Rice Magazine | Winter 2024

GABRIELA LENA FRANK’S GLOBAL MUSICAL JOURNEY

WINTER 2024

CONTENTS

A scene from the San Francisco Opera’s production of Gabriela Lena Frank’s opera, “El último sueño de Frida y Diego.”

FEATURES

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Oncologist Mark Lewis ’01 developed a rare cancer and found another connection to patients and family alike.

Composer and pianist Gabriela Lena Frank ’94, ’96 talks about her lifelong journey of discovery.

Historians Alexander X. Byrd ’90 and W. Caleb McDaniel discuss the project that changed our view of Rice’s history.

Kindred Spirits

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Walkabout

Rice’s Past — and Future

PHOTO BY CORY WEAVER. COVER ILLUSTRATION BY ISRAEL G. VARGAS

RICE MAGAZINE WINTER 2024

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PHOTO BY GUSTAVO RASKOSKY, ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX EBEN MEYER, PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW, PHOTO BY MIKE MCGREGOR

WINTER 2024 RICE MAGAZINE

DEPARTMENTS Sallyport

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Campus as canvas, Rice Athletics Hall of Fame, Rice-Taylor Swift quiz, chair architecture and opera manager Jessie Mullins

Wisdom

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A Thor’s hammer for cancer, human performance, a gift from Terrence Gee ’86, Cite 104 and faculty books

Alumni

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Wine writer Ray Isle ’86, Classnotes, bridges to hope, alumni books and “Do Not Lament” from Rebecca Scout Nelson ’14

Last Look

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Fans root on the Owls at the First Responder Bowl versus Texas State University in Dallas.

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FIRST LOOK

How To Approach Monsters

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ZEISHA B.

A Dream Comes to Life

Students enrolled in Monster: Conceptions and Misconceptions of the Monstrous in Fiction and The San Fancisco in BioScience, Medicine and Opera’sinproduction of in Art, view “the Lena monstrous” Gabriela Frank’s El Ultimo Sueño throughopera, the lenses of science and de Frida— y Diego dem the the humanities and through andicatsupported emolupt creationendis of artworks asinis ut eos aut by the Moody Center forexercithe endae voloreris sitati.

Arts. The course’s professors, Read the full story bioscientist Mike Gustin and on page 26. comparative literature scholar Deborah Harter, aim for students to examine “the ways in which the monstrous is, and has been, both conceived and misconceived.” Rice Magazine intern Zeisha Bennett ’25 photographed students wearing their inventions for an exhibition at the Moody that will be on display through fall 2024.

See magazine.rice.edu/monsters for more photos from the series.

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CONTRIBUTORS

RICE MAGAZINE Winter 2024 PUBLISHER

Office of Public Affairs Melinda Spaulding Chevalier, vice president EDITOR

Holly Stapleton (“Kindred Spirits”) is an illustrator and painter based in Toronto, Canada. In both her editorial and commercial work, Stapleton explores the complexities of the human experience through themes of selfhood, relationships and nostalgia.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Elle and The Economist.

Steven Boyd Saum (“Walkabout”) is an award-winning editor and writer of fiction, essays and reviews. His writing has been published in Orion, The Believer and WorldView, and he contributes to many college and university magazines. He is the executive director of strategic communications at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Israel G. Vargas (“Walkabout”) is an illustrator based in Mexico City. His work is a constant exploration of the collage technique, both digital and analog.

His work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly and The Atlantic.

Lynn Gosnell CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Alese Pickering EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Tracey Rhoades ASSISTANT EDITOR

Hilary C. Ritz PHOTO/VIDEO

Jeff Fitlow, Brandon Martin, Gustavo Raskosky PROOFREADER

Jenny West Rozelle ’00 CONTRIBUTORS

Andrew Bell, Julie H. Case, Silvia Cernea Clark, Adam Finkle, Avery Ruxer Franklin, Jennifer Latson, Delphine Lee, Mark Lewis ’01, Mike McGregor, Alex Eben Meyer, Paddy Mills, Kim Philippi, Robert Premeaux, Steven Boyd Saum, Holly Stapleton, Mabel Tang ’23, Israel G. Vargas INTERNS

Julie H. Case (“The Wine Writer”) writes about wine, food, foraging, travel and health for magazines.

She’s also working on a book about foraging, specifically about America’s prized edible mushrooms and the people obsessed with picking them.

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Mike McGregor (“The Wine Writer”) is a photographer based in Hudson Valley, New York. His work has appeared in Wired, New York magazine and Time.

WINTER 2024

Mabel Tang ’23 (“Bridges to Hope”) is a former Rice Magazine intern, proud Hanszenite and M.D. candidate at California Northstate University College of Medicine. She finds joy in exploring new coffee shops and bragging about her labradoodle, Summer.

Zeisha Bennett ’25 Nithya Ramcharan ’25 Rice Magazine is published four times a year and is sent to Rice alumni, faculty, staff, parents of undergraduates and friends of the university. © January 2024, Rice University

FROM THE EDITOR THE RICE UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Robert T. Ladd, chair; Elle Anderson; Bart Broadman; D. Mark Durcan; Josh Earnest; Michol L. Ecklund; Terrence Gee; George Y. Gonzalez; James T. Hackett; Jennifer Kneale; Holli Ladhani; Lynn A. Lednicky; Elle Moody; Brandy Hays Morrison; Asuka Nakahara; Vinay Pai; Brian Patterson; Byron Pope; Gloria Meckel Tarpley; Jeremy Thigpen; Claudia Gee Vassar; James Whitehurst; Lori Rudge Whitten; Randa Duncan Williams; Michael Yuen.

ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERS

Reginald DesRoches, president; Amy Dittmar, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs; Stephen Bayer, vice president for Development and Alumni Relations; Paul Cherukuri, vice president for Innovation; Melinda Spaulding Chevalier, vice president for Public Affairs; Kelly Fox, executive vice president for Finance and Administration; Caroline Levander, vice president for Global; Tommy McClelland, vice president and director of Athletics; Paul Padley, vice president for Information Technology and chief information officer; Ramamoorthy Ramesh, executive vice president for Research; Yvonne Romero Da Silva, vice president for Enrollment; Omar A. Syed, vice president and general counsel; Allison Kendrick Thacker, vice president for Investments, treasurer and chief investment officer.

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

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STORY TIME ON RICE’S CAMPUS, the winter lull is upon us. Gone are the ubiquitous electric scooters, racing bikes and the hordes of students crossing the Inner Loop from colleges to classrooms.

Grabbing a coffee at the Brochstein requires no waiting in line, and finding a table in the tranquil and always inviting Crownover Courtyard is a breeze.

It’s the perfect season to settle in with a book — or an issue of Rice Magazine!

We’re bringing readers a great variety of stories in this issue. Like a good biography? Turn to our cover feature, “Walkabout,” and learn about the Latin Grammy-winning composer and pianist Gabriela Lena Frank ’94, ’96. A prolific composer, Frank has lately been making news for the premiere and subsequent stagings of her first opera, “El último sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”). There are so many surprising layers to the story of this proud Shepherd School graduate and one of the most influential composers in American music today.

How about a memoir? At a college associates’ night several years ago, I learned from an alumna about her fellow Will Ricer Mark Lewis ’01, an oncologist who writes candidly about his own hereditary cancer. Last summer, we reached out to Lewis for a story in the magazine, and we learned he’s working on a book, too. Don’t miss his clear-sighted and lyrical essay (“Kindred Spirits”) about his diagnosis and family history and how his illness connects him to his patients.

We’re bringing readers a great variety of stories in this issue.

Like a good biography?

Turn to our cover feature, “Walkabout,” and learn about the Latin Grammywinning composer and pianist Gabriela Lena Frank ’94, ’96.

For a revealing and complex story of American history, we would be remiss if we didn’t recommend “Looking Back To Look Forward,” our interview with Rice’s esteemed historians Alexander X. Byrd ’90 and W. Caleb McDaniel.

The co-chairs of the four-year Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice recently released the third and final report of this consequential scholarly project.

For short story lovers, our departments deliver a reader-friendly collection about student and campus life, research and discovery, and accomplished alumni. There’s also a fun Taylor Swift-themed quiz created by our magazine interns and a delightful profile of wine writer Ray Isle ’86, whose new book shares his knowledge of and affinity for the world’s natural and biodynamic wines. Cheers to the winter issue!

Have some feedback to share with fellow readers? Kindly write to me at lynn.gosnell@rice.edu.

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PRESIDENT DESROCHES

and breadth of studies, coupled with flexibility, that Rice offers our students, and I believe it sets them up not only for success but also to have true impact on the world. Today’s higher education landscape demands that we educate the whole student, because problemsolving and innovation require the kind of critical thinking and creativity that come only from exposure to a wide range of knowledge, skills and ways of thinking.

EDUCATING THE WHOLE STUDENT ON A RECENT TRIP to New York City, I met a Rice graduate who had double-majored in computer science and art. He’s working in the financial sector, where many of his colleagues have a background in business or economics.

He talked about how his unusual combination of majors has enabled him to tackle the daily challenges of his job. His computer science background has been helpful in analyzing and interpreting complex data, while his art degree has equipped him with skills he didn’t realize would be so valuable, including creative self-expression and empathy, both of which have allowed him to be open to other people’s perspectives and engage effectively in complex problems. What has surprised him even more is that these qualities are setting him apart from his peers.

During my time at Rice, I have come to learn that double and even triple majors that combine the arts and humanities with STEM or business are not uncommon and are often advantageous. I am proud of the depth

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Now and in the future, innovation will come from the intersection of humanities, technology, arts and sciences, and other areas of study. This confluence of knowledge happens at all levels — undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate — and across all disciplines.

Now and in the future, innovation will come from the intersection of humanities, technology, arts and sciences, and other areas of study. This confluence of knowledge happens at all levels — undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate — and across all disciplines.

The stories in this issue of Rice Magazine recognize the excellence we offer across the board at Rice — from the cover feature on lauded composer and Shepherd School alumna Gabriela Lena Frank ’94, ’96 to Rice’s expanding research partnerships with the Texas Medical Center and a newly established postdoctoral research fellowship in African and African

American studies made possible by a consequential gift to the School of Humanities.

This excellence is also on view in the newest “Tent Series” from Rice’s Moody Center for the Arts. The “tents,” technically known as Provisional Campus Facilities, were originally placed during COVID-19 as flexible spaces to be used for classes and other events. Now, they are a canvas for Houston-based artists, including one right here at Rice — and you can read about them here.

Looking ahead, Rice University is becoming ever more vibrant. With unwavering dedication to a broadbased liberal arts education, a dynamic and supportive city as our backdrop, and the steadfast support of our loyal alumni, we are well positioned to become one of the premier full-spectrum research universities, with a unique commitment to teaching and learning inside and outside the classroom.

It is an exciting time to be at Rice.

The tapestry of diverse accomplishments showcased in this magazine is a testament to the collective brilliance and assiduity of our students, staff, faculty and alumni. As we navigate the myriad opportunities and challenges on the horizon, we do so with the knowledge that Rice’s impact extends far beyond the hedges, shaping not only the future of our university but also the broader landscape of education and innovation.

