Rice Magazine | Fall 2020

THE MUSICAL WORLDS OF GERMAINE FRANCO

FALL 2020

HIGH SCORES A S A COMPOSER FOR BELOVED FILMS LIKE “COCO,” GERMAINE FR ANCO MOVE S AUDIENCE S WHILE CRE ATING OPPOR TUNITIE S FOR YOUNG PEOPLE IN HER COMMUNIT Y.

BY LYNELL GEORGE ILL U S T R AT I O N BY G LE NN H A R V E Y

G GERMAINE FR ANCO ’84

had firmed up a full slate for 2020. As a much in-demand film composer, music producer and musician in Los Angeles, her roster is always lively — a series of seamless segues she’s mastered. But March arrived and the world shut down — abruptly, and hardly on an up note. Many creatives live in the swirl of unpredictability, but this strain of uncertainty was far different.

Despite the dips and spikes of a global pandemic, deadlines pressed — and so did the demand to focus on the work at hand. The chaos in the world notwithstanding, Franco knew she would have to trust her process in hopes that she might find a familiar place to float in the delicate space of creation, building environments and moods in music.

In late February, Franco took a brief timeout to chat at a street-side cafe, steps away from Sony Pictures Studios in downtown Culver City, a quiet yet quickly gentrifying community within LA’s sprawling Westside. She’s midpivot between projects, having just completed “Work It,” a teen dance movie for Netflix, and she’s ready to sink into something new.

“Well, actually, I already started,” she admits after ordering a bowl of soup. “I’m doing ‘Curious George,’ an animated feature for Universal Animation. I literally finished and sent off ‘Work It’ right before I came here.”

Full rests are rare for Franco. A multiple awardwinning composer who earned both her Bachelor of Music and Master of Music at Rice, she’s been in motion ever since. Through the power of her body of work — not simply her extensive resume, but her agility, curiosity and inventiveness — she’s been a trailblazer. Franco is the first Latina invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ music branch. In 2018, for her achievements as arranger, songwriter and music producer on DisneyPixar’s “Coco,” she was the first to win the Annie Award for Outstanding Achievement for Music in an animated feature. Her long roster of features includes “Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” “Someone Great,” “Little,” “Tag” and “Dope.” She also created the sound design for “Kung Fu

4 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2020

Panda: The Emperor’s Quest,” an immersive attraction at Universal Studios.

Somewhere in all of this, Franco has made time to fundraise and volunteer at the Neighborhood Music School in the East LA community of Boyle Heights. She wants children and young women to be able to see someone who looks like them in a position of creativity and power.

“They teach 450 kids a week, and 80% of them are Latino,” she explains. “I got connected to them after doing a screening of ‘Coco,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, I have to get involved.’” She knows precisely how important this is. “People, these young people in particular,” she says slowly, considering her words, her gaze direct, “need to know it’s possible.”

Border Beginnings Franco remembers music as always part of her day-to-day landscape, as essential as the earth and sky. Born in Oxnard, California, her family relocated to El Paso, Texas, when she was just 1 year old. During her childhood, the ambient sound that caught her attention, that persistently drifted in and circled around her, was the music on the border. “We went to Mexico quite a bit, and I would hear all of the live musicians,” she recalls. “Also, there was always music in the house. I used to play a lot of records and also [listen to] the radio. Once I started playing, when I was 10, there was no end to it.”

From the beginning, her family was supportive. “My mom drove me to so many music lessons. I started learning all of the percussion instruments, like timpani and mallets, and eventually started taking private piano lessons as well.” She absorbed sound, picking up rhythms, textures and shading. “I listened to rock and jazz and lots of R&B and Mexican music, both traditional and Mexican pop.”

Looking back to those preteen and teen years, she suspects she swam in music for two to three hours per day — from marching and concert band to orchestra and stage band. “I was in all of them. And the El Paso Youth Symphony.”

Music, for her, was never a backdrop; it was an actual place to be, to live in, “kind of like a language and also a meditation in a way,” she explains. “You can go into another world and you can stay there. And when you encounter other musicians and you’re making music together, it’s really joyous.”

At 16, she followed her brother, Michael Petry ’81, two years her senior, to Rice. She’d applied to a few other schools, but Rice offered

PORTRAITS BY ROBERT ZUCKERMAN

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 5

the sort of liberal arts education and music program that felt like the right fit. “The [Shepherd School of Music] was so advanced. It was a conservatory. That’s what I really wanted. Plus, the family felt, ‘Your brother’s there, and he’ll take care of you.’ So it seemed like a good opportunity in every way.” She enrolled in a mix of classes — courses in harmony orchestration, percussion and music history, as well as linguistics and anthropology. “It was all really absorbing.”

At Rice, she began to perfect an ability to juggle duties and interests, to always be ready for whatever scenario or possibility she encountered. “She was always able to keep many things in the air at once without any of them suffering,” says Petry, now a multimedia artist, author and director of MOCA London. “She was driven. She was always playing in different groups, classical and Latin jazz.”

In addition to performing in the percussion ensemble, she had also become part of an informal band with other students that proved sophisticated enough to book paying gigs. “I had four jobs. I had a full scholarship and was supporting myself while I went to Rice. I worked at the registrar’s office and at the theater doing tech. I used to cut hair, and I would book the band. I just did what I had to do.”

A Career Takes Off In 1988, Franco landed in LA, setting the intention to study with percussionist Luis Conte, whom she saw perform at a percussion convention back in Texas. A tag line next to his name, “master of rhythm,” imprinted. It was a desire of her own, distinctly expressed. “After I heard him in a workshop, a light bulb went off: ‘Well, I’m moving to LA.

6 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2020

I’m going to study with him.’”

Not knowing a soul in LA , Franco’s pronouncement was audacious. But just weeks before she was ready to head west to California, by pure luck she met bass player Randy Tiego at a gig in Houston. In casual conversation between his set and hers, she announced her grand plans. “I had no connection to Luis Conte whatsoever. And Randy said, ‘Well, Luis is my friend. I can get you his phone number so you can connect with him.’”

Two phone numbers tucked away — Tiego’s and now Conte’s — she moved to LA. At first, she did side jobs like substitute teaching and playing piano in churches. “I started getting work in theaters like the LA Theater Lab [now the Latino Theater Company], where we’d work on these theatrical comedy shows, and I would be the music director. And I was playing with Luis Conte, and also I had my band. I was just playing at Cuban clubs, UCLA and at museums all around the city.”

Franco kept putting herself in the mix. Before long, she’d begun to create a life in LA and a list of credits and commendations. Her first big break arrived while working with sound mixer Armin Steiner, who heard a score she’d written. Impressed, he began to reach out to his network. That was an open hand, a gift. “He would call people and say, ‘You’ve got to hear this woman.’ And that connected me to ASCAP [the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers] and more opportunities.”

Her brother would also step in, helping to forge one of the most important professional relationships in her career by introducing her to master composer John Powell and, by extension, conductor and composer Gavin Greenaway. “[Michael] had been working with [Powell] for a long time,” Franco said. “They had [established] the Media Arts Group in London. John was his writing partner. I hadn’t met him because I hadn’t been able to get to London.” But in the 1990s, Powell and Greenaway moved to LA.

“Can I Just Learn From You?” When she and Powell had their first in-person meeting in LA, Franco already had a clear plan in hand. “I asked him, ‘Can I just learn from you?’ I wanted to be around him and see what his process was. I had only done small films, independent films and some television, but I had never done a big studio film.” He brought her in to work on “The Italian Job.” Working with Powell and Greenaway, she saw the process close up in real time. “Every

minute costs thousands of dollars, so you can’t make any mistakes. You have to bring things in on time, under pressure,” Franco says. Soon, she was part of that team. “In the end,” says Petry, “Germaine was running John’s studio.”

“When Germaine first came to town,” says Federico “Freddy” Ramos, a guitarist, arranger and producer, “she immediately associated herself with and was praised by a number of high-caliber musicians. Everyone was talking about her.” Franco first encountered Ramos early in her LA tenure when he played on her first film score, “Tanto Tiempo.” In those sessions, she and Ramos clicked. They were, in a word, symbiotic. Ramos had toured Mexico for more than a decade working with headliner Latin artists like Vicente Fernández, and he had acquired a vast knowledge of Mexican regional music. “It’s my work with him playing live and on my initial film scores like ‘La Carpa’ and ‘Margarita’ that helped me develop the authentic Mexican sound for ‘Coco.’” Now, many years later, they still work together.

“To be a prolific film composer is a tricky proposition that requires skills beyond music theory and orchestration,” Ramos says. “Remember that a composer is responsible for not just the composition — you have to deliver the score. And the score is there to move the plot and address the emotional content. … And you have to do it with budget constraints. Germaine’s trademark is that she checks all the boxes.”

The Full Sweep of It When we check in midsummer via FaceTime, Franco admits to feeling more than a bit hemmed in. “The first few weeks were hard,” she says. During the chat, her screen image floats up amid a desktop busy with consoles and screens, one with a wide-eyed Curious George

paused on a monitor — a gesture away from stepping into mischief. She hits Germaine Franco play, allowing just a hint of George’s performs at the sounds — cavaquinho, ukulele, mandoASCAP Screen Music Awards lin, guitars, marimba, hand percussion in 2018.

— to drift out of the speakers.

Franco conducts In these wearying months, both a performance working in the present and reflecting of “Kung Fu Panda” with a on the past have been, for Franco, a full orchestra. welcome retreat and a balm.

Franco at work Throughout her life, music has on a movie in the transported her deep into unexpected Warner Bros. territories, to different continents, into control room. wormholes back in time — for her score for “Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” she had a singer translate Spanish poems into Quechua. “Here we were, going through the tunnels of Peru. And the Incan story was amazing, so I wanted to have the Quechuan language part of all this. We needed this sound.”

Her compositions have been performed by symphony orchestras around the globe, and she has also been invited to perform alongside those musicians. “That solid orchestral training has taken me far on a path that I had never dreamed of while at Rice.”

Recalling her experience with “Coco,” she revels in the richness of working with the best musicians in Mexico.

“We were all in this one studio from morning to super late at night. Then I would go back and edit and mix. I would be blown away by this treasure of Mexican music that went in and out of the story that we made together. It was important to me to get the beauty, the full sweep of it, the whole world.”

This is what it means to build a story that is both vivid and inclusive, not just in a studio setting but also in the world. Her presence in all forms sends a powerful message. “It’s the doing that’s important,” she says. “In doing the work, you show other people they can do it.” ◆ CLOCKWISE FROM FAR LEFT:

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 7

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

1

26

40

Composer Germaine Franco ’84 moves audiences and creates opportunities for young people in her community.

These young Rice alumni are using their vision, creativity and ambition to clear a path toward a better, more just world.

What does the history of the yellow fever epidemic tell us about the politics of disease today?

High Scores

8 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2020

20 in Their 20s

We’ve Been Here Before

PHOTOS COURTESY OF RICE ALUMNI

CONTENTS FEATURES

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PHOTO BY BRANDON MARTIN, PHOTO BY ALESE PICKERING, PHOTO BY BRAND0N MARTIN, ILLUSTRATION BY MIA COLEMAN

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

DEPARTMENTS Sallyport

13

Campus tents, incoming student stats, new VADA building, feeding students during the pandemic, gaming nerd

Wisdom

19

Egg protein preserves produce, Provost Reginald DesRoches, removing water pollutants, Alexander Byrd ’90 leads change

Alumni

43

Women’s suffrage pioneer Elizabeth Green Kalb ’16, Classnotes highlights, Elizabeth Baird Saenger ’64 fights for civil rights

Last Look

50

Leaping lessons!

Obstacles are no match for these students.

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 9

FEEDBACK

RICE MAGAZINE “Life in the Pandemic,” our special Summer 2020 issue, drew lots of feedback and commentary. Here is a sampling of reader responses drawn from emails, an online survey and Google Analytics.

Fall 2020

PUBLISHER

Office of Public Affairs Linda Thrane, vice president EDITOR

Lynn Gosnell ART DIRECTOR

Kudos

You Enjoyed

“I’m an alumna and I just wanted to say that the July issue is my favorite ever. The art was amazing and the writing was so interesting, moving and wide-ranging. It feels like a gift.”

“Pivoting in a Pandemic” Pathology resident and researcher Freddy Nguyen ’02 explains how he refocused his work to evaluate plasma treatments for COVID-19 patients.

— JEN TUCKER FARRA ’98

“Thank you so much for the many voices and excellent art in the summer issue.

The photos of the Thresher staff [“Stop the Presses”] showed me how diverse Rice has become. We have so far to go as a country, and Rice makes me hopeful that we can make fundamental changes.”

— SARAH “SALLY” SMITH ’63

“It felt like I was getting an informed insight into a field that I wouldn’t have access to otherwise.”

“Paradise of the Lost” This photographic essay

by Terrence Liu ’20 captures the loneliness and abandonment of anonymous sites around Galveston Island.

78%

of readers say that Rice Magazine helps them stay connected to Rice University.

“Evocative photos!”

Most Read Online

June 30– Aug. 31, 2020

“Mission Critical” Critical pulmonary care physician Zachary Dreyfuss ’07 shares insights and realities of his work on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“From Rice EMS to Chicago Med” Hashim Q. Zaidi ’11 provides an insider’s perspective on COVID-19 from within the University of Chicago Medical Center’s ER. “Face Time” Chethan Ramprasad ’12 and Simone Elder ’12 are helping each other through demanding residencies in New York City.

