Rice Magazine Issue 1

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| Talking Oil

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| Earthquake Watch

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| When They Get Ambitious

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| From MOB to High-Tech

IKE

“MY PRIDE IN THIS UNIVERSITY HAS NEVER BEEN GREATER.” —President David Leebron

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THE LITTLE NETWORK THAT COULD PAPER, PLASTIC OR NANO? TAKING BOWS AT THE KENNEDY CENTER COURTING THE COLLEGE WORLD SERIES

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How can you possibly see grains of sand orbiting distant stars? Ask astronomer Christopher Johns-Krull.

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Rice makes the Best Places to Work ranking for the third year in a row.

Fill ’er up with buckyballs!

Introducing new high-pressure storage for hydrogen.

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20 Buckytubes and bones form a fast-growing partnership.

15 New Rice trustee Lee Rosenthal is judged to be among the best.

21 Researchers are putting the pressure on cartilage.

11 17 Gobbling spilled oil on demand: Meet the nanobaton sac.

A chemist makes a remarkable archaeological discovery.

12 Biomedical research gets a boost.

On the cover: View of Hurricane Ike from the International Space Station.

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Astronaut Peggy Whitson ’86 loves breaking things in space.

A low-cost wireless network developed at Rice has become a valuable resource for sociologists, medical researchers and anthropologists studying neighborhood dynamics.

Students 23 Looking for an alternative to the traditional office? Look no further than Caroline Collective.

Features

Arts

3 Hurricane Ike

42 From the Summer Window Series to the student art show, the Rice Gallery showcases the old and the new.

From making sure students were safe to organizing community relief efforts, Rice weathered Hurricane Ike with resilience and compassion.

46 If there is a way for a composer to write music for walking on cloud nine, Kurt Stallmann will probably find it.

24 Lynn Laverty Elsenhans Lynn Laverty Elsenhans ’78, the new CEO and president of Sunoco, reflects on global energy concerns, the challenges facing women in the corporate world — and her favorite university.

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By Christopher Dow

28 Cracking Quakes and Other Earthy

Bookshelf

Matters

We might not be able to prevent earthquakes, but decoding the signals that precede them could minimize loss of life and property damage. Rice Earth scientists are cracking the code.

48 If you think that architecture students just design buildings, you might be surprised by “The Things They’ve Done.”

By Jade Boyd and Christopher Dow

32 Historic Building

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With “green” roofs cropping up on new Rice buildings, the Recreation Center rising next to the Rice Memorial Center and “The ‘John and Anne’ Grove” enticing strollers with its cooling shade, the campus is looking better than ever.

36 Green as Grassroots

By Merin Porter

40 The Entrepreneur Next Door High-tech entrepreneur David Zumwalt ’81 brings his touch for success to the University of the Virgin Islands Research and Technology Park, where he helps provide opportunities for the region’s rising business and technology stars.

49 April DeConick was intrigued

by National Geographic’s translation of the Gospel of Judas — until she read the original for herself.

Sports

By Merin Porter

A student-led initiative to lessen the environmental footprint of the campus is producing tangible results for Rice.

47 Summer music camp fills the air with ... well, the sound of music.

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50 No matter what the outcome, you know these outstanding student–athletes worked hard to earn Rice’s seventh trip to the College World Series.

52 Class act Cole St. Clair ’08 receives the 2008 CLASS Award.

By Merin Porter

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Rice Magazine Fall 2008, Vol. 65, No. 1 Published by the Office of Public Affairs Linda Thrane, vice president

WELCOME TO OUR NEW LOOK

As Rice University takes bold strides to achieve its Vision for the Second Century plan to grow the institution in size, impact and reputation, it deserves a flagship publication worthy of its aspirations.

In that spirit, we’ve spent much of the last year looking at what we’ve been doing right with this magazine, what needs improvement and what we can do without. Now, with the dust of renovation finally settling, we’re pleased to unveil the new Rice Magazine.

The process of charting a fresh course for the magazine was made possible, in large part, by our recent readership survey. Many of our decisions were based on your suggestions and comments, and we sincerely thank you for your valuable time and input.

The first thing you probably noticed — aside from the magazine’s dimensions — was the absence of the name “Sallyport” on the masthead. The overwhelming number of responses to the question concerning the name indicated that it had limited recognition outside of the university community and did not adequately communicate the magazine’s affiliation with Rice. This is a critical point since the purpose of the magazine is to help further Rice’s mission and reputation as the university expands its influence beyond Houston and Texas.

We’ve adopted the simple but evocative name, Rice Magazine, to better achieve identification with the university we represent. At the same time, we felt that “Sallyport” is a time-honored, symbolic name, and it will live on in a major department, “Through the Sallyport,” where you can read campus news and articles on people and research.

You’ll find a number of changes inside, as well. While we’ve kept many of the basic bones that made Sallyport such a durable publication, we’ve trimmed the fat, toned the muscle and given the magazine a face-lift. We’re making the magazine a lot more fun to read, as well. Shorter, livelier features will allow us to increase our coverage of the kinds of teaching, research, engagement and international impact that have long characterized Rice. And because there’s just too much going on at Rice to adequately cover in a quarterly magazine, we’ll leave you with lots of Web resources so you can delve more deeply into topics that strike your fancy.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is our excitement at presenting all the great people, discoveries and resources that make Rice one of the best universities anywhere. Nor has our commitment to our readers — alumni and many others who share an affinity with Rice. So, without further ado, I invite you into the pages of the new Rice Magazine. ...