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CAMPUS NEWS AND STUDENT LIFE

ART

Campus as Canvas

The Moody Center’s newest “Tent Series” speaks of diasporic culture, self-love and environmentalism.

BY ANDREW BELL

P HO T O S B Y G U S TAVO R A SKO SK Y

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Previous page and here: “We Played” by Kenneth Tam, assistant professor of art at Rice

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N THE south side of campus stands a 37word poem adorning one of the walls of the large tentlike structures along Loop Road. The arrangement of stanzas, citing a “batsman’s errant sweep” of a “fluorescent ball” into the night, may seem out of place at first glance, especially sitting alongside two colorful art installations that pop in the daytime.

But once the sunlight dims, this work of art comes to life.

Featuring a choreographed performance by Indian dancer Jeevika Bhat, the tent’s exterior lights up with a video portraying the intricate motions of a cricket player, throwing and swinging for the proverbial fences behind the text of the poem.

Kenneth Tam, assistant professor of art at Rice and the creator of the installation, “We Played,” says he had no prior relationship with the sport of cricket before being commissioned by the Moody Center for the Arts to create an artwork for

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF RICE ATHLETICS

SALLYPORT this unique public space.

So, why cricket? Tam says he wanted to explore the culture of sports at Rice and how it correlates to campus life.

But when he learned about the rise of self-organized cricket leagues in Fort Bend and Harris counties’ South Asian communities, he made an additional connection between sports, culture and community.

“The prevalence of cricket in Texas was something that I was surprised to hear,” Tam says. “I thought it was an interesting opportunity to think about the relationship between sports and community and diasporic memory.

“For someone who stumbles upon the tent casually, without knowing the context of the project, which I imagine is most people, I just want them to be curious and spend some time looking at the performer and thinking about what those movements are,” he says.

Tam’s artwork is one of three installations by Houston-based artists taking part in the fourth round of the Moody Center’s ongoing “Tent Series.” These “tents” — formally known as Provisional Campus Facilities — are large flexible spaces designed for classes, events and meetings and were first installed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Multimedia artist Preetika Rajgariah’s installation, “Your Potential Self Is Infinite,” continues her exploration of identity, race, pop culture and sexuality. Using yoga mats, family-owned saris and lights, she created a collage of self-portraits based on a traditional Indian dance. “It’s a message of self-love to all the women on campus, especially those who look like me,” Rajgariah says.

In “Skeeter Control,” artist and illustrator Sarah Welch invites viewers to consider the effects of deadly insecticides on natural habitats along the Gulf Coast and beyond. “I like the contrast between a frog pond, which you could say is its own form of mosquito control, and the chemical bug spray as a humanengineered tool of control,” she says.

Learn more at moody.rice.edu/tents.

ATHLETICS

‘You Have To Be Great’

Rice Owls welcome a new class of Hall of Fame honorees.

IN OCTOBER, FORMER and (track and field), James Casey ’11 current Owls were celebrated (football), Lauren Hughes ’16 in a Hall of Fame ceremony that (women’s soccer), Anthony Rendon recognized their standout athletic ’12 (baseball) and Lennie Waite records and their contributions ’08 (cross-country/track and field); to the Rice athletics community Genny Volpe, who is entering her as a whole.

20th season as head volleyball coach The Rice Athletics Hall of at Rice; and this year’s Distinguished Fame welcomed alumni Natalie “R” and Honorary “R” Award winBeazant ’15 (women’s tennis), ners, Adam Peakes ’95 and Richard Christopher Caldwell ’94 Stabell, respectively.

“Rice planted a seed in me that you have to be great,” said Caldwell.

“It gives you a sense of being great, so that everything you do has a greatness attached to it. And there’s an expectation from individuals outside of the Rice community that if you go to Rice, you must be great.”

Beazant offered this tribute: “From the moment I stepped on campus, my official visit, I felt like I was wanted, the kind of want where you’re part of the family. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was key for me and my success in college, as it helped bolster my confidence and made me realize that I did belong on the court.”

In addition to these athletes, letterwinner Adam Peakes received the Distinguished “R” Award for his exemplary life as a Rice studentathlete, alumnus and valued athletics community member. Richard Stabell, former Rice dean of admissions, received the Honorary “R” Award for his tireless support of the Owls over the course of his career and beyond.

“I can assure you that the future of Rice Athletics is exceptionally promising due to the incredible Left, from top: leadership of President DesRoches, Genny Volpe, Natalie the board of trustees, our loyal Beazant, Lennie Waite, Anthony donors, great coaches and staff, and Rendon, Richard most importantly, our remarkable Stabell; right, from top: Lauren Hughes, student-athletes,” said athletics Chris Caldwell, director Tommy McClelland.

James Casey, Adam Peakes

— ANDREW BELL

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Owl Eras

A Rice class for Taylor’s times

Hanszen junior Katherine Jeng teaches COLL 167: Miss Americana: The Evolution and Lyrics of Taylor Swift — which adds Rice to the list of institutions offering Taylor Swift-centered courses. The class focuses on the lyrical and musical evolution of Swift’s career and explores supplementary topics surrounding the singer, such as gender, social media, politics, nationalism and family. Jeng, who studies social policy in the School of Social Sciences, says her favorite part about teaching is the students. “I love the conversations and different perspectives they have.”

— ZEISHA B. AND NITHYA RAMCHARAN

Can you guess the Taylor Swift albums that these Rice-focused album covers evoke? We’re leaving a “blank space” for the answers.

1. Harris Gully is a restored watershed on campus that reportedly attracts the most birds of any college campus in the U.S. It’s a natural area that could inspire campuswide folktales.

TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM:

2. The DJ booth in KTRU — Rice’s very own student-run radio station at 96.1 FM, located in the Ley Student Center — is the perfect place to play your best music or share your voice, loud and proud!

TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM:

3. Our 1916-founded student-run newspaper, the Thresher, fits the aesthetic of a certain comeback album.

4. The Berlin Wall, a piece of which is located in front of Baker Hall, came down the same year Taylor Swift was born.

TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM:

5. These swanky Rice cowboy boots, given as a high school graduation gift to Hanszen junior Isabella Bartos, evoke cowboys and career-launching country music.

TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM:

6. The Hoot, a student-run go-to for post-dinner food and snacks, is the perfect place to fuel those latenight ruminations.

TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM:

7. These two Rice lovebirds were spotted under a blossoming tulip magnolia tree near Anderson Biological Lab and evoke love ballads to love itself!

TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM:

TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM:

Answers: 1. folklore, 2. Speak Now, 3. reputation, 4. 1989, 5. Taylor Swift, 6. Midnights, 7. Lover 12

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PHOTOS BY ZEISHA B. AND BRANDON MARTIN

POP QUIZ

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Left: This chair’s woven design, led by fifth-year student Gabriella Feuillet, seems to convert wood into a textile.

SYLLABUS

A Seat of Learning ARCH 327/627 Construct SCHOOL Architecture DESCRIPTION This popular course involves undergraduates and graduates in the design and construction of real projects. For this semester, the focus is building a chair.

The goal for each team is to develop critical thinking, project management, technical skills and collaboration, in addition to building the chair itself.

PHOTOS BY ZEISH A B .

Below: A team led by graduate student Deandra Smith designed a chair with “x” bracings and a fabric seat for comfort.

A CONSIDERABLE amount of thought is given to chair construction. In this Construct class, taught

by Professor in the Practice Danny Samuels ’71, students spent a semester working in teams to build a chair that factored in various considerations such as load distribution, human comfort, aesthetics and stability.

Offered by the School of Architecture since 1986, Construct courses have included large-scale projects, even as large as a house. “The intention is to get students out of the studio into the community doing design projects and building the projects they designed,” Samuels says.

These courses are time- and labor-intensive and require faculty to supervise the

construction. Before thinking about the technicalities of building a chair, the fall class conducted research and sought inspiration in several ways, such as taking a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to view its chair collection.

The goal of the class was for students to explore techniques of chair construction with one main constraint: “The beauty of it is that [the chairs] are all wood,” Samuels says. Students had to choose the type of wood that worked best for them and discuss their design and technical choices with Samuels. Subsequently, they spent hours in the wood shop building and shaping the components for their chairs.

Fifth-year student Gabriella Feuillet and her group, which included junior

Nikola Kolarov and sophomore Musab Salah, wanted to integrate traditional weaving methods with a more contemporary style.

“No screws are used in our chair,” she says. In class, she shared a prototype for a joint that took 15 hours to build.

“Achieving balance can be a matter of centimeters or millimeters,” she adds.

By the end of the semester, each group was to have produced a full-scale chair model and entered their projects in an international competition for chair design. Regardless of their success, their hard work and deliberate technical choices will sit well with them.

— NITHYA RAMCHARAN ’25

Go to arch.rice.edu/ projects/construct to learn more.

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SALLYPORT BEHIND THE SCENES WITH RICE STAFF

Ten Things About ...

Jessie Mullins, Opera Production Stage Manager and Administrator, Shepherd School of Music AT RICE’S SHEPHERD SCHOOL OF MUSIC, opera is thriving. Since the 2021 opening of the Brockman Hall for Opera, a European-style theater that seats 600 with state-of-the-art acoustics, the school has performed five full-length operas and recorded two “green screen” operas and other productions. Jessie Mullins joined the program July 1, 2020, as a full-time stage manager. More than three years later, her role has grown tremendously — and while she is never visible on stage, her work is essential to the success of the Shepherd School’s student performers and the enjoyment of their audiences. We recently met up with Mullins to discover more about her job. Here are 10 things we learned.

— INTERVIEW BY LYNN GOSNELL

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Before taking on her current role at Rice, Mullins was a freelance stage manager for Houston-based opera and theater productions, including Rice’s opera program.

She works every Shepherd School opera production starting six weeks before opening night.

She likens her stage management role to that of an air traffic controller who keeps the show safe and on track “while also trying to keep six puppies in a box.”

High school was actually a career booster: She ditched marching band for theater and eventually became the program’s stage manager.

She went from college at Michigan State to the Houston Grand Opera and stayed for nine seasons — doing three to five shows a year.

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Her favorite operas are “Tosca,” “La Bohème” and “Billy Budd.”

Her organizational superpowers help make art come to life.

She is the daughter of an electrical engineer and a schoolteacher, which she describes as “the perfect mix” for the career of stage manager.

During performances, she can be found at a moveable control station just off stage, headset plugged in, eyes on screens and listening to just about everyone involved in the performance — and also the performance itself.

She loves seeing the growth of students. “Their end goal is to be a performer.

My main goal is to make sure they have positive experiences while they’re here.”

PHOTO BY ZEISHA B.

INNOVATION IN THE LAB, THE FIELD AND THE CLASSROOM

WISDOM BIOENGINEERING

A Thor’s Hammer for Cancer Rice’s new immunotherapy implant aims to reduce U.S. cancer deaths.

