carry their memories as we make our haunted way in the world. She doesn’t let the darkness overwhelm, however; her verse points to hope as a guiding force through grief.

“This is a poetry that mourns the fleeting world — the death of a parent and the death of a species, the loss of a house to floodwaters and the loss of a child to adoption — with an eye for crystalline detail and a sure sense of formal possibility,” writes fellow poet Peter Kline. “Yet the emotional resonance of these fine poems goes far beyond simple lament; they chronicle and question and celebrate even as they weep.” Loss, after all, is a part of life, and Barrett observes the joys of the human experience even as she mourns our mortality. “Being is surviving,” she writes in her poem “Death Waits,” “despite the deep pain of / loss and despair.”

— J.L.

The Magic Carpet Where it takes you is beyond the mundane, the ordinary.

Words emerge from notebooks or scraps of paper or computers to be interwoven into lines like woolen fibers that create the ride of the imagination.

The escape into the beauty of language elevates, clarifies, and makes meaning deeper through the metaphors and symbols of life.

Poetry floats above making the world better because of its existence.

Used by permission of the author.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 31

hen Hoffius first got hom om the hospital, she spent onths staring at a poster in r living room until she co nally recognize the printe ters L-O-V-E. By the end e first year, she could read a third grade level, with h st book being Houston-ar thor Randy Cecil’s book, ucy,” about a tiny dog, a n us girl and a juggler. Alm ree years into her recover e still struggles with read

me t in ould ed of When Words d Fail her rea

nermost ry, ding

Aphasia researchers examine the nature of language.

BY RACHEL FAIRBANK Photos by Tommy LaVergne

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 33

F For Susan Hoffius, an English as a second language teacher at the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies, her stroke started as an intense migraine.

After scrambling to find a replacement substitute for her class, she spent the day in bed, her anxious husband checking on her at periodic intervals. Within a day, she had passed out due to a massive brain hemorrhage that was 10 centimeters in diameter, or roughly the size of an orange.

34 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2019

Hoffius spent the next three months in the hospital. A few months into her recovery, while staring at a friend’s phone, she realized she couldn’t recognize the words printed on the screen. “I was terrified,” she said. “I couldn’t read a letter.”

Gaylen Poole, a health care auditor, first noticed the symptoms of her stroke at church, when a young boy pointed out drool on her cheek. A worried friend took her to the hospital, where a nurse said the words, “stroke victim.” Hearing the nurse, Poole looked around, wondering who that was, only to realize she was the patient. When she woke up, she found herself unable to speak a single word. Poole experienced a bewildering mixture of recognizing the medical terminology spoken by the doctors while also struggling to recall simple words such as “chair.”

“It was scary,” she said. “I was confused, like a little baby.”

Both Hoffius and Poole had a long, hard road ahead of them, one that would test their endurance and resolve. They both developed aphasia, which is the impairment of language following brain damage, as a result of their stroke. During their recovery, they had to relearn how to read, write and speak.

Hoffius, who spent 26 years teaching English, describes her recovery as similar to the process her foreign language students went through, learning the alphabet and how to read all over again. “I have a new understanding of my students,” she said.

During their recovery, both Poole and Hoffius found their way to Rice’s T.L.L. Temple Foundation Neuroplasticity Laboratory. There, they work with Rice researchers including Simon Fischer-Baum, an assistant professor of psychological sciences, and Randi Martin, the Elma Schneider Professor of Psychological Sciences, to help establish a better understanding of the kinds of language problems suffered by people with aphasia.

Gaylen Poole, a former health care auditor, developed aphasia as the result of a stroke.

Today, she helps Rice researchers Simon Fischer-Baum and Randi Martin better understand language limitations that result from strokes.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 35

One possible result from a stroke is aphasia, a condition that affects each patient differently. Some aphasia patients can understand what people say but struggle with speaking. Some can speak but have difficulty reading or writing. Others struggle with hearing words but can hear sounds such as the barking of a dog or the jangling of keys. Some people can write but lose their ability to read. Others can read words but struggle to put them into sentences.

“Language difficulties come in many different forms, nearly as many forms as the number of people who come into our lab,” said Fischer-Baum. These different forms of aphasia are a testament to the many steps involved in understanding and expressing language, whether written or verbal.

FOLLOWING STROKE PATIENTS DURING RECOVERY

Susan Hoffius describes her ongoing recovery from a stroke as similar to the process foreign language students go through in learning a new language.

Three years after her stroke, the former English teacher still struggles with reading and numbers. “It’s my normal.”

THE MANY DIFFERENT FORMS OF APHASIA The brain is made up of billions of neurons and glia, all connected in a network of staggering complexity. Contained within the brain, in a set of networks we don’t fully understand yet, is the ability for language.

For most of us, language is something we take for granted.

We listen to the words of a friend, understand the words they are saying and reply in kind. We glance at written words on a page, our brain organizing these words into sentences and paragraphs, turning them into a story that makes sense. All of this requires a complex relay of visual and auditory cues, as well as the ability to integrate these cues into meaning.

What we think of as language — the written and spoken word — is in fact a hugely complex process, one that incorporates many different parts of the brain. When parts of the brain sustain damage, such as during a stroke, the results are every bit as complicated and nuanced as language itself.