Editor Christopher Dow Editorial Director Tracey Rhoades Creative Director Jeff Cox Art Director Chuck Thurmon Editorial Staff Merin Porter, staff writer Jenny West Rozelle, assistant editor Photographers Tommy LaVergne, photographer Jeff Fitlow, assistant photographer The Rice University Board of Trustees James W. Crownover, chairman; J. D. Bucky Allshouse; D. Kent Anderson; Keith T. Anderson; Teveia Rose Barnes; Alfredo Brener; Vicki Whamond Bretthauer; Robert T. Brockman; Nancy P. Carlson; Robert L. Clarke; Bruce W. Dunlevie; Lynn Laverty Elsenhans; Douglas Lee Foshee; Susanne Morris Glasscock; Robert R. Maxfield; M. Kenneth Oshman; Jeffery O. Rose; Lee H. Rosenthal; Hector Ruiz; Marc Shapiro; L. E. Simmons; Robert B. Tudor III; James S. Turley.

Administrative Officers David W. Leebron, president president; Eugene Levy, provost vost; Kathy Collins, vice president for Finance; Kevin Kirby, vice president for Administration; Chris Muñoz, vice president for Enrollment Enrollment; Linda Thrane, vice president for Public Affairs; Scott W. Wise, vice president for Investments and treasurer; Richard A. Zansitis, general counsel; Darrow Zeidenstein, vice president for Resource Development.

Rice Magazine is published by the Office of Public Affairs of Rice University and is sent to university alumni, faculty, staff, graduate students, parents of undergraduates and friends of the university.

Editorial Offices Creative Services–MS 95 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, T TX X 77251-1892 Fax: 713-348-6751 E-mail: ricemagazine@rice.edu Postmaster Send address changes to: Rice University Development Services–MS 80 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 © OCT. 2 0 0 8 RICE UNIVE RSIT Y

Christopher Dow cloud@rice.edu

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Ike

HURRICANE

Stop the Presses! Actually, we didn’t have much choice. Just as our newly designed Rice Magazine was hitting the presses, a big fellow named Ike strode across the Houston area and stopped them for us. Now that we’re up and running again, we’ve added a special section to let you know how Rice fared during and after the storm. In short, very well, thanks to thoughtful planning before the storm, quick action throughout and helpful responses — both on campus and in the wider community — in its aftermath. But see for yourself.

For more in-depth coverage of Hurricane Ike and Rice, visit: ›› › media.rice.edu/media/20081.asp

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O W L S

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L E E B R O N

People and institutions often are defined by how they respond to crises.

For more than four years, I have had the privilege of being part of the extraordinary Rice community, and my pride in this university has never been greater than during the week after Hurricane Ike as I watched my colleagues and associates respond to both the threat and the aftermath of the storm.

Baker Institute Director Ed Djerejian’s important new book is titled “Danger and Opportunity.” He takes this title from the Chinese word for crisis, which is composed of two characters — one derived from the character for danger and the other from the character for opportunity. In short, the word embodies the idea that in each crisis lurks both danger and opportunity.

That has surely been our experi-

in the last day or so before it made landfall, veered northward and largely spared the Houston area from serious damage. We learned a lot from that experience and implemented changes to our procedures.

In the days before Ike and even during the storm, the Rice Crisis Management Team met regularly via conference call to review every aspect of preparation, action and response.

news media.

Once the winds subsided on Saturday, we immediately began to assess damage, clean up and make repairs to prepare for a speedy return to normalcy. This was especially important in light of the large number of students living on our campus who were eager to return to classes.

While recognizing that the campus had been spared major damage, we

In the days before Ike and even during the storm, the Rice Crisis Management Team met regularly via conference call to review every aspect of preparation, action and response. ence with Hurricane Ike. Make no mistake: For Houston and certainly for Galveston and nearby shore areas, this was a once-in-a-quarter-century hurricane (we certainly hope!) in terms of its strength, its size and directness of the hit. The last hurricane that was similar to Ike, both in force and location, was Alicia in 1983.

Literally years of preparation at Rice paid off. In 2005, we were fully prepared for Hurricane Rita, which,

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We went into high gear on Thursday and Friday to batten down the campus, set up special shelters for our students and lay in food and water supplies.

Ping and I walked the campus to meet with students, who were cheerful and patient as they faced the prospect of being crowded into shelters for the night. Throughout, we communicated with parents and others through e-mail and postings on the Web, in part to counteract the hyperbolic reports in the

also understood that much of the city had suffered substantial losses, and millions of people were without power.

Water pressure throughout the city had dropped, creating sanitary threats. Trees were down, gasoline was in short supply and transportation was challenging.

The response of our community to all this was nothing less than amazing — a case study in both resilience and compassion. Everyone pitched in. Our students stood side by side

Ike

HURRICANE

with our Facilities, Engineering and Planning crews to clean up tree debris that blanketed the roads and blocked walkways on campus. Our construction crews redeployed to open up roadways and repair water and wind damage. Our Housing and Dining staff found and prepared fresh food for people sheltered on campus.

While we got Rice back on its feet in just a few days, many in our com-

battered city. Volunteers began lining up to help almost before the storm had subsided. Hundreds of students and staff helped sort and pack food at the Houston Food Bank and organized collections of supplies and money.

They joined crews cleaning up parks and hard-hit neighborhoods. Several members of our basketball team helped remove debris in Galveston, which was seriously damaged by the storm.

overflow injuries from hospital emergency rooms.

And, throughout, we never forgot that we are a community of learning and research. As the storm approached, Jerry Dickens, professor of earth science and master of Martel College, gave a lecture to the students on hurricanes.

Before and after the storm, Rice faculty members served as resources for the media and others on a range of issues

The response of our community to all this was nothing less than amazing – a case study in both resilience and compassion. Everyone pitched in. munity — students, faculty and staff — still lived under difficult conditions.

We did our best to accommodate those circumstances, from canceling tests to setting up day camps for children whose schools remained closed. We created emergency loans for staff members in need, handed out ice and opened up showers and laundry facilities on campus. If people needed time to deal with repairs, flexibility was the rule.