BY JADE BOYD

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Omid Veiseh (right) and Amir Jazaeri in Veiseh’s Rice laboratory Below: A prototype of the HAMMR implant

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HE ADVANCED Research Projects Agency for Health, a new agency within the National Institutes of Health, has awarded a Rice-led team $45 million to rapidly develop implant technology that Rice bioengineer and principal investigator Omid Veiseh says is aimed to slash U.S. cancer-related deaths by more than 50%.

The award will fast-track development and testing of a new approach to cancer treatment that aims to dramatically improve immunotherapy outcomes for patients with ovarian, pancreatic and other difficult-to-treat cancers.

“Instead of tethering patients to hospital beds, IV bags and external monitors, we’ll use a minimally invasive procedure to implant a small device that continuously monitors their cancer and adjusts their immunotherapy dose in real time,” Veiseh says. “This kind of ‘closed-loop therapy’ has been used for managing diabetes, where you have a glucose monitor that continuously talks to an insulin pump. But for cancer immunotherapy, it’s revolutionary.”

The team includes engineers, physicians and multidisciplinary specialists in synthetic biology, materials science, immunology, oncology, electrical engineering, artificial intelligence and other fields spanning 20 different

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The award will fast-track development and testing of a new approach to cancer treatment that aims to dramatically improve immunotherapy outcomes for patients with ovarian, pancreatic and other difficultto-treat cancers. research labs across seven states.

The project and team are named THOR, an acronym for “targeted hybrid oncotherapeutic regulation,” and the implant is called HAMMR, or “hybrid advanced molecular manufacturing regulator.”

Amir Jazaeri, a principal investigator and director of the gynecologic cancer immunotherapy program at MD Anderson Cancer Center, explains, “Cancer cells are continually evolving and adapting to therapy. However, currently available diagnostic tools, including radiologic tests, blood assays and biopsies, provide very infrequent and limited snapshots of this dynamic process. As a result, today’s therapies

treat cancer as if it were a static disease. We believe THOR could transform the status quo by providing real-time data from the tumor environment that can in turn guide more effective and tumor-informed novel therapies.”

Jazaeri says that the implant is designed to provide a complex assessment of cancer cells, including the hormones they produce and the way they change over time.

“The first clinical trial will focus on refractory recurrent ovarian cancer, and the benefit of that is that we have an ongoing trial for ovarian cancer with our encapsulated cytokine ‘drug factory’ technology. We’ll be able to build on that experience,” Veiseh says. He adds that with the funding award from the federal government, the team hopes to bring the solution to patients in as little as five years — a highly accelerated timeline.

President Reginald DesRoches says, “Rice is proud to be the recipient of the second major funding award from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. This is the type of research that makes a significant impact on the world.”

Omid Veiseh is associate professor of bioengineering at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering.

He is also a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas scholar in cancer research.

Visit magazine.rice.edu/thor for a short video featuring Veiseh and Jazaeri.

WISDOM

NATURAL SCIENCES

The Big Number

5,432°F A DECONTAMINATION process developed by a team of Rice scientists cranks up the heat to 5,432 degrees Fahrenheit to remove organic contaminants and toxic heavy metals from soil.

Rice chemist James Tour and researchers from the geotechnical structures and environmental engineering branches of the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center have discovered that mixing polluted soil with nontoxic, carbonrich compounds that carry electrical current and then zapping the mix with short bursts of electricity flushes out both organic pollutants and heavy metals without using water or generating waste. The ultrafast method will be useful in addressing emergency situations.

According to a study published in Nature Communications, the electrical pulses bring soil temperatures to 1,832–5,432 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds, turning organic contaminants into nontoxic graphite minerals and toxic heavy metals into vapor collected via extraction pipes. “Our high-temperature electrothermal process can remove multiple pollutants simultaneously,” says Bing Deng, a postdoctoral research associate in the Tour lab. “This newly established method, which we call

high-temperature electrothermal process, or HET, is based on the flash Joule heating technique we developed a few years ago. It is the first time that direct electric heating has been used for soil remediation.”

This new process regenerates soil while leaving particles and overall mineral composition relatively unchanged. “Plants actually like it more, because of the minerals that get freed up in the thermal cycling,” Tour says.

Experiments using the method have showed germination rates to improve by 20% to 30% in remediated soil.

Yi Cheng, a Rice postdoctoral researcher and lead co-author who helped with the characterization of soil properties, says the process works equally well on wet soil. “Our process is economical and environmentally friendly,” Cheng adds.

The collaboration between Rice and the Army Engineer Research and Development Center could help the technology transition from the proof-of-concept stage to real-world practice.

— SILVIA CERNEA CLARK James Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry and professor of materials science and nanoengineering in the Wiess School of Natural Sciences at Rice.

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SPACES

Motion Captured

Rice’s new Center for Human Performance, which is unique to Texas, uses advanced technology to help prevent and treat injury.

PHOTOS BY JEFF FITLOW

ONE OF RICE’S latest forays into the world of research is shining a spotlight on the human body. The Houston Methodist-Rice University Center for Human Performance, a 6,000-square-foot facility in Tudor Fieldhouse, opened in October 2023. Researchers at the center are studying exercise physiology, injury prevention and rehabilitation using the latest technologies for 3D motion capture, force-plate measurement, region-by-region quantification of bone density, metabolic analysis, cardiovascular screening and aerobic performance testing. The goal is to help both athletes and nonathletes avoid injury — and recover faster when an injury occurs.

“What’s really going to happen here is the ability for baseline testing … as it relates to injury and recovery,” says Tommy McClelland, vice president and director of athletics.

“We will be able to say with more certainty and more confidence to a student-athlete, ‘You’re ready to reenter.’ It’s going to be a game-changer in that aspect.”

Rice student-athletes stand to benefit from the joint venture between Rice Athletics, the Department of Kinesiology within Rice’s School of Natural Sciences, and Houston Methodist’s Department of Orthopedics and Sports Medicine. The center will also test patients from outside the Rice Athletics family with an aim to help overall public health through its findings.

“This center is really the first of its kind in Texas,” says Marc Boom, president and CEO of Houston Methodist.

— ANDREW BELL

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WISDOM

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center become a prime location for innovative work,” says Pinn, who recently stepped down from the directorship. “I am particularly honored and grateful to have this fellowship in my name. I’m humbled by their thoughtfulness.” On Jan. 1, Rice welcomed Sherwin K. Bryant, a leading scholar of slavery, race and the early modern African diaspora, as the next director of the center and an associate professor in the history department.

Our donation reflects our firm conviction that one should actively back the causes close to their heart, and this field is undeniably one of them.

HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

A Gift From the Heart

A million-dollar donation from Rice trustee Terrence Gee ’86 and family honors Anthony B. Pinn of the Center for African and African American Studies.

TERRENCE GEE, a member of the Rice School of Humanities Advisory Board and the Rice Board of Trustees, and his wife, Terri, are long-standing champions of the humanities at Rice.

Their donation of $1 million to Rice University to establish the Dr. Anthony B. Pinn Postdoctoral Fellowship is intended to help recruit scholars from the humanities and social sciences whose

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research is pivotal to African and African American studies.

“We recognize the vital significance of African and African American studies in today’s world,” Gee says. “Our donation reflects our firm conviction that one should actively back the causes close to their heart, and this field is undeniably one of them.” Gee says his hope is that this endowment will launch the center, which is a collaboration between Rice’s School of Humanities and School of Social Sciences, into prominence and pave the way for more support.

“We wanted to invest in rigorous scholarship and dedicated, emerging scholars,” he says. “There is no better place to make that investment than Rice University, and we encourage others to do the same.” Gee adds that he is pleased to honor the work of Pinn, the founding director of the center, by naming the endowment after him.

“The gift from Terrence and Terri Gee will go a long way in helping the

A native of Houston, Gee has been a member of Rice’s Humanities Advisory Board since 2013 and a Rice trustee since 2017. He has also been a staunch supporter of interdisciplinary scholarship at the university throughout the years, helping start initiatives like the Civic Humanist Program, which builds relationships between Rice and high schools serving underrepresented and economically disadvantaged students, and BrainSTEM, which teaches STEM subjects through neuroscience. He spent more than 20 years at Accenture, the global management and technology consulting firm, and is currently the chief information officer at privately held Coca-Cola Beverages Florida, the fourth-largest Black-owned business in the United States.

— ANDREW BELL Anthony B. Pinn is the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities, professor of religion, and founding director of the Center for African and African American Studies.

Visit caaas.rice.edu to learn more about the Center for African and African American Studies.

PHOTO BY PRISCILLA BOSMA

Terrence and Terri Gee

WISDOM

IT’S HIGHLY UNUSUAL, to say the least, to hold a launch event for the publication of a single issue of a magazine. But Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston is no usual magazine, and issue No. Cite’s issue No. 104 104 is uncommon even for Cite, as it is the publication’s 40th anniversareflects on 40 years ry issue. For those in the know, the of its own history event at Basket Books & Art last fall — and 40 years of felt entirely earned.

“Cite has been the voice of Houston’s many Houston’s architecture and design transformations. community for four decades,” writes 104’s guest editor, Reto Geiser. “During this time, Houston has witnessed significant change … and Cite has been a trusted observer and commentator of this transformation. The magazine has Below: Covers of Cite’s issues one created a permanent record of this through 100 were on display at the Rice Design Alliance Gala in 2022. city in which the states of decay and ascent are blurred.”

Those last few poetic words give you some sense of Cite. It’s a magazine that can’t be taken lightly, and not just because 104 clocks in at an astonishing 247 oversized pages. It’s chiefly because the magazine was created by Rice Design Alliance, which, as the community outreach arm for Rice’s School of Architecture, has the primary mission of design advocacy. This focus is apparent on every page of the magazine, whether through its new (as of 2021) visual design, which merits the same time and attention as any worthwhile work of art, or the weightiness of its content. As School of Architecture Dean Igor Marjanović writes in his introductory letter, Cite has long captured the “ecological and urban friction” that is native to Houston.

Indeed, while the issue devotes 40-plus pages to its own 40 years of history — a fully forgivable choice for an anniversary issue — it spends well over a hundred pages tackling Houston’s economic inequalities, housing struggles amidst a growing population, how infrastructural systems shape the city, and more.

Cite may observe and offer critique of urban design, but it’s clear that part of its work is to foresee and even help shape Houston’s future. As Geiser writes, it is “critical to develop an image for what this city can be.” Cite’s contributions to that important task will surely continue to be remarkable.

— HILARY C. RITZ SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

A Permanent Record

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FACULTY BOOKS

Now Reading GROWING UP IN THE East Texas town of Grapeland, where her parents were sharecroppers on a cotton plantation, Ruth Simmons — born Ruth Jean Stubblefield, the youngest of 12 children, in 1945 — never dreamed that one day she’d become a pioneering figure in education.

When she was named president of Brown University in 2001, she became the first Black woman to lead

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an Ivy League institution. At Brown, and as president of Smith College and Prairie View A&M University, Texas’ oldest historically Black university, she made an indelible mark on the schools’ curricula and their culture — so much so that in 2001, Time magazine called her “the moral compass of the school she governs.”