During a stroke, the blood supply to the brain gets cut off.

Deprived of oxygen, cells begin to die. Depending on the severity, a stroke patient can be left with impairments ranging from mild to severe, affecting everything from memory to the ability to walk and talk.

36 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2019

Martin and Fischer-Baum’s research groups are examining complementary aspects of aphasia and the recovery process. For one part of their work, Martin’s group recruits patients within a few days of their stroke, following them over the course of a year, performing MRI imaging and cognitive testing. This work, which is done in collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine faculty member Tatiana Schnur, helps establish the initial symptoms as well as get a sense for how the healing process is associated with early improvements.

“At each time point, we’ll relate the damage to whatever kind of difficulties they’re having,” Martin said.

Although the first year following a stroke is when patients make the most dramatic improvements, recovery is a lifelong process — one that is a testament to the brain’s resiliency.

Both Martin and Fischer-Baum’s research groups examine patients later in their recovery when the brain has healed. At this point, the brain is adapting to its new limitations, finding ways to compensate for lost abilities. Depending on the patient, this work can go on for months or years. “We have patients who have been coming in every week for years,” Fischer-Baum said.

Developing long-term relationships with patients offers an opportunity to look at specific aphasia cases in depth, as well as track their recovery over time. Plus, as Fischer-Baum points out, patients become part of the family after a while. “We like them, and this is a good environment for them.”

With this research, the benefit goes both ways.

Patients gain a deeper knowledge about their specific form of aphasia, while the research groups working with patients gain valuable insights that will help others in the future.

Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections.

Every time you learn something, the brain rewires itself just a little bit, pruning and refining the connections between neurons. Following a brain injury such as stroke, the brain can adapt these connections to compensate for whatever is lost.

NEUROPLASTICITY: THE ABILITY OF THE BRAIN TO REORGANIZE ITSELF Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections. Every time you learn something, the brain rewires itself just a little bit, pruning and refining the connections between neurons. Following a brain injury such as stroke, the brain can adapt these connections to compensate for whatever is lost. Generally speaking, after a stroke, brain activity will increase in either the area around the injured region or in a complementary area, such as switching from one side of the brain to the other. This is one of the reasons why, years after a stroke, patients can still improve.

The tests performed by Fischer-Baum and Martin’s research groups are aimed at defining the exact limitations of a stroke patient’s language ability, while also looking at how the brain has changed, both as a result of the initial injury and how the brain has adapted.

The results are sometimes surprising, offering new insights about how our brain receives and processes language, as well as its capacity for reorganizing.

“What you really want to find are the striking contrasts,” Fischer-Baum said. Examples of striking contrasts include losing the ability to hear language but not other types of sounds, or losing the ability to see letters but not other types of shapes, or losing the ability to remember the sounds of words but not the meaning of words.

If there is a sudden difference in a patient’s performance between two similar tasks, it offers more information about the exact nature of a patient’s impairment and how the brain processes language.

“We can analyze the patterns of errors to address broader questions about the nature of mental cognition,” FischerBaum said. Long term, understanding the different variations in aphasia as well as the brain’s capacity for healing and reorganizing promises to help improve treatment options, both by refining existing therapies and suggesting new ones.

THE ROAD TO IMPROVEMENT For patients like Hoffius and Poole, recovery is an ongoing process. These improvements don’t come easy. For every story of a patient making a miraculous recovery, there are other stories of patients who struggle to make minimal gains. Sometimes these contrasts can be heartbreakingly frustrating, with two very similar patients having two very different recovery outcomes.

“Don’t compare one stroke to another. There is no comparison,” Poole said. “Everybody’s stroke is different.”

Poole described sitting in a stroke recovery support group for months, afraid to speak. “I was in this classroom with other people like me,” Poole said. “Wanted to say something, but scared.”

After a while, with the support of people who were going through the same struggles, Poole started to open up. She started to speak again. With practice came improvement.

Both Poole and Hoffius have made good use of the available resources, such as attending support groups at the Houston Aphasia Recovery Center. “Improvements often come from targeted, fixed practice,” said Lynn Maher, a University of Houston faculty member and one of the founders of the Houston Aphasia Recovery Center, which offers programs for aphasia patients as well as their families and caregivers. “This takes a lot of time and effort.”

For Hoffius and Poole, the continued capability for improvement has been a lifeline. When Hoffius first got home from the hospital, she spent months staring at a poster in her living room until she could finally recognize the printed letters L-O-V-E. By the end of the first year, she could read at a third grade level, with her first book being Houston-area author Randy Cecil’s book, “Lucy,” about a tiny dog, a nervous girl and a juggler. Almost three years into her recovery, she still struggles with reading and numbers. Although Hoffius will likely never work again, she is adjusting to her new life — to her new normal. “It’s still there, but it’s not normal,” Hoffius said. “It’s my normal.”

For Poole, should you pass her on the street, you would never guess that just a few years ago, doctors told her she would never be able to walk or talk again. Talking is more difficult because it takes a lot of energy, similar to a grueling workout, while many of the words exist just at the tip of her tongue — there in her mind but frustratingly out of reach.

Both Hoffius and Poole possess a ferocious work ethic and a determination to recover as much as they can. Along the way, as they continue to improve, their collaboration with FischerBaum and Martin means they’re also helping other aphasia patients.

