Rice Magazine | Summer 2016

The Magazine of Rice University

SUMMER 2016

A RUNNER’S WORLD What’s it like to spend a year literally running around the world? Becky Wade ’12 chronicled the world’s great running cultures in her new book.

ALSO TROPICAL TOPICS

Digging and diving in Belize’s rain forests and reefs is no vacation.

FLOAT PLANES

Yuan Kang Lee’s model airplanes defy gravity — and win international competitions.

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YOU LOOKIN’ AT ME?

A queen angelfish (Holacanthus ciliaris) at Glover’s Reef, Belize, is caught on camera

by Kevin Pisters ’16.

The Magazine of Rice University

Summer 2016

Contents FEATURES

24

SHE RUNS In an engaging memoir, Becky Wade ’12 recounts a golden year spent exploring the world’s great running cultures.

BY BECKY WADE

30

LIGHTER THAN AIR Yuan Kang Lee’s ’92 delicate model airplanes are like dreams in motion.

BY SANDRA MILLERS YOUNGER

38

SUMMER SCHOOL A tropical field biology class turned Belize’s rain forests and reefs into a memorable classroom.

BY SCOTT SOLOMON

42

NIGHT OWL David Keck ’09 is a rare vintage — one of just 250 master sommeliers in the world.

BY MICHAEL HARDY ’06 DEPARTMENTS

P R E S I D E N T ’ S N OT E

5

S A L LY P O R T News and updates from campus

6

SCOREBOARD Dispatches from Rice Athletics

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A B ST R ACT Findings, research and more

15

SCENE A glimpse at student life

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ARTS & LETTERS Creative ideas and endeavors

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FA M I LY A L B U M From Rice’s archive

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on the web Featured Contributors Nicholas Zaibaq

(“Six Degrees of Valhalla”) is a doctoral candidate in the lab of Rice chemistry professor Lon Wilson.

His research focuses on the organic chemistry of fullerenes and the use of these compounds for drug delivery and in medical imaging applications.

Sandra Millers Younger

MAGAZINE.RICE.EDU Our new website features select content from our print edition, multimedia stories, fresh updates between issues and a link to our flip-through magazine (and archives) via ISSUU. Go there now and find these online extras: VIDEO

(“Lighter Than Air”) grew up in the South, where people swapped stories over fried chicken, apple pie and sweet tea. She’s been telling stories ever since as a magazine editor, frequent contributor to university publications and author of “The Fire Outside My Window: A Survivor Tells the True Story of California’s Epic Cedar Fire.”

Adam Cruft

Float Yuan Kang Lee ’92 reigns as world champion of F1D flight. To see the mesmerizing F1D model planes in flight, check out Phil Kibbe and Ben Saks’ documentary-inprogress, “Float.” Story on Page 30.

VIDEO

Rice Helps Open Malawian Hospital Ward The day after we interviewed Provost Marie Lynn Miranda for the Unconventional Wisdom profile, she flew to Malawi to help dedicate a new neonatal ward at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, where the Rice 360� Institute for Global Health has been active for a decade. Videographer Brandon Martin was there. Watch for our complete story in the fall issue.

DRINK

David Keck ’09 Has a Fine Palate We asked the master sommelier to recommend a few wines appropriate for the summer months — wherever you live. Story on Page 42.

(“Unconventional Wisdom”) is a Londonbased illustrator. He works predominantly in pen and ink and draws inspiration from an eclectic mix of sources: books, paintings and film, to name a few. He has a profound love for portraiture.

Justin Galloway

(“Lighter Than Air”) is a San Diego-based photographer who once drove 12,000 miles around the country in a 1984 Volkswagen Westfalia Camper. He is a husband and the proud parent of a kid, a cat and a snake.

Want More Rice News and Views?

On the Cover From Instagram to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and more, we document the daily goings-on about campus and far beyond.

ISSUU

FLICKR

issuu.com/riceuniversity

flickr.com/photos/ricepublicaffairs/

TWITTER

INSTAGRAM

@RiceMagazine

@riceuniversity

RICE PHOTO CORNER

YOUTUBE

rice.edu/gallery

youtube.com/riceuniversity

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Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Rice running legend Becky Wade ’12 at the Bill Coats Bridge in Houston’s Hermann Park.

Wade has published a memoir about her year as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. See the story on Page 24.

foreword

The Magazine of Rice University SUMMER 2016 Rice Magazine is published four times a year and is sent to university alumni, faculty, staff, parents of undergraduates and friends of the university.

Published by the Office of Public Affairs Linda Thrane, vice president EDITOR

Lynn Gosnell ART DIRECTOR

Alese Pickering CREATIVE SERVICES

Jeff Cox senior director Dean Mackey senior graphic designer Jackie Limbaugh graphic designer Tracey Rhoades editorial director Jennifer Latson assistant editor Tommy LaVergne senior university photographer Jeff Fitlow university photographer Jenny Rozelle ’00 proofreader CONTRIBUTING STAFF

Jade Boyd, Holli Clements, Kaitlyn Dubose, Randal Hall, Patrick Kurp, Brandon Martin, Amy McCaig, Mike Williams

Minds at Work and Play

W

H E N W E S TA RT E D

planning this issue, we used verbs like run, fly and dive to capture themes in each of our features. After all, our summer issue highlights some amazing activities: the travels of Becky Wade ’12, a former Rice athlete and newly minted author, who embedded herself for a year in different running communities around the world; the gravity-defying flights of model airplane builder Yuan Kang Lee ’92, whose featherlight airplanes are the best in their class; and the intense, jam-packed days of students studying tropical field biology in Belize.

But some contemplative counterthemes emerged as we learned more about these stories: an athlete’s capacity for observation, reflection and writing led her to document her special year abroad; an engineer’s patience and focus saved the day when things didn’t go as planned in an international competition; and students quietly observed and carefully collected data, key skills in field biologists’ tool kits. Movement and stillness combined to deeply explore and engage the world.

Our “Night Owl” profile series continues with a story about a master sommelier — a rare Owl indeed! We check in with Provost Marie Lynn Miranda on the one-year mark of her Rice tenure, relive the (Mc)traditions of McMurtry College, explore a class in “mental toughness” and highlight recent research and publications from Rice faculty.

Whether your summer is on the active or contemplative side, we think you’ll find plenty to enjoy.

Finally, we warmly welcome Alese Pickering, Rice Magazine’s new art director, to our staff. A Houston native, Pickering graduated from the University of Houston before taking off for New York and Denver to work as a graphic designer in book publishing and the magazine world. Her imagination and talent are fueling a new era of print and online magazine design — committed as always to our readers. We welcome your feedback at ricemagazine@rice.edu.

Lynn Gosnell lynn.gosnell@rice.edu

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letters READER RESPONSE | SPRING 2016

THE RICE UNIVE RSITY BOARD OF TRUSTE ES

To the Editor

Robert B. Tudor III, chairman; Edward B. “Teddy” Adams Jr.; J.D. Bucky Allshouse; Doyle Arnold; Nancy Packer Carlson; Albert Chao; T. Jay Collins; Mark Dankberg; Ann Doerr; Doug Foshee; Lawrence Guffey; James T. Hackett; Patti Kraft; Robert T. Ladd; Charles Landgraf; David Rhodes; Ruth Simmons; Jeffery Smisek; Amy Sutton; Gloria Meckel Tarpley; Guillermo Treviño; Randa Duncan Williams; Scott Wise; Huda Zoghbi.

I really enjoyed reading Terrence Doody’s piece on Dennis Huston [“Exit, Stage Left,” Page 24]. During my four years at Rice,

Prof. Huston (or “Dennis,” or “Doc” — he let us know that he didn’t care much as to what we called him) was my English literature professor (twice), my college master (all four years), my castmate in college theater productions (twice) my teammate on an intramural touch football team and my friend.

One memory that stands out for me is of a cookout for students held in the back

yard of Hanszen House.

Several of us were gathered around Prof. Huston, discussing various topics, and he launched into a rumination on what the undergraduate experience should be — not a time, he said, to just prepare for a professional career; rather, an opportunity to discover and explore what really fires your passion.

To borrow a phrase often used these days in our school’s fundraising letters, Dennis Huston will always be for me a huge part of what makes Rice, Rice.

— Robert Catterall ’82

I read with interest the article “100 Years of the Thresher” (Page 36) and was disappointed to see no mention of Rice’s discovery of the hanging chad 33 years before Florida made it a household word. I refer to the attempt to computerize student government elections in 1967, reported in the Thresher with the headline “Election Today. Results? Next Week.”

As the geek responsible for the fiasco, I learned that voters and computer punch cards don’t play well together. What seemed like a perfectly reasonable system for counting votes led to incompletely punched cards jamming the computer and resulted in a contested election resolved by the Intercollege Court. If only Florida election officials had had the foresight to read the Thresher, we might have been spared a disputed presidential election.

— Charles P. Schade ’68

Selected Survey Results

ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICE RS

David W. Leebron, president; Marie Lynn Miranda, provost; Kathy Collins, vice president for Finance; Klara Jelinkova, vice president for IT and chief information officer; Kevin Kirby, vice president for Administration; Caroline Levander, vice president of Strategic Initiatives and Digital Education; Chris Muñoz, vice president for Enrollment; Allison Kendrick Thacker, vice president for Investments and treasurer; Linda Thrane, vice president for Public Affairs; Richard A. Zansitis, vice president and general counsel; Darrow Zeidenstein, vice president for Development and Alumni Relations.

E DITORIAL OFFICES

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

MOST-READ DEPARTMENTS

Abstract

Research and Creative Achievements (and “Six Degrees of Valhalla”)

MOST-READ FEATURE

Exit, Stage Left: Dennis Huston Retires

Unconventional Wisdom The Historian (Alex Byrd ’90)

“In my senior year, Prof. Huston allowed me into his Shakespeare class when I had not taken any English courses since my freshman year. I will always be grateful.

He taught with such passion and energy; he deserved every honor he was accorded. I wish I had a fraction of his energy. It was so good to hear that it’s never flagged.”

Have a comment, criticism or story idea? Write to us at ricemagazine@rice.edu.

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Send address changes to: Rice University Development Services–MS 80 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 ©August 2016 Rice University

president’s note

DAVID W. LEEBRON

Reflections on the Revolution

TO M M Y L AV E R G N E

I

AM WRITING THIS COLUMN ON JULY 4th —

the 240th anniversary of the formal adoption by the Continental Congress of the Declaration of Independence. It’s a magnificent document, a document that has influenced history through the success of the American republic and through the importance of the ideas upon which it rested.

Which of course got me to thinking about Rice and higher education (but almost anything does). The study of history and the study of ideas (and, of course, the history of ideas) have always seemed to me to be among the most defining attributes of a university. Because history is indeed important, and the ideas that emerge from history are important, both are deeply contested in a world in which physical and ideological conflict seems to be the norm.

The birth of our republic (Amexit, if you will) was swathed in conflict — and not just the conflict with the British. The contradictions and ambiguities in the views and expressions of our founders continue to fuel disagreements to this day.

To take one example, the Declaration of Independence is suffused with references to God, the Creator, the “Supreme Judge of the World” and “Divine Providence.” And yet the Constitution contains not a single such reference. Thus we continue to disagree deeply about the role of religion in public life and public policy.

Our republic was also born amid conflict over slavery. And although the declaration may refer by implication to slavery (through a reference, recently discussed in a New York Times op-ed, to the incitement of “domestic insurrections”), the Constitution contains the odious suggestion that slaves (referred to only as “other persons”) should count as three-fifths of a person. Our founders had the chance to address the implications of their principles for slavery and failed to do so.

That does not eliminate the importance of the American achievement.

It did, however, take nearly another century to abolish slavery, and to this day we struggle to realize fully the ideal of racial equality and justice. History and a clear understanding of the ideas that have emerged over time must inform our discussions. It is not only, as George Santayana said, that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (a sentiment, like the title of this essay, also attributed to Edmund Burke), but that those who do not understand the past — and its influence on the present — are unlikely to find enduring solutions to our problems or the common ground on which to debate them.

As I was contemplating the events of two centuries ago, I was also struck by a more recent event, namely the passing of Elie Wiesel — a Holocaust survivor, recipient of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and renowned writer. I remember precisely when I read his book “Night,” which recounts his experience in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

I was 16 and on a flight to Frankfurt to attend my junior year of high school in Braunschweig, Germany. It was an overnight flight, but I stayed up reading Wiesel’s book. I felt somehow it was my responsibility, particularly being Jewish, to arrive in Germany conscious of this piece of history.