Simmons, who joined the Rice faculty last spring as a President’s Distinguished Fellow, developed her own moral compass in Grapeland and in Houston’s Fifth Ward, where her Up Home family moved in 1952. Her memoir, “Up One Girl’s Journey Home,” documents these early formative Ruth J. Simmons years when she overcame daunting chalRandom House, 2023 lenges and found opportunities to develop her sharp intellect and pursue ambitious goals — what she calls the “imagined castles” she built in her mind from a young age, knowing they’d most likely be washed away.

“Although I did not by any means witness firsthand the worst of what my parents and the rest of my family experienced in Grapeland, I was certainly made aware that being Black enclosed me in a web of stereotypes which I would not likely escape,” she writes. “I had no thought that I would be exempt from the treatment my parents recounted from their past.”

Despite bitter hardships, including losing her mother to kidney failure when Simmons was just 15 and her father’s apparent indifference to his children, Simmons found supporters who recognized and helped nurture her immense talent. These included neighbors, teachers and her older siblings, who had few resources to spare but shared what they could — and that made all the difference. The memoir ends with Simmons’ college years but hints at her later accomplishments, offering inspiration to other young people that “they are born not to be the person that history, limited resources and others dictate but, rather, the person that they are willing to pour their heart and soul into becoming.”

At Rice, Simmons advises the president’s office and collaborates with faculty and staff to build programs that will help develop future leaders, as well as provides input on the development of Rice’s Center for African and African American Studies.

She is a former director of African American studies at Princeton University, and in 2003 she led the Slavery and Justice Initiative at Brown, which spawned similar initiatives around the world.

— JENNIFER LATSON

RUTH SIMMONS PHOTO BY GITTINGS PHOTOGRAPHY

WISDOM

WISDOM

The Deadly Rise of Anti-science A Scientist’s Warning Peter J. Hotez

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023

ANTI-VACCINE ACTIVISTS have been around for decades. At first, as members of grassroots groups on the social fringes, they promoted the unsubstantiated claim that vaccines cause autism. More recently, they’ve become more vocal and more mainstream — and their claims have become more audacious and allencompassing.

“Increasingly, the far-right extremists have adopted what I consider antiscience activism, turning it into a new form of aggression against both science and scientists,” writes Dr. Peter J. Hotez. He should know: He’s been a target of vaccine opponents since the early days.

In his latest book, “The Deadly Rise of Antiscience,” Hotez argues that this new, expanded form of anti-science activism threatens both America’s national security and its global reputation as an incubator for groundbreaking scientific research. The Baker Institute fellow in disease and poverty at Rice and the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, Hotez documents some of the violent threats he’s received over the years, particularly as a result of his efforts to develop a patent-free COVID-19 vaccine. But his chief focus is the threat the anti-vaccine movement poses to the health of Americans, more than 200,000 of whom died during the COVID-19 pandemic because they refused vaccines. “America is descending into a period of darkness, with scientists portrayed as enemies,” he writes. “[But] it is not too late to stem the tide.”

— JL

Perspectives on Race in Organizations

Eden B. King ’01, ’04, ’06, Quinetta M. Roberson and Mikki R. Hebl, Eds. Information Age Publishing (2023)

IN THE WAKE OF MULTIPLE grave racial events in 2020, including the murder of George Floyd and violent attacks on Asian communities, companies around America responded by proclaiming their commitment to inclusivity and anti-racism. Scholarship on race in the workplace has been underway for decades, and modern research describes continued struggles and important measures that individuals and organizations can adopt to protect those targeted with bias and discrimination. The new book “Perspectives on Race in Organizations” — the fifth work in the series “Research in Social Issues in Management” — tackles these topics and more.

Lynette S. Autrey Professor of Psychological Sciences Eden King and Martha and Henry Malcolm Lovett Chair of Psychological Sciences Mikki Hebl served as editors for the book, which highlights researchers whom the editors describe as “experts and trailblazers for building a science around race at work.” The volume provides a response to the expanding of public consciousness as it relates to race and racism in the workplace, with the stated objective of “building understanding and kindling new directions.” The book features 17 experts, including several alumni from Rice’s psychological sciences graduate program. According to the editors, their reflections provide “poignant examples of why scholarship on race continues to be of critical importance to management science.”

— KIM PHILIPPI

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WISDOM

BAKER INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY

Brain Capital How do you build thriving, resilient communities?

A Rice expert has an innovative answer.

BRAIN HEALTH IS A CRITICAL aspect of human well-being that affects cognitive abilities, socioemotional stability and quality of life, says Harris Eyre, a fellow in brain health at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and a physician and neuroscientist.

The statistics are attention grabbing.

According to Eyre and co-authors in a paper titled “Call to Action: Putting Brain Health on the Global Agenda,” up to 1 billion people were living with a neurological condition and 970 million people were living with a mental health disorder in 2019. Anxiety and depressive disorders are the most common, and brain disorders, including chronic pain and multiple sclerosis, are widespread, disabling and difficult to treat.

“The growing prevalence of brain disorders is” also “taking a steep economic toll,” Eyre and his co-authors write in “The Global Brain Capital Dashboard.”

“Mental health disorders alone are estimated to cost the global economy $5 trillion per year, and this is projected to rise to $16 trillion by 2030.”

This economic burden has inspired Eyre to champion “brain capital.”

Eyre’s research looks at the interconnected and interdependent systems that can benefit from stronger brain health. To Eyre, the idea of brain capital encompasses a nation’s cognitive and emotional resources, including brain skills. This includes “cognitive capability, emotional intelligence and the ability to collaborate, be innovative and solve complex problems, and brain health which includes mental health, well-being and neurological disorders that critically impact the ability to

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Mental health disorders alone are estimated to cost the global economy $5 trillion per year, and this is projected to rise to $16 trillion by 2030. deploy brain skills effectively, build and maintain positive relationships, and display resilience against challenges and uncertainties,” according to findings published in “Building Systemic Resilience, Productivity and WellBeing: A Mental Wealth Perspective.”

“Although brain skills and brain health are commonly examined at an individual level, brain capital represents a broader, collective concept and national asset that is a fundamental contributor to economic and social productivity,” Eyre explains.

But “the main reason for improving brain health is not to address a perceived burden. It is to allow people

to thrive — to live in health and in happiness, to power our labor markets and economies, and to build for future generations.”

Eyre’s full strategy and road map of how to achieve a next-generation brain technology industry were unveiled at the United Nations General Assembly Science Summit Sept. 18–19, 2023. The plan includes neuroscience-inspired technologies, physical and digital infrastructure helpful to physical and mental fitness, and prioritizing the needs of communities alongside financial interests of shareholders to ensure workforce preparedness.

At the summit, Eyre and colleagues urged the importance of recognizing brain health as a priority in making global action plans. “There is no health without brain health,” he wrote in a brief drafted after the United Nations event.

— AVERY RUXER FRANKLIN Read more about how to achieve a nextgeneration brain technology industry at magazine.rice.edu/capital.

WISDOM

ADVANCING WOMEN

JONES GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

Leading the Way

FROM LEFT: PHOTOS BY BRANDON MARTIN AND JEFF FITLOW

Rice’s entrepreneurship programs shine in the latest rankings.

FOR THE FIFTH CONSECUTIVE year, Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business has been ranked No. 1 among graduate entrepreneurship programs

by Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine. This year’s list identifies 50 undergraduate and 50 graduate schools that offer the best programs in entrepreneurship studies from Princeton Review’s survey of more than 300 institutions. The rankings are based on academic offerings, experiential learning opportunities and career outcomes.

The MBA entrepreneurship program was also recently ranked No. 3 globally

by Poets & Quants and No. 5 by Bloomberg Businessweek.

The Rice entrepreneurship ecosystem combines academic courses and programs led by the Liu Idea Lab for

Innovation and Entrepreneurship with regional, national and cocurricular programs led by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship.

“Our students are learning about entrepreneurship at every step of their Rice Business journey,” says Yael Hochberg, the Ralph S. O’Connor Professor in Entrepreneurship and director of entrepreneurship initiatives. “Innovation is embedded in coursework, and ideas are valued and supported financially through a network of innovative thinkers and business plan competitions.”

Rice Business also takes advantage of a strong relationship with the business community of Houston. “Our close ties to Houston as well as national startup ecosystems give our students unique opportunities to pitch to and connect with angel investors, venture capitalists and corporations,” says Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance. “These connections allow for mentorship as well as launch points for new ideas, not only for our students but also for the city and surrounding communities.” — AVERY RUXER FRANKLIN

Michelle “Mikki” Hebl, the Martha and Henry Malcolm Lovett Chair of Psychological Sciences and professor in the Jones Graduate School of Business, is the 2023 recipient of the Advancing Women in Leadership Award from the Academy of Management. Hebl is the recipient of 21 teaching awards and the author of 200 publications exploring workplace and other forms of discrimination and how to address them. “I have been blessed to be able to watch so many Rice women and people from underrepresented backgrounds break down barriers that have long held them back from reaching their full potential,” she says. — AMY MCCAIG

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K I N DR ED SPI R I T S When oncologist Mark Lewis developed a rare cancer, he discovered another connection to his father and grandfather — and to his patients.

BY DR . M A R K A . L E W I S ’01

I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y H O L LY S T A P L E T O N

F

or as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be an oncologist. But I never suspected that the first patient I’d diagnose with cancer would be me.

On the first morning of orientation for a three-year fellowship to study the treatment of cancer, I awoke with a knifelike pain lancing my side. I already held an M.D. and had completed four years of medical residency, so I reflexively triaged myself as I would any other patient: Was the discomfort localizing to the lower right quadrant of the abdomen, like appendicitis? No, nor did I have a fever. Was it slightly higher, under the rib cage, like an inflamed gallbladder? Not quite. Was it an extreme manifestation of the “nervous stomach” that can plague apprehensive public speakers and jittery fledgling doctors alike? Possibly. Only further testing could distinguish psychosomatic from visceral causes. As the name of the discipline implies, internal medicine is an incisive exploration into what ails the body within.

Fortuitously, I was training at the Mayo Clinic, a world-class health care facility with every diagnostic tool available to arrive at the correct explanation.

Scans revealed tumors in my pancreas, an alarmingly personal entree into oncology. But, just as tellingly, my bloodwork showed a high calcium level, or hypercalcemia. It was that test result that sparked an epiphany, because it was an electrolyte disturbance that afflicted my father as well, prompting painful, stabbing kidney stones.

It was his even more agonizing death from a mysterious cancer when I was 14 years old, however, that traumatically catalyzed my interest in the medical field. At the time, it had appeared to be an inexplicable tragedy: a clean-living man felled

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FA M I LY H I S T O R Y

before his 50th birthday by “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

As two points make a line, my diagnosis connected me to my dad not only by a cryptic loss but also by a quantifiable and shared metabolic anomaly. The physician’s descriptor for an unknown cause of illness is “idiopathic,” an elegant Greekderived shorthand for an etiology that eludes a would-be detective hunting for both culprit and remedy. I had acquired a tiny clue by which to reopen an investigation into my father’s untimely passing.

Although it was still early in my career, I had just enough aptitude to know that there were only two heritable conditions that would cause hypercalcemia in consecutive generations: one entirely benign and the other a more sinister mutation that could precipitate deadly tumors as well as jagged crystals in the urine. In the process of elimination, my head needed only to consult my still-grieving heart to provide the answer.