“Little by little, better, better, better,” Poole said. ■

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 37

In

a sunny McNair Hall conference room, Ruth Oh Reitmeier ’92 and a Rice student sit facing each other at a long conference table. The setting is austere, but the conversation is intimate. The student — her long hair loose, a gray backpack and wad of keys at her side — talks candidly about a weakness she has discovered in herself while running a large campus organization. “I’m someone who needs a lot of information,” she tells Reitmeier.

She likes to stay informed about others’ progress on their projects, but her questions have been interpreted by others as micromanaging — or, worse, trying to take credit for their work.

“I guess I still need to work on how to manage without micromanaging,” she confesses. Reitmeier sips a lime LaCroix and listens carefully. She prods gently with questions.

“When somebody is accusing you of micromanaging, what do you think they’re basing that on?” Reitmeier asks. “What could you actively do to counteract that perception and dismantle those assumptions people might have?” Reitmeier doesn’t offer solutions or dispense advice. But for more than an hour the student talks it out, scribbling notes and creating a plan to communicate better with the people in her student organization.

Reitmeier is the assistant director for coaching at the university’s Doerr Institute for New Leaders, which provides a wide range of programs — from one-on-one coaching to group-based skill training — to help students develop as leaders. Nearly 40% of Rice students will have worked with the Doerr Institute by the time they graduate.

The Doerr Institute doesn’t offer a certificate or course credit, which allows a kind of a la carte flexibility that differs from most college leadership programs. Both undergraduate and graduate students choose one or several semesters of training or coaching from leadership professionals.

“Leadership is about more than roles and titles. Wherever you are, you have the opportunity to influence and impact the environment around you.”

— Ruth Oh Reitmeier, assistant director for coaching, Doerr Institute

Lettering by Molly Jacques Photos by Jeff Fitlow 39

Expanding the Practice These days, plenty of universities have leadership programs. Many are small and selective, catering to students who are already campus leaders. Others operate strictly within a single program or department, such as a business school.

The Doerr Institute is unique: It is available, free of charge, to every student.

“We’re not going to select out some blessed few,” says Tom Kolditz, the institute’s founding director. “We’re going to do it at a large scale for anybody who wants it.”

And in the Doerr universe, leadership has a broad definition. It doesn’t have to mean holding an office or being in charge. Sometimes leadership training does indeed help the student who is running for campus president or who wants to be a CEO by the time she’s 35.

But it’s also designed to help the inter-

national student who wants to succeed in the American workplace, the lifelong “quiet kid” who wants to challenge himself to speak up more in class and the freshman who wants to contribute more to the organizations she has joined.

“We tell them leadership is about more than roles and titles,” Reitmeier says. “Wherever you are, you have the opportunity to influence and impact the environment around you.”

The idea of leadership training may sound a little corporate, conjuring images of company retreats, ropes courses and trust falls. In 2017, when Jason Lopez signed up for a semester of coaching, he wasn’t sure what he was getting into. “I won’t lie — I went into it with a little bit of cynicism,” says Lopez, who graduated in May. “You hear the word ‘leadership’ and it’s kind of a buzzword, right?”

Lopez thought it might just be a gimmick designed to pad resumes. But he ended

“We’re not going to select out some blessed few. We’re going to do it at a large scale for anybody who wants it.”

— Tom Kolditz, director, Doerr Institute

4 0

up getting involved in just about every program the institute offers. Lopez has an easy manner and an infectious smile, but he hasn’t forgotten he is the first in his family to go to college. “I’ve always kind of doubted myself, doubted my ability to perform well,” he says. But as he prepared to leave Rice with a consulting job lined up after graduation, Lopez recognized that leadership training has given him confidence to navigate his career.

“You can be the smartest guy in the room,” he says, “but if you don’t know how to communicate — if you don’t know how to establish meaningful relationships — where does that knowledge get you?”

Catalyzing Change That’s exactly what John ’73 and Ann Doerr ’75 were thinking in 2015, when they pledged to their alma mater the largest single gift in university history. The $50 million donation from the California couple’s private family foundation was an investment in making Rice students better leaders and stronger team players.

“You cannot make a business with one person — teams accomplish everything,” says Ann, a Rice trustee who also serves as chairman of the board of directors of Khan Academy. But it takes instruction and practice, she believes, to lead and inspire a team.

John is a venture capitalist who has backed the founders of some spectacularly successful technology companies, including Amazon and Google. When he spoke at a campus event in December, he recalled the incident that sparked his idea for a leadership institute. In 2007, when he was invited to speak at Rice commencement, he prepared by talking to a dozen or so undergraduates. They were “the best and the brightest,” he said — students hand-selected to meet him.

But he was surprised to discover that despite their obvious intelligence, they were inarticulate when asked about their work and plans, looking down at their shoes to avoid eye contact.

“I thought: You’re judged on your ability to think and speak on your feet,” he said last year. “What if we conducted an experiment, an experiment of considerable scale, that would involve some training — but most of all some coaching — to develop better leaders?”

In 2009, the Doerrs — who both earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering — funded the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership, a multiyear certificate program that builds leadership skills in future engineers. A few years later, they decided to make leadership training available to all Rice students.