These horrors had occurred three decades earlier, and some of the people I would meet would have been involved in some way. During my stay and subsequent trips, I visited at least a half dozen concentration camps, ranging from Auschwitz, which was preserved as liberated, to the sanitized

Because history is indeed important, and the ideas that emerge from history are important, both are deeply contested in a world in which physical and ideological conflict seems to be the norm. fields of Bergen-Belsen. It seemed essential to me that this knowledge (and more) should form part of the foundation for this engagement.

That historical knowledge did not diminish the deep affection that I developed for Germany as a result of my experiences there. My interest and experience in Germany form part of the background for my broader interest in religious tolerance. Out of the Holocaust emerged new ideas, particularly among university scholars, supporting a new view of human rights and the development of a new international law to protect those rights. And while those ideas and laws have not eliminated the terrible abuses of human beings that we observe daily in the news, I believe they have diminished them and changed how we respond to them.

In so many of the contentious debates of our time, history, philosophical ideas and cultural chasms lie at the heart of our disagreements. Universities play a crucial role in fostering this critically important examination of history and social ideas. We hear today much discussion of the humanities, and some question why we should continue to study them. There are a wide range of reasons why we must, including the basic fostering of creativity. And without such disciplines as history, philosophy, religion and the study of other cultures, we would be far less well positioned to understand the implications of history for us today, or how to build upon that history to realize the most fundamental values and aspirations of the evolving American republic. m aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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SALLYPORT

News and Update s from Campus

IN MAY, RICE STUDENTS immersed themselves in the art, architecture, archaeology, museums and neighborhoods of Rome via an experiential art history course that traced the city’s mythical beginnings to modern times. The class, Rome: The Eternal City, packed local tours, readings, day trips and independent study into a three-week field study led by John Hopkins, assistant professor of art history and classical studies, and Natasha Mao, an art history doctoral student. In addition to the Roman Forum, St. Peter’s Basilica, medieval 6

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ABOVE Sophomore Vincent Gonzales, standing in front of fourthcentury mosaics in the Salone d’ingresso at the Villa Borghese, contemplates the Roman sculpture of a satyr in attack (circa 120–140 C.E.).

More: arthistory.rice. edu/hart-world

pilgrimage routes, the Borghese Gallery, the Jewish Museum and the National Museum of XXI Century Arts (to name a few), the syllabus included visits to temples and museums not normally open to tourists. Professors built in time for students to roam and discover the city on their own, and pizza, gelato and espresso fueled their studies. The course is part of the HART in the World program, an art history initiative that covers airfare and lodging for students to travel to a different city each year with department specialists.

JOHN HOPKINS

When in Rome

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TRADITIONS | McMURTRY COLLEGE

Hold the Haggis AS THE 13th day of the month approaches, most Rice residential colleges get ready for battle. Not McMurtry. Instead of pitching water balloons at students dressed in their finest shaving cream ensembles, the Murts bake cookies to hand out to marauding members of Baker 13.

“We offer this sign of peace,” said junior Kelsi Wicker, “and McMurtry goes unattacked by the runners.” Senior Madhuri Venkateswar, the college’s incoming president, said, “Murts love it because it represents who we are as a college.”

Founded in 2009, McMurtry has relatively new traditions. A few years ago, Murts began to don banana suits at Beer Bike to cheer on their team. “McMurtry is In-Tents” has been adopted as “an

anti-cheer” that originated when the college was still being built and its commons area was a collection of tents.

But the high-water mark of McMurtry traditions is surely McScottish Night.

Launched in 2014 by Alana LemayGibson and Brian Gibson, head resident fellows, the October festival pays homage to founders Burt ’56 and Deedee McMurtry’s ’56 Scottish ancestry. The event features unique Highland games (St. Andrews beer golf and throwing the Braemer Stone), Scottish food and drink (alas, no haggis allowed) and, of course, bagpipe music. There’s also a kilt-making workshop.

In a specially prepared fire pit, an effigy called a Wicker Man is burned.

Murts attach sticky notes with wishes that presumably come true when put to the torch. Later, food trucks show up to provide sustenance as the party goes on through the night. — FRANZ BROTZEN ’80

TOP FIVE

Stranger as Fiction A few of our favorite Rice-inspired characters on page and screen

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Landry Clarke

In “Friday Night Lights,” the beloved TV series (and 1990 book) set in fictional Dillon, Texas, football player Landry Clarke (played by the versatile Jesse Plemons) left his small town — and the show — to attend Rice.

2

Danny Deck

In “All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers” (1972), Larry McMurtry ’60 introduces readers to a naïve young writer and Rice student named Danny Deck. Deck returns in the sequel, “Some Can Whistle,” as a much older character whose writing career has been a mixed bag.

3

William Duffin

Did McMurtry, who taught at Rice in the early 1960s, model Bill Duffin, “a prize modernist that Rice had managed to hire away from Ohio State,” after a real Rice faculty member? “Moving On” (1970), which features the character, is the second book in McMurtry’s “Houston trilogy.”

4

Louis Holland

In Jonathan Franzen’s second novel, “Strong Motion” (1992), the main character attended Rice, where he was the station manager at KTRU.

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Unnamed mathematician

Rice’s science cred gets a nod in novelist William Gibson’s 2003 novel “Pattern Recognition.” Computer security specialist Boone Chu mentions a “friend of mine at Rice,” a mathematician who discovered a hidden encryption in mysterious video clips. m aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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sa llypo rt | Unco nvent io na l wisdo m

THE DATA SCIENTIST Marie Lynn Miranda arrived in Houston one year ago to serve as Rice’s provost. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Duke with an A.B. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, Miranda is a pioneer in the field of children’s environmental health and geospatial health informatics (the use of data-rich maps to study public health issues). Her work frequently takes her into communities directly affected by exposure to environmental toxins, both domestically and abroad. She and husband Christopher Geron have three children. We caught up with the busy provost in June, a day before she left for Malawi to learn about Rice’s global health projects.

Detroit Pride I grew up in a neighborhood that had originally been white in Detroit and was transitioning to being black — and I was brown. Our family was neither one nor the other, nor at that time did people use the term “brown.” As a consequence, from a very early age I was given the opportunity to live and navigate in a multicultural world. It became second nature to me and has provided great advantages in the work I do.

Goan Heritage My family is from Goa. When my parents were growing up, Goa was still a Portuguese colony, and I was the first one of my family born here in the U.S. Goa is a unique part of India: Everybody is Catholic; the first language is Portuguese; the language, the music, the food are all quite different from the rest of India. At family events, there’s always music, and Mirandas are dancers!

Her First Year at Rice I spent a lot of time visiting with faculty and staff from across campus, touring every one of our buildings, spending time with students — both undergraduate and graduate — and just generally trying to get to know the university and its unique culture. People have been so kind and generous in helping to orient me. Creativity, positive energy and passion abound here. I have had the opportunity to brainstorm with people from across campus about new ways to bring people and ideas together even more fruitfully. I love this place — and I am really looking forward to year two.

Finding Her Life’s Work I’m deeply interested in and motivated by questions surrounding the environment. Early on in my research I’d been applying my skills in the spatial analysis of data to questions about land management. But it didn’t feel like this was my life’s work. Then I got the opportunity to direct undergraduate programs for Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. When I looked at the curriculum, I discovered that you could earn a degree there without studying 8

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ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM CRUFT

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the justice dimensions of environmental problems. It is clearly the case that low-income and minority communities experience the environment quite differently — they have more exposure to environmental contaminants and less access to amenities. We decided to infuse these kinds of topics across the curriculum. For example, I introduced a module on childhood lead exposure, covering toxicology, differences in exposures and impact.

Lead Poisoning: Then and Now When I was growing up, there was a huge public health campaign to address lead exposure. Until the recent broad national attention to Flint, Mich., many people thought lead was a problem of the ’70s: “We’ve solved it, and everything’s fine.” In fact, even before Flint, there were half a million kids with elevated blood lead levels.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been unable to identify a level below which — aside from zero exposure — there’s [no risk]. We have aging infrastructure and housing stock, millions of housing units that still contain lead-based paint. Kids are still getting exposed to something that’s been a known neurotoxicant since 1898.

of community resources, all those sorts of things — and put them into a single integrated spatial data architecture.

That becomes a resource for researchers across Houston and potentially the U.S.

Power of Maps I don’t have any formal training in geography, but I personally find maps interesting beyond measure. If you sent me to a desert island and told me I could have only one book, without a doubt I would pick a good atlas. A cartographically well-designed map is a thing of great beauty.

there since some of my relatives were driven out by Idi Amin.

Everyone’s Talking About: Campus Diversity In terms of students on campus, we’ve made a lot of progress in diversity, and we’d like to make more. Our staff is also quite diverse. The place where we have a lot of progress to make is in our faculty.

We’ve made a number of hires in key positions, who we believe will play a real leadership role in our efforts to further diversify the faculty. Over the course of my first year as provost, we had a discus-

If you sent me to a desert island and told me I could have only one book, without a doubt I would pick a good atlas. A cartographically well-designed map is a thing of great beauty.

Disease and Data There’s lots of energy and interest in bringing geospatial approaches into ongoing work at various organizations within the Texas Medical Center. For example, you could take electronic data for people with chronic diseases (like type II diabetes) and spatially locate it to better understand how the environment contributes to the disease, as well as to people’s ability to manage their conditions.

City Data Kathy Ensor in the statistics department is leading the development of the “urban data platform” for Rice’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research. The whole idea behind the urban data platform is to gather layers upon layers of data that are relevant to urban issues — housing quality, traffic, air pollution, the location

Working in East Africa My work in East Africa has been focused on malaria. With malaria you can manage the vector (which is the mosquito) or you can manage the disease, or you can do both. But the decisions about how to manage the vector are made typically by different people from the ones who are deciding how to manage the disease. Our work there has been to optimize managing the disease and the vector simultaneously, particularly looking at environmental interventions. That work was in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

In general, East Africa feels like a second skin to me. There are a lot of Goans in East Africa! When I went to Uganda for the first time, it was the first time anyone in my family had been

sion about faculty diversity — what you need to be doing in the pipeline, in the stage of recruitment, in retention, for example. So there have been individual faculty hires, but also this question of what is the across-the-board program to make us more successful.

Favorite Thing in Her Office That photograph of a dragonfly. When it appeared in Science magazine, I wrote the photographer and asked if he would send me a large print of it — I just loved it. There’s a tessellated pattern in the dragonfly wing; these patterns are special to people who do spatial analysis.

The colors and the light reflecting off the wings, the details on the body of the dragonfly; for me, it’s kind of like a map, and it is a thing of great beauty. — LYNN GOSNELL m aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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sa llypo rt | sylla bus

ANATOMY OF A RICE CLASS

A Gentler Kind of Toughness When Elizabeth Slator was a college athlete, playing softball and basketball at Auburn, training philosophies tended to put the “tough” in mental toughness.

The problem: There wasn’t any evidence that this approach made athletes play better. More recently, trainers have shifted toward techniques based in self-awareness and acceptance, which research has linked to better results. In her summer class, Slator, a sport psychology consultant and the associate director of Rice’s Gibbs Recreation and Wellness Center, teaches these principles to anyone looking to improve performance — athletic, artistic, academic or otherwise. In the fall, she teaches the course to grad students in the Shepherd School of Music.

COURSE

LPAP 113

Mental Training for Performance Enhancement (Summer 2016)

DEPARTMENT Lifetime Physical Activity DESCRIPTION This course provides a broad overview of sport psychology concepts that are relevant to most kinds of performance, including arousal and anxiety regulation, behavior modification, goal setting, intrinsic motivation and selfconfidence.

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HIGHLIGHTS Getting in the Flow Traditional sport psychology required athletes to apply the same brute force to their minds that they did to their bodies: regulating their breathing, eliminating distracting thoughts and fixating on their goals. But since one of their goals is to achieve a state of flow — which is, by definition, fluid and seemingly effortless — Slator, who has a Ph.D. in health and human performance, was not surprised that a more flexible approach worked better. “The harder you try to shut out the noise in the background, the harder it becomes,” she said.

“That’s true with a lot of things. The harder you try to relax, the more stiff you become.”

Mental Toughness: You’re Doing It Wrong Slator’s students learn a new way of defining mental toughness. “I had a student call it ‘mind control’ once, and we had a whole conversation on what it really means to be mentally tough,” she said. Rather than refusing to allow for weakness or failure, true toughness comes from acknowledging the stumbles along the way to success, according to Slator. “There’s this oxymoron: In order to really become mentally tough, you have to be comfortable being vulnerable.”

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Throwing (Mental) Darts In one lesson, Slator drew on Buddhist principles to discuss a theory called the darts of suffering. As the teaching goes, suffering begins with the first dart, the organic cause of grief or loss: perhaps the end of a relationship or the loss of a job. The second dart is self-inflicted; it’s the way we make sense of that suffering, and often it does more damage than the first. “If you tell yourself you didn’t get that job because you’re stupid or a failure, then you create this layer of suffering that you don’t really have to add to your life,” Slator explained. “Stepping back and seeing that choice point can eliminate some of that suffering.”