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

Send your feedback to ricemagazine@rice.edu.

10 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2020

Alese Pickering CREATIVE SERVICES

Jeff Cox, senior director EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Tracey Rhoades ASSISTANT EDITOR

Kyndall Krist PHOTOGRAPHERS

Tommy LaVergne Jeff Fitlow PROOFREADER

Jenny West Rozelle ’00 SPECIAL CONTRIBUTORS

Deborah Lynn Blumberg, Jade Boyd, Mimi Chiquet, Lynell George, Michael Hardy ’06, Kendall Hebert, Sarah Brenner Jones, Jennifer Latson, David Levin, David D. Medina ’83, Katelyn Powell, Katharine Shilcutt, Sean Morey Smith ’05, Ashley Wagner, Mike Williams INTERNS

Savannah Kuchar ’22 Mariana Nájera ’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 2020, Rice University

PRESIDENT LEEBRON THE RICE UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Robert T. Ladd, chair; J.D. Bucky Allshouse; Donald Bowers; Bart Broadman; Nancy Packer Carlson; Mark D. Dankberg; D. Mark Durcan; Michol L. Ecklund; Douglas Lee Foshee; Wanda Gass; Terrence Gee; James T. Hackett; Tommy Huie; Patti Lipoma Kraft; Holli Ladhani; L. Charles Landgraf; Lynn A. Lednicky; Elle Moody; Brian Patterson; David Rhodes; Jeffery A. Smisek; Guillermo Treviño; James Whitehurst; Randa Duncan Williams; Huda Y. Zoghbi.

ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERS

David W. Leebron, president; Reginald DesRoches, 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; 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

LEADERSHIP LIGHTS THE WAY AS I WRITE THIS, the Rice campus has been open to students for the fall semester for a month, plus a week of orientation. We are in hybrid mode, giving students and faculty as much of a choice as possible in how they want to learn and how they want to teach.

Over half of our courses are offered in person, and those students report they are grateful and happy to be here. Approximately 40% of our undergraduates are living on campus (compared to the usual 73%), about 37% are living off campus but occasionally come to campus, and the remainder are remote. So far we have been remarkably successful, with a positivity rate of 0.10% from 30,000 COVID-19 tests.

How was this achieved? After we decided in March to send most students home and switch completely to remote delivery of our courses, we began detailed planning for the fall — including comprehensive testing, isolation and quarantining protocols and facilities, improvements in air handling, and construction of outdoor tents and temporary classrooms that would enable distancing. Classrooms were equipped with additional technology to support dual or hybrid delivery and reconfigured for physical distancing.

The Information Technology group instituted a student corps of technology assistants, and they, along with staff from Rice Online and the Center

for Teaching Excellence, provided remote delivery support and education for faculty. This required an immense amount of organization and work from faculty, staff and administrators, and they all stepped up.

But frankly, without the extraordinary leadership of our students, these steps would not have been enough to open our campus safely. On the undergraduate side, this required completely reimagining new student orientation.

Our campuswide O-Week coordinators, Matthew Burns and Erica Lee, led a group of 33 college coordinators to

Approximately 40% of our undergraduates are living on campus (compared to the usual 73%), about 37% are living off campus but occasionally come to campus, and the remainder are remote. redesign and deliver O-Week in a dualdelivery format, including redesigning a variety of events that happened across the 11 colleges.

In planning for the fall, we knew that student behavior would be a critical, if not determinative, factor in our success. Indeed, since August we have watched many colleges fail to sustain their openings as a result of student behaviors. We hold our students accountable for their behaviors, but it’s more important to recognize that they also hold each other accountable. This is reflected in our Honor Council and in our college judicial system under the college chief justices. Of course, we must be realistic in our expectations as we develop our plans. But at least in the case of Rice, I think we can also say that our expectations of student

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 11

responsibility are realistically high.

Indeed, we took a similar approach to undergraduate student behaviors under the rules we adopted for operating Rice during the pandemic. Working with the students, Dean of Undergraduates Bridget Gorman created the COVID-19 Community Court, staffed by undergraduates from each residential college.

Their intention is not primarily to enforce rules and penalize violators, but rather to determine educational and alternative responses with the goal of helping students correct their behaviors at an early stage. Yes, there have been cases reported to the court, but they have been minor. And our students have been outstanding at calling attention to any potential violations. That, too, is leadership and reflects the student commitment to our “culture of care.”

As our students returned to campus, Sid Richardson College faced a particular challenge, as we had decided to vacate the building and use Sid Rich for isolation of any positive cases. That required dispersing Sid Rich residents across the campus.

Nia Prince, president of Sid Rich and a proud Houstonian, demonstrated remarkable leadership in keeping the college’s culture and identity strong.

Indeed, Sid Rich became in some ways the most visible college on the campus despite not having a home, since they were everywhere. Nia didn’t stop there.

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outdoor activities.

In some ways, our graduate students faced even greater challenges, as they don’t have the social equivalent of residential colleges and they were dispersed even more than usual as the result of the pandemic. One Students of their key gathering places, attend Augusto Valhalla, was closed and Rodriguez’s remains closed under the Kinesiology class rules for Harris County. Our in person graduate students have had in Duncan Hall and to find new ways to accomremotely plish their work and support via Zoom. the community. Graduate Student Association President Alison Farrish and other GSA officers have worked hard and nimbly to use online tools to promote graduate student community, well-being and success.

Black Graduate Student Association President Joshua Moore instituted a twice-per-month online lunch, which was especially important given the dual burden of the pandemic and racial issues that our Black students are dealing with at this time. Graduate students have found ways to continue their research, and indeed some have pivoted to support work being done around COVID-19.

And, of course, our students provided campus leadership on issues not directly related to the university’s response to COVID-19, including the She also proposed the idea of public issues of race enveloping our nation health ambassadors — students on the and the upcoming elections, especially ground who were tasked with directly regarding voter turnout. educating and reinforcing the prinThey say that leadership “starts at ciples of our culture of care to peers. the top.” Maybe. But as my dad might The response was amazing, with 165 have said, it doesn’t mean squat if you students serving in that capacity. don’t have leadership on the ground Student Association President Anna where it counts. Student leadership and Margaret Clyburn and her leadership volunteerism have always been a central team worked tirelessly to address part of the Rice experience and, in this collaboratively the wide range of issues pandemic, Rice students have demonthat the spring and summer presented. strated that leadership in ways that will Lovett College President Chloe Oani — have an impact for a long time to come. who hails from Hawaii and is also my occasional Fitbit competitor — worked with student sports reps across all the colleges as well as rec center staff to come up with guidelines to allow

Student leadership and volunteerism have always been a central part of the Rice experience and, in this pandemic, Rice students have demonstrated that leadership in ways that will have an impact for a long time to come.

PHOTO BY TOMM Y L AV ERGNE

SALLYPORT

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

COVID-19

Flex Space

New tents provide room for classes and clubs to meet safely.

BY KENDALL HEBERT

PHOTO BY BR A NDON M A R T IN

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 13

SALLYPORT

Left: Graduate student Kevin T. McDonnell teaches ENGL 269: Science Fiction and the Environment in PCF 2.

R

ICE MIGHT LOOK very different this fall, but new temporary structures are making it possible for campus life to continue safely.

The structures, which include four Provisional Campus Facilities (PCFs) and five open-sided tents, serve as flexible space to accommodate a range of needs — classrooms, meeting spaces and event rooms. One structure currently serves as the commons for Sid Richardson College, while another provides overflow library space to align with COVID-19 restrictions for study room occupancy.

Scheduling for the temporary structures is handled through the Office of the Registrar, which oversees PCF academic scheduling during the day, and Campus Events, which manages scheduling for other uses and the open-air tents.

“So far, we’ve had about five student organizations and three classes that have scheduled tents, and they range in size from 15 to 50 people,” said Hollie Evans, campus events manager. “A couple of classes are using the outdoor tents on nice weather days, and an architecture course is doing some pre-build under the Fondren tent for a project installation.”

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“Even if it’s not the dorm life, servery meals or Will Rice events that I thought would characterize my senior year, I’m grateful to have a designated space and time that keeps me tethered to campus life.”

The open-air tents are available each afternoon after 1 p.m. Evans said there may be additional adjustments to tent usage in the spring. “After we know what the academic need will be, we can offer more space for other campus activities.”

Each PCF used for classroom learning features a wide range of technological innovations. “The tent is completely enclosed, air-conditioned and, in so many other physical ways, feels just like a large classroom,” said Madeline Ngo, a Will Rice College biochemistry and cell biology major.

“If someone on Zoom speaks, we hear it through speakers all around the room.

There are also microphones around the students’ desks so the in-person students can project their responses to those on Zoom.”

Ngo is using PCF 2 for a dualdelivery English class that meets three times per week — titled Science Fiction and the Environment — which includes about 20 students total, approximately five of which rotate each class to attend in-person. “I know many students who can come to the tent but choose not to,” Ngo said. “I can’t speak on behalf of them, but I think it is a testament to the fact that both options are wellexecuted.”

Ngo said this class is the only reason she comes to campus this semester.

“Even if it’s not the dorm life, servery meals or Will Rice events that I thought would characterize my senior year, I’m grateful to have a designated space and time that keeps me tethered to campus life,” she said. “My professor does a fantastic job helping both the in-person and virtual students feel engaged. Don’t get me wrong — we still get the occasional awkward silence amplified in our space and in laptops across several different time zones, but so far, the tent class has been a pleasant experience.”

PHOTOS BY BRANDON MARTIN (LEFT) AND TOMMY LAVERGNE (RIGHT)

Right: Tom Stallings teaches SMGT 360: Sales and Revenue Generation in PCF 3.

SALLYPORT

BY THE NUMBERS

Welcome, New Owls!

In August, Rice welcomed its newest Owls — first-time freshmen and transfer students — during this most unusual historic moment. The stats below apply only to undergraduate enrollment.

23,455

54

freshmen applicants

transfer students

11%

932

U.S. students

admit rate

TOP STATES

Texas (418) California (83) New York (45) Florida (39)

1,047 new students

993 first-time freshmen

115

international students

TOP COUNTRIES

China (69) United Kingdom (4)

Diversity

F R E S H M A N C L A S S*

31% White

30% Asian

14%

Latino or Hispanic

8%

Black or African American

5%

Two or more races, nonHispanic

1%

Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander and unknown

Source: Rice’s Office of the Registrar and Office of Admission

VADA

BUILDING THE ARTS Thanks to the generous lead gift from Houston businessman and philanthropist Fayez Sarofim, Rice’s campus is one step closer to seeing a new visual and dramatic arts facility. The building, to be named in honor of Sarofim, will be next door to the Moody Center for the Arts and will seek to amplify the arts on campus and in the community. “The new building will house a vibrant, growing arena of arts at Rice and will foster innovations and collaborations that draw students from all schools at Rice,” said Humanities Dean Kathleen Canning.

“This historic gift will elevate the place of the student creative arts in a Rice liberal arts education.”

— KATHARINE SHILCUTT

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

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SALLYPORT

DEPARTMENT Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures DESCRIPTION Is this the end? The end of our planet, truth, certainty?

Taught from a global perspective, the course examines writers’ responses to major topics of our age, including facts, climate change and borders.

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SYLLABUS

The Stories of Our Lives

Andrea Bajani is Rice’s current writer-in-residence and an awardwinning novelist, while Sophie Esch is a scholar of Latin American literature and armed conflicts in the global south. Is This the End? is part of the School of Humanities’ Big Questions series and exemplifies the program’s objective of teaching students how humanistic inquiry can address some of our most pressing questions. By tackling topics such as climate change, truth, doom, borders and migration through modern literature, Bajani and Esch challenge their students to explore how stories enable both writers and readers to respond to modern-day events.

“WE LIVE IN a world full of narratives and storytelling, so it’s important to grasp how stories work,” Esch said. “With this course, I want to teach students how to read and think critically, but also to understand literature as a way of conceiving our world differently and opening doors to new perspectives.”

Each week, students engage with works of fiction, nonfiction

and film. Through class discussions, their personal reading diaries, and assignments focused on both creative writing and literary analysis, students are presented with a wide range of perspectives on modern literature and its impact on our lives.

“After taking a Big Questions course last semester, I wanted to take another one,” said Sophie Parker ’21.

“I love classes that

encourage connecting multiple areas of study, and this one combines storytelling, climate studies, apocalyptic history and literature analysis in a beautiful and engaging way.

It’s easily one of my favorite classes this semester, especially because the titular question seems so relevant right now.”

Bajani and Esch hope to show their students how literature and language help us understand the stories we are

experiencing at any given time. “We are living in a time of crisis, and all of the topics we talk about in the course can be described as crises,” Bajani explained. “However, crisis is the place where the end meets the beginning. So is this the end? Or, as I want students to ask themselves when faced with chaos, change and disaster, is this really the beginning?”

— MARIANA NÁJERA ’21

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY 123RF.COM

HUMA 124 Is This the End? A Big Questions Course

SALLYPORT

COVID-19

Feeding the Classes Campus dining staff meet the challenge of preparing meals for students during the pandemic.