“There are leaders in every sense of the word,” Ann says — not just in politics and corporations, but in labs, in classrooms and in families. Learning how to work well with others, to both lead and follow, she says, is necessary in everything a Rice graduate will pursue.

The Doerr Institute operates with 11 full-time staffers from a 1,200-squarefoot office in McNair Hall. The training, however, happens everywhere. Leader developers from the Doerr Institute might meet with students at the library or at a coffee shop, but they’re just as likely to schedule a phone call or a Skype session that better fits into a student’s busy life.

Lauren Yeom, who graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in cognitive sciences, is a high achiever who used to have trouble celebrating her own successes. She began to untangle that when she signed up for one-on-one coaching her junior year.

Yeom — like all Doerr Institute participants — took an emotional intelligence test, the industry standard EQ-i 2.0, to reveal her strengths and weaknesses. Her biggest weaknesses: self-perception and self-regard. Looking at her life, it made so much sense. Even after a success, “I was always more focused on what failed and what I didn’t do,” Yeom says. “It was helpful to realize that I’m not good at recognizing what my strengths are, even though I’m really good at seeing my weaknesses.”

Yeom’s coach gave her techniques for dealing with that tendency. “It was easier, when I had those negative feelings about myself, to catch myself in those moments and say, ‘Let me try to implement one of the action plans that I designed with my coach.’”

Substance and Results The Doerr Institute’s own leader sets the no-nonsense tone for its programs. To Kolditz, leader development is serious business. Kolditz is disarmingly genial and approachable — he shows up at the

institute’s recruiting events to mingle with students in a button-down shirt and a fleece vest. But he makes it clear he is focused on substance and results.

Before he was recruited to Rice, Kolditz directed the Yale School of Management’s Leadership Development Program and led the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point.

A retired brigadier general with a Ph.D. in psychology, Kolditz is determined to guard against the “hokey, leader-tainment stuff” found at corporate conferences and retreats. “There are a lot of things that are sold as leadership development that are simply entertainment,” he says.

Kolditz also doesn’t want the Doerr Institute to turn into a job pipeline that matches students with employers. “We never want students to come to us because they think we can get them a job,” he says.

But everyone at the Doerr Institute is aware that students are learning skills that will make them more attractive in the

“Students who raise their hand and want to participate in this are signaling that they want to grow and that they are capable of being coached. That’s what companies want.”

— Lillie Besozzi, senior associate director, Doerr Institute

workforce, and the institute has a close and enthusiastic relationship with Rice’s Center for Career Development.

“This is almost a sorting process we’re going through,” says Lillie Besozzi ’16, the Doerr Institute’s senior associate director. “Students who raise their hand and want to participate in this are signaling that they want to grow and that they are capable of being coached. That’s what companies want.”

Justin Onwenu ’18 used to think he was a “phenomenal” listener. Then he got leadership training. As president of the Rice Student Association his senior year, Onwenu had the most visible leadership position on campus — one that required him to hear from fellow students every day.

When people talked, he was hearing their words — “I could recite [back] what people were saying,” Onwenu says with the ease of a natural-born leader. But he didn’t realize that hearing is just one part of listening.

With his coach, Onwenu talked over

some of the conflicts he’d experienced with others. That’s when it dawned on him: The conflicts might be his fault. “I realized, ‘Justin, you are listening really well, but maybe people don’t know that,’” he says.

For a semester, Onwenu met privately with his leadership coach.

“We worked on active listening and trying to make sure people know their input and comments are valued,” Onwenu says.

Onwenu’s first job after Rice was leading community outreach for the Hurricane Harvey Registry, a program tracking the emotional, physical and other impacts of the 2017 storm. His training came in handy while talking to people whose homes flooded, he says. “You have to be a really good listener, and people have to know that you care and that you listened.”

Back in McNair Hall, Reitmeier is watching her student arrive at solutions. Near the end of the hour, she leans back in her chair. “I’m thinking back to one of our earlier sessions,” Reitmeier says, “and I want to point out something that I’ve noticed is different.” In their first meetings, she says, the student spoke mostly about “tactical stuff: processes, goals, projects.”

“You were very goal-driven,” Reitmeier says. “I didn’t hear you talk much about relationship-building.” Today, chastened by experience, the student is concerned with building trust and tending to her connections with other people. “It’s interesting, because those are the two things that most leaders need to balance, right?” Reitmeier says.

“The higher you go, the more important those relationships are.”

“People are a lot more complicated than a project is,” the student says, and it is tempting to focus on the goals instead of the personalities. But with coaching and experience, she has learned that leadership means managing both. “I like to call it my growth arc,” she says with a short laugh.

“It’s been a journey.” ■

How does the Doerr Institute know whether or not it’s succeeding?

The Measurement Mentality

“We do not congratulate ourselves without measuring anything,” says the institute’s founding director, Tom Kolditz.

And there are professional researchers who handle that. As managing director for measurement, Ryan P. Brown’s entire job is to measure the Doerr Institute’s impact. “Every chance we can get, we hold things up to the light of evidence,” says Brown ’93, a social psychologist. Before coming to Rice, Brown helped establish the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing at the University of Oklahoma.

What They Measure

“Every chance we can get, we hold things up to the light of evidence.”