Mindful Assignments Throughout the course, Slator’s students practiced mindfulness, becoming more aware of their surroundings and physical sensations in an effort to stay focused on the present. Zoe Loversky, a McMurtry College junior majoring in viola performance, said the experience will help her as a musician. “It’s been a relief learning that mindfulness doesn’t mean you have to control your thoughts,” she said. “It can be easy to turn into a machine, especially in music school, when you’re practicing the number of hours we do. This showed me that I can be human and also perform well.”

— JENNIFER LATSON

sallyport | writ i ng h om e

¡Hola desde Quito!

[Greetings from Quito]

I

ERNESTO BILBAO ’09

AM WRITING YOU FROM Quito — la mitad del mundo (the middle of the world) and the first city to be declared a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site.

After earning my master’s degree in architecture at Rice, I opted to base my design studio, Estudio Ernesto Bilbao, in my hometown. I also teach at the School of Architecture of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ). Quito’s unique geography (it’s 9,350 feet above sea level) and striking contrasts serve as a fascinating case study of the Latin American city and make it a great place to practice architecture.

Quito possesses one of the bestpreserved historical centers on the continent — one that is subject to both the pressures of modern real estate

PHOTOGRAPH BY YOLANDA ESCOBAR JIMÉNEZ

development and the realities of an extreme topography. In my practice, I have been exploring how architecture and public space can respond to this strong opposition between the city and the natural landscape. The design studios I took at Rice taught me that architectural structures cannot be seen as objects apart from their context. It was great to explore these ideas in Texas towns, including Houston and Marfa.

After teaching design and theory classes in the mornings, I drive back to my office, review our projects and meet with clients. My office now has 11 full-time architects and four students-in-training. On an easy day, I’m usually at the office until 7:30 p.m.

On the weekends, I love spending time with my family. My wife, our two

sons (ages 10 and 6) and I usually visit the city parks and plazas or explore the nearby mountains and valleys. Sundays in the Old Town of Quito are dedicated for pedestrians — and the plaza is full of locals and tourists alike. One of my favorite examples of colonial religious architecture is the Compañía de Jesús Church (the Church of the Society of Jesus), a masterpiece of Spanish baroque architecture in Latin America.

Soon, I’ll be moving back to Texas to pursue a Ph.D. in architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. It will be great to be close to Houston again and especially to the Rice Owls!

Are you a young alum living outside the U.S.?

Write us a letter and tell us about your day-to-day experiences: ricemagazine@rice.edu m aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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sallypo rt | NOTED + QUOTED

“As we go from Rice, we should remember that we seldom have the luxury of knowing how things are going to play out. However, instead of being overwhelmed by fear, indecision and what could go wrong, let us dwell on what could go right, taking life as it comes and making changes as needed.”

— Jake Hassell ’16 in a speech given at the Undergraduate Convocation May 13, 2016. Hassell was selected by a committee of students, faculty and staff from more than 25 undergraduate applicants.

In 2006, tradition was broken when graduates didn’t receive their actual diplomas during Rice’s 93rd Commencement.

After discussions between the registrar, administrators, graduates and students, the decision was made to postpone delivery of the actual diploma. At approximately 18 inches by 23 inches, Rice diplomas are unusually large and oftentimes damaged after graduation. As a result, a significant number of diplomas had to be replaced. Graduates now receive a commemorative poster of an iconic campus shot and a letter from Rice’s president inside a manila tube when they walk across the stage. Official diplomas are mailed to recipients by midsummer.

2016 C OM M E NC E M E N T E D I T ION

total degrees conferred (some students with double or triple majors)

965

undergraduate or undergraduate professional degrees

932 master’s or Ph.D. degrees 12

R i c e M a g a z i n e | s u mm e r 2 0 1 6

— Sheryl WuDunn, the Commencement speaker for Rice’s 103rd Commencement. WuDunn won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, along with her husband, in 1990.

— Alex Byrd ’90, associate professor of history and outgoing Wiess College master, speaking at the Undergraduate Convocation ceremony.

Following Undergraduate Convocation Friday night in the Academic Quad, graduates and their families enjoyed a fireworks display. What went up in smoke?

Thirty cakes with 25 shots each for a total of 750 shots. (That’s pyrotechnic speak!)

J E F F F I T LO W

1,952

“One of the great challenges ahead will be the important decisions you will make in life. Most will involve trade-offs you will face. So we have to get our priorities right and figure out what we care most about.”

“You are a special community, and I think the world will need you to articulate even more fully and embody who you are and who you have been here even more fully in the next stage of your lives, because racism, sexism, nativism and fascism do not crumble under the weight of their own fallacies.”

dispatche s from rice athletics

C O U RT E SY O F L E N N I E WA I T E A N D O L AYA PA ZO

Olympic Owls T WO FOR M E R R ICE AT H L E T E S A R E headed to Rio for the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Lennie Waite ’09 will compete in the grueling 3,000-meter steeplechase, representing Great Britain. Waite, a native of Scotland, secured her spot at the British Championships in late June after running a personal best earlier that month in Portland. Waite, who has a Ph.D. in sport psychology, has maintained an active blog (lenniewaite. com) about her racing life — especially her “not always smooth and ideal” journey to the Olympics.

At Rice, Waite won two C-USA indoor titles (mile

Lennie Waite

Olaya Pazo

and 3,000 meter) and received the Joyce Pounds Hardy Award, the highest honor for female athletes. Former volleyball star Olaya Pazo ’06 will represent her home country, Venezuela, in beach volleyball. At Rice, Pazo was named most outstanding player and led the volleyball team to an NCAA tournament. After graduation, she played professionally in European leagues as well as on the Venezuelan national team for three years, teaming up with twin sister Rebeca Pazo ’05, also a former Rice volleyball player. The competition will take place on Copacabana Beach. m aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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s coreb oa rd DAY IN THE LIFE

Katherine Ip SPORT

WOMEN’S TENNIS HOMETOWN

HONG KONG COLLEGE

DUNCAN

MAJOR

KINESIOLOGY COACH

ELIZABETH SCHMIDT

MONDAYS

6:30 a.m.

Wake up, eat a breakfast bar, head to Tudor Fieldhouse

7:30 a.m.

Lift weights

8:40 a.m.

Second breakfast at Baker College: The croissants, scones and muffins are the best!

9 a.m.

Go to class: Motor Control, which explores the neurophysiological, behavioral and biomechanical aspects of human movement.

Career goal: physical therapist 14

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All-American senior Katherine Ip helped the Rice tennis team clinch its fourth consecutive C-USA championship last spring. Following some stellar postseason play in the NCAA Women’s Championship tournament, she vaulted 60 spots (from 104th to 44th) in college tennis rankings.

Over the summer, Ip competed in tournaments across Southeast Asia. At Rice, she organizes events and maintains the budget of the Hong Kong Student Association.

Noon

5 p.m.

1 p.m.

6 p.m.

Eat lunch (salad with lots of nuts) and catch up with friends at one of the serveries Go to class: Foundations of Health Promotion and Education

2:25 p.m.

Either treatment (massage, foam roll or stretches) or homework before practice

2:45 p.m.

Practice, practice, practice

Back to Duncan to shower and get ready for dinner and night class Go to class: Anatomy

8:30 p.m.

Study or read, Skype with parents and watch a Hong Kong TV show online

11 p.m.

Lights out

Before she even attends her first class this fall, Rice soccer player Erin Mikeska is already a part of a Rice University legacy — she’s the latest in a family line of talented, athletic Owls. Both her father, Shawn Mikeska ’87, and her uncle, Carl Mikeska ’85, were Rice baseball lettermen.

Shawn was a pitcher who finished his collegiate career with a 6-0 record and struck out 60 batters in 71.1 innings. Carl, his older brother, was a four-year letterman and a member of Baker College. He was a prominent player on the 1984 Rice team that finished second in the Southwest Conference.

At Elgin High School, Erin was named freshman of the year on the soccer team after scoring 16 goals and making 35 assists. A midfielder, she was a first-team, all-district player who led her team in goals scored.

When it came time to look at colleges, her father joined her on a campus visit, sharing some stories that she had never heard before and which made it clear he’d treasured his time at Rice.

“I knew he would support me in whichever school I chose to attend,” said Erin. “But I also knew he would absolutely love it if I went to Rice.”

Erin ultimately chose Rice over Auburn, Texas Tech and others, but she became an Owl for her own reasons. “I couldn’t stop smiling while I was on my visit,” she said, noting the beauty of the campus and “dynamic of life” at Rice. Soccer coach Nicky Adams has reason to smile, too.

“Erin leads through example with pure heart, work ethic and commitment.” — KAITLYN DUBOSE

K AT H E R I N E I P BY J E F F F I T LO W ; E R I N M I K E S K A BY A L L I S O N E D M O N

A Legacy Continues

Findings, Re search and more

Robotics research holds promise for stroke survivors CAN STROKE SURVIVORS “Our results are promising,” O’Malley said. “We “think” their disabled limbs know we can help people who have suffered a stroke.”

Stroke survivors often lose the use into motion? The research of EEG devices translate brain waves from healthy subof limbs and struggle Marcia O’Malley, associate professor of mechanical jects into control outputs to operate the robot, and then to regain control from stroke survivors who have some ability to initiate engineering and computer science at Rice, is heading movements, to prompt the robot into action. This perin that direction.

A robotic mits the team to refine the EEG-robot interface before O’Malley and her collaborators have developed exoskeleton, moving to stroke patients without residual upper-limb a robotic orthotic device that revolutionizes uppercoupled with the limb rehabilitation. The neurotechnology interprets function. Repetitive motion has proven effective at power of survivors’ own thoughts, may brain waves and makes it possible for stroke patients retraining motor nerve pathways damaged by a stroke, help patients relearn to operate an exoskeleton surrounding the arm from but patients must be motivated to do the work. how to use their fingertips to elbow. O’Malley’s lab is developing the O’Malley and research assistant Jennifer Sullivan arms and legs exoskeleton, while researchers at the University of ’11 traveled to Capitol Hill in June to share their work Houston work on the electroencephalograph (EEG)with lawmakers. The research is funded by a $1.7 based neural interface. The device has been tested by million grant from the National Institutes of Health ricemagazine.info/robotic and Neurological Research Institute. — PATRICK KURP UT Health physicians on volunteer patients.

J E F F F I T LO W

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

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a bst ract | Faculty Bo o ks

Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence

by Timothy Morton (Columbia University Press, 2016)

Part philosophical treatise, part historical account and part lyric essay, “Dark Ecology” offers a playful, poetic parsing of our era’s environmental crisis, focused less on the ecological challenges we face than on the ways we’re facing them. Morton, the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice, is interested in how humans make meaning of an increasingly fragile world, offering a theory-driven analysis that draws more heavily from Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger than from Rachel Carson and John Muir.

“What is dark ecology?” he asks rhetorically. “It is ecological awareness, dark-depressing. Yet ecological awareness is also dark-uncanny. And strangely it is dark-sweet.”

Morton is the author of numerous other books, including “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World” and “Ecology Without Nature.” He blogs at ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.

— J.L.

Border Lives: Fronterizos, Transnational Migrants and Commuters in Tijuana

by Sergio Chávez (Oxford University Press, 2016)

Chávez, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice, spent the better part of a decade studying “livelihood strategies” in Tijuana. “Border Lives,” the culmination of his years of research — and 158 interviews with border residents — explores the resourcefulness and adaptability those residents demonstrate in negotiating rapidly shifting immigration and border enforcement policies in the face of economic instability and social inequalities. The very geography of Tijuana, known by locals as la ciudad del brinco (jumping-point city), both constrains and enables mobility, as Chávez illustrates.

“By examining the strategies that people … employ to cross the border, find work, and settle into the borderlands across time and space, this book provides a nuanced picture of how people reproduce social structure and challenge — successfully and unsuccessfully — the very system which restricts their mobility and livelihood options,” Chávez writes.

— J.L.

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abstract | Re searc h B rIE Fs

B IOE N G IN E E R IN G

Building a better synthetic heart valve Heart valves typically work for decades without pause. They’re among the strongest and most The polymer hyaluronan can durable tissues serve as a versatile in nature, and template for unfortunately growing tissue for sufferers of heart-valve Gel-based scaffolds disease, the degrade as the options to repair cells grow into or replace them natural tissue are still limited.

Jane GrandeAllen, professor of bioengineering, and her colleagues have found that a natural polymer called hyaluronan, one of the chief components of skin and connective tissue, can serve as a versatile template for growing spongiosa, the middle tissue layer in the valve’s leaflets. The team, whose research recently appeared in the journal Biomacromolecules, is working toward the construction of replacement heart valves from materials that match those produced by nature as precisely as possible.