We also turned our attention to our

When hospitals in the Texas Medical Center lost their helicopter landing pads, we opened up our bicycle track in the parking lot of Rice Stadium to allow them to land. Our neighbors clapped and cheered as the helicopters released their injured passengers and ambulances whisked them away for care. We also delayed the opening of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen for a week so disaster-assistance medical teams could use it as a triage center to handle

regarding the weather and related topics.

Most of all, Rice emerged from Ike with a reaffirmation that we are a community that cares: We care about each other, we care about our neighbors and we care about the world beyond.

That is a big part of what makes Rice so special, and what makes the work we do so important.

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Rice Gets Back to Business After a challenging weekend, Rice’s Vice President for Administration Kevin Kirby felt confident the university had passed the test posed by Hurricane Ike, the most serious storm the campus has seen in decades.

“It’s a judgment call as to what we call ‘normalcy,’ but I think we’ll be there by Monday,” he said a few days after the hurricane, looking at blue skies through the windows in his Allen Center office. “We don’t have any building we can’t use, though we had damage to almost every building,” he said. “Most of the problems are with windows and roofs — nothing that would keep us from operating or using the buildings.”

Several construction projects, including the new Rice Children’s Campus on Chaucer Drive and the Collaborative Research Center at the corner of Main Street and University Boulevard, suffered minor damage that was expected to only minimally delay their completion.

“The biggest challenge to all the construction is that the labor force was significantly reduced in the week post-Ike,” said Barbara White Bryson, vice president for Facilities, Engineering and Planning (FE&P).

The “R” Room at Rice Stadium sustained some damage, but other athletic facilities came through the storm fine. “Rice Stadium has been standing since 1951, and it’s not going anywhere,” said Athletics Director Chris Del Conte, who added that the baseball stadium and Autry Court, which is nearing the completion of its renovation, also are in good shape.

Bryson said it will take some time to fix the “R” Room, as six windows facing the football stadium were blown out by Ike, and the interior sustained substantial water damage. It was among the initial buildings to get attention from FE&P cleanup crews.

“Our first-response tasks were to maintain infrastructure, address life-safety issues, board up windows where they were broken and clean up the largest water-intrusion areas,” Bryson said. “We had water in a few basements, most seriously over at Brown College. Those kinds of things had to be attended to right away. Happily, we kept power to most of the campus all the way through the event.”

On a scale of one to 10, she said, Ike probably was a three for Rice in overall impact. “But it’s the kind of event,” Bryson said, “that we end up dealing with for weeks and months in an effort to get everybody back to normal operations.”

—Mike Williams

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Ike

HURRICANE

Rice Students Ride Out Ike When Will Rice College freshman Hannah Thalenberg decided to attend Rice last year, she never thought her first month on campus would be so exciting.

“My mom in Atlanta knew I was safe at Rice during Hurricane Ike, and my dad in Brazil was ecstatic,” Thalenberg said. “My dad said that our Polish ancestors could never have imagined a Thalenberg riding out a hurricane. I’m first-generation!”

To pass the time, Thalenberg said, about a half-dozen students made cookies with Paula Krisko, a master at Will Rice, while others played games, watched movies or read.

Excitement appeared to be the sentiment of most Rice undergraduate students hunkered down in their respective colleges.

Most said Rice was well-prepared with water, food and shelter.

“Rice is the safest place in Houston to be,” said Annie Kuntz, Sid Richardson College sophomore. She is from Houston and decided to stay on campus rather than return to her parents’ home on the north side. “You know Rice is going to have power, being so close to the Texas Medical Center.”

For Jones freshman Brianna Mulrooney of New Jersey, this wasn’t her first brush with a hurricane. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd dumped 15 inches of rain on the upper East Coast, killing 57 people.

“This hurricane was very much like Floyd,” said Mulrooney, who, along with Kuntz and many others at Rice, donated blood to a Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center that was set up in Farnsworth Pavilion.

Making the best of it was the mantra of the day.

An unconfirmed but widely spread report said certain Martel College students were flying kites during the tropical storm-force winds that preceded the hurricane. Also unconfirmed are reports that the Martel kites had special messages written on them for Jones College residents.

“Most of us were having a good time and making the best of the situation,” said Brown College senior June Hu of Katy, Texas. “We saw Shepherd School students practicing a quartet in the Rice Memorial Center, so it put us in the mood to watch the movie ‘Titanic.’”

Both Hu and Brown senior Kevin Liu commented on the eerie sounds of Hurricane Ike. “We couldn’t see what was going on outside, but we could hear it,” said Liu, of San Antonio, Texas.

Like all other undergraduate Rice students, Hu and Liu left their rooms to take shelter in hallways or other interior areas within buildings and away from glass when the actual storm hit campus. “We were in the hallways from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.,” Liu said, “and I don’t think most of us slept much.”

While undergraduate students stayed at their colleges, graduate students who lived in Rice housing or mandatory evacuation zones were sheltered at Janice and Robert McNair Hall and Rice Memorial Center until Monday. Rice officials had to inspect and secure the apartment buildings, due to downed power lines and 15-pound roof tiles that were a potential threat.

“It was frustrating because we really wanted to get back to our apartments Saturday to have access to our clothing, food and other items,” said Andrew Staupe, a Shepherd School of Music graduate student from Minnesota. “At the same time, we knew that they wanted to make sure it was safe for us to go back.”

—David Ruth

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Alumni Go Long to Keep Rice Water Pumping It’s not often that you see football players turn into water boys, but it may be the most important play these two former Owls ever made for Rice.

It started when the city lost its pumping station at Trinity River, which feeds the water treatment plants in Houston.

When water pressure started to drop on campus, Rice turned to its backup well, but the pump motor burned out during an electrical surge.