COVID-19 HAS AFFECTED every aspect of how Rice operates, and feeding its students has been a challenge of gastronomical proportion. With a consistent ranking of best college food in the country, Rice students have had food choices that satisfy the pickiest of eaters to those willing to give anything a try.

So how does a campus go from six serveries — with menus encompassing everything from bison tacos, pho, Texas-shaped waffles, duck, cauli-

flower hoisin and renowned cinnamon rolls — to five kitchens operating with a reduced staff? The answer: Prepare a six-week cyclical menu plan that offers grab-and-go, basic takeout meals; lose the buffets, including popular eateries such as Wok on Sunset; and season each menu with food supply chain issues, including exorbitant tariffs on products such as aluminum foil.

“It’s not easy,” says Susann Glenn, director of communications for administration. “Every kitchen has the same menu, and this is challenging, especially for the chefs.” Rice’s 17 chefs, all certified in various specialties and levels of certification, have developed almost cult-like followings over the years, and students could go to any of the serveries to eat.

To contain cross-contamination, that option is no more. Glenn explains that a key goal is to reduce “touch points” in all of the serveries, which means there’s no longer self-serve menu items or buffetstyle meals.

While dining at Rice looks and tastes very different these days, students recognize the challenges the administration faces. “It’s clear to me how much effort has gone into making sure all students, regardless of diet, can eat and eat well,” says Anna Margaret Clyburn, a senior and Student Association president. “I know how many conversations about how to best provide food to students took place and the challenges Housing and Dining faces.” These obstacles have added stress and anxiety for all those with chairs at the table, but the administration, chefs, and Housing and Dining personnel are listening to students’ suggestions and offering additional dining options such as “Curbside at the Club,” giving students the ability to order online from Cohen House and pick up and pay with points from their meal plan.

“We believe [Cohen House] has been a positive alternative for breakfast and lunch during the week,” says Johnny Curet, director of campus dining, and Kyle Hardwick, assistant dining director. “And through student feedback and communication with Student Association reps, we are continually adding additional menu options to help make the new normal more pleasing to the palate.”

Hardwick notes that, as chefs, they’re accustomed to adapting to change. “Our entire culinary team has adjusted to the restrictions, and while we would prefer to have the ability to provide our regular variety of food, we know this is only temporary,” he says.

And on a sweet note, Chef Roger Elkhouri’s beloved cinnamon rolls are available at Cohen House.

PHOTO BY JEF F F I T LOW

— TRACEY RHOADES

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SALLYPORT

through every phase of my life. So it was surreal to have the opportunity to give back to the company.”

Carr attributes his appreciation for gaming to the escape from reality that it offers. “I found that video games have always been really good for me to decompress and just kind of exist, to plug in and play something,” Carr said.

Carr has co-taught a college course called Super Smash Theory for two semesters, along with Duncan College senior Daniel Christl. He says the best part for him is being able to use his status as a gaming nerd to help others learn and grow.

“Gaming is about bringing people together,” Carr said. “It is as valid an interactive medium as watching movies, listening to music — any of the other things that we do on a day-to-day basis. Anyone can get a lot out of it.”

— SAVANNAH KUCHAR ’22

GET YOUR GAME ON

I’M A NERD ABOUT ...

Gaming

Jaylen Carr has taken a childhood passion for video games to the next level.

WHEN HE WAS 3 YEARS OLD, Jaylen Carr’s parents gave him a Nintendo GameCube and the Super Smash Bros. Melee game for Christmas. “And that was just the impetus of everything that would come,” he said.

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Since then, the Martel College senior has become an avid fan of the gaming world, taking time to explore how they’re made and what video games mean for socialization today.

“It all started with the GameCube and Smash. From there, I had a lot of fun branching out and learning more about Nintendo’s franchises and all of their internal operations,” he said.

This passion even led him to an internship with Nintendo the summer after his sophomore year. “Interning at Nintendo was a dream come true,” Carr said. “I literally grew up on their products, and they have been there

“Due to the accessible nature of gaming, anyone can become an expert relatively easily. But not all games are created equal in terms of being accessible, so it’s important to land with ones that resonate with you personally. I find resources like YouTube Gaming or console Reddit websites to be supremely accessible resources for learning more about games.

YouTube, specifically, has a host of gaming analysts ranging from beginner-friendly to advanced who can help you align with people who have similar interests and experience levels.”

P H O T O B Y C A R LT O N C A N A R Y

INNOVATION IN THE LAB, THE FIELD AND THE CLASSROOM

WISDOM MATERIALS SCIENCE

Bad Eggs and Good Apples

Scientists use egg protein coating to preserve fresh fruits and vegetables.

BY MIKE WILLIAMS

PHOTO BY A LE SE PICK ERING

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 19

WISDOM COVID-19

TRACKING THE VIRUS

A

THIRD OF THE FOOD produced around the globe goes to waste, but materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and colleagues in Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering have developed a micron-thick coating that helps preserve produce while reducing food waste. That’s good for the consumer and the environment.

Egg whites (aka albumen) and yolks account for nearly 70% of the coating.

Most of the rest consists of nanoscale cellulose extracted from wood, which serves as a barrier to water and keeps produce from shriveling; a small amount of curcumin for its antimicrobial powers; and a splash of glycerol to add elasticity. When the coating was applied to produce by spraying or dipping, it showed a remarkable ability to resist rotting for an extended period comparable to standard coatings like wax.

The United States produces more than 7 billion eggs a year, and manufacturers reject 3% of them on account of discoloration, shape or any reason an egg might be inedible. Researchers estimate more than 200 million eggs end up in landfills. “Reducing food shortages in ways that don’t involve genetic modification, inedible coatings or chemical additives is important for sustainable living,” Ajayan said. “The work is a remarkable combination of interdisciplinary efforts involving materials engineers, chemists and biotechnologists from multiple universities across the U.S.”

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Along with being edible, the multifunctional coating retards dehydration, provides antimicrobial protection and is largely impermeable both to water vapor and to gas that causes premature ripening. The coating is all-natural and washes off with water.

Lab tests on dip-coated strawberries, avocados, bananas and other fruit showed they maintained their freshness far longer than uncoated produce.

Compression tests showed coated fruit were significantly stiffer and more firm than uncoated and demonstrated the coating’s ability to keep water in the produce, slowing the ripening process.

An analysis of freestanding films of the coating showed it to be extremely flexible and able to resist cracking, allowing better protection of the produce. Tests of the film’s tensile properties showed it to be just as tough as other products, including synthetic films used in produce packaging.

Further tests proved the coating to be nontoxic, and solubility tests showed a thicker-than-usual film is washable. Rinsing in water for a couple of minutes can completely disintegrate it, Ajayan said.

The researchers continue to refine the coating’s composition and are considering other source materials.

“We chose egg proteins because there are lots of eggs wasted, but it doesn’t mean we can’t use other [proteins],” said co-corresponding author Muhammad Rahman, a research scientist in Ajayan’s Rice lab, who mentored and led the team.

To better track and monitor the spread of COVID19, especially in Houston, the COVID-19 Registry, a research study designed by Rice, provides real-time information about the virus. A joint venture between several counties and regional health and human services departments, the registry tracks the spread over time and across geographical areas, measures economic and health impacts, identifies effective sources of information and anticipates health care needs as the pandemic continues. Participants take an initial survey and provide follow-up surveys that help monitor changes over the duration of the crisis. Data from the registry is anonymous and is stored in a secure Rice-built system.

To join, go to registry.rice.edu.

WISDOM

Pandemic Planning COVID-19 is pretty much what we’ve spent our time on. As provost, I want to work on strategic issues and how we can improve our educational and research programs, and I haven’t had as much time to do that over the past few months. I hope that once we’re in a steadier state, I can focus on my broader role and think about the academic programs, where to make investments and how we can build excellence across the university.

But COVID-19 has impacted all of our lives, so we really are laser-focused on getting back to our mission as safely and securely as possible.

UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM

Meet the Provost

Reginald DesRoches in his own words INTERVIEW BY MIKE WILLIAMS

F

ROM THE START OF HIS TENURE as Rice University provost, Reginald DesRoches has been challenged in ways no higher education administrator could anticipate. Having accepted the job last December, the former dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering and a structural engineer with expertise in earthquake-resistant structures knew the transition would be demanding. But who expected the level of disruption created by COVID-19?

“It’s absolutely going to be a much more challenging role, not just for me, but for everybody at Rice, to be able to achieve our mission while making sure that health and safety is paramount in our minds,” he told Rice News in May. Having come through a summer of intense, ongoing planning for the fall semester and beyond, the same holds true as he works to keep Rice moving forward.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y J O H N J AY C A B U AY

Addressing Faculty Concerns Obviously, there are some [faculty] who have concerns about direct student contact in the lab or classroom, and we’re allowing them the flexibility to teach remotely.

About half of the faculty have chosen that option.

And others can’t wait to get back in the classroom.

Either way, as we found out in the spring when faculty rather successfully moved to online instruction on very short notice, I know the faculty are going to do a great job. There were challenges early on in terms of how we could return in a safe manner. I think we’ve handled that pretty well.

Shifting Lab Schedules Some researchers, like computer scientists and mathematicians, have continued doing their work and

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 21

WISDOM

those jobs where everything that happens on campus impacts the academic part.

So, I end up in a lot of meetings with many different segments of the campus community.

weren’t as impacted as physical labs that had to be shut down. We’ve been phasing them back in, and I’m pleased to see how well it’s gone this summer. Instead of having everybody working from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., we now have shifts and we’re getting work done. More pragmatically, we have to satisfy the contracts given to us by funding agencies. They gave us a break for a short period of time, but now we have to go back to it.

Rice’s COVID-19 Research Many [Rice research faculty] are doing extremely important work, some of it related to COVID-19, and some of that was funded internally by the Rice COVID-19 Research Fund.

One is environmental engineer Lauren Stadler, who is looking at wastewater treatment plants all over the city because we know that the virus lives in our waste.

She is working closely with the county health department to identify regional outbreaks of COVID-19.

There’s another cool project by the Shepherd School of Music and the Department of Electrical Engineering to see what social distancing should look like for people singing or playing horns, and they’re using advanced technology to see how far the virus could travel.

We also funded a joint project with bioengineer Rebecca Richards-Kortum and a colleague from MD Anderson, Kathleen Schmeler, to develop a low-cost, point-of-care diagnostic tool

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It’s great to see today’s youth with the passion and the energy and wanting to make a change. And I hope they do continue those conversations on campus, both within their own groups and with the administration. to detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 in less than an hour. The team received additional funding from USAID to further develop this work and scale it to several countries in Africa, and Rice plans to deploy these tests on campus. Those are just a few projects that are underway.

The $100 Million Welch Institute Gift The new Welch Institute for Advanced Materials is transformational for Rice and Houston. Technology drives so much in today’s society, and advanced materials drive so many

technologies. It will allow us to bring the top talent across disciplines focused on materials to join our already outstanding cohort of faculty working in materials research.

Campuswide Role I’m finding this position touches every part of campus. There’s really nothing I don’t deal with, even though my role is on the academic side. I’m realizing how important it is for me to be aware of what everybody’s doing, because it ultimately will impact our academic mission. That was sort of surprising, but it’s one of

Racial Justice Issues I was a student when the attack on Rodney King happened in 1991. It was one of the first times such a thing was caught on tape. That really opened my eyes as to living in this community and the risk that particularly Black and brown kids take. So [George Floyd’s killing] wasn’t as much of a surprise to me as it was perhaps for this young generation of students. The video of Floyd, coupled with the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor before that, has had a huge impact on people all over the world, and certainly on me, personally. I think it caught the attention of many people who hadn’t previously thought about these issues, or weren’t aware these issues existed.

It’s great to see today’s youth with the passion and the energy and wanting to make a change. And I hope they do continue those conversations on campus, both within their own groups and with the administration. We’re very open to those conversations, and now we have a vice provost for diversity, equity and inclusion [Alexander Byrd ’90] who will work with members of our community to be more strategic and focused around building a more inclusive and equitable community at Rice.

WISDOM

FACULTY BOOKS

The Future Is Houston

Based on almost 40 years of data, sociologist Stephen L. Klineberg paints a portrait of a city that heralds the changing face of America.

STEP ASIDE, New York City: Houston represents the true future of America.

That’s the conclusion Rice sociologist Stephen L. Klineberg presents in “Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing America” (Simon & Schuster,

2020), the culmination of 38 years of demographic data drawn from his annual Kinder Institute Houston Area Survey — the longest-running survey of its kind.

In that time, Houston has evolved from an Anglo-dominated boomtown where oil was power and cash was king into one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse cities in the country — more so in some ways than New York.

Klineberg himself was a somewhat reluctant Houstonian. When he took a teaching gig at Rice in 1972, it wasn’t because he felt a magnetic attraction to what he describes as “this mosquitoinfested, oil-lined, smoggy and polluted swampland.” But during the boom years, Houston’s rapid growth and transformation made it “a perfect laboratory for a sociologist interested

in social change,” he writes.