— Ryan P. Brown, managing director for measurement, Doerr Institute

In addition to changes in well-being and perceived progress toward their own goals, one key metric Brown is looking for is change in “leader identity” — whether students see themselves as potential leaders and feel they have the confidence and willingness to lead. Leader identity is measured at the beginning and the end of a semester. Then, it gets measured against comparison groups. More data comes from surveying each student’s leadership coach.

The institute even surveys friends and acquaintances, who can report whether the student’s desired improve-

ments — better communication, selfregulation, self-confidence — are visible to others.

Brown’s research has found that students who spend time at the Doerr Institute experience a measurable strengthening of their leader identity. “Just being older and having been at Rice for four years does not change your leader identity,” Brown says. But in studies large and small, a “tapestry” of information shows that Doerr Institute training does.

Process Versus Outcome

Kolditz draws a distinction between “process metrics” and “outcome metrics.” It’s easy to get good results when you focus on process metrics, he says: “How many students came? Were they happy? Did they like the pizza?”

But the Doerr Institute is primarily interested in outcome metrics, he says; namely, how its programs alter the way students function in their work and their lives. “It doesn’t matter if students enjoy [a program] if it doesn’t change them,” Kolditz says. “We do more.

That’s why we know we’re not just making students happy; we’re making a difference in their behaviors and, therefore, their lives.”

ALUMNI

PROFILES, HISTORY AND CLASSNOTES

ARTS & LETTERS

Applause Welcome Aubrey Ferguson Bergauer finds ways to attract audiences to classical music performances.

BY KEN KEUFFEL

PHOTOS BY T HE MORRISONS

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 4 3

ALUMNI

fications, including rewriting program notes and encouraging patrons to clap whenever they want — even between movements. Taking drinks to seats got the go-ahead, too.

The results at the box office were not only obvious, but measurable, Bergauer said. Among other indicators, the symphony achieved a first-time audience retention rate of 30% — triple the industry average. Over the five years she was there, the symphony doubled the number of tickets sold in a

“For us, the call was not to get new audiences. It was about how we could be laser-focused on getting those newcomers to return again.”

W

HEN AUBREY Ferguson Bergauer ’05 talks of “changing the narrative” at symphony orchestras, she espouses a philosophy that guided her recent turnaround of the California Symphony near San Francisco.

Bergauer became executive director of the symphony in 2014.

Like many orchestras across the country, the California Symphony was facing an existential crisis. Its core audience was aging and no similarly loyal group of younger patrons was emerging to replace it.

“For us, the call was not to get new audiences,” said Bergauer, a Houston native. “It was about how we could

44 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2019

be laser-focused on getting those newcomers to return again.” That meant exploring the patron experience, particularly for millennials and Gen Xers, and it meant coming up with a disciplined strategy for retaining them.

First, though, research was needed.

Early in her tenure, Bergauer sought feedback on the concert experience from younger audiences. She got an earful. The chief finding: The music itself wasn’t the issue. “Over and over, we heard from audiences that they felt a sense of awe during our live performances.” Rather, Bergauer found, it was “everything tangential to the experience” that was keeping people away.

Based on the findings, the organization made simple yet significant modi-

year. Bergauer was soon in demand as a speaker for other orchestras, musical organizations and universities.

“I realized how much I enjoyed those conversations, and it really lifted me out of the weeds of the day to day of my current job,” she said. Now working full time as an arts consultant, Bergauer aims to share what she’s learned about audience development with more people.

Bergauer’s musical talents were nurtured early at the Houston Youth Symphony. At Rice, she studied with David Kirk, an associate professor of tuba in the Shepherd School of Music.

A double major in managerial studies helped prepare her for the business of music and nonprofits.

An active resident of Will Rice College, she served as treasurer, played intramural sports and coordinated O-Week. Every year, she rode for the college’s supercompetitive Beer Bike team. She married fellow Owl Ryan Bergauer ’04. “Rice is absolutely a part of who I am today and forever.”

ALUMNI

LETTER HOME

Greetings From Austin Alberto Rodriguez ’15 changes direction and expands his sense of home.

few steps outside my apartment near Lady Bird Lake. In many ways, Austin is a traditional city full of Southern hospitality, yet it’s also open-minded and modern. It also feels like a border town dream. From Hispanic restaurants to salsa dancing nights and midnight taco runs, there is a vital Latino presence in the city. I love celebrating my heritage through mariachi, just like I did at Rice with Mariachi Luna Llena.

Looking back, Rice was a place where I first truly learned about community, diversity and the beauty of pursuing a common goal. Everyone at Rice was on a unique journey, but we were all passionate about education and making an impact on the world. There were countless things I loved about my time at Rice, and the more time I spend in Austin, the more I fall in love with this place too.

AFTER GRADUATING WITH a degree in civil engineering, I moved to Detroit to work at General Motors.

It was my first time being away from Texas — I grew up in Laredo — and my first time living by myself. This was an education. I learned a lot — what drives my fears and how to persevere, but also what makes me happy.

Ultimately, I stayed in Detroit for 3 1/2 years and had a fantastic experience being part of the transformation of a city. But Texas always had my heart.