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I have likened this moment of revelation as akin to stargazing and suddenly discerning a constellation amid the lights in the firmament. Rather than peering through a telescope at the heavens, however, I was assessing my own family history as if exhuming one grave at a time. My investigations took me searching beyond the death of my father, which I’d witnessed firsthand, to reconstructing the downfall of the paternal grandfather whom I’d never met.

Our relatives helped me piece together his story. He had been one of the most prominent ministers in Belfast in the ’60s and ’70s, known especially for the power of his preaching. The first sign of his undoing had been dysphonia, a vocal disturbance that changed his timbre and threatened to silence him; as his speech faltered, it became more suitable for the whisper of private prayer than a booming homily from the pulpit. An operation on his throat briefly restored him to full volume before he developed difficulty swallowing in autumn 1977, indicating that a lesion lower than his larynx was impinging on his esophagus.

Soon after, debilitating pain indicated metastases to the spine. Then he lost the plot during a sermon, heralding the spread of malignancy from his bones to his brain. By summer, he had lapsed into a coma before dying at the age of 64.

I was born the following year and, when I was old enough to learn about him, was taught that, outside of his obvious significance to his parish, he had been important to the peace process in Northern Ireland. When his country was riven by the sectarian violence of the Troubles, he tried to heal the fractures by spreading and embodying the gospel.

The quieting of his pastoral rhetoric had indeed been far more foreboding than laryngitis. As if performing a bloodless autopsy, I could see in my

PHOTO BY ADAM FINKLE

mind that a cancer must have blossomed in his chest like a bad seed rooted behind his breastbone, compressing the nerves to his voice box; that specific anatomy fit the pattern I was increasingly recognizing as multiple endocrine neoplasia, Type 1, or MEN1, an esoteric condition affecting various and sometimes obscure glands.

The thymus, one such gland located behind the sternum, is an organ that serves no known physiological purpose in the adult body — it seems to exhaust its usefulness after harboring lymphocytes during the early instruction of the pediatric immune system — so it is a maddeningly vestigial tissue to kill a grown man. Yet I became convinced that it was the cellular site of origin for both my grandfather’s and my father’s “idiopathic” tumors, inspiring my hypothesis that our family curse was in fact a rare but defined cancer syndrome.

During my undergraduate years at Rice, I studied ancient Greek in an effort to be more like my dad, who studied classical languages to aid his exegesis of Scripture as a preacher himself.

While I did not hear the call to follow him and my granddad into the ministry, I found an understanding of Hellenism helpful in decoding the vocabulary I encountered in my medical career, wherein every initiate utters the Hippocratic oath. And so I revisited the etymology of “idiopathic,” summing ιδιοσ (“idios,” one’s own) and πάθος (“pathos,” suffering) to at long last dispel the uncertainty that had enveloped my forefathers’ ends: MEN1 was the name of the pox on our house.

I have since developed a pet theory that cancer is an occupational hazard for oncologists not because we are exposed to excess radiation or other mutagens in the environment but because so many of us are drawn to the specialty through the loss of first-degree relatives to the disease, potentially indicating risk at a genomic level. My own hereditary predisposition to tumors is as much a part of me as my eye color, with far more profound consequences than my appearance. The depth of genotype trumps the superficiality of phenotype. This is simply who I am meant to be.

A PA T I E N T A N D A P H Y S I C I A N I am a patient-physician, always inhabiting the front part of that phrase, and every day of my oncology career has been filtered through an unavoidably bisected mind which holds objective facts on one side and embodied experience on the other. The former is a function of the higher cortex, where I can cogitate about science, whereas the latter is a repository of often-painful memories through which I can empathize with the suffering of those under my care. I will never forget, for instance, the deep cuts of the scalpel by which surgeons excised the most threatening tumors in my pancreas. Of all the operations I witnessed as a medical student, none were as indelibly instructive as when I went under the knife myself.

“Gnosis,” the Greek word for knowledge, forms the suffix for so many of our thought processes in medicine — the largely deductive reasoning by which we identify precisely what vexes

each patient from among a vast number of possible maladies, a sort of informed prophesy, like modern oracles. But “pathos” appeals more to feeling, and this is what our patients seek to communicate.

Their understanding of illness is different than that of most health care professionals, acquired not through medical school, postgraduate training and clinical practice, but through dwelling in a stricken body. It is the same gaping difference between a birdwatcher’s and a hawk’s comprehension of flight.

My own hereditary predisposition to tumors is as much a part of me as my eye color, with far more profound consequences than my appearance. The depth of genotype trumps the superficiality of phenotype. This is simply who I am meant to be.

The raptor feels the air beneath its wings, rides the thermals, instinctively plots its angle of attack. The doctor, like the birdwatcher following a trajectory, is limited to observing the disease course without sharing in the experience.

This sense of always being at a slight remove — a perpetual outsider looking in — has particularly irked me as an oncologist. In truth, most cancer doctors know not quite what they say when they talk about chemotherapy. We are akin to teetotalist bartenders slinging artisanal cocktails, pulling ingredients off the pharmacy’s top shelf without absorbing the full impact of our mixology.

As a patient, I have not yet required chemo, although a taste of my own medicine may still await.

In the meantime, I feel forewarned by the losses of my father and grandfather, as well as a strange sense of inevitability around my choice of vocation, much as it differs from theirs. Although I don a white coat instead of their clerical robes, I must wonder if this, too, has been ordained.

Mark Lewis is the director of gastrointestinal oncology at Intermountain Healthcare in Sandy, Utah, where he lives with his pediatrician wife, Stasha, and two children. He graduated from Rice in 2001 with a double major in biology and ancient Mediterranean civilizations. His book in progress is tentatively titled, “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: A Pedigree of Cancer.”

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In her lifelong journey of discovery, composer and Shepherd School alumna Gabriela Lena Frank just might be changing the way we think about American music.

Walkabout

By Steven Boyd Saum Illustration by Israel G. Vargas Illustration by Israel G. Vargas

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n a stunning September day in the hills of California’s Mendocino County, just above Anderson Valley and the little town of Boonville, where the redwoods meet the vineyards, composer and pianist Gabriela Lena Frank ’94, ’96 pauses to reflect on where recent months have taken her. She is at home with her husband, cat and three dogs, sitting on their terraced deck within sight of the school where she nurtures a music program. The past year has brought Frank an arrival: the premiere of her first opera, “El último sueño de Frida y Diego” (“The Last Dream of Frida and Diego”), building on three decades of work as a composer.

Gabriela Lena Frank with one of her three dogs near her Boonville home in the hills of Mendocino County

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Illustration by Israel G. Vargas PHOTO BY C A RLOS CH AVA RRI A

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A scene from Frank’s first opera, “El último sueño de Frida y Diego,” which premiered at the San Francisco Opera in June 2023

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Sung in Spanish, “Frida y Diego” is the tale of a journey between the land of the living and the dead.

Frank co-wrote the opera with Pulitzer-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, a frequent collaborator over the past decade and a half. For this epic project, they set out to tell the story of the titular Mexican artists, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera — not to craft an operatic biopic, but as a folkloric tale where Kahlo is called to escort the dying Rivera to the underworld where she already resides, Orpheus in reverse.

“Frida y Diego” premiered with the San Diego Opera in fall 2022. The San Francisco Opera staged it as part of its centennial season in summer 2023.

The Los Angeles Opera would stage it that fall. It has brought a new scale of media attention — although Frank, the recipient of a Latin Grammy and a Guggenheim Fellowship, is no stranger to accolades. Her work as a composer-in-residence with numerous institutions has taken her from Houston to Philadelphia, Detroit to Seattle. In 2017, the Washington Post included her in a list of the most significant women composers in history.

Sometimes she will tell audiences that when they hear that word — “composer” — she knows she’s not who they picture: a disabled, middle-aged, multiracial woman. She has dark, curly hair and has worn hearing aids since she was a child — a necessity for the high moderate/near-profound hearing loss she was born with.

As for how she’s found herself at this point in her journey, here’s part of the answer: “If I look at the projects that I have now — 30 years later — for many of them, you could trace a lineage back to Rice.” Her work as a composer is deeply reliant on personal relationships. “I don’t even mean powerful people, just colleagues. I talk with somebody from my school days at Rice every week.”

PHOTO BY CORY WEAVER

FINDING JOY IN MUSIC Frank’s mother was born in Peru, of mixed Indigenous and Chinese descent, and worked for years as a glass artist. Her father is Lithuanian Jewish and had a career as a Mark Twain scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. The couple met when he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru.

Gabriela was born in 1972, their second child. While she was still a toddler, her parents noticed that she spoke differently from other children, though they weren’t sure why. They did recognize, however, that

she had a gift for music. The family acquired a castoff spinet piano, and Frank recalls sitting with her grandmother as she played and sang Depressionera tunes.

“Then I would just add some notes,” Frank says.

“There was this special bond we had. There’s a musical gene in the Frank family on the Jewish side, like a physical trait you could trace through the family.”

That trait skipped her father and brother. “Then I came along. ‘She has it!’ they said. I loved the piano, because I could hear it just enough, and I could feel it.”

It was Frank’s kindergarten teacher who identified signs of hearing loss; the teacher had If I look at the previously worked with projects that children in the Deaf I have now — 30 community. Frank was fitted for hearing aids. years later — for She also began piano many of them, lessons with Babette you could trace Salamon, a refugee from a lineage back South Africa who had to Rice. I don’t studied at the Royal even mean powerCollege in L ondon. ful people, just Salamon taught her colleagues. I traditional classical talk with somemusic with the patience body from my necessary to work with a school days at pupil with perfect pitch; Rice every week.

Frank could hear something once and play it, lessening her motivation to learn to read music.

As a high school student, Frank was transfixed by the geopolitical story unfolding behind the Iron Curtain — glasnost, perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall — as well as the democratic uprising crushed at Tiananmen Square. “What a time to have your adolescent political awakening,” she says. A future in Slavic studies might have been in the cards, were it not for a summer composition program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She put her first piece on paper and heard it played by her peers. “I was hooked, instantly.”

Scholarship support from Rice brought her to the Shepherd School of Music. “It was just so brilliant and vibrant. This whole world of classical music exploded to me.” Frank studied composition with the school’s founding dean, Sam Jones. New faculty and studios arrived, feeding a joy of new music in young composers and performers. Frank

Illustration by Israel G. Vargas

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miraculous for me. My music changed a lot as a result. I became more like a storyteller.”

Over tea, she talked with an instrument maker, Señor Huamanga, who told the history of each instrument, which he tailored to his clients’ needs. “He felt it was so important to make beautiful instruments that could last, to keep telling the story of Peru.” She met Familia Pillco, three generations of musicians who play traditional Inca tunes, bending the vibrato on their violins the way that quena players do on traditional Andean flutes.

“Because the violin can do other things that quenas can’t, they add in other things.

This is the role of culture: We take it, we eat everything, and then we make new food and new recipes.”