“It’s worth pursuing more gel-based scaffolds in tissue engineering,” Grande-Allen said, “because these can be easily tuned to match the stiffness of natural tissue, and researchers can encapsulate cells during cross-linking to study them in a 3-D environment.”

The study determined that naturally produced hyaluronan performed as well as a synthetic hydrogel, polyethylene glycol diacrylate, as a template for growing new spongiosa tissue. They reported that the stiffness of either hydrogel and the presence of a peptide known as RGDS could be even more influential in controlling a cell culture’s behavior.

— MIKE WILLIAMS Few options exist for replacing natural heart valves

S OCI OLOGY

From Islamic history, lessons on religious freedom Prophet Muhammad believed that freedom of religion and civic rights were important components of a “Muslim nation,” according to a new analysis of the prophet’s covenants with Christians.

Research by Rice sociology lecturer Craig Considine — published recently in the journal Religions — shows how the agreements emphasized tolerance. “These covenants were designed Rice sociologist’s to protect and even defend peaceful Christian analysis shows how communities, not attack them,” Considine said.

Muhammad valued Considine studied covenants written between freedom of religion and civil rights 622 and 632 A.D. Scholars have found the documents in obscure monasteries around the world and in books that have been out of print for centuries. All four covenants examined in the paper include an emphatic paragraph on the issue of religious freedom.

“And even as they honor and respect me, so shall Muslims care for that people as being under our protection and whensoever any distress or discomfort shall overtake (Christians), Muslims shall hold themselves in duty bound to aid and care for them, for they are a people subject to my Nation, obedient to their word, whose helpers also they are,” Muhammad wrote.

Considine said that as violence against Christians continues in countries such as Iraq and Syria, scholars and believers can point to the covenants as evidence that Islamic teaching cannot justify violence.

“Prophet Muhammad’s covenants with Christians can be viewed as a kind of medicine to cure the diseases of Islamic extremism and Islamophobia,” he said. “His message radiates compassion and peace.”

— AMY MCCAIG Prophet Muhammad authored covenants, or agreements, with Christian communities

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a bst ract | Resea rch Briefs ASTR ONOMY

A giant planet with a young star The recent discovery of a giant planet called CI Tau b contradicts the longstanding idea that larger planets take longer to form.

Christopher Johns-Krull, professor of physics and The finding calls into astronomy, and a dozen coquestion ideas about authors worked on the study, how planets form which will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

It’s at least eight Earth and the sun are times the size more than 4 billion years of Jupiter old, and while the 3,300plus catalog of exoplanets includes some older and some younger than Earth, the obstacles to finding planets around newly formed stars are varied and daunting, Johns-Krull said.

There are relatively few stars that are young enough, give off enough light to see clearly with telescopes and still retain circumstellar disks of gas and dust from which planets form. Stars so young also are often active, with visual outbursts and dimmings, strong magnetic fields and enormous starspots that can make it appear that planets exist where they do not.

CI Tau b orbits the star CI Tau every nine days.

It was found with a planet-hunting technique that relies upon slight variations in the velocity of a star to determine the gravitational pull exerted by faint nearby planets. Johns-Krull said the team has examined about half of the young stars in the survey sample, and the data from several of these suggest that more planets may be found.

— JADE BOYD A mammoth planet orbits a 2 million-year-old star in the Taurus constellation

P UB L IC P O L ICY

The cost of ‘right to try’ laws Since 2014, a major movement of patient advocates has worked to hasten access to experimental medical treatments. As a result, a number of state legislatures, including in Texas, have passed “right to try” laws designed to give terminally ill patients access to early investigational Science policy drugs before full Food and Drug experts worry Administration (FDA) approval. that these laws But these laws may make safety and compromise safety and efficacy efficacy secondary to speedy access, according to a new report by Kirstin Matthews, senior fellow at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, and Michelle Rubin, from Baylor College of Medicine.

“The goal of the laws is to remove the FDA and ethical oversight required in the expanded access application process,” the authors wrote. “However, these are important oversight mechanisms that can prevent harm and promote informed decision-making.”

The chance to access investigational drugs can naturally raise the hopes of patients and families, the authors said. “However, many policy scholars, physicians and scientists believe this can be a false hope and criticize the laws for, at times, causing more stress in a terminally ill patient’s life. ‘Right to try’ laws can perpetuate the idea that an experimental drug is worth the risk and potential danger, despite the fact that 85 percent of experimental drugs fail during clinical trials.”

Instead of focusing on removing regulation, the authors recommended that patients and advocates work with the FDA to improve access issues, perhaps through subsidies or tax breaks that would incentivize companies to provide the drug at little or no cost. The FDA has already started the process of revising its application process to make it less cumbersome.

— JEFF FALK The “right to try” movement has pushed for giving terminally ill patients faster access to early-stage therapies

abstract | Re searc h B rIEfs

P UB L IC P O L ICY

Hey Houston ...

What’s your big problem?

EARTH SC IE N C E

New answers to why Earth’s atmosphere has oxygen Today, some 20 percent of Earth’s atmosphere is free molecular oxygen, or O2. But for much New model of Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history, free oxygen suggests that the was all but nonexistent in the atmosphere. rise of oxygen on Earth was a result of Understanding how this change happened is key plate tectonics and to our knowledge of the planet’s early history. Now continents formed new research suggests that the rise of oxygen was in the presence an inevitable consequence of continent formation, of life life and plate tectonics.

The research team, led by Rice Earth Science Oxygen levels Professor Cin-Ty Lee, published its findings in spiked 2.5 billion years ago and Nature Geoscience. Lee co-authored the study 600 million with Laurence Yeung, assistant professor of earth years ago science, and Adrian Lenardic, professor of earth science, and with Yale’s Ryan McKenzie and the University of Tokyo’s Yusuke Yokoyama.

Lee and colleagues showed that around 2.5 billion years ago, the composition of Earth’s continental crust fundamentally changed.

“We believe the first rise in oxygen may have been due to a substantial reduction in the efficiency of the oxygen sink,” Lee said. He invoked the leaky bathtub analogy, in which the sources and sinks of oxygen and carbon dioxide are imagined as water flowing in and out of a tub. “This is equivalent to partially plugging the drain.”

The study also suggests that the second rise in atmospheric oxygen, 600 million years ago, was related to a change in production — analogous to turning up the flow from the faucet.

Lee and his team’s work predicts that production of carbon dioxide must increase with time, a finding that goes against the conventional wisdom that carbon fluxes and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have steadily decreased over the last 4 billion years.

“The change in flux described by our model happens over extremely long time periods, and it would be a mistake to think that these processes that are bringing about any of the atmospheric changes are occurring due to anthropomorphic climate change,” he said. “However, our work does suggest that earth scientists and astrobiologists may need to revisit what we think we know about Earth’s early history.”

— JADE BOYD

Houston area residents are remarkably optimistic about jobs and the future, according to Rice University’s 35th annual Kinder Houston Area Survey, conducted by Rice sociologist and Kinder Institute Founding Director Stephen Klineberg. Residents also rate Houston more favorably than ever, while continuing a long-term trend toward becoming more secular and more aligned with the Democratic Party.

Here is a sampling from this year’s findings:

If you work hard in this city, eventually you will succeed.

87.3%

agree

11.9% disagree

How would you rate the Houston area in general as a place to live?

80%

positive ratings

19.7% negative ratings

Do you think your financial situation will be better, worse or the same as today, after three or four years?

61%

better

8.7% worse

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a bst ract | Resea rch Briefs

P SYCHOLOGY

Bad couple: stress and diabetes A Rice study has found a link between emotional stress and diabetes, with roots in the brain’s ability to control anxiety.

The research establishes a metabolic chain reaction that starts with low inhibition, Interventions or attention control, which may include anti-inflammatory leaves a person vulnerable medications, to tempting or distracting cognitive behavioral information, objects, thoughts therapy and or activities. Previous studies mindfulness have shown that such vultherapy nerability can lead to more frequent anxiety, and anxiety is known to activate a metabolic pathway responsible for the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines, signaling proteins that include interleukin-6 (IL-6).

Along with cognitive tests that measured attention control, the Rice study measured levels of both blood glucose and IL-6 in more than 800 adults.

IL-6 is a biomarker of acute and chronic stress that also has been associated with a greater likelihood of diabetes and high blood glucose. The STRESS research showed individuals with low inhibition were more likely to have diabetes than those with high inhibition due to the pathway from high anxiety to IL-6.

“The literature shows individuals with poor inhibition are more likely to experience stressful thoughts and have a harder time breaking their attention away from them,” said Kyle Murdock, lead author of the study. “That made me wonder if there’s a stressinduced pathway that could link inhibition with inflammation and the diseases we’re interested in, such as diabetes.” Murdock is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Rice lab of Christopher Fagundes, assistant professor of psychology.

“Individuals who are anxious are more likely to avoid treatment and use maladaptive strategies (like smoking or unhealthy diets) that enhance their blood glucose, which is problematic. It’s a snowball effect: The further they go, the worse it gets,” Murdock said.

The National Institute on Aging and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute supported the research.

— MIKE WILLIAMS Researchers have suspected a biological pathway between anxiety and poor health, including diabetes

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E N G IN E E R IN G

A better way to compost A student engineering design team invented a device that sits under a sink and takes macerated food waste produced by a standard garbage disposal and sends it in one direction while liquid waste (including water) goes in another. It simplifies the process of recycling garbage into a useful product, while helping to protect water supplies.

Chalmers University The members of the design team, of Technology in (com)-post-haste, included Kavana Sweden is testing the device Gowda, Christina Petlowany, Andrew Miller, Edgar Silva, Mitch Torczon BioBlend produces and Ryan Yeh, all members of the finely chopped Class of 2016. They spent much of last waste that turns into year working in the basement of Rice’s compost faster than Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, regular garbage where they installed an actual research kitchen — or at least the sink part.

The project is a partnership with NASA, which has an interest in such devices for outposts on the moon, Mars and beyond, and with Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, which pitched Rice on the project and intends to install The BioBlend at its Living Lab, where it will be tested alongside other emerging household technologies.

“One of the things our sponsors want to see is if they can make the device large enough to put in the basement of an apartment complex or a grocery store or restaurant — places with a ton of food waste,” Torczon said. “They could create a lot of biogas they could then turn around and sell or, if they’re in a restaurant, use themselves.”

Whether it’s used for compost or biogas production, the key to the invention’s success will be its ability to keep garbage out of wastewater treatment plants, where it’s not only useless but also costly and complicated to remove.

The teammates had no problem finding a way to feed their creation. “One of the cool things about the project was digging once a week through the trash in the Rice serveries,” Yeh said.

Matthew Elliott, lecturer in mechanical engineering, was the team’s faculty adviser.

— MIKE WILLIAMS

ricemagazine.info/bioblend

B I O B L E N D : J E F F F I T LO W

A student engineering design team prototyped The BioBlend, a device that turns food waste into a highly compostable form

abstract | si x degrees

SIX DEGREES OF VALHALLA is inspired by Stanley Milgram’s experiments in social networks; actor Kevin Bacon’s eponymous parlor game; the stellar academic genealogies of Rice graduate students, alumni and faculty; and the enduring awesomeness of Valhalla, Rice’s graduate student pub.

HAFNER’S research group

Matthews analyzes molecular structure using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy to study protein misfolding and insertion into biological membranes in the lab of Jason Hafner ’98 (b. 1971), a professor of physics and astronomy and of chemistry.

1

4

and semiconductor ionic clusters in a machine of his own design after coming to Rice in 1976. He studied as a postdoc under physical chemist Donald Levy (b.

1939) at the University of Chicago.

2

5

LEVY’S work focuses on interactions between molecules in supersonic beams, which slow down molecular movement so they can be studied. Levy was a graduate student in the lab of Rollie John Myers Jr. (b. 1924), at the University of California at Berkeley.

3

6

uses gold nanoparticles and atomic force microscopes to study how cell membranes are constructed. Hafner earned his Ph.D. in physics at Rice in the lab of Richard Smalley (1943–2005).

SMALLEY studied metal

M AT T H E W S : J E F F F I T LO W

JAM ES M AT T H EWS GRADUATE STUDENT DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS

MYERS worked for

William Gwinn (1916–1997) as a graduate student in chemistry at Berkeley, where Gwinn studied how molecules absorb and emit energy from microwaves. Gwinn got his Ph.D. from Berkeley under Kenneth Pitzer (1914–1997).

PITZER studied the rotation of carbon bonds and served as dean of the College of Chemistry at Berkeley. He later became Rice’s third president (1961–1968). While at Berkeley, Pitzer also trained then-graduate student Robert Curl Jr. (b. 1933).