“It was never a drinking-water issue — we had plenty of bottled water,” said Kevin Kirby, vice president for administration. “We needed water for sanitary reasons, for toilets and showers. We needed water for the boilers so we could produce steam and hot water for cooking and cleaning. And we needed water to run the air-conditioning system — the chillers and the cooling tower. After the safety of our students and employees, water pressure turned out to be our biggest concern during this whole storm.”

Enter Rice Athletics Director Chris Del Conte. “I was in a conference call with the Crisis Management Team, and one of the things that came up was the well,” he said.

“We needed a massive motor. My first thought was that trying to get water must be like trying to get oil, and we have a lot of former students working in the oil industry.

If anybody knows how to get something from 1,600 feet underground, it would be those guys.”

Del Conte put in a phone call to former football players John Huff ’69 and Jay Collins ’68 of Oceaneering International Inc., a Houston company that supplies products to the offshore oil and gas industries. Collins succeeded Huff as president and CEO of the company in 2006.

The former Owls had a 2,500-pound motor assembly in Tennessee, and they wasted no time in making arrangements to get it to Rice. Two members of the Rice University Police Department, Jim Baylor and Niraj Rajbhandari, were dispatched to meet the delivery truck halfway, in Morgan City, La., to escort it to campus. It was installed soon after it arrived.

From Design Kitchen to Medical Triage Center It may have happened by chance rather than design, but Rice’s newly completed Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, with its quiet, climatecontrolled atmosphere, proved to be the perfect location for an emergency medical triage center. The center was organized through a collaborative effort among Rice and Memorial Hermann, St. Luke’s, Ben Taub and Methodist hospitals. About 70 physicians, assistant physicians, nurses and paramedics who came from the Houston area and as far away as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida treated about 250 patients a day, most suffering from low-acuity ailments such as bruises, bumps and rashes or needing further information about resources.

—Jessica Stark

Learn more about the Rice triage center by visiting: › › › tinyurl.com/4m69 v y

Photos: Matt Dunaway

—Mike Williams

Disaster Day Camp

Instrument shop worker Terry Phillips, left, and supervisor Carl Riedel stand with the pump motor that was shipped from Tennessee to Rice by former Rice football players John Huff and Jay Collins of Oceaneering International Inc.

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With power out across much of the Houston area in the wake of Hurricane Ike, Rice coaches and student–athletes offered sports day camps for the children of Rice faculty and staff whose schools were closed.

Images from the camps can be viewed at: › › › tinyurl.com/4 4tely

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Parents Respond to President’s Messages

“We continue to be impressed with Rice’s emergency readiness — actually, we are impressed with everything about Rice and its leadership.”

—Margaret Swartz

Before, during and after Hurricane Ike, Rice President David Leebron made it a priority to post notices on the university’s Web site to describe the conditions on campus and reassure students’ parents that their sons and daughters were safe. His efforts were rewarded with a number of grateful e-mail responses from parents. Here is a sampling: “My daughter is a freshman and 1,650 miles away from home. Your reassuring e-mails and the timely Web site updates, as well as the reports from my daughter regarding all the precautions taken, were extremely comforting. The sense of community eased the anxieties both on campus and off.”

—Susan Corkett

“Although I wanted my daughter to come home to Austin as Ike approached, she chose to stay on campus. Between the Rice Web site, your reassuring e-mail messages and cryptic text messages from my daughter, I knew during the whole weekend that she was safe and well cared for. In retrospect, I’m glad she stayed on campus as she had the opportunity to have a positive growing experience during the hurricane and got to see how a community can work together to protect itself and do the right thing.”

—Denise C. Fischer

“We know that Rice cares about its students’ wellbeing more than it does about the university’s ranking, performance and achievement. We appreciate all the devotion you put into the campus.”

—David and Fen Wang

“ If our children are remarkable it is, in part, because they have received a remarkable education at Rice University, both inside and outside the classroom. Thank you for keeping them safe and for instilling in them the importance of coming to the aid of those less fortunate.”

— Marci Waters and C. J. Steuernagel

“My wife and I have many friends, family members and colleagues in the Houston area. Of all of them, our daughter — the Rice student — was the one about whom we had the least worries.”

—Steve Altchuler

“We want to thank you and the entire Rice community for ensuring the safety and well-being of all Rice students during this past weekend. Even though our son is living off campus this year, it was so comforting to know that he and his roommates were welcome and expected back at Jones during the storm.”

—Ann and Louis Gilbert

“We live thousands of miles from Houston in the small country of Serbia. You can only imagine our anxiety as this terrible natural disaster stormed through your city and state. I had no way of communicating with my son, and the only bright lights in that long night were the constant updates on the Rice University Web site. Your letters calmed me, a helpless mother so far away from her child. Thank you and all the other people at Rice who remained with our children and helped them unconditionally throughout the storm and its aftermath.”

—Zorica Nakic and Boban Zivojinovic

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The Universe in a Grain of Sand

“One theory is that the disc-shaped clouds of dust around newly formed stars condense into microscopic grains of sand that eventually clump into pebbles, boulders and whole planets.”

—Christopher Johns-Krull

Imagine trying to glean useful information from processes that take millions of years or from objects so far away they can’t be seen. Welcome to the world — or, rather, the universe — of the astronomer. Sometimes, though, ingenuity can help bridge even interstellar distances and shed light on the unknown.

“Precisely how and when planets form is an open question,” said Rice astronomer Christopher JohnsKrull. “One theory is that the disc-shaped clouds of dust around newly formed stars condense into microscopic grains of sand that eventually clump into pebbles, boulders and whole planets.”

Johns-Krull is a member of an international team that analyzed a binary star system using data collected during the past 12 years from a dozen observatories around the world. The team’s findings may help explain how Earthlike planets form.

The researchers looked at a pair of stars called KH-15D in the Cone Nebula (image at left). The stars are about 2,400 light-years from Earth, and they are only about 3 million years old, compared to the sun’s 4.5 billion years. But the stars’ youth wasn’t their only important feature.