The book traces Houston’s development from the boom times through the oil bust that came just after Klineberg conducted his first survey, and nearly four decades since. It charts the ways Houston’s economy and population transformed — and the ways they herald similar changes in the national landscape. Like the rest of the U.S., Houston has witnessed the decline of its natural resource-based economy and the rise of a new knowledge-based economy. It just saw it happen earlier and faster than in other parts of the country. Likewise, Houston has seen a decline in its Anglo population and an influx of Black, Asian and Hispanic residents that other parts of the country are just now noticing. In fact, the latest census reveals that more than 70% of Harris County residents under the age of 20 are Black or Hispanic.

Houston’s Anglo majority isn’t on its way out — it’s already long gone.

“Prophetic City” came out just as the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum this summer in the wake of numerous deaths of Black Americans at the hands of white police officers. Racial equity still eludes much of America, and that holds true for Houston, too. But Klineberg’s surveys show that attitudes are changing here, especially among the younger generation. White residents increasingly see Houston’s diversity as a source of strength rather than a problem, and their fear of an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants has declined precipitously in the past few years.

“The demographic transformation is a done deal,” he writes. “You can close the border, seal off America, build an impenetrable wall, and deport all 10 million people who are here without the proper papers; none of those efforts will make much of a difference. No conceivable force will stop Houston or Texas or America from becoming more Asian, more African American, more Hispanic and less Anglo as the 21st century unfolds.” — JENNIFER LATSON

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BIOENGINEERING

HEARTHEALING STEM CELLS

WE DON’T KNOW ...

How to Break Down “Forever Chemicals”

Chemical engineer Michael S. Wong searches for ways to remove PFAS pollutants from water.

I’M A CHEMICAL ENGINEER and chemist by training, and I use those skills to find new ways to clean contaminated water.

You can physically remove some pollutants with filters or reverse osmosis, but others are far more persistent, and the only way to get rid of them is to destroy them through a controlled chemical reaction. I design nanoscale structures, called “catalysts,” that help kick-start that process.

One of the big questions I’m trying to answer is how to break down a class of molecules called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Because the molecules they’re made of are nearly indestructible, they resist grease, oil, water and heat. After they were invented, large companies like DuPont, Dow and 3M started making them for household products like nonstick pots and pans, which people loved. Today, there are at least 4,000 different PFAS compounds used widely in fabrics, cookware, food packaging and firefighting foams.

About 20 years ago, government regulators and scientists realized that some of

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those molecules could be harmful for human health. They can leach out of landfills and factory sites and accumulate gradually in aquifers. Long-term exposure to them can cause cancer, slow down the body’s immune system and damage entire ecosystems — and since they last for hundreds of years in nature, there’s no real way to get rid of them.

I want to figure out how to create a substance that removes PFAS from water easily.

My lab recently developed a way to do that for a single PFAS compound called perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, but there are still 3,999 other PFAS pollutants to deal with. How can we break down all of those different PFAS chemicals in water safely and easily? How can we seek out those molecules underground or in an aquifer and destroy them effectively?

How can we make nanotechnology and materials work for us? That’s what gets me up in the morning.

— AS TOLD TO DAVID LEVIN Michael S. Wong is the Tina and Sunit Patel Professor in Molecular Nanotechnology.

Every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a heart attack.

In each case, an artery that supplies blood to the heart becomes blocked and heart muscle tissue dies due to lack of blood.

Hearts damaged by heart attacks pump less efficiently, and scar tissue wounds can further reduce heart function.

In a recently published study, a team led by Rice’s Omid Veiseh and Baylor College of Medicine’s Ravi Ghanta showed they could make capsules of wound-healing stem cells and implant them next to wounded hearts using minimally invasive techniques. Within four weeks, heart healing was 2.5 times greater in animals treated with shielded stem cells than those treated with nonshielded stem cells, the researchers found.

— JADE BOYD

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

WISDOM FACULTY

Leading Change

History professor and alumnus Alexander Byrd will guide university diversity initiatives.

ALEXANDER BYRD ’90 has been appointed Rice’s first vice provost for diversity, equity and inclusion. President David Leebron and Provost Reginald DesRoches created the position in June as part of a plan of action aimed at improving the university and the broader community.

Byrd will provide strategic leadership for diversity initiatives and help create one point of responsibility for all programs and efforts around diversity. This will include overseeing the design and development of a new Multicultural Center (MCC). The revamped MCC is a priority that will benefit from Byrd’s deep familiarity with Rice’s campus culture as an undergraduate, as a fouryear resident associate at Baker College and as a five-year magister of Wiess College.

Byrd said his newest role provides an opportunity to continue building upon his alma mater’s critical work in these areas. “My interest in the post is informed by an abiding respect for the mission of the university and the ways in which the fullest execution of that mission are increasingly dependent on our ability to productively speak to, harness and shape issues related to the human diversity of our nation and our world,” Byrd said, referring to the fact that Rice’s charter originally prohibited nonwhite students.

PHOTO BY JEF F F I T LOW

Opened in 1912, the university did not admit Black students until 1964.

“Although the kinds of divisions, fears and hatreds that were so taken for granted at the founding of the university and that so fundamentally shaped its initial growth are no longer central tenets of American life, the university’s success is bound up like never before in assuring that present inequities rooted in that past are acknowledged and addressed,” he said.

Also vital, Byrd said, is purposely and deliberately working to build greater community across — and out of — the differences of sexuality, gender, class, race and region associated with past and present inequities. “Implicit, I think, in the description of the new vice provost position is the very necessary and compelling question, ‘How do we continue to address — and how do we best address — our founding error?’

A great many people across the university are deeply committed to thinking about and addressing that question,” he said. “I am excited to have the opportunity to assist and, where I can, guide them from this newly created post.”

Byrd’s current research is focused at the intersection of urban history and the history of education. In addition to being recognized by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation as one of 2020’s top 10 teachers in Texas, Byrd is also a four-time recipient of Rice’s George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching.

— KATHARINE SHILCUTT

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20 20 in their

These young alumni have a zillion different dreams, but one thing in common — being a Rice grad is never far from their hearts and minds. Ranging in class years from 2010 to 2020, each is clearing a particular path — via music, public health, medicine, architecture, journalism, law, social justice advocacy, visual arts, engineering or biology — toward a better, more just world.

And they are doing all these things with energy and imagination. In an imperfect world, this is perfect vision indeed.

S

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PHOTO CREDIT TK

IAN AKASH MORRISON ’13

A

fter graduating from

Rice with a degree in electrical engineering and working for four years in finance, Ian Akash Morrison quit his job. “It was a bit of a leap of faith,” Morrison says. “I was afraid I was getting pigeonholed in one type of career.”

That singular leap led Morrison down a path of his own choosing.

Three months into his work sabbatical, Morrison was asked by a friend to help launch a biotech company in Los Angeles. He had long been drawn to entrepreneurial risk-taking — “this idea that you can go out and start a business, and you can succeed or you can fail,” Morrison says.

In fact, it was at Rice that Morrison

got his first taste of building something from the ground up. In 2012, along with fellow Will Ricers Vivas Kumar ’14 and Veronica Saron ’14, MBA student Darren Clifford ’13, and alumnus Bryan Hassin ’01, Morrison founded OwlSpark, a business accelerator that launches startups from idea to commercialization. The program is still going strong, having launched more than 50 startups that have raised more than $19 million in funding to date.

Morrison left his initial startup, but stayed in LA to found Optio Ventures, an advisory firm whose formal mission is “to empower anyone from any background to dream big, innovate boldly and fearlessly build transformational technologies to solve the world’s greatest problems.” Or, as Morrison explains, “We help startups

raise money to do cool things.”

He’s also deepening his entrepreneurial credentials as the co-founder and CEO of Avesta76 Therapeutics, a company that grew out of research conducted by both his grandfather, Yogesh Awasthi, and his uncle, Sanjay Awasthi, an oncologist and scientist at Texas Tech University. Avesta76’s mission is to develop disruptive new treatments for cancer.

When not working two demanding jobs, Morrison is taking advantage of all that LA’s environs have to offer — hiking in the mountains and surfing or sailing in the ocean. He also stays active in the Rice alumni community and recently completed service on the Rice Engineering Alumni board. Three years after taking a risky leap of faith, Morrison has found his element.

— ASHLEY WAGNER

PHOTO CREDIT T K

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ERIC STONE ’19

E CHELSEA SHARPE ’15

V

iolinist Chelsea

Sharpe has performed at Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl and has been conducted by everyone from John Williams to Kanye West. As a fellow at the New World Symphony Orchestra in Miami, Sharpe is one of classical music’s rising stars — and she owes it all to her mom.

Sharpe’s mother, Tanya, had played the violin for one year in kindergarten before being forced to give it up because her family couldn’t afford private lessons. She was determined that her daughter would have a different experience. “She always wished she could continue,” Sharpe says.

“Since I was her firstborn, she decided that I would kind of live out her dream.”

Her mother sacrificed to ensure Sharpe had all the resources she needed to develop as a musician.

After high school, Sharpe had to choose between attending a music conservatory like Juilliard or a university-

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based music school. She ended up picking Rice’s Shepherd School of Music and studying under Kathleen Winkler. “I liked the fact that the Shepherd School had the intensity of a conservatory, but also opportunities to explore other subjects and meet nonmusic students.”

While studying for her master’s degree at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, Sharpe also took advantage of opportunities to record television and film soundtracks. In 2017, she won a fellowship with the New World Symphony Orchestra, a training academy with a reputation for sending graduates to the world’s top orchestras; only 35 fellows are selected each year. One of Sharpe’s favorite parts of the fellowship is the chance to mentor young musicians in Miami public schools.

“When I talk to students, I always think about which of them might be future musicians,” Sharpe says. “After all, the only reason I started is because someone visited my mom’s school and taught her to play.” — MICHAEL HARDY ’06

ric Stone says he feels as busy as a one-armed paperhanger most days.

He produces one to three daily news stories for the people of Ketchikan, Alaska, an island town with a population of about 8,000 — and a place he had never been to before reporting for duty to cover it. “It’s not as cold here as you might think,” he says. “We’re in the middle of the country’s largest national forest and part of the largest temperate rainforest in North America.”

Stone is a reporter for KRBD Community Radio, a four-person staff that covers every issue that is important to Ketchikan. “We’re the only public radio station for this part of Alaska,” he says. “I pitch my own stories, which is exciting and intimidating for someone who just graduated college.”

While new to Alaska, Stone isn’t a stranger to new places. He initially pursued a degree in computational mathematics, but left Rice after a couple of years to explore and travel. He spent a few winters as a ski lift operator in Colorado and worked as a sailboat instructor in Galveston. “While away from school, I spent a lot of time listening to public radio and podcasts, which sparked my interest in journalism,” he says. “I returned to Rice for the one-on-one campus experience, and the Thresher became my journalism school.”

Stone served as the paper’s opinion editor and spent many late nights soaking up how the news industry worked. Today, he continues to gain on-the-job experience covering the pandemic in an isolated town with minimal medical resources.

“Reporting on COVID-19 has been incredibly stressful, exhausting and rewarding,” he says.

“The town has been reeling from the cancellation of the 2020 cruise ship season — the majority of its economic activity. My team and I are working to quickly inform everyone in Ketchikan as developments unfold.”

— KENDALL HEBERT

CASSY GIBSON ’17

I

“

ESTEVAN DELGADO ’13

E

stevan Delgado was just months away from graduation when he felt called to change his life’s course.

Though he had long planned to become a physician, Delgado began reconsidering what was truly driving his future hopes and dreams. The first-generation college student and son of motor factory workers decided to pivot from pursuing medical school to serving patients by focusing on health care quality and decisionmaking.

It was a step in the right direction, but still didn’t feel quite right. “I wanted to see what I could do to affect society so we’re not just caring about people at their deepest, darkest moments, but that we’re really caring about people from the time they enter society to the end,” he says.

Delgado decided he needed one more change, so he earned a master’s degree in public affairs and began a new career in public policy. Today, he serves as program manager for the Hispanic Impact Fund at the Austin Community Foundation, working to improve economic security and advancement across Central Texas. At its heart, his job is about listening and advocating for support — two skills he also uses as a member of the Association of Rice Alumni’s Board of Directors, where he strives to improve the Rice experience for everyone and uplift “stories of pivot” like his own.

Through a winding search for purpose, Delgado found a way to do exactly what he felt called to do in his last semester at Rice: inspire others, impact the community and do it all on his own path. — A.W.

n tech, you hear

phrases like ‘human design,’” Cassy Gibson says, “but so much of technology is actually exploiting human traits instead of supporting them.” Understanding user and patient needs is the basis of Gibson’s work. As a user experience (UX) designer in health care technology, she interviews patients and creates blueprints for digital systems that cater to the real people behind the screen, making sure the technology is accessible and inclusive for everyone who uses it.

Gibson started at Rice on the pre-med track. After completing her requirements, though, she switched to an English major, wanting to reinvigorate her studies with her love for literature and writing. When Rice piloted the medical humanities program, she was able to join the worlds of science and humanities and became one of the first two students to graduate with the minor.

In fact, Gibson first encountered UX design in Kirsten Ostherr’s Medical

Media Arts Lab. She made her first app for Texas Children’s Hospital in the class and has been dedicated to unlocking the potential of humanism in tech ever since.

Now based in Los Angeles, Gibson is navigating leadership and entrepreneurship on her own terms. In addition to her current work at Sidebench, a technology consultancy, she co-founded a women’s health startup and is a part of Vital Voices, an international initiative that brings together and empowers female leaders.