CURL studied the structure of free radical molecules, using experiments and theoretical calculations, and collaborated often with Smalley. In 1985, Harold Kroto (1939–2016) visited Rice and joined Curl and Smalley in studying the formation of carbon-based molecules in giant stars. It was during this work that the trio found the first evidence of C 60 (buckminsterfullerene), which would earn them a 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

— NICHOLAS ZAIBAQ

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Scene

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Pride

Photo by Jeff Fitlow

T

HE RICE COMMUNITY came out in force for the 2016 Houston Pride Parade June 25. It’s a partnership with a long history: Rice’s original LGBT organization, the Rice Gay/Lesbian Support Group, was formed in 1979, the same year as Houston’s first official Pride Parade. Since 2008, Rice Queers and Allies, Rice Alumni Pride and the Graduate Student Association have joined the Office of Public Affairs in cosponsoring a float in the annual parade.

This year, more than 80 students, staff, faculty and alumni walked, waved and tossed glow bracelets to an estimated crowd of 700,000 attendees. The back of Rice’s float featured a banner honoring those killed and injured in the Pulse nightclub shooting, just two weeks earlier. “We were very proud that the Rice community chose to stand in commitment to equality, dignity and the intrinsic worth of all,” said Greg Marshall, director of University Relations in the Office of Public Affairs.

— L.G. m aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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She Runs

From England to Japan, Ethiopia to New Zealand, Becky Wade ’12 spent a golden year after graduation living, working and running with some of the world’s fastest and most fascinating athletes. Here’s how it all began.

By Becky Wade

Illustration by Michael Byers

25

Stretching at the base of Mount Entoto, 8,500 feet above sea level, I caught my breath after lagging behind Banchi and Meseret in that morning’s hill workout. I had an excuse ready: I’d arrived in Ethiopia only days before and would need several weeks to acclimate to the time zone and altitude. I longed to prove to these women that I was also a serious runner, having competed at the U.S. Olympic Trials and at the World Junior Track and Field Championship, but neither my language nor my lungs would let me. I’d have to gasp my way through the girls’ “easy” runs, watch helplessly as they pulled away from me in workouts like this one, and grin with every shout of encouragement. “Aizosh, Becky!” “Berta!”

Derartu, though, was struggling. The 22-year-old, born and raised in Sululta, a town 10 kilometers outside Addis Ababa, could normally hold her own against the other two. Pound for pound, my five-foot friend was one of the stronger distance runners I’d encountered, with the quads of a soccer player and the spring of an antelope. But you’d never know it if you saw her that morning. As Banchi and Mesi bounded up the dirt road, Derartu lagged farther and farther behind. Glistening with sweat, a grimace on her face, she looked more like the local firewood carriers who piggybacked buffalo-size bundles up the mountain than she did her fleet-footed training partners.

In broken English and the same nonchalant tone she used to describe doro wat and shiro at dinner the night before, Banchi explained Derartu’s dilemma: The Devil was inside her, sapping her strength.

I’ve never wished more than in that moment to understand a foreign tongue. But given the English-to-Amharic language gap — not to mention cultural chasm — I had to rely on a bare-bones explanation and my own limited experience to make sense of what I had seen and heard.

I thought back to the blue Rice University track in Houston, Texas, where I’d spent the past five years chasing faster times in the 10,000 meters, 5,000 meters and 3,000-meter steeplechase, and tried to imagine the same conversation.

“Sorry, Coach Bevan, but I can’t finish the last mile repeat [hard interval] today.”

“What’s going on? Are you getting that weird sensation in your lower legs again?” my coach of almost a decade, Jim Bevan, would ask, probably dreading the details about my latest injury.

“No, it’s not that. I’m not hurt. It’s just that the Devil is inside me, and he won’t let me finish the workout.”

There was a long list of excuses that my forgiving coach would accept from his runners — a stomachache, a sleepless night, poor recovery from the last workout, even a recent breakup — but 26

R i c e M a g a z i n e | s u mm e r 2 0 1 6

Wade spent two months in Ethiopia.

inhabitation by the Devil had no place in it.

Worlds away in Ethiopia — the cradle of humanity, and of many of the world’s best endurance athletes — Banchi’s explanation wouldn’t be given a second thought. In fact, it was one of the more acceptable reasons that Derartu, one of the most privileged runners in the area, would be too weak to complete a hill session. Along with Banchi and Mesi, she had raced her way to a scholarship that entitled her to four months of comfortable housing, balanced meals, English and career-skills lessons, and her first structured running environment.

The Yaya Girls, named after the Yaya Village hotel and training camp where I lived and volunteered for two months, were the envy of Sululta, living like royalty compared to most of their family members and neighbors, whose homes were typically shacks lacking electricity and running water. The girls were still learning how to reconcile this new, temporary existence and its many resources with the familiar, simpler one that awaited them at the end of the program. They slept two to a twin bed for comfort when there were enough beds for all and declined the pre-run breakfasts offered each

J E F F F I T LO W

“The Devil is in Derartu. Today very, very not strong.”

morning. Clearly the lifestyle preferred by first-world runners was not universally considered ideal.

Less apparent was if and how, by exposing Banchi, Mesi and Derartu to new elements such as a varied, meat-inclusive diet, a strength program and fresh shoes, the Yaya Girls Program was tinkering with their potential as runners. Would such added comforts keep my friends healthier and more focused, or make them softer athletes, more likely to fold during key decision points in a race? Conversely, I wondered how adopting some rural Ethiopian practices — the very ones which we were tweaking — might influence, even enhance, my own running. Would a huge leap in the distance I walked daily interfere with my training? Would treating every Sunday as a day of rest make me a more consistent runner, or less fit? And how would a nutrition plan that emphasized grains over fruits and vegetables, and little protein, affect my energy and ability to recover?

I had about eight weeks to find some answers. Then it would be time to pack up and start again in a new country. That morning, I accepted that I’d probably never fully grasp Banchi’s reasoning about Derartu and the Devil — which I later learned was a blend of Ethiopian Orthodoxy and religious superstition, both foreign to my Catholic upbringing. But I was committed to trying, as I remained open-minded to other cultural beliefs and practices that inform how communities like the Yaya Girls approach long-distance running. I was searching for meaning in the universal phenomenon of running — the oldest, purest and most global of all sports — and, just maybe, an edge on my competition down the road.

A year earlier, I’d stood firmly on the opposite side of the world. I had lived in Texas all 22 years of my life, other than a few summers spent training in Colorado, and I was anxious to flee the coop, to see what the wider world could teach me about living, connectFINLAND ing and, naturally, running.

SWEDEN A scholarship athlete at Rice IRELAND University and a runner since ENGLAND the age of 9, I had engaged in the sport as it was dictated to me: practice schedules, track repeats, travel itineraries and SWITZERLAND rehab plans. My goal the past five years had become sunupto-sundown productivity, punctuated by two runs most days and peppered with naps, ice baths and ample time to cook and eat, even as I streamlined my nutritional and social needs. When my graduation from Rice approached, I faced an open-ended running future Wade for the first time, and I wasn’t traveled to sure what to make of it.

22 countries The prospect of copious free from July time and a more active social 2012 to life was attractive. Would my July 2013, body finally learn to sleep past spending the 6 a.m.? What would it feel like most time to eat a hamburger and fries in the nine at lunch, not having to hold noted here.

back for a looming afternoon workout? How many beers would I have to consume to catch up to my twin brother, Luke?

But I also didn’t feel quite ready to find out. I was wrapping up a fruitful career at Rice that included four NCAA Division I All-American Honors and two Olympic Trials qualifiers, and I was miles away from wanting to hang up my spikes. I felt shortchanged in my college career due to a string of injuries, and I was young and fresh by long-distance standards; I’d mainly focused on the 300-meter hurdles until college, and female marathoners typically don’t peak until their mid-30s — if they stick with it that long.

Most important, I still had a deep, childlike love for running. Finding new routes, learning the nuances of my body, forming relationships on the move and challenging myself at various distances still excited me, more than a decade after I first laced up a pair of Sambas and circled the block with my dad. I couldn’t fathom a life without running as a huge part of it.

At Rice University, where I competed from 2007 to 2012, my passion for running soared. Now, with my newfound independence, I wanted to be more deliberate with my running. To question the practices I had assumed were best, test how much of myself I would invest when the leash came off, and ultimately, find a balance between freedom and structure. Recalling Coach Bevan’s philosophy that “a happy runner is a fast runner,” I was on a mission to synchronize my heart and my feet.

JAPAN

ETHIOPIA

AUSTRALIA

NEW ZEALAND

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Wade runs along one of her favorite trails in Hermann Park.

excelled in certain disciplines — the United States and Jamaica in the sprints, Kenya and Ethiopia in the distances and Germany in the throws — there wasn’t an obvious overlap in the approaches of the victors. More clear to me was the idea that having such rituals, and believing in them, went a long way in each competitor’s experience of the event. In other words, the culture of a team, reflecting the place it comes from, seemed to matter. I left Poland not only with a suitcase full of new uniforms I’d traded for but also the desire to explore some of those cultures firsthand and to apply my discoveries to my own running endeavors. Four years later, I’d get my chance.

The Thomas J. Watson Fellowship sounds like one of Willy Wonka’s Golden Tickets. Awarded annually to 40 graduating college seniors “to enhance their capacity for resourcefulness, imagination, openness and leadership and to foster their humane and effective participation in the world community,” it basically funds the dream year of each recipient. Relying on a strict budget, each fellow spends 12 months traveling the world independently in pursuit of a personal passion — from beekeeping and meditation to unicycling and, in my case, long-distance running.

I proposed to spend my first year out of college diving into foreign running communities, searching for both unique and common ways that people around the world approach running and construct their lives around it. To find the pulse of each place’s running climate, I wanted to tackle all angles: jogging with recreational enthusiasts, questioning coaches about training philosophies, emulating the routines of professionals, interviewing running historians, tracking down retired legends, watching and competing in races, and exploring the trails and courses that locals loved most. My original agenda, hatched through obsessive research and with the help of hundreds of contacts, included England, host of the 2012 Olympic Games and a strong club culture; Ethiopia, nest of countless endurance phenoms; New Zealand, birthplace of the jogging boom and one of the world’s most influential running coaches; Japan, home to a famously disciplined running regime; and Finland, the tough and tiny nation that, having topped the long-distance world two separate times in the last century, epitomizes the ebb and flow of athletics. My curiosity was driven by the running culture I grew up in — a pressure cooker in which every result is scrutinized and Type A personalities are the norm. I loved it, but at times was left frustrated and drained.

Once I got on the road and started toying with the incredible flexibility of the fellowship, those plans evolved into a more organic strategy. The apartments and hostels I budgeted for? I only needed a few, in my very first destination and for the occasional rendezvous outside my base city. Eventually, I strung together 72 sleeping arrangements, most of my hosts in some way connected to their local running community and willing to open their doors to this small, curious American runner. The handful of countries I proposed to visit? I began using the money I saved on housing toward plane, train and ferry tickets. Before I knew it, five countries had snowballed into 22, some

J E F F F I T LO W

The most pivotal event in my running career up to that point was the 2008 World Junior Track and Field Championship, in Bydgoszcz, Poland. While debuting on an international stage in the 3,000-meter steeplechase, I first glimpsed the full spectrum of approaches to track and field. The Team USA distance squad emphasized short and easy runs in the days leading up to our races, while the Ethiopians continued running intense interval workouts. The Japanese team warmed up in silence, looking solemn and fierce, contrasted by the Italians chatting their way around the practice field. Differences emerged away from the track, too, as the athletes relaxed and supported one another. The Swedes runners always had a card game going in the hotel we shared, seemingly to help calm their nerves; the South African team performed infectious celebratory dances; and the Irish athletes and coaches were the clear extroverts of the bunch, requesting pictures and singlet swaps with everyone who passed by their training tent.

How all of those rituals influenced competitive performance, I couldn’t tell. Though the usual suspects

that I briefly explored in transit, and a dozen in which I lingered for at least a week and in some cases up to two months.

The real crux of my journey would defy research and planning. There would be discoveries about running and recovering; recipes gathered from hosts in each country; growth in adaptability and openness to new training methods; and relationships built with runners all over the world. My assumptions about the formula for athletic success, and the essence of distance running, would be both affirmed and shattered.

Banchi’s explanation for Derartu’s struggle — the Devil — was one of many obvious differences that I encountered in Ethiopia and elsewhere from the classical American approach to running.

KO LO : A L E S E P I C K E R I N G

Oats — in the form of porridge in the United Kingdom, muesli in Switzerland and pancakes in Scandinavia — are the breakfast of champions the world over.