“We were attracted to this system because it appears bright and dim at different times, which is odd,” Johns-Krull said. This hinted at a situation that might allow the researchers to directly observe processes taking place near the stars, which normally is difficult because glare from a star obscures its nearby region. Until now, astronomers have used infrared heat signals, instead of direct observation, to identify microscopic dust particles around distant stars, but the method isn’t precise enough to tell astronomers just how big the particles become and how closely they orbit their star. KH-15D offered a solution.

The researchers found that the Earth has a nearly edge-on view of KH-15D. From this perspective, the disc of dust surrounding the system blocks one of the stars from view, but its twin has an eccentric orbit that causes it to rise above the disc at regular intervals.

When it rises above the disc, its light reflects off the dust, allowing the researchers to take photometric and spectrographic readings to determine the dust’s composition and chemical makeup.

The results were the first measured evidence of small, sandy particles orbiting a newborn solar system at about the same distance as the Earth orbits the sun.

The research was funded by NASA and the Keck Foundation, and the report was published online in the journal Nature.

—Jade Boyd

Nature article: › › › tinyurl.com/ 5ojsv f Animation of KH-15D: › › › tinyurl.com/6c5aaf

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THROUGH THE

Sallyport

Ron Parry’s favorite destination has a name:

It’s called “the middle of nowhere.” Nothing makes the full-time Rice chemistry professor and parttime environmental activist happier than wandering through uncharted wilderness areas. “I don’t really think of it as taking a vacation,” he said. “It’s more like ‘revisiting reality.’”

Parry has been exploring those places “least overrun with human artifacts” since the 1960s, but his passion for wilderness areas really began in his early teens. “I grew up in Los Angeles, and we had a big yard with lots of plants and foliage,” he said. “I became fascinated by the interplay between science and the natural world.”

As he grew older, the self-proclaimed desert rat explored England during his postdoctoral fellowship and spent some time in Costa Rica, but he developed a particular affinity for the rugged terrain and arid environment of the American Southwest. He spends plenty of time in Arizona and Nevada, but, like a true adventurer, he also loves the lure of unexplored territory. He takes the bait as often as possible, usually during a semester or midterm break.

In choosing where to go, Parry finds a sufficiently intriguing “vacant area on the map” and heads out.

These days, he avoids heavy equipment and backpacks and prefers to use his car as a base camp.

Parry has become deft at packing his gear, which usually includes a sleeping bag, food and water, a tent, first aid materials, clothing, a hat, sunscreen, wildlife guidebooks, maps and “something interesting to read.”

He got lost once in a little-known section of the Grand Canyon and found his way out — dangerously dehydrated — a day and half later, so he carries a global positioning system now, too. Parry’s trips usually last for nine or 10 days, mostly because it takes him “about three days to slow down.” He also travels alone for the most part.

“The key is to pay attention,” he said, “and that’s usually easier to do when you’re by yourself.”

Parry may walk 10 miles in a day, but he’s not walking to log distance. Rather, he walks to satisfy his curiosity as he watches the unspoiled world unfold in its daily dance around him. Sometimes, the world surprises him, as it did during a recent trip to 120,000 acres of Arizona wilderness.

Parry was resting next to a spring when he spotted something astonishing. The hillside next to him was covered in Native American artwork — drawings of horses, birds and other animals, of humans and deities and cultural symbols. The petroglyphs hadn’t been charted in any guidebook, and that was fine with him: Less publicity means fewer opportunities for vandalism and exploitation.

While discoveries like these are exciting, they aren’t the only reasons Parry traverses the unknown.

“What I get from these trips is mostly intangible,” Parry said. “It provides perspective, and it allows me to disconnect the electronic umbilical cord. That’s satisfying in its own right.”

A Place in the Sun

—Merin Porter

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Gift Boosts Biomedical Research Pictured from left are Virginia and L. E. Simmons of the Virginia and L.E. Simmons Family Foundation; David Leebron, president of Rice University; Mark Wallace, president and CEO of Texas Children’s Hospital; and Ron Girotto, president and CEO of the Methodist Hospital System.

“The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations,” wrote philosopher and historian Will Durant. That may be, but modern biomedical research often takes substantial financial backing — the kind Rice recently received from the Virginia and L.E. Simmons Family Foundation.

The $3 million, five-year gift will enable Rice University, Texas Children’s Hospital and the Methodist Hospital Research Institute to work together on biomedical research aimed at discovering new ways to treat disease and benefit the health of both children and adults.

“The future of biomedical research will involve skills and knowledge that draw from highly specialized and premier institutions,” said L. E. Simmons, president of the Simmons Family Foundation and a trustee of all three of these Texas Medical Center institutions.

“In the end, it will be people working together who will make the discoveries that change people’s lives. We want to help make it happen.”

The fund is intended to assist researchers who have new ideas, junior researchers who do not yet have funding and experienced researchers who might not otherwise collaborate with the other institutions. Ideally, the projects supported by the fund will develop into successful research

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programs that can be sustained by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other sources of competitive funding.

commitments this city has ever made toward breakthrough research that will help people throughout the world.”

Simmons is president and founder of SCF Partners, an investment firm that provides management expertise to energy service companies. He also is president of L.E. Simmons and Associates, a private equity fund manager and general partner of SCF. He serves as chairman of Oil States International Inc., a leading global provider of specialty products and services to oil and gas drilling and production companies. Virginia Simmons is vice president of the Simmons Family Foundation, which supports religion, art and culture organizations, education, and youth and medical associations.

—B.J. Almond

“The future of biomedical research will involve skills and knowledge that draw from highly specialized and premier institutions.

In the end, it will be the people working together who will make the discoveries that change people’s lives. We want to help make it happen.”