She also has co-authored a chapter about acknowledging and resolving bias in artificial intelligence in a recently published book.

At home during the pandemic, she has been sending customized embroidery to Rice friends in exchange for donations to Black Lives Matter charities.

Gibson explains, “What’s most important, whatever you’re doing, is that it’s done in a way that is humancentered and thoughtful. It feels urgent, now more than ever, to do things with social impact.”

— MIMI CHIQUET

LILLIAN SEIDEL ’15

A ANGELICA RAZO ’16

A

ngelica Razo

wants to use her leadership skills to uplift the Latino community by ensuring that they participate fully in democracy. “We need to demand that our community be part of decisionmaking processes that impact us,” she says. “We are experts in our own experience; and, therefore, we should be at the forefront of creating policies, initiatives and practices that best fit the needs of our community.”

The 26-year-old is deep into accomplishing her goal.

Razo is the Texas state director of Mi Familia Vota, a nonprofit organization with the mission to build Latino political power through voter registration, voter engagement and leadership development. “My role is to create a state strategy that ultimately contributes to building Latino power and representation throughout Texas,” Razo explains. She focuses on fundraising, governmental relationships, establishing partners, media visibility and supporting team members as they implement strategies.

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Her ambition is to rewrite the narrative of Latino voters. “As a community, we’ve been marked as the ‘sleeping giant,’ giving off the false assumption that our underrepresentation of civic participation can be boiled down to apathy and laziness,” Razo says.

Razo is a prime example of her belief that people can develop into leaders.

Born in Mercedes, Texas, she grew up in Bentonville, Arkansas, where her parents worked in the landscaping business. An introvert, she forced herself to join clubs in high school because she was determined to attend an elite university. At Rice, she was elected vice president for HACER (Hispanic Association for Cultural Enrichment at Rice) and led the annual cultural show to resounding success by including more diverse participation, such as Brazilian students and the Latino graduate student groups. She has come to find out that leaders are ordinary people.

“We should empower each other to recognize this and take collective action,” she says. “My personal mantra is ‘Lift as you rise.’”

s a self-proclaimed “risk-averse art

student,” Lillian Seidel didn’t care for sports. But after an ACL injury during Powderpuff football, she would soon become a runner.

“After five months of post-op therapy,” she says, “I decided if I was going to go through all of this physically and emotionally, I wanted to make it worth it.

I decided to train for a sprint triathlon before I graduated.” Her first few workouts consisted of running to the Rice Farmers Market for snacks and walking back with her roommates. Thinking about that now makes Seidel laugh, but finishing her first race is what she remembers most.

“I burst into tears,” she says. “I realized I’m capable of so much more than I thought. From that moment, I was like, what else can I do?”

On the second anniversary of her ACL surgery, Seidel ran her first half-marathon. She followed it with a half-Ironman relay with her mom, which she’s done three times now, as well as running several 10K trail races. Between runs, she took a solo trip to Alaska’s Denali National Park and hiked up Emory Peak in Big Bend National Park.

While studying law at the University of Texas at Austin, she finished a 50K trail race. Now, with a law degree in hand, she’s working in child welfare in Texas as a government innovation fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Running and keeping active are integral parts of her life but are not always easy. “I have to be intentional in pushing myself out of my comfort zone.” — KATELYN POWELL

— DAVID D. MEDINA ’83

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SUMMAR McGEE ’20 & SONIA TORRES RODRÍGUEZ ’19

T

he murder of former

Houston resident George Floyd in late May struck a chord with Summar McGee and Sonia Torres Rodríguez, as it did for so many people around the world.

Coming soon after the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, Floyd’s death drove home America’s deadly legacy of racism and gave new life to the Black Lives Matter movement. In solidarity, McGee, Torres Rodríguez and a group of current Rice students decided to start the group Rice for Black Life.

“I was asking myself, what can you tangibly contribute?” McGee explains.

“And then I thought about what I had at my disposal, which was the Rice network. The network is huge, and you have access to almost unlimited resources.” She began talking with Torres Rodríguez, whom she had met through the George R. Brown Forensics Society, about starting a new organization dedicated to racial justice.

“We wanted to create a group that

wasn’t just limited to current Rice students,” Torres Rodríguez says. “Campus groups are great, but you belong to them for four years and then you graduate.” Torres Rodríguez currently works as a researcher at the Urban Institute, while McGee is a first-year master’s student in American studies at Brown University. Rice for Black Life quickly attracted about 60 members, both current and former Owls. Other members in leadership roles include Black student activists Anu Ayeni ’21, Kendall Vining ’22, Magdah Omer ’22, Malaika Bergner ’23, Martina Faciane ’21, Michelle Fokam ’20, Morgan Seay ’22, Nia Howze ’22, Shifa Rahman ’22, Taylor Crain ’21 and Zahrah Butler ’23.

Operating as a nonhierarchical collective, the group chose as its first action a one-day “contact-a-thon” to raise money for Houston racial justice groups. They set up a GoFundMe campaign with a target of $2,500 to be divided among the Texas Organizing Project, Indivisible Houston, Pure Justice and the Houston chapter of Black Lives Matter.

Using their new Facebook page, the group recruited nearly 300 volunteers to send out personalized donation appeals. The campaign went live on the morning of May 31, and the team spent the day sending dozens of social media messages and emails to everyone they knew.

By midnight, they had raised an astonishing $93,362 — more than 37 times their original goal — from over 2,200 people.

Rice for Black Life’s success inspired groups at Cornell, Wesleyan, Lehigh and other universities to launch similar fundraisers. McGee and Torres Rodríguez created an online toolkit with fundraising templates and advice on how to conduct a contact-a-thon.

To Torres Rodríguez, the fundraiser’s success demonstrated the reach of the Owl network. “This was just Rice kids dialing, texting, tweeting and Facebooking,” she says. “Sometimes you forget the power of getting together with people who share your cause.”

— M.H.

PHOTO CREDIT T K

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 31

DOLLY LI ’12 & JOEY YANG ’12

D JUSTIN ONWENU ’18

W

hen the

wail of sirens signals disaster, most people run for cover.

But for Justin Onwenu, the sound of an alarm means it’s time to roll up his sleeves and get to work. As the 2017–2018 Rice Student Association president, Onwenu was one of the first students called upon when Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston. The crisis response that followed changed his outlook on life.

“I remember calling my mom so overwhelmed by the gravity of everything. … That was a turning point.

I realized I wasn’t going to medical school. The environment people live in, the crises people face and their access to good jobs, nutritious food, clean air and adequate housing all have a significant impact on their health before they step foot in a doctor’s office,” he says.

After graduating, Onwenu

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returned to Michigan and began working for the Sierra Club in Detroit as a community organizer focused on environmental justice issues.

When a new crisis hits, his job takes a turn. Some weeks, he pivots from rallying with citizens outside of state agencies to helping draft city ordinances to protect drinking water. But the goal of each day is the same — to make sure people have a healthy environment to live in.

Onwenu has accomplished a lot in a short time, from working with residents to secure air filtration systems in schools to serving as the youngest appointee to the Michigan Advisory Council for Environmental Justice, the first convened in state history. He’s committed to bringing about change by building coalitions and responding to community needs. “There’s this perception that there’s only one solution or one way to do things. Being active civically doesn’t just mean going to protests or sharing posts on Facebook. … We need people fighting for justice as researchers, teachers, lawyers, artists — we need everybody.”

— K.P.

olly Li grew up in New York City

listening to the local Cantoneselanguage radio station, 1480 AM, with her family. The station carried traffic and weather reports and played music, but also covered stories of particular interest to the Asian American community, such as the 2003 SARS outbreak in Hong Kong. Last December, Li was listening to the station with her mother when she came up with the idea of starting an Englishlanguage version.

“I loved the range of information that was available, and I realized that there wasn’t anything else quite like that,” says Li, who now lives in Brooklyn. For technical help, she reached out to her friend, Joey Yang, an Oakland-based web designer whom she met at Rice. Yang, who had been a DJ at KTRU, told Li that buying a terrestrial broadcast license would cost several hundred thousand dollars, but that they could start an internet radio station with just a few hundred dollars of equipment.

In early 2020, they launched “Plum Radio,” a show that airs Sundays at 4 p.m. Eastern time on Instagram Live and is released as a podcast the following Wednesday. Hosted by Li and Yang, the approximately hourlong show includes news,

commentary and interviews.

Yang’s time at KTRU and Li’s experience as a video journalist — she’s reported for Al Jazeera and the South China Morning Post — make them naturals. Both approach the news from an unapologetically leftist viewpoint, and neither is afraid to take a critical cultural stance.

On the first episode, Li and Yang decried what they call “boba liberalism.” Named after the bubble tea houses ubiquitous in Asian American communities, the term refers to a shallow version of cultural pride focused on food rather than politics.

Just because Asian food and culture are increasingly popular, Yang argues, doesn’t mean that Asian Americans have achieved full equality.

Li and Yang frequently bring up the history of anti-Asian discrimination in America, dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, as a way to encourage solidarity between the Asian American and African American communities.

George Floyd’s murder in late May became a focus of Li and Yang’s weekly episodes.

Li has been reporting on the Black Lives Matter movement since 2014. “The more you know about the history of the civil rights movement [and] about Black American history, the more you realize that your own immigration history is intertwined with that movement,” she says.

Li and Yang want to use their radio show to educate their audience and themselves about that history. “To understand how we got to where we are today requires us to dig in and relearn some things,” Yang says.

— M.H.

DAISY CHUNG ’14

D

aisy Chung has never been one to limit her options.

She transferred to Rice from her home in Taiwan for the opportunity to study both of her passions — biological sciences and visual art. “I was the only student at the time pursuing both majors,” Chung says. “Once I realized I wanted to become a science illustrator, I essentially invented my own path and designed an independent study course under the guidance of [Rice associate professor of painting and drawing] Natasha Bowdoin, my mentor.”

After graduation, Chung considered entering academia but didn’t want to restrict herself to a specialized field of science. With a desire to communicate academic science to a broad audience, she enrolled in California State University’s science illustration graduate program, the only of its kind in the country. “Through my program’s internship component, I began working with Scientific American, which sparked my interest in visual journalism,” she says. Chung then joined National Geographic’s graphics team in

Washington, D.C. “Each magazine story was a monthslong collaborative project between writers, photographers, designers and graphic researchers,” she explains. “The researchers helped me become a mini-expert in specialized topics so I could act as a communication liaison for our audience.”

Chung says her greatest challenge in creating visual stories that explain complicated scientific topics is getting the audience to engage. “Once you’re too removed from your audience, you forget why the visuals don’t work,” she says. “It’s hard to explain science, but getting your audience to care about the science is even harder.”

Today, Chung works part time as the creative director for wikiHow, an educational website with how-to guides, and expands on her freelance career, where she’s able to dream up her own story ideas, such as community efforts to save Hawaii’s Ōhia tree from a rapidly spreading fungal disease.

Her recent work has also brought her back to Rice as a visual communication collaborator for Rice Magazine and the Carbon Hub. — K.H.

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M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 33

RAJ SALHOTRA ’13

W NATHAN BONNES ’15

A

self-taught musician,

Nathan Bonnes has cultivated a career that combines his passion for writing, performing and producing music. Bonnes’ foray into the Texas music scene began in high school, playing at local venues in Corpus Christi, his hometown. At Rice, he found there wasn’t a place where musicians could regularly perform; so in 2012, Bonnes partnered with Rice Coffeehouse and headlined the first Coffeehouse Goes Acoustic event. The open mic nights grew in popularity with other student performers and became appropriately dubbed “Espresso Yourself.” With regular Wednesday night gigs, Bonnes focused on songwriting and collaborating with other local musicians.

Following graduation, Bonnes pursued a full-time career in folkcountry music, releasing his first full-length album in 2016. He toured around Texas, playing at places like the Floore’s Country Store and Gruene

34 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2020

Hall, legendary honky-tonks that have hosted the likes of Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett and George Strait. On Sundays, he’d return to Houston, where he served as a part-time worship leader at The Story Houston. After two years on the road and hundreds of shows, the church offered him a full-time position. “I had to weigh the benefits of this stable job with the idea of trying to develop a career under my own name as a solo, secular musician,” Bonnes says.

Once his decision was made, Bonnes never missed a beat. “Every week is a new, creative, fun mess,” he says. “We create services, podcasts and original music.” And Bonnes continues to enlist the help of friends he made at Rice.

“There are so many talented people at Rice whom I still draw from when I need help on a project,” he says.

While Bonnes misses aspects of the country music life, he admits between time with his wife, Gretchen Oertli ’15, whom he married in 2019 at the Rice Chapel, and his responsibilities as a worship leader, “the future is looking great!”

— TRACEY RHOADES

hen you

speak with Raj Salhotra about his mission to improve opportunities for underresourced students, your first response is to ask where to sign up to help. The focus of his enthusiasm is Momentum Education, a nonprofit that provides mentorship, scholarship funding, and college and career counseling to high school and college students in the Houston area.

After graduating from Rice, Salhotra joined Teach For America as a high school

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math teacher and also taught at YES Prep Southwest. This experience drove home the dearth of opportunities for first-generation and low-income kids and motivated him to gain a greater understanding of law and policy. In response, he founded two educational nonprofits: One Jump, which connected high school students to summer programs, and SWAG (Students With Ambition Go) to College, a mentoring program. He also attended Harvard Law School, where he focused on the intersection of law and policy.