Having heard about the tech boom in Austin, I started looking at opportunities here. Eventually, I found a fantastic position at Oracle, where I now work as a solutions engineer. I knew it was going to be a culture shock coming from a legacy corporation to the tech world, but I was excited to be a part of a booming city with an active Latino community. I’m enjoying the fusion of cultures that “keep Austin weird.”

A typical question everyone asks here is, “Where are you from?” It’s a rare instance to meet a native Austin resident. As a minority at Oracle, I strongly advocate for diversity and inclusion and help to facilitate a better understanding of the communities in which the company resides.

Living in East Austin, I have so much to enjoy — nature, city vibes and an employer that encourages a work-life balance. I can hop on a scooter and go to Gabriela’s Downtown, one of my favorite restaurants. Or I can bike to my office or grab a paddleboard just a

PHOTO BY DRE W A N T HON Y SMI T H

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 4 5

ALUMNI

CLASSNOTES

Keeping Cool and Catching Up Excerpts from Owlmanac

1960s

1990s

“A quarter century after graduating from Rice, I’m a college professor myself, and I live in Chicago with my fiancée.

I’ll occasionally refer to the ’90s when speaking with undergraduates, and I’m pretty sure they are giving me the same bewildered look that we gave Rice professors when they spoke knowingly of the ’60s. I’d be keen to catch up with any and all friends and acquaintances who may be passing through Chicago.

A good email for me is tonychen@ alumni.rice.edu.”

— Contributed

by Tony Chen ’94 (Brown: BA)

“In spring and summer 1965, I typically spent all night working on the Rice computer with Joel Cyprus ’58 (BA and BS, 1959; MS, 1961; PhD, 1963), Algernon ‘Algy’ Badger ’48 (BS; MS, 1949; PhD, 1963), Dwayne Chesnut ’59 (BS; PhD, 1963), Mary Shaw ’65 (Jones: BA), Forest Baskett III ’64 (Hanszen: BA, 1965) and others. When morning arrived, because I lived in an unairconditioned apartment on Bolsover, it would be too hot to go home 2000s and sleep. I would put on a bathing suit and cabana top to go to the A group of more than 15 Rice alumni from the classes of 2007–2011 (predominately 2009) reairport and take a flying lesson. It was cooler up in the air. None of the united in a rented house outside of Nashville over men’s colleges — except for the commons — were air-conditioned Presidents Day weekend to catch up and relive in those days, nor were most of the classrooms, so the students were college memories. Rainy weather couldn’t stop a capable of living without it.” — Contributed by Pat Groves ’62 trek for tasty local barbecue, but it led to a signifi(Will Rice: BA and BS; MS, 1964; PhD, 1967) cant amount of indoor activities like board games and Fishbowl, which featured an appropriate 1980s number of Rice-themed clues, including Sammy “My choir, the Angel City Chorale, competed in ‘America’s Got Talent’! We got the the Owl, college cheers and, of course, Doc C! golden buzzer from guest judge Olivia Munn and made it all the way to the semi— Contributed by class recorder Clint finals. It was a surreal experience to look out from the stage in Hollywood and see Corcoran ’07 (Will Rice: BA and BS) Simon Cowell, Howie Mandel, Heidi Klum and Mel B looking back at us, then commenting on our performance. Mel B, also known as ‘Scary Spice’ from the Spice Girls, gave me a fist bump backstage. I’m not sure how I can ever top that, choir-wise.

“I even got a brief close-up on national TV, dancing while singing ‘This Is Me.’ To access digital Classnotes, create a Rice Portal All of those Rice dance parties finally paid off!” — Contributed by Kurt Eggert ’81 account at alumni.rice.edu/connect. Once registered, (Hanszen: BA) log in and click “Owlmanac Online.”

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IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y C HR I S DA N G ER

ALUMNI

Dickie Kerr of the Chicago White Sox, pictured in October 1919, coached Owls baseball in 1928 for less than three months.

FAMILY ALBUM

Dickie Kerr’s Legacy

PHOTO BY APA/GETTY IMAGES

On the centennial of baseball’s biggest scandal, the memory of a little-known Rice coach stands tall.

IN THE ANNALS OF RICE baseball, dating back to 1913, only one of the school’s 20 head coaches failed to last an entire season. A certain “Wee” Dickie Kerr — who stood 5 feet, 7 inches tall and weighed 130 pounds — took charge of the Owls in late January 1928 and was gone by the middle of April.

Kerr departed after a poor start that included a pair of tough defeats at the hands of The University of Texas, making him not much more than a footnote in Rice sports history — except that in 2019 he rates special consideration.

This fall, baseball laments its low point — the 100th anniversary of the 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and Cincinnati Reds, when eight Chicago players were

paid by gamblers to lose. But the “Black Sox” centennial also commemorates that same Dickie Kerr, who pitched brilliantly for Chicago in the tainted series, winning two games while his teammates were sloughing off. When he died of cancer in 1963, legendary New York Times sportswriter Arthur Daley declared Kerr “a symbol of integrity” and a “shining beacon of righteousness.”

The scandal led to a gust of fame for the pitcher, but by 1927 he was adrift, a struggling, itinerant baseballer. That’s when Rice Athletic Director Claude Rothgeb hired Kerr as baseball coach.