The disparities among cultures struck me earliest and hardest, but similarities were abundant as well. With few exceptions, Sundays are universal long-run days, and kilometer repeats (or mile repeats for U.S. runners) are a bread-and-butter workout.

Oats — in the form of porridge in the United Kingdom, muesli in Switzerland and pancakes in Scandinavia — are the breakfast of champions the world over. Runners across the globe never seem to get their fill of tea; the Finn Valley Athletics Club in Donegal, Ireland, ends each daily session with hot tea and scones in the clubhouse. And somehow, amid all of that caffeination, distance runners everywhere with the luxury to do so treat afternoon naps as seriously as business meetings.

Deviation from the all-or-nothing, gadget-driven, resultsobsessed training style pervasive in the United States is neither comfortable nor secure. But stepping outside a conventional approach offers great potential to extend careers, foster unexpected connections and find fulfillment in running’s simplest form. Five months after returning from my trip and cherrypicking from each training style I encountered led me to the third-fastest marathon time in American history for a woman under age 25 and a contract with Asics, a shoe company with Japanese roots and a worldwide reach.

More important, my experiences running with athletes in different cultures laid the foundation for a future of continued joy and friendship found through running. In these pages are many of the lessons, techniques and rituals I encountered on my journey. Some I have incorporated into my own life, others I have included simply because they fascinate me. Together, they power the heartbeat of the global running community.

A big part of experiencing the running cultures of the world, Wade said, was eating the foods that powered the runners. The book includes a side helping of recipes for foods she tasted in the homes and kitchens of her hosts and fellow runners. Here is a snack favored by runners in Ethiopia, a country that has produced more than its share of world record holders and where Wade spent two months of her journey volunteering with the Yaya Village Girls Program.

RECIPE

Kolo

A crunchy snack mix available in Addis Ababa market stalls and grocery stores, kolo is the Ethiopian version of trail mix. Delicious by the handful or in a cup of yogurt, it’s a great snack for a hungry runner to keep on hand.

1 cup barley kernels 1/4 cup peanuts 1/4 cup dried chickpeas 1/4 cup sunflower seeds 1/4 cup dried soybeans Olive oil Salt Optional seasonings: 1 tablespoon berbere (Ethiopian spice mix, available at ethnic grocery stories or on Amazon) for savory kolo or 1 tablespoon honey for sweet kolo.

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Adapted from “Run the World: My 3,500-Mile Journey Through Running Cultures Around the Globe,” (William Morrow, 2016).

2. Toss barley, peanuts, chickpeas, sunflower seeds and soybeans in olive oil until lightly covered. Dust with salt and optional seasonings and toss to coat evenly.

3. Spread mixture onto a baking sheet and toast in preheated oven, tossing occasionally, until the mixture becomes crunchy and starts to crackle (20–30 minutes).

4. Remove from oven, let cool, and eat plain or on top of yogurt or oatmeal. m aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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LI G HTE R THAN AI R Last April, a small group of expert model airplane builders — competitors in the rarified world of indoor free flight — gathered in a Romanian salt mine to put their delicate creations to the test. Yuan Kang Lee ’92 was there to defend his world championship title, but first he had to launch a comeback.

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“ O N C E YO U HAVE TASTE D FLI G HT, YO U WI LL FO R EVE R WALK TH E E ARTH WITH YO U R E YES TU R N E D S K Y WAR D, FO R TH E R E YO U HAVE B E E N , AN D TH E R E YO U WI LL ALWAYS LO N G TO R ETU R N .”

— Leonardo da Vinci

Y UA N K A N G LE E C O U LD N ’ T CATC H A BREAK. He’d traveled all the way from California to Romania to compete against the best of the best in his sport. But the reigning world champion at the highest level of indoor free flight kept running into one setback after another.

The two model airplanes he’d designed, engineered and built in his garage workshop at home in San Diego — shimmering, gossamer creations made to soar higher and longer than any others — weren’t flying worth a nickel, and he couldn’t figure out why.

Lee spent all three pre-competition practice days fine-tuning his models, adjusting the wings, the tail, the rubber band engine that powers each flight. All to no avail.

Finally, he decided to use his backup plane, a third model he’d never flown high enough to win a world championship. Lee’s flurry of last-minute modifications left no time for extensive test flights.

He’d arrived at the competition site, an abandoned underground salt mine near the town of Slănic, feeling confident in his workmanship and flying skills.

Now he had no idea if his only remaining model would perform well or not.

There was only one way to find out. When his turn came, Lee paid little attention to the watchful audience of bundled, ski-capped competitors and participants seated in folding chairs all around the perimeter of the enormous, dimly lit space. Focusing only on the flight ahead, he carried his model out to the floor of the cavern, opened his hand and let it fly.

D R AG O N FLI E S I N S LOW M OTI O N AT LE F T: Lee in his garage workshop.

A free-flight model plane is a thing of beauty, a happy marriage of barely there transparent film and spaghetti-thin strips of the world’s lightest balsa wood.

A long, thick rubber band, wound a precise number of turns to produce a perfect climb and long, leisurely flight, powers its propellor.

Hold this work of art in your hand — carefully, very carefully — and you can barely discern any weight at all: less than a dollar bill. Let it go, and it scoffs at gravity, floating like a cloud, untethered and uncontrolled, until it’s good and ready to settle gently back to earth.

Imagine a silent squadron of these fanciful creations, all flying high and free above you, like a swarm of giant dragonflies in slow motion. Whichever one stays afloat the longest wins the round. Whichever amasses the most total flight time over three days of competition clinches the championship.

Sometimes the delicate models collide or crash land. Sometimes a nervous competitor tears a wing or crushes a tail.

All of these calamities and more befell Lee during last April’s biennial world championship competition in Slănic’s old salt mine, now a tourist attraction, prized by free flyers for its still air and 180-foot-high ceiling.

“Everything that could go wrong did go wrong,” Lee said. But Lee’s easygoing personality, Zen-like patience and uncommon ability to focus, even under stress, gave him an advantage, keeping him grounded even as he willed his plane to soar.

C R A Z Y A B O UT AIRPLANES From his boyhood years in Cleveland, building plastic and radio-controlled models on his own, Lee was “crazy about airplanes.” He’d hoped to study aeronautics during his undergrad years at Cornell, but his traditional Chinese father steered him toward fields he thought offered better job prospects. Lee dutifully took his father’s advice and studied electrical engineering but never lost his fascination with aviation.

After completing his graduate work at Rice — an M.S. in 1992 and a Ph.D. in 1998 — Lee further honed his research and problem-solving abilities m aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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I T C A N TA K E A N Y W H E R E F R O M 2 5 T O 1 3 0 HOU RS TO BU ILD A FREE- FLIGHT MODEL , DEPENDING ON THE BUILDER’S S TA N DA R D O F P E R F E C T I O N I S M . L E E S P E N D S 4 0 – 5 0 H O U R S I N H I S D I S H E V E L E D G A R AG E C R E AT I N G E AC H O F H I S P L A N E S .

AT LE F T: An artist’s rendering of Lee’s championship plane; one of Lee’s float planes under construction.

while working as a systems architect, first during 11 years at Texas Instruments and later at a San Diego cellular communications startup he launched with Chaitali Sengupta ’98, another Rice Ph.D. Since selling that company, Lee recently joined Fitbit as an embedded systems engineer.

“From very early on in my career, not only could I see the deepest and most detailed parts of the problem,” he said, “I could see the bigger picture.”

His focus came back to aeronautics six years ago, when his daughter’s science teacher asked him to coach a Science Olympiad team. Lee had a blast working with the middle schoolers to build and fly rubber-band-powered model planes. “Once I helped the kids, I was kind of hooked.”

With a little research, Lee discovered a global community of competitive but congenial aficionados who staged high-performance competitions in “indoor free flight,” a pursuit governed by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) Aeromodelling Commission. Considered both a hobby and a sport, this elite level of aeromodelling demands a combination of engineering, fine craftsmanship and wily strategy — a blend of talents seemingly tailor-made for Lee. “I need to be solving problems,” he said. From his home garage-turned-workshop, where hand tools, bottles of glue and bits of balsa wood clutter every horizontal surface, came sophisticated designs that stayed aloft longer than anyone — even veterans with decades of experience — had thought possible. He advanced quickly through the entry-level classes and began to compete in and win regional and even national competitions.

It can take anywhere from 25 to 130 hours to build a free-flight model, depending on the builder’s standard of perfectionism. Lee spends 40–50 hours in his disheveled garage creating each of his planes.

Although some of his colleagues keep impeccable

work spaces, a habit Lee’s wife wishes he would emulate, his work space suits him. “At certain levels, my mind’s a mess, too.”

In Lee’s case, it seems chaos breeds problem-solving.

He reached the F1D level, the pinnacle of indoor freeflight competition, just 18 months before the 2014 Indoor Free Flight World Championship and performed well enough in selection trials to qualify for the four-person U.S. adult team.

FLOATI N G TO TH E TO P And then in Slănic, Lee surprised everyone by coming out of nowhere to clinch the top trophy.

Fueled by his lifelong passion for airplanes, the talented newbie had discovered and exploited previously unimagined opportunities for improvement in model design.

“Now and then during the competition, I felt some deep panic, but it was momentary,” he said. “I was really driven by my love of these planes and the joy I get out of flying.”

Debuting later this year, “Float,” a documentary film, will revisit Lee’s winning performance at that 2014 event. Seeing the transparent, diaphanous model planes in flight, and the obsessive devotion of the competitors who build and fly them, drew the attention of independent filmmaker Phillip Kibbe.

“At first, it was a purely aesthetic thing,” Kibbe said, “but when I went to a competition and met the guys who do this, I realized it had a story to it.” Kibbe expected a short project, just a few months from start to finish. Instead, he ended up spending years filming F1D competitions in Japan, Argentina, England, Serbia and finally Romania, where he captured the 2014 World Championship. m aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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H E T O O K A D E E P B R E AT H A N D T O L D H I M S E L F T O S TAY P O S I T I V E . BY T H E T I M E H E ’ D R E PA I R E D T H E DA M AG E , T H E L E A D E R H A D A L R E A DY F L O W N . L E E N O W K N E W E X AC T LY W H AT H E N E E D E D T O D O T O W I N .

“Kang made our story,” Kibbe said. “The guys who fly these models wait decades for a chance to win the world championship, and then this new guy shows up, and all of a sudden he’s won.”

Perhaps no one was more amazed than Lee himself. He’s still not sure how he managed to pull off such a coup so early in his F1D experience.

“Maybe it was my training in engineering, which was all about getting as deep an understanding as possible by looking at a problem from every angle,” he said. “My mind was often thinking about the mystery of ‘How do I get that next 5 percent of performance?’”

It turns out a huge piece of the puzzle is how to get the most energy out of the rubber band used in the model’s “engine.” Lee keeps his extensive collection of rubber bands in a dorm-sized refrigerator, each in its own tiny manila envelope, covered with notes to remind him when he used it, how tightly he wound it and how long it kept the plane aloft.

“I was very surprised [to win], especially because what I did then was chump change compared to what I’ve learned since,” he said. “I was fortunate; at that time, chump change was good enough.”

FLY I N G

JA K E PA L M E R

W ITH LOV E

AT LE F T: F1D planes at the biennial world championship competition in Slănic’s old salt mine.

Last spring, Lee knew it would be different. His eyepopping performance in 2014 plus subsequent rule changes (shorter rubber bands to curtail flight times and keep competition on schedule) had inspired everyone to up their game. What worked before wouldn’t be good enough in 2016.

Still, Lee felt ready — until his top two models failed during practice. Setting out that first day of competition to defend his title with an untested backup plane, his confidence had dissolved.

And then he got an email from his daughter, Miranda Lee, an incoming Rice freshman, who will

join her older sister, senior Olivia Lee, on campus this fall. It was Miranda’s middle-school science project that had introduced her father to indoor free flight.

“I’m so proud of you,” she told him in the email. “Fly with love.” Lee recognized an echo of the advice he’d given Miranda before each of her lacrosse matches.

“Play with love,” he’d tell her. “Love of your teammates.

Love of the game.”

It wasn’t until the third (and last) day that Lee erased his shaky start with the best flight of the competition.

“It went exactly as planned, flew 5 feet below the ceiling, and it stayed in the air forever,” he recalled.

This stellar round brought him within 20 seconds of the leader. But while weighing his model for the final round of the competition, Lee encountered more bad luck: a piece of the scale fell off and ripped the plane’s wing.

He took a deep breath and told himself to stay positive. By the time he’d repaired the damage, the leader had already flown. Lee now knew exactly what he needed to do to win. He prepped his model for a conservative flight, just enough to beat the leading time without risking further damage, and aimed it for the heights.