After law school, he returned to Houston, deferred a job with Baker Botts and launched a campaign for city council. “The decision to run was driven by a desire to use policy to address the many issues I saw affecting my students outside of the classroom,” Salhotra says. “I was thinking about housing, transportation and the lack of opportunities to attend after-school or summer programs.”

Salhotra lost the city council race, but he learned that his north star was leveling the playing field for students from underserved backgrounds. Instead of returning to Baker Botts, he rolled both One Jump and SWAG to College into the nonprofit Momentum Education.

“I’ve seen the power of social capital, of connections, of mentors and of access to resources,” Salhotra explains. “I fundamentally believe that we have an obligation to level the playing field and expand opportunities for all.”

— SARAH BRENNER JONES

DOHA ABOUL-FOTOUH ’15

W

hat is most striking

about Doha Aboul-Fotouh is her profound sense of gratitude. When asked about her experiences as an English major, her studies at Baylor College of Medicine, her pediatric residency, her poetry or her family, she always starts out with, “I’m so very grateful.” It is this sense of thoughtful reflection that permeates her writing as well as her practice of medicine.

It seems natural that Aboul-Fotouh would choose a medical career. Her mother and two older sisters are all physicians. But she also loved the humanities, particularly writing poetry, and it was actually her sensibilities as a writer that moved her toward the body and pediatrics. “Medicine is much like English — they are both about story-making,” Aboul-Fotouh explains.

“Everything has a beginning, middle and end. Much of medicine is putting together that story, proving that something happened or could happen.”

Even through the rigors of medical school and residency, Aboul-Fotouh has continued writing poetry, what she describes as “putting parts together.” She attends a monthly poetry workshop and considers it “one of the absolute best things I have going for me.” In 2019, she published a long poem in the literary journal RHINO Poetry.

The poem, titled “Begetting,” contemplates the loss of her father.

In fact, the death of Aboul-Fotouh’s father was instrumental in solidifying her approach to practicing medicine.

She was dissecting a cadaver in her first year of medical school when she realized that the body presented with liver disease; her father had succumbed to liver cancer just two years before.

“That recognition, while it brought about its own grief, also taught me that every body is a loved body,” she says.

“This is something I recognize and verbalize often in pediatrics. I spend a lot of time telling parents, ‘I know your child is precious to you.’ My work is about honoring the loved body as well as those who care about them.” — S.B.J.

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M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 35

TRISHNA NARULA ’11

S LUCRECIA AGUILAR ’18

W

hile visiting

her extended family in Guatemala, 11-year-old Lucrecia Aguilar walked through the rainforest with a heightened sense of awareness. With electricity in the air, she knew without a doubt there were jaguars near.

Aguilar vividly recalls that moment in the middle of the jungle and how it furthered her childhood desire to pursue wildlife conservation. As a Rice student, she studied pumas in New Mexico, jaguars in Belize and encountered her first big cat in the Tanzanian wild.

“Being in spaces with big cats just has this energy. When I’m in that place, … it’s the best part of what I do. … But conservation can be sexist and racist and not done for the right reasons. The destruction of nature is so much worse than what you can imagine when reading a textbook,” she says.

“There are more tigers in captivity in the U.S. than there are in the

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wild all over the world.”

In her senior year, Aguilar won a coveted Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. After graduation, she traveled to 17 countries to explore big cat conservation and human-wildlife coexistence. With big cats on the brink of extinction, Aguilar is determined to find solutions for these endangered species. She’s now pursuing a Ph.D. in conservation ecology at Harvard University. Her interest in data analysis and her fieldwork experiences have led her to also look at underrepresented minorities and how they experience conservation.

While Aguilar continues her studies and anxiously waits to get back in the field when it’s safe to travel again, she has also been answering questions from friends about Netflix’s hit documentary, “Tiger King.” With the show in the spotlight, Aguilar hopes people will talk about the future and how big cats impact key parts of our ecosystem.

“We are running out of time,” she says.

— K.P.

ugar Land native Trishna

Narula is back in Houston after spending the better part of a decade away. An only child of two doctors, Narula grew up playing with her “Sesame Street” stethoscope, shadowing physicians at local clinics and volunteering in the Texas Medical Center.

Learning about human behavior and its effect on health in Rice professor Mikki Hebl’s lab cemented her interest in the intersection of psychology and health.

After two college summers working with children in India, Narula found her interest pivoting to public health.

She graduated a year early from Rice, where she met fellow Bollywood fan and now-husband Jaimeet Gulati ’10 through her involvement with the South Asian Society. Then, while finishing her master’s degree in public health at Emory and internship at the CDC, she applied to attend medical school at Stanford, seeking one-on-one patient interaction and medical skills

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to inform her public health knowledge.

During medical school, Narula represented fellow medical students as one of the first minority women elected speaker of the American Medical Association (AMA) Medical Student Section. From Chicago to Washington, D.C., to Honolulu to Dallas, Narula attended 17 AMA meetings and coauthored 18 resolutions. One notable bill for which she advocated made California the fifth state in the country to adopt the End of Life Option Act, allowing terminally ill patients to access physician-assisted aid-in-dying.

Clearly able to make waves in public policy, Narula was hesitant to go down what she describes as a “tunnel-vision path” to practicing clinical medicine without first exploring how to balance a career that included both seeing patients and advocating for healthy communities. When a Rice professor connected her to Karen Tseng, a lawyer leading the brand-new population health department at Harris Health, Narula found her calling.

Combining her training in psychology, public health and medicine, Narula has helped lead comprehensive, preventative programming at Harris Health, where 90% of patients are uninsured or underinsured. The first project she worked on was a “Food Farmacy.” Highrisk patients receive “food prescriptions” to be redeemed for 30 pounds of fresh produce every two weeks, coupled with support from staff nutritionists and trained professionals to help navigate federal food benefits. Her work is in health care reform, transforming clinics into community-centered hubs that focus on social determinants rather than funneling resources into treating diseases and complications that are largely preventable.

Next up for Narula is applying to a psychiatry residency to continue to advocate for patients in the clinical and social worlds. As she reflects on her path, she realizes that she had spent so many years chasing “global health” in cities and programs far away when there were so many inequalities right here, in her own backyard.

— M.C.

SHAAN PATEL ’14

S

haan Patel is only 28

years old, but his resume reads like one that belongs to a seasoned professional — he’s an architectural designer, owns a design and construction firm, is a cast member of a reality television show, writes a blog and belongs to two nonprofit boards that advocate for better living conditions in MiamiDade County.

After earning his Bachelor of Arts in 2014 and Bachelor of Architecture in 2016, Patel returned to his hometown of Miami and started Tanin Group, a design, construction and real estate firm that builds residential townhomes in Central Miami and luxury waterfront homes in St. Petersburg, Florida. “What sets us apart is being able to design, construct and sell in-house,” he says. “When you see all the pieces, you end up with a better product.”

Patel decided he wanted to be an

architect when he was 10 years old.

Playing with Legos and putting things together, he discovered his calling for a career in design.

While studying architecture at Rice, he realized that he loved project management. “Making decisions, putting the project together and making sure it gets done was just as much fun for me as the design portion,” he says.

What he’s also found fun is being a cast member of the reality TV show “Family Karma,” which is produced and aired by Bravo.

The show follows a group of Indian American families who grew up together in Miami. It’s filmed everywhere the families go — restaurants, construction sites and homes. “I was balancing the filming of a show while meeting my girlfriend and trying to make sure that it did not interfere with someone I really liked,” Patel says. “This was never something I planned on, but I really enjoyed being able to tell my story and be on this crazy ride.”

— D.D.M.

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M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 37

CORTLAN WICKLIFF ’10

C KIM RIGHTOR ’16

I

n March, Kim Rightor

was a year and a half into her Peace Corps stint when she and more than 7,000 other volunteers were evacuated due to COVID-19 — the first global evacuation in the organization’s history. “It was definitely dramatic,” Rightor says. “Once I received the email, I had 12 hours to pack up, say my goodbyes and evacuate.”

While stationed in Dar Ould Zidouh, a Moroccan village of about 40,000 people, Rightor focused on improving her Arabic language skills and building community relationships. “I started three girls soccer teams, taught English at a women’s sewing cooperative, led yoga classes at the rec center and created a library at the high school with local teachers,” she says. “A lot of my time was spent making sure the programs were established in a culturally sensitive way. For example, the girls soccer teams couldn’t have any male involvement.”

38 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2020

Rightor says she dedicated the first three months of her assignment to making connections and building trust in the community.

“I was the only volunteer in my town, and I didn’t know the language very well,” she explains. She conducted a community needs assessment to understand which programs to prioritize. “English was a high priority, while women’s health was highlighted as something I shouldn’t touch,” she says. “I think serving in the Peace Corps gave me incredible entrepreneurial experience because you aren’t given marching orders. You’re simply placed in a community and tasked with finding ways to help them.”

Back on U.S. soil with an advanced midlanguage ranking in Arabic and countless learning experiences under her belt, Rightor is focused on her next step — applying to business school, pursuing entrepreneurship and one day launching a startup related to female empowerment.

— K.H.

ortlan Wickliff’s book,

“Young and Driven: Overdrive,” published in 2017, is a blueprint of exercises and lessons learned on how to succeed in life. And he should know. At a very early age, Wickliff was fascinated with electronics and eager to invent medical devices. But the untimely death of his father from a heart attack changed Wickliff’s focus. He realized that instead of designing the equipment, he needed to find innovative ways to reduce the time it takes to get technology to market by efficiently navigating legal and technical hurdles. Thus, at 10 years old, his three-degree plan was hatched.

At 15, Wickliff started his college career, finishing his required high school classes and earning 70-plus college credits that he used to apply toward his

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bioengineering degree at Rice. Graduating in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree, Wickliff became the nation’s youngest engineer at 19 — earning the first of many mortarboards — and headed to the East Coast.

Leaving Texas for the first extended time in his life, Wickliff entered Harvard Law School. This time, acclimating to college life was more challenging. “I strengthened my abilities to advocate for myself and others,” he says, “and [gained] the tools to argue policy.” When Wickliff graduated in 2013, he became one of the youngest African Americans to graduate from the school. After passing the state bar, he became the youngest attorney in Texas.

Still intent on melding business, law and technology, Wickliff went on to Texas A&M, where he completed a Ph.D. in engineering. He returned to Rice in 2018, not as a student but as associate vice provost for academic affairs and strategic initiatives. “Rice gives me so many opportunities to positively impact so many people, and I can’t imagine a job that could give me that same access and ability,” he says.

In 2019, the second edition of Wickliff’s book was released. So in October, to motivate people to pursue their dreams and believe in themselves, he embarked on a self-funded speaking tour, Be Driven to Succeed, a 25-city, 4,500-plus-mile endeavor in which he spoke to over 40,000 students in high schools, colleges and community events across the state. Beginning in Beaumont, Wickliff spent his vacation on the road, giving a total of 52 presentations.

Wickliff recounts hearing about a student who attended a youth engineering camp that he organized and spoke at. “He had recently been orphaned and was having issues in school,” says Wickliff. “He soon after turned his life around and credited what I said at the conference for his motivation and change of heart. So, anytime I can motivate someone to improve their lives or pursue their dreams,” Wickliff says, “is a proud moment for me.”

— T.R.

VIVAS KUMAR ’14

A

s an electrical

engineering major, Vivas Kumar learned a lot about batteries and energy storage for electricity.

This knowledge came in handy after graduation, when he joined Tesla’s battery materials team in the Bay Area.

“I like to think of Tesla as a battery and software company that happens to make cars,” Kumar says. “Electric cars are on the road today because of the decades of electrical engineering innovation on battery technology.”

At Tesla, Kumar became a part of that innovation. “It was an amazing career opportunity to be at the forefront of the electric and autonomous cars trend — the biggest change to happen to the transportation industry in the 130 years that we’ve been making cars in the United States,” he says.

“I managed a multibillion-dollar portfolio sourcing the metals

needed to make batteries.”

Kumar’s role took him to 25 countries in three years. “The personal and professional development that I was able to seize early on turbocharged my career,” he explains. “It was fascinating to work within Tesla’s business model because it will likely redefine the future of the automotive sector.”

Last year, Kumar left Tesla to pursue his MBA at Stanford University and work part time for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a London-based specialist information provider for the lithium ion battery to electric vehicle supply chain. “I wanted to stay involved in the industry while I went back to school, and this experience has solidified what I’m looking for in my long-term career,” Kumar says. “I want to do something that marries engineering and business, involves a lot of international travel, allows me to work with diverse people and is grounded in cutting-edge technologies.” — K.H. ◆

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M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 39

Two centuries ago, an epidemic led to political and racial strife and exacerbated fears of immigrant refugees. What does history tell us about the politics of disease?

WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE

BY SEAN MOREY SMITH ’05

40 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2020

This woodcut from 1793 depicts Stephen Girard, a French banker, caring for the sick during the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia.

Carriages rumbled through the streets to pick up the dying and the dead.