“Coach Kerr is a master flinger of the horsehide and his knowledge should stand the Institute chunkers in good stead,” noted The Rice Thresher. The

new coach was enthusiastic: “We ought to have a good club,” Kerr said. “In fact, I won’t have nothing but a good club.”

But the regular season began with two one-run defeats to the powerful Longhorns. Losses piled up and Kerr’s tenure abruptly ended. John Sullivan, an assistant director of sports information at Rice, doubts the early losses triggered Kerr’s exit. “He was a very well-respected baseball man and not someone who was fired or quit when the Rice college season was not going too hot,” said Sullivan.

In 1940, Kerr became manager of the Daytona Beach Islanders, a St. Louis Cardinals farm team. One of his players was a 19-year-old pitcher with uncertain prospects named Stan Musial.

Kerr recognized Musial’s uncommon ability as a hitter and played him in the outfield between pitching starts. When Musial injured his shoulder, putting his pitching career in doubt, Kerr — who’d become a father figure — persuaded him to turn his attention to the outfield and the batter’s box. The result was more than 3,000 big league hits and induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969.

Stan “the Man” Musial stepped up to the majors, while Kerr was soon out of professional baseball.

In March 1949, Rice football coach and Athletic Director Jess Neely brought the old left-hander back to Houston to assist coach Harold Stockbridge for a season. The Thresher noted that he helped top hurler Tom Hopkins ’49 show “remarkable improvement.”

In 1958, Kerr was holding down a nondescript office job in Houston when Musial surprised his mentor with a birthday present — a house. News of the gift revived memories of Kerr and cemented his status as a living symbol of sports integrity. Kerr never sought praise for his 1919 heroics, once saying, “It always did seem funny to me that so much fuss could be made about a man’s being honest.”

— RICHARD JOHNSON Read an extended version of this story at magazine.rice.edu.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 47

ALUMNI

BOOKS

Now Reading

BY JENNIFER LATSON

King of the Mississippi Mike Freedman ’14 Hogarth, 2019

IN “KING OF THE MISSISSIPPI,” Mike Freedman skewers the corporate culture of a fictional Houston management consultancy where two very different alpha male archetypes square off for supremacy — in the firm, in the city and in the realm of manhood generally. Brock Wharton is a pedigreed 1-percenter in Houston’s good-old-boy hierarchy: a former Longhorn football captain with an MBA from Harvard Business School. Mike Fink, meanwhile, hails from “the land of the lower class,” as Wharton describes it: a former Green Beret who creates his own advantages out of an endless reserve of audacity and wile. Their lives intersect in this darkly satirical buddy comedy of sorts as they vie to sabotage each other at every turn, but ultimately must work together on a common cause.

Like Fink, Freedman served in the Special Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan before returning to Houston to earn his MBA at the Jones Graduate School of Business, and a veteran’s perspective suffuses the book. The author’s experiences also inspired the setting: Freedman chose the world of management consulting as the novel’s backdrop after a real-life job interview at a prestigious consultancy went nearly as disastrously as Fink’s interview with Wharton.

(Or maybe even more so — Fink got the job, Freedman didn’t.)

“The first chapter is the only autobiographical chapter in the book,” Freedman joked with friends at a Houston party for the book in July. “Though I bombed my consulting interview far worse in real life.”

As an exploration of over-the-top machismo, the book strikes a timely

48 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2019

chord. Freedman’s debut novel, “School Board,” also set in Houston, pits an ambitious high schooler against an executive at an Enron-like company for a spot on the local school board — and there, too, machismo plays a key role in the central power struggle. But the conversation about toxic masculinity has only grown more relevant since then, especially as it relates to some of the nation’s highest leadership positions. Fink and Wharton’s rivalry casts a comic light on the futility, and the ridiculousness, of competitive manliness.

EXCERPT

“King of the Mississippi”

T

HE SHINE AND swagger of a new day. Great Recession? Not Houston.

And yet, and yet there had been a speed bump in September 2008, sure, but that had been assessed and corrected; and now the

city of Brock Wharton seceded further from the rest of the flatlined country in the first week of September 2014.

As Wharton was considering whether to rearrange his weekend schedule to pencil in sex with his wife, one of the strangest men he had ever laid eyes on breached the space of his open doorway. Of average height, the boyish, sun-cooked man appeared taller than he was as his askew brown hair lashed out in every direction. His rangy build (accentuated by the too-small, off-therack, navy double-breasted suit he wore as if he were a redneck admiral at a regatta that Wharton would never enter) seemed pulled at the sinews’ seams. It was the sort of flawed build that none of the South Texas ranching families would ever breed. If not for the intensity of the blue eyes — divided by a comic eagle nose that dived toward raggedly chapped lips — so nakedly sizing him up in return, Wharton would have dismissed the figure as an apparition too absurd to be real.

ALUMNI

Phenomenology in France

A Philosophical and Theological Introduction Steven DeLay ’13 Routledge, 2019

Phenomenology isn’t an easy field for nonphilosophers to get a handle on. Even phenomenologists disagree on what exactly the discipline entails, although it’s generally described as the philosophical study of consciousness and the human experience. Theology touches on these same themes, of course — and in “Phenomenology in France,” Steven DeLay examines the ways phenomenology blurs the boundaries between philosophy and theology.