—L. E. Simmons

Simmons said he is excited about each of the three institutions’ commitment to research. “Collectively, they are spending nearly a billion dollars on facilities, equipment and resources to begin new biomedical research,” he said. “It may well be one of the most important

Learn more: › › › www.rice.edu/go?id= 0 01

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a great place to learn is also a great place to work?

Rice’s reputation as a first-rate educational institution has again been complemented by its reputation as a great place to work.

When Colleen Dutton, director of compensation and employee relations for Rice’s Office of Human Resources, went to look for her copy of the latest Rice Magazine, she found her 2-year-old terrier/ Chihuahua, Macy, already relaxing with it on the sofa.

For the third year in a row, Rice made the Houston Business Journal’s list of “Houston’s Best Places to Work” in the category of businesses with more than 500 employees. The winners were determined by responses of employees who completed an online survey measuring a variety of attributes associated with employee satisfaction and involvement with the workplace.

High-Flying Records Rice faculty member and NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson ’86 has broken a few things during her two stints aboard the International Space Station, but nobody is complaining. Whitson, who served as the space station’s first-ever science officer her previous time aloft, broke the gender barrier this past spring as the station’s first female commander. She also broke the record for cumulative time in space for a U.S. astronaut, topping Mike Foale’s previous record of 374 days by two days. In addition, Whitson performed five spacewalks during the most recent expedition, for a total of six career spacewalks encompassing 32 hours, 36 minutes. It’s an out-of-this-world accomplishment that puts her 20th on the all-time list — the highest ranking by a female astronaut.

Cyber Sleuth The set of letters written by Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, looked innocuous enough on the auction house Web site. But Lynda Crist immediately smelled a rat.

Crist, editor of Rice’s Jefferson Davis Papers project, knew the documents, worth $15,000, actually belonged to Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky., because she had microfilmed them for inclusion in one of the project’s volumes. Among the items were letters and notes written by Davis and his wife, Varina, dated from 1847 to 1898. The documents had gone missing in 1994.

After Crist notified Transylvania University of her find, the university contacted the auction house and the police. Eugene Zollman, a Jefferson Davis impersonator who researched documents to make his impressions more authentic, was charged with theft of major artwork.

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Next-Gen Wireless When Rice computer scientist Edward Knightly and his graduate student Joseph Camp began to design and build an experimental wireless network in 2003, they thought they were working on a model of how broadband wireless Internet might one day be provided to whole cities. Little did they know how far their network would reach.

The network they built, centered in East Houston’s working-class Pecan Park neighborhood, uses a new technology that is more efficient and less costly to operate than the Wi-Fi gear currently used in homes and businesses.

“We are supporting more than 4,000 users in three square kilometers with a fully programmable custom wireless network,” said Knightly. “This allows us to demonstrate our research advances at an operational scale.”

The project has drawn the attention of the National Science Foundation, which recently awarded $1.5 million to a Rice-led research team for the expansion of the network and the design and testing of experimental mobile systems — and something else: healthmonitoring devices. Collaborating on the five-year project are researchers from the Methodist Hospital Research Institute, the nonprofit Technology For All (TFA) and the University of Houston’s Abramson Center for the Future of Health.

The researchers will examine how patients with chronic diseases can use next-generation wireless networks, cell phones and health sensors to participate in their own medical treatment.

Using sensors, patients with congestive heart failure, asthma or metabolic syndrome will be able to painlessly and noninvasively take stock of several key aspects of their health status on a daily basis. For example, an early design, called Blue Box, can compare current readings with a patient’s history and provide immediate, user-friendly feedback. By taking medical readings every day, rather than only during physician visits or crises, doctors

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may be able to manage chronic conditions more effectively.

Lin Zhong, a Rice assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, is examining another of the network’s unrealized potentials by laying the foundation for long-term field studies in the community.

“My group is interested in how mobile devices like cell phones can provide IT access to underserved communities,” Zhong said, “particularly when they are coupled with low-cost wireless broadband networks.”

TFA President and CEO Will Reed said that when his organization first joined the project, he had no idea that it would lead medical researchers, anthropologists and other researchers to take such a keen interest in Pecan Park. “The community isn’t the kind of well-to-do neighborhood where this type of technology typically would be rolled out,” he said. “As a result, people Edward Knightly and Joseph Camp are knocking down our door to find out how our residents are using the network, what they think of it and how it’s affecting them.”

—Jade Boyd

Learn more: › › › www.rice.edu/go?id=002 › › › www.techforall.org/tfa_wireless.html

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U.S. District Judge Rosenthal Joins Rice Board of Trustees U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal has been elected to the Rice University Board of Trustees. She has served the Houston division of the Southern District of Texas since 1992.

“The community isn’t the kind of well-to-do neighborhood where this type of technology typically would be rolled out. As a result, people are knocking down our door to find out how our residents are using the network, what they think of it and how it’s affecting them.”

—Will Reed

“Lee Rosenthal has outstanding experience in public service, the highest stature as a jurist and savvy judgment,” said Jim Crownover ’65, chairman of the Rice Board of Trustees. “Her insight and experience will richly benefit the university and everyone we serve.”

In addition to presiding over a busy docket, Rosenthal chairs the Judicial Conference Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, to which she was appointed in 2007

by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. The committee supervises the rule-making process in the federal courts and oversees and coordinates the work of the Advisory Committees on the Federal Rules of Evidence and of Civil, Criminal, Bankruptcy and Appellate Procedure.

Prior to 2007, Rosenthal was a member, then chair, of the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Chief Justice Judge Lee H. Rosenthal William Rehnquist appointed Rosenthal to that committee in 1996 and as chair in 2003. Under Rosenthal’s leadership, the discovery rules were amended to address the impact of changes in information technology in 2006. In 2007, the entire set of civil rules was edited to be clearer and simpler without changing substantive meaning. The work clarifying and simplifying the rules used in the trial courts won the committee the 2007 “Reform in Law” Award from the Burton Awards for Legal Achievement, an award issued with the Library of Congress and the Law Library of Congress.