ART FROM THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES

B

Y AUGUST, THE DISEASE HAD reached Philadelphia. But James Hutchinson, the city’s physician of the port, refused to close the port to refugees. Hutchinson believed that the disease was being spread due to local conditions, and he explained his decision to keep the port open to Pennsylvania’s governor, writing “I have learned of no foreigners or sailors that have hitherto been infected.” By the middle of November, more than 10% of Philadelphians had died, and the city’s College of Physicians balked at Hutchinson’s refusal to act. They passed a resolution declaring that the pestilence could never have “been generated in this city, or in any other parts of the United States” and therefore must have “been imported.”

These doctors were not only divided over whether local conditions or refugees were to blame for the spread of the disease — they also belonged to different political parties.

Republicans like Hutchinson favored an agrarian lifestyle and blamed the putrid conditions in the city for making people ill. However, Federalists, including most of the city’s College of Physicians, wanted to close the city to French refugees and blamed them for the spread of the disease. They feared that the Republicans’ support for the French Revolution could lead to bloody upheaval in the United States.

The year was 1793, the disease was yellow fever, and Philadelphia was the new nation’s capital.

We often think that political disagreements over how to

deal with diseases such as COVID-19 are recent phenomena. But the United States has been shaped by experiences with diseases and their political interpretations since its founding.

Martin Pernick, a historian of medicine at the University of Michigan, has shown that Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow fever outbreak accelerated the formation of the United States’ first party system, which emerged early in George Washington’s second term as president. Foreign policy was a major cause of the split between the Federalists led by Alexander Hamilton and the Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson. The Federalists favored closer ties with Britain while the Republicans favored Revolutionary France. When yellow fever appeared in Philadelphia in August 1793, political opinion shaped government officials’ and physicians’ responses.

Today, epidemiologists recognize that yellow fever is a viral disease passed from person to person

by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Yellow fever is named for the jaundice that occurs in severe cases when the virus damages the liver, causing bilirubin levels in the body to rise and leading to the yellowing of the skin and eyes. Because mosquitoes transmit yellow fever, outbreaks in temperate climates are largely seasonal, peaking in mid-to-late summer and dwindling with freezes in autumn or early winter. The disease followed a similar course in Philadelphia in 1793, having been recognized in August and fading by early November.

In 1793, viruses were unimagined. The international medical community debated whether illnesses could spread via contagion, but specific disease-causing microorganisms had yet to be envisioned. Instead, physicians believed that noxious smells and vapors in the air, often referred to as miasmas and effluvia, could be a threat to health.

When yellow fever developed in Philadelphia, the city’s doctors were already divided over whether diseases were the product of local miasmas and effluvia or could be passed from person to person.

The outbreak, however, forced them to transform their beliefs into concrete action. Physicians with Republican leanings generally believed that local conditions in Philadelphia, including putrid smells, were the main cause of the disease. This fit neatly with their desire to accept French refugees, who held antiurban and pro-agricultural beliefs. Federalist physicians, by comparison, tended to have a contagionist view that fit with their desire to keep French refugees out. Federalist leaders such as Hamilton used this connection to push for a ban on trade with French colonies as well as stop the immigration of refugees.

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How Americans responded people who grew up in West Today, as political to yellow fever in 1793 was Africa — and later the planparties in the United deeply political. Roughly tation South — where yellow States argue over 20,000 people fled Philafever was endemic were less delphia, a city of 50,000, likely to die from it as adults. responses to including most of the federal However, the disease had COVID-19 and the same effect on Black government. Federalists in the relative merits and white Philadelphians particular followed their of reopening the who had not been exposed belief that refugees had to yellow fever as children. introduced a contagion to economy and Many of the supposedly the city and left. However, continuing social immune Black volunteer local Republicans organized distancing, it seems a response that included nurses caught the disease and like politicians are setting up a hospital in an died. To add insult to injury, seeking to score abandoned estate and orgaFederalist-leaning Philanizing nurses to serve the city. delphia publisher Mathew political points reThe 1793 outbreak in Carey published a tract in the gardless of the facts.

Philadelphia also reflected closing weeks of the epidemic But diseases have the politics of contemporary claiming that Black Philadelalways been political. race relations. Absalom Jones phians had taken advantage and Richard Allen, founders of the situation and used their of the city’s Free African natural immunity to “exact Society, organized Black [payment] with the utmost volunteers to serve as nurses during the outbreak. Pennrigor from starving families, and then [didn’t] do their sylvania had passed the first law in the nation to graduduty” to care for the sick. Even as Black Philadelphians ally end slavery in 1780 in the midst of the Revolutionary risked their lives to help their fellow citizens, their efforts War; by the 1790s, Philadelphia was home to the largest were besmirched for political ends. community of free Black people in the United States.

Federalists would emerge as the stronger party after When yellow fever struck Philadelphia, assumptions the epidemic despite the efforts of Republicans to combat about racial differences and the politics of Black citithe disease. Some Republicans — such as Hutchinson — zenship also influenced responses. Republican-leaning died, leaving a leadership vacuum. But more importantly, Benjamin Rush, America’s most renowned doctor and a the Federalists’ political message played better to the signer of the Declaration of Independence, believed that public. Most Americans preferred to believe that refuBlack people were unable to be affected by the disease, gees were the source of the contagion and that their home and his theories spurred Jones and Allen to call for Black environment could never produce anything so harmful. nurses. Many Black Philadelphians responded favorToday, as political parties in the United States argue ably, in part because they wanted to demonstrate their over responses to COVID-19 and the relative merits of worthiness as citizens in response to growing political reopening the economy and continuing social distancefforts to curtail Black Americans’ rights in the 1790s. ing, it seems like politicians are seeking to score political Rush’s recommendation to use Black nurses was points regardless of the facts. But diseases have always based in widely accepted, but ultimately wrong, medical been political. assumptions about race. The disease probably did first The impact of an illness is often impossible to deterevolve in tropical West Africa, but enslavers contribmine even after the fact, so in the midst of a pandemic, we uted to its spread to the Americas by forcibly relocatcan only honestly interpret the information we have and ing infected people from African countries to cities and choose whether we should err on the side of commerce plantations in the New World. or human life. We also need to remember that the costs When enslaved Africans arrived in the Caribbean and of disease do not fall evenly on all people. Often the most vulnerable in society — those considered marginal to the the American South and first encountered European doctors, they probably were less likely to die from yellow nation — bear a disproportionate risk in their exposure to fever than white people. However, there is little evidence disease, and still their contributions go unrecognized. ◆ that people of African descent had some innate protection from the disease. Instead, people who were infected Sean Morey Smith earned a B.A. in computer science and with the disease early in life generally had milder reachistory in 2005 at Rice. Earlier this year, he also earned his tions and were more likely to survive. This means that Ph.D. in history at Rice.

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ALUMNI

PROFILES, HISTORY AND CLASSNOTES

HISTORY

Suffrage Pioneer A century ago, a member of Rice’s first graduating class became a leader at the center of the women’s voting rights movement.

BY DEBORAH LYNN BLUMBERG

BY KEN KEUFFEL

IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y MI A C O L EM A N

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ALUMNI arrested. Kalb was imprisoned for several days in the district jail where she fell ill, possibly with the Spanish flu.

“I couldn’t even be lifted up to a sitting posture without something inside of me cutting off my breath at once,” Kalb wrote in a letter to her mother, Benigna Green Kalb. “Two tobacco-y guards and a very onion-y one” lifted her out of bed onto a stretcher and she was brought home in an ambulance.

Kalb’s ordeal, and her broader efforts for women’s suffrage, of course ultimately paid off. One hundred years ago, on Aug. 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, decreeing states could not discriminate at the polls on the basis of sex. Eight days later, the secretary of state certified the ratification, ending almost a century of protest. Texas was the first Southern Officers of state to ratify the the National amendment.

Woman’s Party pictured in front of their Washington headquarters in June 1920 before leaving for the Republican [National] Convention.

Elizabeth Green Kalb is on the far right.

O

N A FRIGID MONDAY in early 1919, Elizabeth Green Kalb, Class of 1916, dressed herself head-totoe in white before leaving her room at the National Woman’s Party (NWP) headquarters. It would have been a short walk for Kalb, an alumna of Rice’s first graduating class, down Jackson Place to Pennsylvania Avenue, where she and her fellow suffragists stood in front of the White House, copies of President Woodrow Wilson’s speeches clutched in their hands.

The women lit the president’s words on fire, then let them burn in metal urns. The protest was one of the first so-called Watchfire demonstrations held in the nation’s capital in January

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and February 1919. NWP members picketed to pressure Wilson into lobbying reluctant senators to pass a women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote. Wilson announced his support for the amendment a year earlier, but NWP members believed his lobbying efforts to be lackluster at best.

On that particular day, Jan. 13, Kalb may have been among the 25 NWP members attacked by a mob led by schoolboys. When the women lit new fires in nearby Lafayette Square, the mob destroyed banners at NWP headquarters and pulled down the bell in the building’s balcony that tolled during the women’s watch. Eighteen suffragists, including Kalb, were

The Owl Who Beat Texas

Born in Ohio in the 1890s, Kalb was one of 59 young men and women to enroll in Rice Institute’s first class Sept. 23, 1912.

Students without cars took a trolley to Rice, riding the South End streetcar to Eagle where they boarded a shuttle car known as the “Toonerville Trolley” to campus. At the front gates off Main Street, a paved street connected to a dirt and shell road that students traversed to registration.

Classes began the next day.

Like all students, Kalb would have enrolled in English, German, physics, mathematics and chemistry. By the end of the first term, one-fifth of the first freshman class had failed so many subjects they were asked to withdraw. Kalb remained. She joined the Elizabeth Baldwin Literary Society, a debating and literary group for women, and her crowning achievement came in 1915 when she won first place in the Texas Intercollegiate Peace Association’s

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PHOTOS VIA NATIONAL PHOTO COMPANY COLLECTION / LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

third annual oratorical contest, where she presented an original essay.

“If our civilization is to outgrow war, we must first outgrow our old narrow, self-centered, half-savage conception of National Honor, and endow coming generations with the heritage of a greater and nobler ideal,” Kalb wrote in her essay, “The Problem of National Honor.” A poster pinned on a bulletin board in the Sallyport the following day pictured Kalb, deeming her “The Owl Who Beat Texas” to mark the first time Rice beat the representative from the University of Texas.

Shirley Marshall, a management consultant for nonprofits whose parents were friends with Kalb and her husband, says, “The award was a big deal for her because she didn’t see herself as a public speaker. Her true passion was writing and editing.”

At Rice’s first commencement in 1916, Kalb and classmates celebrated with

“If our civilization is to outgrow war, we must first outgrow our old narrow, self-centered, half-savage conception of National Honor, and endow coming generations with the heritage of a greater and nobler ideal.” dances, a play, a tennis tournament and a garden party. Kalb graduated with distinction and wrote a dedicatory poem for her class to mark the occasion.

“Rice was clearly a very formative place for her,” says Marshall, who inherited some of Kalb’s diaries and correspondence from her parents. “It really gave her confidence.”

Committed to Voting Rights

After graduation, Kalb tried to find work as a writer or an editor. Ultimately, she moved to Washington, D.C., after her mother encouraged her to join the suffragist movement. At first, Kalb volunteered. But then, in 1918, the NWP offered her a job as editor of The Suffragist, the NWP’s weekly journal.

Kalb moved into the bustling NWP headquarters, where she mingled with suffragist leaders such as Alice Paul and Lucy Burns. Unlike other suffragist groups, the NWP was laser-focused on a single goal: a national amendment supporting women’s right to vote.

Kalb’s mother joined her, and they often picketed together. One iconic photo (see previous page) shows Kalb, her mother, Paul and other suffragists outside the headquarters holding a sign with Susan B. Anthony’s famous quote, “No self respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her sex.”

After her arrest in 1919, Kalb became one of 166 women awarded the “prison pin” from the NWP for time spent in jail. And even after the 19th Amendment was passed, Kalb continued with her commitment to voting rights, helping Native American and Chinese immigrant women who were unable to vote.

Today, Kalb’s legacy lives on at Rice at a time when issues such as who gets to vote and what it means to be a U.S. citizen are still just as relevant.

When Kalb donated a copy of NWP member Doris Stevens’ 1920 book “Jailed for Freedom,” which documents the work of the NWP, to Rice in 1920, she wanted future women to remember the suffragists’ struggle and their ultimate success.

On the flyleaf of the book tucked away in the Woodson Research Center’s archives, Kalb wrote in black ink, “To The Girls of Rice, Past and Present, This Book is Affectionately Inscribed.”

Kalb pictured in 1920.

PHOTO CREDIT T K

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ALUMNI

CLASSNOTES

Warbirds, Speeches and Animatronics

Excerpts from Owlmanac 1950s

What a pleasant surprise to meet and chat with Anne Bray Berling ’47 (BA). … Like everyone else at Rice, I knew who Hubert Bray 1918 (PhD) [her father] was. He was a treasure of Rice, in that he was the perfect combination of a splendid mathematics professor and an unpredictable and entertaining teacher. His math students quickly learned to stay alert — or else. I watched a friend slowly nod off as Bray simultaneously backed up to grab a chalkboard eraser.