In this case, Frank isn’t just speaking in metaphor: The grandfather insisted they hop in his truck and head to the spot in Cusco with the best “picarones” — doughnutlike creations drenched in syrup. “When I went back to composing my music, the delivery went past the page,” Frank says. “I had to think about bringing senses like that to life, connecting to my musicians as if we were eating picarones across the music stands. But I didn’t want to do a literal translation. What helps me is to remember that I have a violin, and I have quena flute, and just go fanciful.

What if they had a baby? What kind of music would it make? That’s your job as an artist: You’re kind of a journalist, kind of an ethnomusicologist. But you’re trying to use your imagination to push it forward.

It’s really ingenious when you do it in a way that’s revelatory but authentic, too.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF HOUSTON SYMPHONY

wanted to write music more complex than she could improvise, so she buckled down and began to truly read music. She also came to recognize the value of understanding music from a performer’s perspective.

“I took piano lessons as if I were a piano major,” she says. She played for the percussion ensemble under Richard Brown, accompanied performers in the vocal studios and performed chamber music.

In fact, she says, “I learned more from composing because I was at a performance school than I did from the composition department.”

Jeanne Kierman Fischer, a member of the piano faculty, introduced Frank to the music of Alberto Ginastera — the first Latin American composer Frank had encountered. “His work blew my mind, because the music seemed so familiar to me.” Traditional Latin American music was What helps me is part of Frank’s upbringto remember that ing, as was the folk scene I have a violin, in Berkeley. “Here’s and I have quena this guy with a differflute, and just ent life story, putting it into classical music. I go fanciful. What credit Jeanne for giving if they had a me kind of the right baby? What kind cultural witness at the of music would time I needed it. I started it make? seeing music as more than just acrobatics or something that’s fun to do or as kind of a vague mission of upholding the past. Now, it seemed something very specific to me.”

After completing her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Rice, Frank enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Michigan. She studied with William Bolcom, known for incorporating popular culture into his music. “Why aren’t you in Latin America?” she recalls him asking. “You have a lot to say, but you need to find it, and to find it you need to travel.” She began a series of mostly selffunded trips to Latin America with her mother. “I had the most intimate kind of guide that you could have. The person who gave me Peru was the one showing it to me.”

At first, Frank thought she needed to be deliberate about hearing a lot of music. But as she spent time there, she realized how important it was to absorb the culture and see the people all around her. “Things that are ordinary for them are pretty

Frank on the Houston Symphony’s stage with violinist and former Houston Symphony conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada

A GATHERER OF STORIES Aspiring to tell stories of human movement, culture and development, Frank wrote “Sonata Andina” (“Andean Sonata”), for piano, dedicated to her maternal grandmother, Griselda Cam. It weds

traditional piano with sounds inspired by Andean folk instruments — drums, flutes, panpipes, guitars and marimba. “It draws inspiration from the idea of mestizaje, as envisioned by the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas,” Frank writes in the program notes, “whereby cultures can coexist without the subjugation of one by the other.”

Illustration by Israel G. Vargas

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Frank surrounded by the cast of “El último sueño de Frida y Diego” at the San Francisco Opera

Over the past quarter century, Frank has completed more than 100 works for orchestra, string quartet, voice, solo instruments and more.

Her “Walkabout: Concerto for Orchestra” was completed in 2016 and draws on her travels with her mother in Peru. The concerto was commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and premiered by assistant conductor Michelle Merrill.

While serving a residency with the Houston Symphony under Andrés Orozco-Estrada, she composed the epic “Conquest Requiem,” a work for orchestra and chorus sung in Spanish, Latin and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Call it a reclaiming of history on behalf of a woman who left no historical record in her own words: “Malinche, who was Cortés’ — they call her ‘concubine’ — really,

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captive,” Frank says. “Cortés seized her, they had a child, Martin Cortés — one of the first mestizos.”

Frank wove in elements of the Latin Mass for the Dead along with new text written by Nilo Cruz; she worked with an expert on Mesoamerican languages for the sections in Nahuatl.

BEYOND THE CONCERT HALL Despite her historically inspired works, Frank says, “I’m a living person. And I don’t want to do a literal translation of a native culture that people will keep in the museum. Where do mixed-race cultures come in? Where does modernity, as well as tradition, come in?”

PHOTO BY CORY WEAVER

In 2017, Frank and her husband, Jeremy Lyon, founded the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music. Its goal: to support a talented and diverse crew of emerging to composers, bringing them to Boonville for residencies, forming yearslong relationships, and “creating an experience that would give them a strong professional/artistic boost; and to encourage composers to think of the arts as indispensable to communities beyond the concert hall.”

Dozens of composers have already benefited from the academy. It’s Frank’s way of enlisting others on the journey and helping them steer their own selfdetermined artistic lives.

Boonville lies two hours north of the San Francisco Bay Area. “It’s one of these rural areas where you don’t have to go very far to be connected to big city life and art,” Frank says. “I also feel that, as an arts citizen, I’m needed more here. My composers see that.”

Comprising a population of around 1,000 are longtime rural families, vestiges of the hippie generation, newcomers — perhaps with a second home — and the Central American community, many of them vineyard workers. Within walking distance of Frank’s home is Anderson Valley JuniorSenior High School, where Frank and the academy have forged a teaching program. The students have taught Frank lessons as well — including how quickly they could take to the arts.

A few years ago, the Chiara String Quartet and the Del Sol String Quartet, which both included graduates of Rice’s Shepherd School of Music, were visiting the academy; Frank had them play for the kids. She had students — mostly boys, mostly Latino — write music with help of computer software.

“Now, these 16- to 17-year-old boys are really hard to reach — too cool for school. They’ve only heard their little bit of music played back on the computer.

One kid is like this” — she crosses her arms, tilts her head back. “You know, real skeptical. The quartet plays it. Of course, it sounds amazing. I see the kid nod with approval but try not to show it. I say, ‘OK? You want it louder or softer?’ ‘Louder.’ So, they play it really big. ‘And now?’ ‘Faster,’ he says, ‘really fast.’”

Then, Frank told him, “‘I’m going to have them do it pizzicato, check this out.’” That was a breakthrough moment. “Some of the boys went, ‘That was tight!’” Chins up, fist bumps all around.

“We did a concert in the cafeteria: 17 world premieres. They wrote program notes. Parents came — it was the most blended audience I’ve ever seen.

People were weeping — because their kids were poets.”

ARTS AND SERVICE Not coincidentally, Frank’s vision for American classical music starts with education. “First, I would enrich all the public schools with thriving arts programs.” The focus would be on schools in underrepresented communities, and she would not solely emphasize performance; rather, she would advocate for children writing their own stories and music and others performing it.

It’s also important to destigmatize community work, Frank says, so artists don’t worry that they will not be taken seriously if they want to teach in local public schools. “Part of the power of my academy has been that my composers come and have the life that they want. They see me live quietly, how much energy I put into this little school,” she says.

“I think about what they need, as a matchmaker for great performers. And I say, ‘Now you guys go out, because you’re supposed to go farther than me. Not just because you’re younger, you’re next, but there’s only one of me. We can’t do this alone.’”

Looking ahead through spring 2024, there are scores of performances of her compositions by orchestras and opera companies from Austin to Edinburgh, Montreal to San Jose. In March, the Shepherd School Chamber Orchestra will perform “Elegía Andina” at Rice. Recordings are in the works, including the concerto “Walkabout” by the Nashville Symphony, a Grammy-winning orchestra, for the Naxos label.

“Creatively, I’ve got some wonderful projects coming up,” Frank says. “I have my swan song at Philadelphia Orchestra,” where she has been composer-in-residence. “It’s a big 45-minute orchestral work that we’re thinking of like a Latin American ‘Rite of Spring.’”

Frank and longtime collaborator Cruz have a significant list of projects they would like to undertake. “Anna in the Tropics,” the play for which Cruz won the Pulitzer, is a natural candidate. For the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Frank is working with writer Drew Lanham — a Black American ornithologist, poet and 2022 recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” — writing orchestral songs based on Lanham’s essay, “What Do We Do About John James Audubon?” She is also undertaking some chamber works with friends.

“I’m now in my 50s. I want to slow down,” Frank says, “tell big stories, but just a few of them — you know, fragment less.”

Illustration by Israel G. Vargas

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Looking Back To Look Forward Rice historians Alexander X. Byrd ’90 and W. Caleb McDaniel took time to discuss the yearslong research project that updated and corrected the historical record around Rice’s founding and its fitful path toward desegregation. Their research points the way toward a more diverse and inclusive future for the university.

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ON OCT. 6, 2023, RICE’S TASK Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice, which was commissioned by former President David W. Leebron in 2019, released its third and final report to the public. The report, titled “Constraints of Race: A History of Rice University and Black Texans from Segregation to Second Founding,” brings to a close a four-year period of in-depth archival research, writing, creative public programming and discussions by dedicated members of the larger Rice community. This final report follows the 2021 publication of two historical narratives, one examining and documenting the entanglement of William Marsh Rice and his business partners in the region’s slave economy, and the other examining PHOTOS BY BR ANDON MARTIN

the symbolic, ceremonial and popular lore surrounding the Founder’s Memorial, the 1930 statue of William Marsh Rice that formerly sat in the center of the university’s Academic Quadrangle.

To mark the release of the final report, we met up with the task force’s leaders, historians Alexander X. Byrd and Caleb McDaniel, as they reflected on the project they guided for the past four years. Fittingly, our conversation took place in Fondren Library’s Woodson Research Center, where a great deal of the scholarly work took place.

RM: What was the initial charge of the task force?

CM: Over the course of about four years, we hosted a total of 19 featured events — from lectures by distinguished speakers like Annette Gordon Reed or [former Brown University] President Ruth Simmons to panels featuring Black alumni or Black staff, who talked about their experiences at the university. We brought in historians whose institutions have been engaged in similar processes of self-reflection and discovery.

From a conversation we hosted with Raymond Johnson ’69, we learned things about the history of Rice that subsequently informed the narratives we produced. All this was unfolding at a time when many events on campus had to be online. In retrospect, that was an advantage for us, because it meant that we could bring a much bigger audience to those events, including people who weren’t necessarily on campus at the time but had an interest in learning more about what Rice was doing during this moment.

It was good for me to get together with my colleagues weekly to talk about the history of the university — what happened to that history when you centered the experiences of African Americans and their contributions to the university.”

— Alexander X. Byrd

CM: Back in 2019, the task force was formed and charged by President David Leebron with conducting research about the history of the university with respect to slavery, segregation and racial injustice and also with planning a variety of campus programming that could facilitate discussion about those issues. The final charge was to make recommendations about the future of the university.

Four years later, we’ve completed our charge, but certainly, the work that was launched will continue into the future.

RM: What were some of the ways you approached this project?

AB: One of the most engaging ways was a series of weekly [Zoom] meetings that we titled “Doc Talks,” where each of us would bring a [historical] document that we had considered over the previous week and talk about how that document informed the history of the university. It was good for me to get together with my colleagues weekly to talk about the history of the university — what happened to that history when you centered the experiences of African Americans and their contributions to the university. We were also joined by an audience that shaped that work considerably.