“We are truly fortunate to have Judge Rosenthal as the newest member of our board,” said Rice President David Leebron. “She has a reputation of being a thoughtful, dedicated and decisive leader, and she is widely known as one of the most outstanding judges in the country.

Her experience and judgment will be invaluable to Rice as we continue to pursue our high ambitions as an international research university.”

The Texas Association of Civil Trial and Appellate Specialists selected Rosenthal as trial judge of the year in 2000 and 2006. She has received the Houston Bar Association’s highest bar-poll evaluation for judges three times — in 1999, 2005 and 2007.

Rosenthal is a member of the board of editors for the Manual for Complex Litigation, published by the Federal Judicial Center. She is a member of the American Law Institute (ALI) and was recently elected to its council. She serves as an adviser for the ALI’s Aggregate Litigation Project and Rules of Transnational Civil Procedure Project.

Rosenthal has several connections to Rice. Her mother, Ferne Hyman, was assistant university librarian at Fondren Library until her retirement in 1999. Her father, Harold M. Hyman, is the William P. Hobby Professor Emeritus of History at Rice. Her husband, Gary Rosenthal, is a member of Leebron’s President’s Advisory Board.

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NANO NEWS

Tiny Buckyballs Squeeze Hydrogen Like Giant Jupiter Materials scientists at Rice University have made the surprising discovery that buckyballs are so strong they can hold volumes of hydrogen nearly as dense as those at the center of Jupiter.

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Today, the hunt is on in earnest for viable alternative fuels to power automobiles. One of the most promising is hydrogen, which is so cleanburning and abundant that the U.S. Department of Energy has devoted more than $1 billion to developing technologies for hydrogen-powered automobiles. But there is a snag. Because hydrogen is the lightest element in the universe, it is very difficult to store in bulk. It is estimated that a hydrogen-powered car with the range of a gasoline-powered car would require a storage system that could hold the element at densities greater than those found in pure liquid hydrogen. That’s a pretty strong container, but Rice materials scientists may have found it, and it’s a lot smaller than expected. Buckyball small.

“Based on our calculations, it appears that some buckyballs are capable of holding volumes of hydrogen so dense as to be almost metallic,” said lead researcher Boris Yakobson, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Rice. “It appears they can hold about 8 percent of their weight in hydrogen at room temperature, which is considerably better than th e fe d e ra l ta rget of 6 percent.”

In layman’s terms, that’s nearly as dense as the pressures at the center of Jupiter.

Yakobson said scientists have long argued the merits of storing hydrogen in tiny molecular containers like buckyballs, and experiments have shown that it’s possible to store small volumes of hydrogen inside buckyballs.

The new research by Yakobson and former postdoctoral researchers Olga Pupysheva and Amir Farajian offers the first method of precisely calculating how much hydrogen a buckyball can hold before breaking.

“Bonds between carbon atoms are among the strongest chemical bonds in nature,” Yakobson said.

“These bonds are what make diamond the hardest known substance, and our research showed that it takes an enormous amount of internal pressure to deform and break the carbon-carbon bonds in a fullerene.”

If a feasible way to produce hydrogen-filled buckyballs is developed, Yakobson said, it might be possible to store them as a powder.

“They will likely assemble into weak molecular crystals or form a thin powder,” he said.

“They might find use in their whole form or be punctured under certain conditions to release pure hydrogen for fuel cells or other types of engines.”

The research, which was supported by the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Department of Energy, appeared on the cover of the American Chemical Society’s journal Nano Letters.

—Jade Boyd LEARN MORE:

›› › tinyurl.com/55emea

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Paper, Plastic or Nano?

What do you do when you have a mess? You bag it up and throw it away. But some messes — such as an oil spill — can’t be disposed of so easily. Or maybe they can.

Meet nanobatons: multisegmented nanowires that are made by connecting two nanomaterials with different properties.

Mechanical engineering and materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and his colleagues were working with one combination — carbon nanotubes that they fused to short segments of gold — when they noticed something peculiar. The nanobatons spontaneously assembled by the tens of millions into spherical sacs as large as BB pellets around droplets of oil in water. Even better, the researchers found that ultraviolet light and magnetic fields could be used to flip the nanoparticles, causing the bags to instantly turn inside out and release their cargo.

Ajayan says that by adding various other segments — like sections of nickel or other materials — the researchers can create truly multifunctional nanostructures.

“The core of the nanotechnology revolution lies in designing inorganic nanoparticles that can self-assemble into larger structures like a ‘smart dust’ that performs different functions in the world — for example, cleaning up pollution,” Ajayan said.

“Our approach brings the concept of selfassembling, functional nanomaterials one

step closer to reality.”

The tendency of nanobatons to assemble in water-oil mixtures derives from basic chemistry. The gold end of the wire

In a development that could lead to new technologies for cleaning up oil spills and polluted groundwater, scientists at Rice University have shown how tiny, stickshaped particles of metal and carbon can trap oil droplets in water by spontaneously assembling into bag-like sacs. is water-loving, or hydrophilic, while the carbon end is water-averse, or hydrophobic. Ajayan, graduate student Fung Suong Ou and postdoctoral researcher Shaijumon Manikoth demonstrated that oil droplets

suspended in water became encapsulated because of the structures’ tendency to align their carbon ends facing the oil.

By reversing the conditions — suspending water droplets in oil — the team was able to coax the gold ends to face inward and encase the water.

“For oil droplets suspended in water, the spheres give off a light yellow color because of the exposed gold ends,” Ou said. “With water droplets, we observe a dark sphere due to the protruding black nanotubes.”