“It is no secret that God — the one of the Bible, I mean — has fallen into disfavor nearly every-

where,” writes DeLay, who earned his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford. “Must, then, phenomenology today continue on the presupposition that it can proceed wholly independent from faith? Can it?”

The book is not only a primer for newcomers to French phenomenology, but also a glimpse at how the field is evolving, according to Claudio Tarditi, a philosophy postdoc at the University of Turin. “It develops a fundamental argument about the fruitfulness of a radical reassessment of the relation between philosophy and theology for the phenomenological reflection that is still to come,” Tarditi writes.

The Evolution of a Building Complex Louis I. Kahn’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies Jeffry Kieffer ’77

MUSIC

In Rotation

Nightflower Elliot Cole ’08

Long Echo Music, 2019

Composer and producer Elliot Cole earned both a B.A. in cognitive sciences and a B.Mus. in 2008 at Rice. “Nightflower” features guitar, cello, clarinet, piano, various percussion instruments and most delightfully — flower pots. His percussion music has been performed by 250 ensembles all over the world and evokes “sparkling icicles of sound,” as described by a reviewer in Rolling Stone. Learn more at elliotcole.com.

Artifice, 2019

Since his college days, Jeffry Kieffer has been fascinated with Louis Kahn’s work on the Salk Institute — the La Jolla, California, complex where Jonas Salk founded one of the nation’s most prestigious biomedical research facilities. It’s taken him four decades to be able to articulate exactly why. “We can never explain our fascination for anything or anyone; we can only adequately or inadequately describe the aspects of things or persons,” Kieffer writes in the preface to “The Evolution of a Building Complex.” “It has taken almost a lifetime for me to appreciate Kahn’s achievement.”

While attending Rice’s graduate program in urban design in the 1970s, however, Kieffer was helped along by an epiphany: It occurred

to him that the floor plan of the Salk Institute’s laboratory building looked just like the image of the Torah.

Kieffer spent several years researching and writing about the Judaic undercurrents of Kahn’s work before working for more than 30 years himself as an architect and project director in New York City, primarily on municipal projects, including schools, libraries, subway stations and community centers.

In his book, Kieffer focuses on aesthetics and considers the ways Kahn broke from previously established architectural norms — making him, and the Salk Institute, one of the most radical figures in design during the 1960s.

Ipsa Dixit

Kate Soper ’03

New World Records, 2018

Kate Soper’s acclaimed experimental chamber opera was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in music in 2017. A composer, performer and writer, Soper explores music, language and meaning via voice, violin, flute and percussion.

Alex Ross, in The New Yorker, described the piece as “a ninety-minute tour de force in which ideas assume sound and form. Call it philosophy-opera.” Soper earned a B.Mus. at Rice before earning a DMA at Columbia University. Learn more at katesoper.com.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 49

09.23.2019 // Brown College powderpuff football practice // Founder’s Court

LAST LOOK 50 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2019

PHOTO BY BR ANDON MARTIN

UNLIMITED Kirsten Ostherr, the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English, is the founding director of the Medical Humanities program at Rice. Her goal is to change the way we train doctors and to reaffirm skills that are essential to health care. Such skills include the ability to think critically, to develop ethical frameworks that can handle ambiguity and uncertainty, and to communicate effectively about complex challenges in patient care. “I want humanities-trained medical students to be open-minded and willing to consider multiple ways of knowing and explaining a patient’s experience. I want them to be intellectually humble, to feel a sense of social responsibility in the ways they practice medicine.�

With the support of the Rice community, the Medical Humanities program can reshape the way we think about health practices, health education and the human dimensions of medicine. To learn more, read a Q&A with Ostherr at envision.rice.edu.

unconventional. unlimited. uncharted. unmatched.

giving.rice.edu

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

ON THE WEB

magazine.rice.edu EXTENDED FEATURE

Solving the “Belle in the Well”

NEXT UP LAST SPRING, LINDA WELZENBACH, a science writer in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Rice, joined an international expedition to study Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier. A geologist and veteran of two other Antarctic expeditions, Welzenbach served as public outreach coordinator for Thwaites Glacier Offshore Research. Her duties included photographing, sharing and interpreting the investigations of this fragile glacial environment during the two-month expedition. Living for the most part aboard the research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer, she worked alongside a team of geoscientists, oceanographers and students that included one Rice graduate.

Look for her annotated photo essay in the Winter 2020 issue.

4 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2019

There’s more to the story of “The DNA Detective” online.

A dedicated team of volunteer genealogists are key to solving the cold cases taken on by the nonprofit DNA Doe Project, founded

by Colleen Fitzpatrick ’76 and Margaret Press. Read about how these genealogy experts helped solve a complex identity case known as the “Belle in the Well.”

VIDEO

One Stinging Sensation

Stinging asps are populating live oak trees in the Texas Medical Center area — the unintended consequence of netting the trees to reduce pesky birds. See what asps look like and listen to Rice bioscientists talk about a unique ecological case study.

MUSIC

Owls Have Talent

Kurt Eggert ’81 shared news about his choir’s — the Angel City Chorale — participation in “America’s Got Talent” in this issue’s Classnotes highlights. We added a link to their rousing performance of “This Is Me” to our online story.

PHOTO CREDIT TK