Twenty-six minutes later, as Lee’s plane drifted down gracefully from an apogee of 180 feet, everyone stood watching, eyes on the clock. Would the reigning champion’s plane fly long enough to win again?

Fifty feet from the ground, the outcome still wasn’t clear. Ten feet, and it looked possible. But not until 5 feet from touchdown did Lee secure a second world championship title, with a final round time of 26:55.

While a handful of others have won more than once in the event’s 55-year history, Lee’s record of winning his first two international competitions is unprecedented.

“It was wonderful,” Lee recalled. “I was at peace even before it touched down, because I’d made up my mind that it was not the results that mattered. I told myself, ‘I’m going to do it for the love of it.’ And I really did.” m aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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R E M M SU SCHOOL This May, Rice students hiked and snorkeled their way through the rain forests and coral reefs of Belize as part of an intense tropical field biology course led by two of Rice’s intrepid biology professors. On the syllabus: observing and collecting data, blogging and recording, and perhaps most important of all — adapting to whatever happened next.

BY SCOTT SOLOMON

he trouble started with an unsettling sound every time our driver, Hugh, put his foot on the accelerator.

We were at least an hour from our destination, a remote rain forest research station called Las Cuevas, located deep inside the Chiquibul Forest Reserve near the Guatemalan border.

Perhaps the 17 of us — 14 Rice undergraduate students, two instructors and Hugh — were more than the 15-person van could handle, especially while pulling a trailer loaded with all the gear we needed for a two-week tropical field biology course. When the students signed up for the summer session course, Tropical Field Biology, we had promised that they would learn what it’s like to be a biologist working in remote sites in Central America.

They were about to get their first lesson.

The sound was getting worse but Hugh kept the van moving steadily forward until we came around a bend where Tapir Camp, a ranger station, came into view. Hugh and I hopped out and checked the transmission fluid. It was dry. Hugh shook his head, looking at the rough dirt road ahead and then back at the overloaded van. “We’re not going anywhere.”

I broke the news to my co-instructor, Adrienne Correa, who is a lecturer and the laboratory coordinator in Rice’s ecology and evolutionary biology program. This was the fourth year that LEFT: Junior Stephanie Zhao we had taught the admires a West Indian sea egg, two-week field a species of sea urchin that course together, inhabits seagrass beds near a nd we had Middle Caye, an island inside come to expect Glover’s Reef Atoll. the unexpected.

However, being stranded in the middle of the jungle on the first full day of our trip would throw off our plans for the rest of the day, if not longer. How would the students react?

Adrienne opened the van door, anticipating disappointment, if not mutiny.

Instead, the students proved they were already on their way to becoming resilient field biologists. “If we are stuck here, can we do lectures?” asked sophomore Megan Siemann. So we found ourselves sitting on the dirt road in the midday sun while Ella Matsuda, a junior biology major, delivered an impromptu lesson about termites.

Two weeks is not nearly enough time to learn about the two most biologically diverse environments on earth — tropical rain form aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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ests and coral reefs — both of which we would visit.

So students prepare by researching organisms, like amphibians or soft corals, in advance and sharing their knowledge. In Belize, they also learn how to design experiments, collect and analyze data, and effectively communicate their results — much like a lab course back on campus. But in the field, they also learn to be flexible when plans change, to solve problems creatively and to live without modern comforts like air conditioning or high-speed internet — lessons not so easily learned in a classroom.

When Ella’s talk concluded, we learned that help was on the way. Soon, we loaded our gear into pickup trucks and piled inside for the rest of the bumpy ride to Las Cuevas. The station gets its name from a cave that serves as a water source. It served the same purpose for the ancient Maya, whose ruined structures became the mounds of limestone boulders overgrown by the jungle surrounding the station.

Adrienne, an expert on corals, likes to point out that the limestone was formed long ago by the same types of reef-building creatures we would later see alive on the reef. Similarities between rain forest and reef slowly become apparent. Both environments contain an astonishing number of species despite lacking nutrients; both depend on organisms that use sunlight to build complex structures — trees in the forest, hard corals on the reef — that create a habitat and food for other species; both face threats as desperate people illegally exploit their natural resources.

Most students who take the course are ecology and evolutionary biology majors. For many, it is their only opportunity to conduct research in a natural environment. But for others, like senior Grace Cullinan, it is just the beginning. Grace took the class last summer and joined this year’s course to collect data for her senior thesis project on the interactions between Christmas tree worms and corals. When our group arrived on day No. 9 at Glover’s Reef Research Station — located on an island 28 miles from the coast — Grace already knew exactly where to go. Much of our research at Glover’s Reef occurs in the calm, shallow waters adjacent to the tiny island. Thanks to her prior experience, Grace collected all the data she needed in just five days.

One of this year’s students, junior Lucrecia Aguilar, hopes to follow Grace’s example by returning to Belize next year to do independent research.

Lucrecia’s dream is to study big cats, which she got to try in our field experiment with motion-sensitive “camera traps.” Checking the photos is always exciting, but having an aspiring cat biologist among us upped the anticipation. After dozens of disappointing pictures of swaying twigs, suddenly there it was — an ocelot. The entire class erupted with cheers, and Lucrecia was beaming.

In contrast with students who already have a deep interest in tropical ecology, it was less obvious what Randy Zhang, a senior electrical and computer engineering major, would get from the course. Yet Randy became one of our most enthusiastic students; he was always the first one up for predawn bird-watching and brought a unique perspective to our group discussions on tropical ecology research. By the end of the course, Randy was inspired. He had a list of ideas for improving electronic devices used in field biology, like camera traps, that he hoped to pursue for his senior design project.

Seeing students become inspired, develop an appreciation for the diversity of life or simply learn to be adaptable makes teaching this course an absolute joy. Often, such transformations are apparent during the two weeks we spend with the students. This year, we witnessed junior Sam Gao turn his aversion to cockroaches into an appreciation that some might consider an obsession (we assured Sam that this is a good trait in a tropical field biologist). But sometimes we only learn about the true effect on students after returning home. In his final course blog post, Sam wrote, “I feel that being in the Chiquibul Forest and Glover’s Reef has not only informed me knowledgewise about these two diverse ecosystems, but it has also changed me spiritually.”

As hard as I try, I doubt my courses back in Houston will ever have such a profound effect.

Scott Solomon is professor in the practice in biosciences at Rice and a resident associate at Baker College. He is the author of “Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution,” forthcoming from Yale University Press (October 2016).

FACING PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP:

The coral reefs at Glover’s Reef Atoll, Belize, are a UNESCO World Heritage Site and outdoor classroom for students in Tropical Field Biology.

Mangroves are key habitats for many marine species, including sponges that cling to their roots beneath the water’s surface.

Students measure the amount of trash that washes up on the shore of Middle Caye.

THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT:

Jenny Groover ’13 and Jordan Rothfeld ’15 pause while exploring the depths near Glover’s Reef in 2012.

Nancy Grieg, director of the Cockrell Butterfly Center at the Houston Museum of National Science, identifies birds for students in the 2012 class.

An ocelot caught by a “camera trap” during a nocturnal outing.

Read more student blog posts from the 2016 Tropical Field Biology course here: ebio319.blogs.rice.edu

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NIGHT OWL A seri e s t hat pro files Owl s wh o se wo rk ta kes flight at night .

Pouring It On

Story by Michael Hardy ’06 | Photo by Jeff Fitlow

B

EFORE POURING A GLASS OF WINE AT

Camerata, the intimate wine bar he co-founded in Houston in 2013, David Keck ’09 gives the glass a quick sniff. “This is Houston — our water is terrible.”

To keep its stemware clean, Camerata uses a water purifier and a deionization tank. But just in case, Keck sniffs every glass. “If there’s something wrong with the glass, the last thing I’d want to do is pour a delicious wine into it. It’s usually not an issue, but I prefer to check.”

That attention to detail is part of what makes Keck a master sommelier, a title given him recently by the Court of Master Sommeliers, the London-based body that certifies wine service professionals. This May, Keck was one of only three out of 63 candidates to pass the notoriously difficult three-part exam, which included a blind taste test. That puts him in an exclusive club of only about 250 master sommeliers worldwide.

Few candidates pass all three parts of the exam on the first try. Keck passed the theory and service portion in 2015 but failed the blind taste test, so he spent much of the past year studying. He was mentored by some of the country’s most legendary sommeliers, including Guy Stout of Glazer’s Distributing, who at the time was Houston’s only master sommelier. None of his mentors ever charged him, although Keck sometimes offered to replace the bottles of wine they sampled.

“It’s a huge part of what we do,” Keck said. “You have mentors and people who help you along the way, and then once you’re a master sommelier it’s about helping the next generation get over the hurdles.” From the beginning, Keck wanted Camerata to be an educational resource for his fellow wine professionals; most of the bartenders are aspiring sommeliers hoping to follow in their boss’s footsteps.

He didn’t always bleed Bordeaux, however. Keck’s first love was opera. A Vermont native, he studied music at Columbia University and Juilliard before becoming a professional singer, performing at opera houses around the world. He came to Rice in 2007 to study with Stephen King, a renowned vocal teacher and the Lynette S. Autrey Chair of Voice at the

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Shepherd School of Music. For his first master’s recital, he sang Dmitri Shostakovich’s rarely performed “Six Romances on Verses by English Poets,” accompanied by the Shepherd School Orchestra.

“I went to the orchestra with the idea to perform the work, and they were totally into it,” Keck recalled. “That was just a great experience.”

All along, Keck had maintained a secondary interest in wine, which he grew up drinking with his family. He worked his way through Columbia, Juilliard and Rice with bartending jobs, learning the industry from the bottom up. In Houston, he unexpectedly found himself in the epicenter of an exploding restaurant scene. “I finished my degree in winter 2009, which was right at the beginning of the food renaissance in Houston,” he recalled. “Uchi moved in, Chris Shepherd opened Underbelly, Pass and Provisions opened up. There was this landslide of wonderful food, so it was a great time to be in the wine business.”

Keck ultimately abandoned his opera career (the constant travel was a big turnoff) to become a wine buyer for several Houston restaurants, establishing a reputation for his discerning palette. In 2012, he was named the beverage director at the Uchi Restaurant Group, a chain of high-end Japanese restaurants with locations in Houston, Austin and Dallas.

The following year, he partnered with restaurateur Paul Petronella to open Camerata, which Keck named after the Florentine Camerata, a group of artists and musicians in Renaissance Italy.

On a recent evening, Keck stood behind the bar, discussing a bottle of rosé from Clos Cibonne, a winery located in the south of Provence that Keck has visited. “They’re lovely folks,” he said. “They use large-format oak for their rosé, and it ages in these huge barrels under what’s called ‘flor’ — a bacterial growth like you find in sherry — that will sit on top of the wine and keep it from oxidizing but also eats all the sugar that might be left. It also lends it this kind of interesting savory, spicy character that’s very different from your average Provençal rosé.”

Keck rejects the idea of a sommelier as a rarefied arbiter of taste. “For most of the 20th century, the sommelier was basically the guy who came by in a suit and tie and tried to sell you the most expensive bottle of wine on the list,” he said. “It had a very stuffy connotation. For me, the most important thing is being humble and gracious, to serve your guest rather than pumping up your own ego. I think a good sommelier’s job is to provide the best beverage possible for whatever the customer wants to spend.”

Are you a night owl? Does your work schedule typically begin when the sun goes down? Send us a note at ricemagazine@rice.edu. m aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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creative ideas and endeavors

RICE GALLERY’S FRONT GLASS WALL IS

abloom this summer with the colorful brush strokes of painter Michael De Feo. The installation, “Crosstown Traffic,” is the seventh in the gallery’s Summer Window exhibition series, which features works visible through the glass wall while the gallery is closed for the summer. De Feo gained recognition for painting over outdoor fashion ads in New York City with buoyant floral patterns. He supersizes 44

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CROSSTOWN TRAFFIC

by Michael De Feo Through Aug. 28 Rice Art Gallery Sewall Hall Free and open to the public

ricegallery.org/ michael-de-feo

the commercial kiosk effect with floor-to-ceiling imagery on Rice Gallery’s wall. “You jolt people out of those rhythms and you create this moment of magic, potentially, or a moment of whimsy or a moment of play,” De Feo said. His iconic line drawings of a curving stem topped with daisy petals can be seen sprouting from the bases of telephone poles, tucked in between signs and embellishing a myriad of surfaces — and, for a time, at Rice Gallery.

J E F F F I T LO W

A Giant Kiosk

arts & Lett ers

What to See Now

We asked Rice Gallery curator Joshua Fischer for his top picks of museum and gallery exhibitions in major cities across the United States.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

“As Essential as Dreams: Self-Taught Art From the Collection of Stephanie and John Smither”

Through Oct. 16

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

This exhibition is a promised gift to the Menil from Houston-based collectors Stephanie and John Smither, who have amassed remarkable works by selftaught and visionary artists from around the world. These artists made works not necessarily intended for the gallery or museum, and they are reminders of the relentlessness and power of the creative spirit. It is a must-see.