CM: A lot of times, the work of history is solitary — sitting in an archive and turning pages. But it’s also very collaborative. Doc Talks brought out the fact that historians test ideas and refine interpretations through that dialogue.

We also had the privilege of working with a steering committee of a couple dozen faculty, staff, students and alumni of the university who brought their own perspectives and experiences and areas of expertise to bear on the work. Over four years, we convened that group close to 30 times, sometimes for daylong conversations or meetings with other guests. Those were the times when I feel like I learned the most about the collective work we were engaged in.

We were grateful to be given the time and space and resources to not just do the original research but to give it time to sit and germinate. That led to some of the most important new insights and discoveries of the research and also, hopefully, will give it more impact in the future.

RM: How did you go about creating such a variety of public engagement programs? And what was their impact?

AB: Also, we were able to contextualize the work by bringing historians to campus virtually, those whose life’s work focused on Houston, on Black Houston, for example, which was critically important.

RM: How did you manage expectations for public answers with the need to do such thorough scholarship?

AB: I went into this thinking, naively, that we could be quiet for however many years it took us to finish. We discovered quite quickly that the community had expectations around our work and that those expectations would have to be addressed directly. So, it was more a case of responding and changing direction.

The discourse around the Founder’s Memorial that emerged on campus not long after we began the work is one of the clearest examples of the power of history

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and public curiosity and public activism merging. Those first two research updates are examples of the task force responding to that public interest.

CM: We were so grateful for the expansive charge we were given by President Leebron. A lot of universities had already begun doing research on the history of slavery and the history of American universities — our charge asked us to look at the history of slavery, segregation and racial injustice.

It opened up the work to a longer time span and really got to the heart of a key part of American history, which is about the continuities between slavery and segregation and the ways that those histories continue to impact our present.

members — this is a long-standing issue at the university. Another example is the recommendation for a Black Cultural Center on campus. This is something that Black students have been advocating for as long as they have been at the university.

We uncovered some of the difficulties they encountered but also some of the successes that they had that maybe aren’t well remembered.

In the ea rly 1970s , there was a building that appeared on campus maps as the Black Student Union Building. Black students had worked hard to impress on administrators at the time the importance of creating space on campus for Black cultural life. But getting the resources and the commitment from the university to sustain that effort was difficult. That building no longer exists on campus maps.

This final report is a history of Rice and Black Texans from segregation to what we term the “second founding” — this moment when the university began to transform into the university that we inhabit and appreciate today.”

— Caleb McDaniel

RM: Tell us more about the final report and recommendations.

AB: We look back on the first founding of the university as something that has begun and has ended. We can have regrets about it, but there’s nothing we can change about the first founding of the university. That’s not true about this second founding, right? We’re all still very much in this moment. And so how this moment will end and how it will be remembered and its consequences lie with the decisions that we will make moving forward.

CM: We felt from the beginning that it was important to understand the history as well as we could and then to make recommendations that flowed out of that research. This final report is a history of Rice and Black Texans from segregation to what we term the “second founding” — this moment when the university began to transform into the university that we inhabit and appreciate today. It was important to underline that Alexander X. Byrd is vice Alexander X. Byrd (left) and Caleb McDaniel in the idea of a second founding, provost for diversity, equity archives at Rice’s Woodson Research Center, where much of the task force’s research was conducted. that this moment of desegreand inclusion and associate gation was a transformative professor of history. W. Caleb one that really needs to be understood relationship to the city of Houston. What McDaniel is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor as the opening of a whole new chapter in we also were looking at were the recomof Humanities. our history. Our recommendations come mendations that have the longest history from that understanding.

— the things that people have been advoVisit magazine.rice.edu/taskforce to We began to think about what would cating for a long time. learn more about the task force’s final improve the university with respect A great example of that is the recomreport and recommendations and to to its students, faculty and staff and its mendation about hiring Black faculty watch a companion video.

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PROFILES, HISTORY AND CLASSNOTES

ARTS & LETTERS

The Wine Writer

Ray Isle ’86 has traveled the world to bring us a book on natural and biodynamic wines.

BY JULIE H. CASE

PHOTOS BY MIK E MCGREGOR

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T

HE WINE is copper-hued and hazy and briefly gives off the distinct “natty” aromas often associated with natural wines, and Ray Isle ’86 is giving it an appreciative swirl. The place is the events room of Japanese restaurant Rule of Thirds, lined with blond wood and pale modernistic chairs, and Isle has just descended from the mini stage, where he’s been moderating a master class for wine-loving Brooklynites about biodynamic winemaking and natural wine.

Isle, of course, knows a thing or two about wine. The executive wine editor for Food & Wine magazine, he is one of the best-known wine writers in the country and among the top wine writers in the world. But 30 years ago, Robert when Isle was just getting into wine, Plummer the natural wine movement was just

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The nice thing about wine is that you’re constantly learning, because it’s inexhaustible. It’s agriculture, and it’s business, and it’s hedonism, and it’s cultural history. beginning — he could not have imagined that he would write “The World in a Wineglass: The Insider’s Guide to Artisanal, Sustainable, Extraordinary Wines to Drink Now” (Scribner, 2023), a Jeroboam-sized book about the stories of sustainable wine and winemakers from around the globe.

On this occasion, the wine in Isle’s glass is a biodynamic Cecilia rosé by

Austrian winery Gut Oggau, whose cofounder Eduard Tscheppe has just been a part of the master class. Isle dips in for a taste and comes up with a grin. “It’s a weird-ass blend of red and white grape varieties from one single plot,” he says.

“It also has this beautiful silkiness to its texture, which rosé doesn’t always have.”

Isle’s path to executive wine editor and wine writer was hardly a direct one. Born and raised in Houston, where his father, Walter W. Isle, taught English at Rice from 1961 to 2007 and his mother, Brenda Isle, was an ice dance instructor, Isle always knew he wanted to be a writer — he just thought it would be novels.

After earning a B.A. in English at Rice, Isle studied creative writing at Boston University, then got an offer from family friend and Pulitzerwinning author Larry McMurtry ’60

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to work in his Washington, D.C., rare books store. In 1993, Isle landed the prestigious two-year fiction-writing Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, in the foothills of America’s best-known wine region, and his interest in wine took off.

Soon, he was making pilgrimages to wine country, then traveling regularly to Napa to help with bottlings on the weekends (and getting paid in wine).

By the time he finished his program at Stanford, Isle was fully fascinated not only with the wine in his glass but also with the whole world of wine — from soil profiles to cultural histories.

He was also sick of the infighting in English departments. “All these people are bonkers,” he thought. So, he started life over in the wine business.

Isle began in New York City, where he lugged bags of wine around the Big Apple by day; by night, he worked on a novel and freelanced for magazines.

He landed at Food & Wine magazine in 2005, rising to executive wine editor in 2009. After years of scoring and reviewing wines, he focuses now on writing feature stories and making wine recommendations and pairings.

He also no longer cares as much about writing fiction.

“I still have a number of friends who are novelists, some of whom are quite successful, but they spend a lot of time sitting in rooms by themselves, working,” says Isle. “With wine, there’s the writing part, but there’s also the visiting vineyards, and going places, and learning, and meeting new people.”

He also discovered that from a writing standpoint, facts are as interesting to him as fiction. “The nice thing about wine is that you’re constantly learning, because it’s inexhaustible. It’s agriculture, and it’s business, and it’s hedonism, and it’s cultural history. And it goes back thousands of years. And it changes every year, because each vintage is different.

New regions come online and old regions kind of fade away, and the people change.

It’s just a great topic, if you want to write about something.”

I’m more and more, over time, interested in being in the vineyard and trying to understand how that place is manifested in the wine.

A Taste for the Earth Even as Isle’s writing passions were changing, so were his interests when it came to wine.

“In the past, there was a kind of paradigm of what constitutes great wine that maybe doesn’t take into account the things people care about more now,” says Isle, noting that younger audiences are interested in questions about exactly how, and with what values, wines are made.

Isle began to feel that those questions were worth pursuing, and before long, he realized he had found the subject of a book — one that would tell stories about oddball winemakers and fastidious grape growers. He wanted to write about farming and terroir, organic and sustainable viticulture, and farming practices that obsess over a vineyard’s underground microbial life.

Over the course of 700 pages, Isle tells the stories of 262 wine producers who make great wines that express the places those wines come from and who, with relatively few exceptions, live on

the land they farm. He tasted every wine mentioned in the book, whether during the more than two years he spent writing it or during earlier research for other stories, and he personally spoke to or visited — or both — every winery and winemaker referenced.

Here is Clare Carver of Oregon’s Big Table Farm, with her Luddite horses and her story of being run over by her own cow. Here are Gut Oggau’s Eduard and Stephanie Tscheppe-Eselböck reclaiming an abandoned farm. Here is Languedoc’s Gerard Bertrand bemoaning the disaster a liver problem is for a Frenchman.

Isle doesn’t necessarily buy into every trend he writes about — one element of biodynamic winemaking is to fill a cow horn with manure and bury it underground until the planets properly align — but he is clear that the microbial life of the soil plays an important role in terroir.

“I pretty much banned looking at tanks and bottling lines. Barrels are still kind of interesting, but I don’t know, the vineyards … ” Isle trails off in a way that leaves the listener imagining rolling vine-covered hillsides glowing in sunlight. “I’m more and more, over time, interested in being in the vineyard and trying to understand how that place is manifested in the wine.”

While over the decades Isle may have gone from budding novelist to slinger of facts, he has remained a storyteller.

With “The World in a Wineglass,” Isle has taken what could have been a dull encyclopedia and returned with vivid and fascinating stories. His book could become the No. 1 reference guide for wine lovers interested in wines made in ways that benefit the planet rather than further harm it. It’s a tall order, but one he has delivered on with enthusiasm and joy — manure-filled cow horns and all.

Visit magazine.rice.edu/wine to read an expanded version of this article with Isle’s wine recommendations.

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1980s

CLASSNOTES

Lemurs, Lifelong Friendships and Lovecraft

Excerpts from Owlmanac

1960s

“Water has always been my real home. This includes rafting and fly-fishing all over Montana. I spent substantial time sleeping in a hammock between palm trees on the Yucatán Peninsula, spearfishing for my meals. Today I live on Maui so that I can windsurf whenever my aging body allows me to and where I have a botanical garden with about a hundred trees and bushes with a variety of Hawaiian fruits.” — Contributed by Bill Berg ’65 (Will Rice: BA, 1966)

1950s

“Herbert Simons ’57 (BA) has been helping to fund the Houston Zoo’s lemur conservation program in Madagascar in memory of his brother Elwyn L. Simons ’53 (BA), who was the long-time director of the Duke University Primate Center and ‘managed the largest collection of lemurs outside Madagascar.’” — Contributed by class recorder Shirley Dittert Grunert ’57 (BA)

1970s

“Instead of assisting in computer science classes at a local high school, I am now walking dogs for the Humane Society, which is much more rewarding.