Everyone in the class save one knew what was coming next. We gave Bray a nice round of applause even though it was only a glancing shot. — Contributed by class recorder Ed Millis ’50 (BS)

1970s

Jeffrey Lee “Jeff” Cox ’70 (Will Rice: BA), a loving husband, father, scholar and activist, passed away Feb. 9. … Our class’s final few years were politically tumultuous, especially relating to the Vietnam War. The culmination of campus protests was an agreement that a class representative would speak at our commencement. Jeff was chosen to present the speech, which he had helped write along with Rick Weber ’70 (Baker: BA) and George Greanias ’70 (Wiess: BA), and was reviewed by Rice administrators. The speech was passionate and controversial, but captured the anguish we felt over the politics of the times. It was considered important enough that both the Thresher and Sallyport reprinted its text in full. In Rice’s first 100 commencements, Jeff was the only student to have given a speech.

— Contributed by class recorder Mike Ross ’70 (Baker: BA; MS, 1974)

1960s

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of V-E Day, the Lone Star Flight Museum … [organized] a lengthy show all around Houston with more than two dozen WWII Warbirds. This is the first time something like this has been done, and millions were watching. I sat in the shade on my driveway with my mask on, binoculars in hand, watching the real-time commentary from newscasters in the faster helicopters on the iPad, listening for the grumble of the heavy old propeller planes in the distance, flying low. Finally spotting those planes lumbering slowly in the sky was purely thrilling. It is not the first time that I have thought about courage in times of peril, a thought that is very appropriate for getting through this tough pandemic.

— Contributed by class recorder Michele S. Roberts ’67 (Brown: BA)

2000s

“For 15 years, I’ve been creating practical (as opposed to computergenerated) special effects in Los Angeles. My focus is on building the animatronic inner workings of state-of-the-art puppets, which I often puppeteer as well. I’ve made and performed key characters in dozens of commercials, international art exhibits and expositions, TV shows and feature films. I’m one of the lead mechanical designers at Legacy Effects in San Fernando, Calif., where I’ve built pieces for movies such as ‘Pacific Rim,’ ‘Iron Man 3,’ ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ and ‘Captain Marvel,’ among others. Most recently, I was lead mechanical designer and puppeteer for the animatronic dinosaur character Old Lace in Marvel’s ‘Runaways’ on Hulu and for Baby Yoda (yes, that one!) on Disney’s ‘The Mandalorian.’ I also built and performed Tom Hanks’ robotic co-stars in the upcoming movie ‘BIOS.’” — Contributed by Peter Clarke ’00 (Hanszen: BA)

To access digital Classnotes, create a Rice Portal account at riceconnect.rice.edu. Once registered, log in and click “Owlmanac Online.”

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FAMILY ALBUM

A Passion for Justice

Elizabeth Baird Saenger has dedicated much of her life to fighting for the civil rights of others.

A

S A STUDENT, Elizabeth Baird Saenger’s ’64 desire to support underserved members of her community was apparent. The daughter of Elizabeth Hill ’40 and Raleigh William Baird Jr. ’38, Saenger was born in Boston and

PHOTO BY MICH A EL N AGIN

grew up in Houston. Between her junior and senior years, she tutored children in inner-city Boston, which is how she met her future husband, an MIT graduate student. After returning to Rice, she started a program to match Rice students with low-income students in Houston for tutoring and support.

Saenger earned her Master of Education from Tufts University in 1965 and married later that year. They settled in New York with their two sons in 1972. She taught middle school social studies there until 1983 and then taught ethics to elementary students from 1983 until 2007.

Prior to her teaching career, Saenger sought jobs for ex-offenders and Vietnam War veterans with “bad papers.” In

the early 1970s, she started volunteering with a group of Quakers who had established a fund to provide bail to release people from the Westchester County Jail. “I used to drive there with $100 bills in my pockets and my own small children in the back seat to interview people who simply were too poor to get out of jail pretrial,” said Saenger.

The people they bailed out were usually Black and young and had been arrested on minor charges like arguing with a police officer or marijuana possession. “I went with them for their court dates, letting public defenders and judges know there was someone outside the system who cared about what happened.”

Saenger wrote an anguished letter to the local newspaper about one “offender” — an orphan who had been arrested for sleeping on the grounds of his former high school. Soon after, she received a phone call from someone she’d never met, Judge Joseph Clifford.

“He told me he’d been distressed about the situation for a while and had seen my letter. He and I began to gather people for meetings to try to find a solution.”

Saenger and Clifford established a house in Mount Vernon as the Youth Shelter Program of Westchester. In more than 40 years of operation, it has provided a safe and secure environment for hundreds of young men between the ages of 16 and 21 as they await trial and offers them educational, vocational and counseling opportunities. Since retiring from teaching, Saenger has been an active member of the Larchmont Mamaroneck Human Rights Committee and has taught English to immigrants.

“Injustice is never really hidden,” said Saenger. “It lurks, harming not only its immediate victims, but our whole society. The work of seeking justice is urgent but accessible. It belongs to everyone. And it is profoundly rewarding.”

— JENNY WEST ROZELLE ’00

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ALUMNI BOOKS

BY JENNIFER LATSON

Fluxus Forms

Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network Natilee Harren ’05

University of Chicago Press, 2020

I

T WAS ONE OF THE MOST revolutionary artistic movements of the 1960s: A rejection of virtuosic art forms that instead celebrated the commonplace and the routine. To the Fluxus collective, of which Yoko Ono was perhaps the bestknown member, art could be found in humankind’s most mundane rituals: pouring water, preparing a meal, washing your face. In “Fluxus Forms,” Natilee Harren, an art history professor at the University of Houston, examines why this movement was so radical in its day — and why it’s so relevant right now.

Q: How would you describe the Fluxus aesthetic?

A: At a time when abstract painting was considered the most advanced art of the day, Fluxus artists were interested in a different set of questions: Can I make an artwork that is both a sculpture and a painting? A piece of music and a poem? Even further, they wanted to make art out of the objects and activities of everyday life, which they found

immensely compelling. They were motivated by the desire to bring art out of the elitist realms of museums and galleries and directly into the flow of common experience. They did this through composing and performing simple instructions, called “event scores,” and distributing small, gamelike kits called Fluxbox multiples, which contained event scores and props that participants could activate themselves. One of my favorite pieces, for example, is Alison Knowles’ event score, “Proposition #2 (1962): Make a Salad.” That’s it. You make a salad, and that’s the art.

Q: What made the movement so revolutionary?

A: Many aspects of Fluxus practice — its interdisciplinarity, conceptualism, emphasis on participation, elevation of the everyday and other “nonart” materials — have become so widely adopted and normalized in contemporary art that we have lost sight of where those radical shifts originated. Fluxus emerged alongside pop art, which did a better job of playing by the rules of the art world. In contrast, Fluxus was more of an artist’s art, part of a subculture or underground appreciated by an international yet tight-knit group of like-minded individuals.

Q: You’ve said that pandemic life offers an opportunity to reinvent our personal rituals and reframe them as art. Have you done this?

A: We have all seen countless articles by health experts exhorting us to practice self-care habits rooted in ritual and mindfulness in order to deal with the tolls of social distancing. To me, these have always sounded very Fluxus!

Whenever possible, I try to pause and notice what I am doing and how I am doing it — handwashing is a good example — and take simple pleasure in that. Fluxus is fundamentally about attuning your perceptual awareness to the aesthetic pleasures that are right here, right now.

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NATILEE HARREN PHOTO BY NASH BAKER

Now Reading

ALUMNI

Food in Cuba

The Pursuit of a Decent Meal Hanna Garth ’05 Stanford University Press, 2020

FINDING THE INGREDIENTS to make a decent meal is increasingly becoming a challenge for Cubans. And as Hanna Garth argues in “Food in Cuba,” that’s a reflection of the difficulty many of them face in making a decent life. Garth, an anthropology professor at the University of California San Diego, focuses on the social and emotional meaning of food in post-Soviet Cuba, where traditional recipes are so much a part of Cubans’ cultural identity that, for many, not being able to prepare them can trigger an existential crisis, or what they describe as “a change in character.”

Unwilling to compromise on the quality of ingredients or to abandon recipes that have been handed down for generations, they devote huge portions of their free time to hunting down dietary staples that were once plentiful, such as corn. “For many Cubans, the process of acquiring food is not only laborious; it is also a major source of daily stress and anxiety,” Garth writes.

The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism Mary Holland ’92 Bloomsbury, 2020

SOME OF AMERICA’S best-known literary realists, including Henry James and Mark Twain, believed fiction had a duty to depict the truth: a “representation through language of real life,” writes Mary Holland, an English professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz. But as Holland notes, this description seems naive today — so much so that she can’t teach these authors “without rampantly scare-quoting words such as ‘real,’ ‘true,’ and ‘objective.’”

In “The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism,” Holland sets out to clarify those terms and describe the ways our ideas about what is real and how to depict it have changed dramatically over the past 30 years, when more than 20 new kinds of “realism” have been described, including dirty realism, traumatic realism, hysterical realism and crackpot realism. “This list raises thorny — if not exasperating — questions for critics of contemporary literature,” Holland writes. “As I am guiltier than anyone of muddying these waters, having already offered three ‘realisms’ of my own in publication or presentation, this book is in part my effort to set things right and begin to clean up the literary mess to which I have repeatedly contributed.”

MUSIC

Now Listening Sparks

Larry Lesser ’86 Poet Larryate Publishing, 2020

SINGER-SONGWRITER LARRY LESSER’S new album, “Sparks,” is deeply grounded in Jewish text and culture, but the folky tunes transcend denomination. Some are thoughtful reflections on the Torah and the Talmud, while others, such as “Two Jews, Three Opinions” and “The Bark Mitzvah Song,” are playful romps. In “Shabbos Keeps the Jews,” Lesser sings, “After dinner, some go out; some stay and schmooze.

More than Jews keep Shabbos, Shabbos keeps the Jews.” A professor of math and statistics at the University of Texas at El Paso, Lesser regularly integrates music into his teaching — and has been described as the “Weird Al” Yankovic of math.

Triptych (Tautological)

Kyle Bruckmann ’94 Carrier Records, 2020

THE THREE EXTENDED SOLO WORKS that make up composer and oboist Kyle Bruckmann’s latest album — “A Spurious Autobiography for John Barth,” “An Extruded Introversion for Blixa Bargeld” and “A Fuzzy Monolith for James Turrell” — are dedicated to a writer, a musician and a visual artist, respectively, who have deeply influenced Bruckmann’s identity and his artistic development. His own wideranging work encompasses genres from classical to free jazz, electronic music and post-punk rock, prompting Dusted Magazine to call him a “modern-day Renaissance musician.” He writes that he hopes the album will “provide some form of solace for those of us sheltered in place — presented, perhaps for the first time in quite a while, with the space to actually sit still and listen.”

M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 49

08.21.2020 // Academic Quad // Sarah Mozden ’22 (left) and Emily Wang ’22 (right)

LAST LOOK 50 RICE M AG A ZINE FA LL 2020

PHOTO BY BR ANDON MARTIN

TALENT DESERVES OPPORTUNITY

PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW

Johnny Dang ’22 did not always see himself getting a college degree. As a first-generation student, he assumed that higher education was financially out of reach.

“Even though I saw my peers applying to college, I was worried about how I was going to pay for my education,” he recalls. “It was a crisis moment for me.” Johnny chose Rice in part because of its generous financial aid policy, and he’s taken full advantage of the Rice experience — serving as vice president of Martel College, an O-Week adviser and a campus tour guide.

Johnny’s experience with the Rice Investment not only has helped him to pursue a career in medicine, but also has influenced his entire family. “Seeing that I have a voice and can make a difference has definitely given my parents a great deal of pride in themselves and in our community,” he explains. “This has motivated them to encourage other families to support their children in seeking out resources for college.”

With the support of the Rice community, the Rice Investment significantly expands scholarship support for low- and middleincome students.

To learn why endowment funding is vital to the success of this important initiative, visit thericeinvestment.rice.edu.

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ON THE WEB

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NEXT UP THE SEARCH FOR A SAFE AND EFFECTIVE COVID-19 vaccine will be the focus of our Winter 2021 profile of physicians Barney S. Graham ’75 and Bill Gruber ’75, lifelong friends and former Will Rice College roommates. Graham is deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief of NIAID’s Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory, which designed and developed the first COVID-19 vaccine candidate. Gruber is the senior vice president of Pfizer Vaccine Clinical Research and Development, where he is responsible for the company’s global clinical development of vaccines. Pfizer developed one of two COVID-19 vaccines that are currently the furthest along in the trial process. Its multidose candidate could be the first to market with delivery by early November.

VIDEO

Welch Foundation Gives $100 Million

The Robert A. Welch Foundation has announced the largest single gift in the history of Rice to establish the Welch Institute, a “sweeping strategic partnership” on campus that will focus on world-leading advanced materials research. The gift is also the largest in the 65-year history of the foundation, which expects that this investment will lead to next-generation materials for energy systems, sustainable water, space systems, biomedical materials, telecommunications, manufacturing, transportation, security and more.

VIDEO

Behind the Scenes: Tents

Construction of the Provisional Campus Facilities next to Hanszen College and South Servery began during the summer, and the tents were ready for move in by the first day of the fall semester. “This has been a very compressed schedule, from designing, permitting and building all within the space of two months,” said Larry Vossler ’02, senior project manager in Facilities, Engineering and Planning.