“Robert Irwin: All the Rules Will Change”

Through Sept. 5 Robert Irwin is a pioneer of the California Light and Space movement, which includes artists such as James Turrell who use minimal means to draw attention to our perceptual experience of architectural spaces. Some Rice alums may remember Irwin’s temporary installation on Rice’s campus in the cloister between Lovett Hall and Sewall Hall in 1987. The Hirshhorn exhibition surveys Irwin’s work from 1958 to 1970. Closer to home, you can view a new permanent installation by Irwin at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, which opened in July.

HOUSTON

Menil Collection

HOUSTON

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston “Kusama: At the End of the Universe”

Through Sept. 18 Rice alums may remember Yayoi Kusama’s “Dots Obsession” from 1997 at Rice Gallery. The gallery was transformed into a vivid yellow, dreamlike space filled with large balloons and with every surface covered by Kusama’s signature polka dots. She is back in Houston with recent installations that will transport and envelop viewers with her refined use of pattern, light and reflection, which make her small spaces feel infinite and vast.

NEW YORK CITY

Whitney Museum of American Art “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing”

Through Sept. 25 Visit the brand new Whitney building by architect Renzo Piano and indulge in the vibrant, colorful paintings of Stuart Davis (1892–1964). One of the most important American modern painters, Davis merged a love of the bold styles and colors of American advertising with the latest trends in European abstract, avant-garde painting.

CREDITS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Robert Irwin, Installation view of Untitled (Acrylic Column), 1969–2011, and Untitled (Acrylic Column), 1969–2011, in Robert Irwin: All the Rules Will Change at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2016. Artwork © 2016 Robert Irwin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York , Photo: Cathy Carver / Yayoi Kusama, Love Is Calling, 2013, courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore; Victoria Miro, London; KUSAMA Enterprise. Image © Yayoi Kusama / Carlo Zinelli, Untitled, 1969. The Menil Collection, Houston, Promised gift of Stephanie and John Smither. © Fondazione Culturale Carlo Zinelli / Stuart Davis (1892–1964), Owh! in San Pao, 1951. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 52.2. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY m aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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arts & lett er s

Author Q&A “Three-Martini Lunch” by Suzanne Rindell (Putnam, 2016) SUZANNE RINDELL’S LATEST NOVEL EXPLORES A WORLD she knows well — the New York publishing scene. Rindell worked for several years at a Manhattan literary agency, during which time she wrote her first novel, “The Other Typist.” Her second, “Three-Martini Lunch,” follows a trio of characters whose literary ambitions parallel her own, although during a different era. The book is set in the late 1950s, and the three young protagonists are vying to establish careers as writers and editors in the face of institutionalized sexism, racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia. Rindell, no stranger to multitasking, is now working on a third novel — and pursuing a Ph.D. in American modernist literature at Rice.

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Things have changed, insofar as it used to be mostly men and now you see women in the business, but publishing still suffers from an overwhelmingly obvious lack of diversity. It’s somewhat falsely encouraging that they’ve finally let women into the biz, because there remains a significant gendered pay gap. So in some ways, these women make up a cheap, educated workforce — which is kind of depressing when framed as such.

You wrote your first book early in the mornings and late at night, bookending (pun intended) what must have been hectic days at the literary agency where you worked at the time. How did you pull that off?

Writing is more of a compulsion than anything else, so I’ve always found that it makes time for itself — it squeezes itself in or else steals time from some other corner of your life. (Goodbye, eight hours of sleep!) At the literary agency, my entire day revolved around answering one question, over and over again: What makes for a good book? So I think that only added fuel to the fire. During the day, I’d work on answering that question by helping other people with their books. And in the wee hours, I was trying to answer that 46

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question by writing the manuscript I was hoping to find in the slush pile.

What made you want to pursue a Ph.D. in literature?

It’s funny, I went into the program thinking one thing, and now I think another. I went into the program with the specific goal of becoming a tenure-track professor.

I’m not sure that’s exactly the right fit for me anymore, and at the same time I think my Rice education is more important than ever. It structured my engagement with literature in a larger way; I believe it’s what keeps me on the “literary” side when I toe the literary/commercial line.

I think a lot of people would say, “If you were going to be a novelist, why wouldn’t you have gone to a creative writing MFA program?” But I don’t think that would have served me as well.

Why did you choose Rice for grad school?

What is the focus of your studies here?

I was drawn to Rice because the English department supported their grad students not only with the obvious — funding — but also with the idea that a grad student ought to take an active hand in shaping his or her specific path of study.

Working on my disser tation actually sparked the idea for my first novel, “The

Other Typist.” I’d been digging through everything to do with women in the Jazz Age when I found an obituary of a woman who’d worked as a typist in a police precinct during Prohibition. I thought, “Well, her life must’ve been interesting!” and the novel just started writing itself. Now I’m returning to work the same ideas through in an academic manner.

Is it jarring to switch between fiction and academic writing? What are the biggest differences between those worlds?

I think of it in terms of “show” or “tell.”

Academic writing is “tell”: You’re supposed to argue your point with precision and transparency. Fiction is “show”: If you do your job right, you present readers with a sensory experience and invite them to construct the narrative, synthesize information and draw conclusions in their own brains.

Any chance that a future novel of yours will include a character who is a Rice student/alum/professor?

This seems like a dangerous question to answer.

How do you like your martinis?

Extra dirty. I drink plenty of wine, but martinis are serious business. I always have to water it down with loads of olive juice.

— JENNIFER LATSON

Read more about “Three-Martini Lunch” at suzannerindell.com.

ELIZABETH ROMANSKI

Your characters must overcome considerable obstacles as they pursue their literary ambitions — especially related to race, gender and sexual orientation. Have those issues disappeared from today’s publishing world?

arts & lett ers

ON THE BOOKSHELF

The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore

by Michele Wucker ’89 (St. Martin’s Press, 2016)

The provocative theory of Wucker’s latest book is that, in business, politics and everyday life, the most likely, high-impact threats are the ones we are often least prepared for. Like “a two-ton rhinoceros aiming its horn in our direction,” these are the threats we should be working hardest to avoid — but time and time again, they’ve caught business leaders and policymakers off guard. Take the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 or the cyberattacks that have done irreparable damage to businesses and entire nations. They shouldn’t have blindsided anyone, Wucker argues. Yet, she explains, “the very obviousness of these problematic pachyderms is part of what makes us so bad at responding to them.”

The book, Wucker’s third, proposes a solution based on her extensive background in policy formation and crisis management — both as a journalist at Dow Jones and the International Financing Review and as a think tank executive at the World Policy Institute and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

— J.L.

Fuego

PA R K E R : C O U RT E SY O F L I Z P R .C O M

by Leslie Contreras Schwartz ’02 (Saint Julian Press, 2016)

With images of floods and fire, birth and death, violence and the exhausted calm of motherhood, Schwartz’s debut poetry collection is an exploration of survival in the face of daunting odds. As the Houston Chronicle put it in a review, “Schwartz doesn’t use words to smooth over life’s edges. Instead, she writes about the jagged parts directly ...

(This is) a collection of clear, crisp poems that tangle directly with the stuff of life.” Schwartz, who has an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College, has published poems in Pebble Lake Review, Southern Women’s Review, Storyscape Literary Journal and other publications; her essays have appeared in the Houston Chronicle, OZY, The Huffington Post and Dame Magazine.

— J.L.

S P OT L IG H T

THAT’S HIS JAM

Jon Kimura Parker, professor of piano at the Shepherd School, can transfix an audience with his own transcription of “Rite of Spring” (an entire orchestra reduced to two hands on a keyboard), and the next moment he’ll have the crowd jamming to Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets.”

He’s a versatile artist and a consummate showman who illuminates stages worldwide.

Parker was recently awarded an honorary fellowship by Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music — an accolade he shares with only one other musician this year: the eclectic singer k.d. lang. It is the highest honor bestowed by the Royal Conservatory, which has been Canada’s national music school since 1886. Parker and lang performed and were fêted at an appropriately themed Royal Occasion gala in May.

— HOLLI CLEMENTS

m aga z i n e . ric e . e du

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FAMILY ALBUM

Closing the Book on a Half-Century Project

By Randal L. Hall

I

Lynda Crist poses with a painting of Jefferson Davis.

N FEBRUARY 2016, THE HISTORY DEPARTMENT AT

Rice hosted seven leading historians from around the country to address the topic “Jefferson Davis’s America: New Perspectives on the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States.” The occasion marked a momentous achievement: the release of the 14th and final volume of “The Papers of Jefferson Davis,” published by Louisiana State University Press between 1971 and 2015.

This massive documentary editing project was conceived at Rice by historian Frank E. Vandiver (1925–2005) and others

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in 1963 and incorporated as the Jefferson Davis Association. Rice hosted the project for more than half a century, and a long list of donor agencies and individuals underwrote the effort, including crucial early support from the William Stamps Farish Fund.

The editors laboriously collected an estimated 100,000 documents from across the United States. They compiled, transcribed and annotated the most important items for publication. The letterpress edition has supported American historians’ research on slavery, the Civil War and other crucial historical issues.

Many talented scholars contributed to the project, but a mainstay, beginning in the late 1960s, was Lynda Lasswell Crist ’67. A Houston native, Lynda graduated from Rice with a B.A. and stayed on for an M.A., awarded in 1969. As a student, she was already interning with the Davis project, but she left Houston long enough to finish the course work for her Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee. When she returned, it was for the long term. She was at work on “The Papers of Jefferson Davis” even while she completed her doctoral dissertation on a Mississippi planter and politician. For the initial three Davis volumes, she was first an assistant and then an associate editor.

In 1979, she was named editor, a position she held until her retirement many thousands of pages later, at the end of January 2016.

It is hard to comprehend the amount of work, discipline and creativity that Lynda and her colleagues invested in collecting, sorting, selecting, transcribing and, perhaps most importantly, annotating and indexing the published documents. Few similar major documentary projects have ever reached completion since Princeton University, in 1943, inaugurated the modern era of documentary editing with its ongoing project on Thomas Jefferson. To have persevered to the end in the grant-starved environment of recent years is a special achievement for the Davis project. In addition to the published volumes, distinguished for their accuracy and scholarship, the endeavor has left a legacy to Fondren Library’s Woodson Research Center. For the ongoing benefit of researchers, it houses many of the documents and other research materials that the project relied on.

The fifth floor of Fondren Library has long been a haven for historians, with history graduate offices and the Journal of Southern History arrayed near the former Davis project suite. It is a less special spot now. Missing is Lynda Crist’s calm elegance — just what you want in an author, an editor, a colleague and a friend.

Randal L. Hall is associate professor of history and editor of the Journal of Southern History at Rice.

THEIR FIRST STEP SHOULDN’T BE A GIANT LEAP.

Join us in building the new Rice network.

Rice students take an important symbolic step when they walk through the Sallyport.

Starting Oct. 12, alumni and parents will have a new way to make sure it’s not their first. The Sallyportal, Rice’s new online professional development hub, will give you the platform to guide our students’ professional paths.

The Sallyportal will be the launchpad for professional connections, where Rice alumni and parents everywhere can volunteer as mentors, create professional development opportunities for students and engage with campus partners. This signature component of the Initiative for Students will be a virtual community where you can create powerful educational opportunities, share your experience and network.

Learn more at sallyportal.org today and sign up on launch day, Oct. 12.

sallyportal.org

Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Permit #7549 Houston, Texas Rice University, Creative Services–MS 95 P.O. Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251-1892

Dog Days of Summer Photo by JE FF FITLOW

RICE’S RESIDENTIAL COLLEGES are home to almost 3,000 undergraduates, college masters, RAs and their families — and that includes a healthy population of dogs. Small or large, fullbred or anybody’s guess, these four-legged family members soak up the attention of adoring college students and give back the love. Take Lady, a 1-year-old purebred Australian shepherd belonging to Ken Whitmire, chemistry professor and master at Sid Richardson College. Lady’s striking “blue merle” coloring, mismatched eye colors and wacky tongue fit perfectly with her enthusiastic personality. She’s also an energetic companion for Stella, Whitmire’s older border collie/golden retriever mix. Sidizens often visit the house for “Stella and Lady study breaks,” Whitmire said. “The dogs love the attention and the students love being able to play with them.”

You might see Lady and Stella taking walks around campus and Hermann Park or visiting a dog park — two of their favorite words. To see more photos of our campus’s canine companions, check out our new website at magazine.rice.edu.

— L.G.