The dogs appreciate my efforts much more than the high school students ever did.” — Contributed

by John Prugh ’73 (Sid Rich: BA)

“I had a great time traveling with a parliament of Owls [including Russ Coleman ’82 (Lovett: BS), Rusty Campbell Jaggers ’73 (Brown: BA), John Jaggers ’73 (Hanszen: BA and MEE) and Charlie Green ’74 (Hanszen: BA)] to Antarctica last February. It was a truly amazing trip — the scale of [the continent] is massive, and the wildlife is extraordinary in its accessibility — whales, seals and penguins of all types, up close and personal. Best of all, we got to go down 900 feet in small submarines!

Rice friendships last a lifetime, truly!” — Contributed by class recorder Gloria Meckel Tarpley ’81 (Brown: BA)

2020s

“Leslie An ’20 (Lovett: BA) and Minh Le ’20 (Lovett: BS) have kept up their love for board games after participating heavily in the gaming culture at Rice, frequently playing games like Settlers of Catan with their friends in the lively Lovett Commons. An and Le are in the process of creating their own original card game set in the 1920s and inspired by Lovecraft.”

— Contributed by class recorder Amy Zhang ’20 (McMurtry: BA; BArch, 2022)

To submit a Classnote to Owlmanac, contact your class recorder or log on to the Rice Portal at riceconnect.rice.edu and click “Submit a Classnote.” Excerpts from Owlmanac may be edited for length.

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IL LU S T R AT IO N S B Y DEL P HINE L EE

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munity to create an integrated system that improves health and equity.

The program provides hospitals with funding, clinical tools and training to help providers better serve patients with drug addiction. CA Bridge started with eight participating hospitals; now, we have 278 hospitals onboard — about 85% of emergency departments in the state.

HEALTH CARE

Bridges to Hope

PHOTO COURTESY OF JENNIFER ZHAN

Emergency physician Jennifer Zhan ’10 is creating a path to substance use disorder treatment.

SINCE 2019, JENNIFER ZHAN has been working with CA Bridge, a Public Health Institute program, to create new approaches to substance use treatment within hospital emergency departments. Zhan’s work began at the California Hospital Medical Center in downtown Los Angeles, where she works. “Before starting our program, my hospital had no medications or protocols to effectively treat patients with substance use disorder,” Zhan says.

“We would temporarily alleviate their symptoms and discharge them imme-

diately. These patients would leave and come back with withdrawal symptoms or other complications of ongoing drug use.”

A grant from the CA Bridge program allowed Zhan to hire a patient navigator and begin building the substance use treatment program at her hospital.

Since then, she has been working to help implement the program across dozens of state hospitals. Zhan spoke with us about the importance of emergency departments in addressing addiction.

Tell us more about why there’s a need for CA Bridge.

Every year, over 100,000 people die from a drug overdose. It has become a public health crisis in our country. A lot of patients with drug addiction do not have access to care in their communities or do not have the ability to pay. The emergency department is the only universal safety net in our health care system, so our program aims to bridge emergency care and ongoing treatment in the com-

What’s different about this approach?

The reality is that substance use disorder is a chronic treatable disease, just like heart disease or diabetes or other medical conditions we see daily. We use medication for addiction treatment.

Evidence shows that starting patients with opioid use disorder on medications like buprenorphine can lead to higher rates of retention in treatment and decreased risk of return to use or overdose. There are also medications that help with alcohol use disorder and stimulant use.

How do you build trust between your patients and large health care institutions?

Language matters. We’ve all heard providers talk about “addicts,” “junkies” or “frequent fliers.” Instead, we advocate for terms like “person who uses drugs” or “person in recovery” to show that a patient has a problem rather than is the problem. Historically, this is a group of patients who experience discrimination and stigma along with a myriad of health and social inequities.

We need to foster an environment of safety, trust and understanding that using drugs is not a moral failing.

Culture change is important because we can throw clinical protocols and navigators in hospitals, but if there isn’t a belief that treating substance use disorders is our lane, it won’t happen.

— INTERVIEW BY MABEL TANG ’23 Read more about Zhan’s work at magazine.rice.edu/bridge.

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Mary Kay Zuravleff ’81

I agree with the reviewer who said you must have time-traveled to write this book. How much research did you do, and how much did you learn from your family?

Well, the book takes place a hundred years ago, so a lot of those people are gone, but I did grow up knowing both sets of grandparents and also great-aunts and -uncles.

I heard a lot of stories. My grandfather on my mother’s side had black lung from working in the mines. My grandmother went to the foreman and said, “You will pay him in money and not scrip.” And my grandmother on my dad’s side lost her citizenship because she married my grandfather [who was born in Russia]. All those things are in the novel.

I had to do a tremendous amount of research on Marianna, Pennsylvania. I certainly didn’t know how people lived in the mines or how the houses were built up the hill. I did a lot of mining research: How much did a miner make? What did they eat for breakfast? What happens in an explosion or a cave-in? That took a lot of work.

MARY KAY ZURAVLEFF’S GRANDPARENTS on both sides of her family lived in the Appalachian mining town of Marianna, Pennsylvania, at the turn of the 20th century. They were Russian Orthodox immigrants living hardscrabble lives; the men worked and died in the coal mines and the girls were married off at 14. Relying on the experiences of her family members and those like them, Zuravleff invested eight years in writing a richly detailed, immersive literary novel, “American Ending,” and the hard work paid off with a mention on the Oprah Daily spring reading list in 2023. We talked to Zuravleff about the research for her book and the lives of the people she wrote about — and the parallels with immigrants to the U.S. today.

What do you want to say about immigration, then and now?

I have told people how my grandmother lost her citizenship, and they have said, “No, that didn’t happen.” We didn’t learn that in history class. And where do you hear what we did to Native Americans, to African Americans, to Chinese Americans? I wasn’t taught anything about that exclusionary treatment

BOOKS

Now Reading

American Ending Blair, 2023

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in school. That’s another way to use this book: as an introduction to what else don’t we know — or acknowledge — about our own country?

I was able to visit two high school classes recently who read the book, and it was astonishing. My writing prompt to them was to write your American ending. An African American student wrote, “My American ending is to live a long life and not be shot in my 20s.” And another student wrote, “My American ending is to go back to Guatemala and a simpler life.” That’s a complicated American ending. One young woman wrote, “My American ending is to get my family here from Haiti.” This is an average American classroom. I was blown away. These students are seeing themselves in the book, so I don’t have to point out the parallels. They’re seeing themselves.

How did your time at Rice inform your writing career?

I studied with Max Apple, who was exquisite, and he has an amazing imagination.

He is something of a magical realist in the vein of Isaac Singer; he’s fanciful but also poignant. And he was the only writing teacher at Rice.

Now, Rice has a wonderful and diverse faculty in writing.

— INTERVIEW BY HILARY C. RITZ

See magazine.rice.edu/ ending for an extended version of this interview.

ALUMNI

Sharing Our Science How to Write and Speak STEM Brandon R. Brown ’92 MIT Press, 2023

As a physics professor who earned his doctorate studying vortex dynamics in superconductors, Brandon Brown has spent a career immersed in the kind of jargon that makes most people’s eyes glaze over — and he’s done something about it. “Sharing Our Science” takes its own advice by using metaphors, personal anecdotes and expert stories to help readers master the challenges of scientific communication.

Nature Physics describes it as “required reading for scientists at any stage of their careers.” — HR

Profit

An Environmental History Mark Stoll ’77 Polity Books, 2023

Mark Stoll’s “Profit” is a sweeping yet impressively detailed history of economics that centers the chilling environmental consequences of humanity’s march toward progress. Modern consumer capitalism was hardly inevitable, Stoll concludes, but now it is like a shark that cannot stop swimming lest it die. The question is how to keep it moving without consuming the Earth’s resources in the process. — HR

MUSIC

Now Listening Do Not Lament

Rebecca Scout Nelson ’14 Il Pirata Records, 2023

“Do Not Lament,” the debut album from Rebecca Scout Nelson, may be unlike anything you’ve ever heard before.

Despite a wide variety of musical influences — most notably bluegrass and Baroque — the album’s reliance on early instruments like the archlute, theorbo, harpsichord and viola da gamba results in an unmistakably Baroque sound throughout. Above the small ensembles floats Nelson’s honeyed, lilting voice, which at times touches the ethereal while still remaining warmly intimate.

Originally from Germany, Nelson discovered her love of early music and the Baroque violin in the U.S., where she earned her bachelor’s in violin at the Shepherd School of Music and a master’s at the University of Oklahoma before completing the historical performance program at Juilliard. “Do Not Lament” displays Nelson’s considerable talent and passion for early music as it tells the story of her grieving process for her younger sister, who died of cancer at only 24.

The album presents a skillful mix of 10 short original instrumental works, arrangements of four period pieces with personal meaning, and four original songs with lyrics in English, all carrying the same remarkable signature. Hauntingly beautiful at times, joyful and lively at other moments, the music moves — not directly, but in the uncertain and halting path that grief often takes — toward vitality. As Nelson sings, “What a beautiful mess life can be.”

The album was recorded by Il Pirata Records, founded just two years ago by Richie Hawley, professor of clarinet at the Shepherd School of Music. Though Il Pirata so far has only four records in its catalog, its recording of “Do Not Lament” accomplishes the label’s stated mission by immersing the listener fully in the crystalline music, as if one sat “right there” on stage with Nelson and her fellow musicians. Listening straight through, undistracted, is a beautiful journey.

— HR

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Dec. 26, 2023 // Dallas // Fans root on the Owls at the First Responder Bowl versus Texas State University.

LAST LOOK

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RICE MAGA ZINE

W IN T ER 2024

PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW

Cultivating a Spirit of Excellence

A pioneer of modern-day tech, Jimmy Treybig ’63 is known for putting his stamp on the early days of Silicon Valley, and he credits much of his professional success to his time studying at Rice. “The Rice faculty fostered a ‘spirit’ in me that ultimately gave me the confidence to evaluate and understand the future, to create a new future, and to evaluate others and their abilities,” said Jimmy, who studied electrical engineering.

Jimmy never forgot the impact that his professors had on him, which is why he and his wife, Drew, decided to establish the Treybig Teaching Excellence Fund to support Rice’s Center for Teaching Excellence. Established in 2012, the center fosters outstanding teaching through evidence-based practices, strong community building and research in pedagogical sciences. It also offers a range of scholarly programs and teaching-focused resources to faculty and graduate students alike.

Scan the QR code to explore opportunities to amplify the Rice experience, or contact Sara L. Rice, executive director of development, at 713-348-3189 or slrice@rice.edu.

Pictured above: Jimmy ’63 and Drew Treybig on the Rice campus.

Photo by Priscilla Bosma.

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

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

UP NEXT

Rice’s Research Portfolio We’re planning a research-themed blockbuster for our Spring 2024 issue. Did you know that Rice just established several new institutes to advance interdisciplinary research? We’ll cover them all, including the Rice Sustainability Institute, which will seek innovative and equitable solutions to urgent climate challenges. This issue will also introduce readers to the new Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering and Science, dive into faculty research around AI and machine learning, and report on a massive citizen science project that’s gathering data for April’s total solar eclipse. We’ll talk “moon shots,” entrepreneurship and opportunities for undergraduate research. There’s something to pique your interest, so don’t miss it.