The team is preparing to test whether chemical modifications to the nanobatons could result in spheres that can not only capture but also break down oily chemicals. Another option would be to attach drugs whose release can be controlled with an external stimulus.

The research, which was supported by Rice University, Applied Materials Inc. and the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation, was published online in the American Chemical Society’s journal Nano Letters.

—Jade Boyd

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› › › tinyurl.com/5b3n9j

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“Dan has the combination of research, teaching and management skills that will help Rice take another giant step forward in the natural sciences arena.”

—David Leebron Dan Carson

Carson Appointed Dean of Natural Sciences Dan Carson, currently the Trustees Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Delaware, has been appointed dean of Rice University’s Wiess School of Natural Sciences.

He will succeed Kathy Matthews when she relinquishes the Since becoming department chair in 1998, Carson has position Dec. 31 after serving as dean for 10 years. Matthews recruited 17 faculty members and developed a robust research will continue to do research as Rice’s Stewart Memorial program, with external research funding increasing from Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology. $1.5 million to $10 million. His comprehensive revision of “I am thrilled to welcome the graduate program has a gifted scientist like Dan resulted in four times as Carson to Rice’s leadership many graduate students as “We have developed a culture of mutual respect team,” said President David the department enrolled 10 Leebron. “Following in Kathy years ago. He also has built here. The faculty and staff feel that they can Matthews’ footsteps is a collaborations with other express their views, that they will be heard and daunting task, but Dan has biomedical research instituthat things will happen.” the combination of research, tions in the region as well as —Dan Carson teaching and management with the university’s College skills that will help Rice take of Engineering. another giant step forward Carson, who also will in the natural sciences arena. We look to Dan to continue to serve as a professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Rice, drive the research that has made Rice a leader across a broad is a reproductive biologist. His research interests focus on range of endeavors and that will make a difference for our the molecular basis by which mammalian embryos implant students, our university, our city and the world.” into the uterine wall. His work earned him a prestigious At the University of Delaware in Newark, Carson manages National Institutes of Health MERIT Award in 2002. a department with 40 faculty members, 1,000 undergraduate Carson’s wife, Mary C. Farach-Carson, is a professor of majors, 80 graduate students and 24 support staff. Scientist biological sciences and materials sciences at the University of magazine recently named the University of Delaware one of Delaware. She has been appointed associate vice provost for the top places to work in life sciences. research at Rice. The Carsons have four children, the youngest “We have developed a culture of mutual respect here,” of whom will finish high school next year.

Carson said. “The faculty and staff feel that they can express their views, that they will be heard and that things —B.J. Almond will happen.”

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I N F O R M AT I O N :

› › › www.rice.edu/go?id=008

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Space Medicine Webcast from Mt. Everest The International Space Medicine Summit II, held at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, featured panels on space medicine, human performance and solar radiation risks for lunar operations. A highlight was a live videoconference from 17,550 feet on Mount Everest with Dr. Christian Otto, expedition medical lead for the Canadian Mount Everest Medical Operations Expedition 2008. The expedition’s mission is to prepare for emergency medical management on long-duration space missions.

VIEW THE WEBCAST HERE :

› › › www.rice.edu/go?id= 004

Chip Off the Old Block

Parochial Bacterial Viruses

Rice University computer engineers have created a way to design integrated circuits that contain many individual selves. The chips can assume different identities, depending on the user’s needs.

The new method enables programmers to strategically reconfigure application-specific integrated circuits while preserving advantages such as speed and low power. The chips could be used for enhanced device security, content provisioning, application metering, device optimization and many other design tasks.

Biologists examining ecosystems similar to those that existed on Earth more than 3 billion years ago have made a surprising discovery: Viruses that infect bacteria are sometimes parochial and unrelated to their counterparts in other regions of the globe.

L E A R N

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› › › www.rice.edu/go?id= 007

M O R E :

››› www.rice.edu/go?id= 005

Single-Molecule Sensing Many of us have difficulty finding our car keys in the morning, so trying to sense a single molecule sounds daunting, no matter what time of day. But don’t try telling that to a group of researchers at Rice’s Quantum Magnetism Laboratory and Laboratory for Nanophotonics.

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››› www.rice.edu/go?id= 00 3

Chipping Away at Chip Pirates Pirated microchips — chips stolen from legitimate factories or made from stolen blueprints — account for billions of dollars in annual losses to chipmakers. But a series of techniques developed at Rice could stop pirates by locking chips with a unique ID tag that can be activated only by the patent-holder — making knockoffs and stolen chips worthless.

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› › › www.rice.edu/go?id= 006

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TISSUE ENGINEERING

SPOTLIGHT ON TISSUE ENGINEERING

Replacing or repairing damaged or diseased tissue with healthy tissue is one of bioengineering’s goals.

The results are even better if the healthy tissue is grown from the patient’s own body because that minimizes the risk of rejection. Discoveries by Rice bioengineers may help point the way.

“Previous research has shown that carbon nanotubes give added strength to polymer scaffolds, but this is the first study to examine the performance of these materials in an animal model.”

—Antonios Mikos

Secret Ingredient Aids Bone Growth For much of his career, bioengineer Antonios Mikos has worked with porous, biodegradable materials called scaffolds, which act as patterns and support for the regrowth of bone tissue. With the right chemical and physical cues, bone cells adjacent to the scaffold can be coaxed into producing new bone. As the bone grows over the scaffold, the scaffold degrades, leaving nothing but the new bone.

“Ideally, a scaffold should be highly porous, nontoxic and biodegradable, yet strong enough to bear the structural load of the bone that will eventually replace it,” said Mikos, who is director of Rice’s Center for Excellence in Tissue Engineering. He’s also the lead researcher for a breakthrough study that found that the growing bone can be enhanced by sprinkling stick-like nanoparticles throughout the scaffolding material.

“Previous research has shown that carbon nanotubes give added strength to polymer scaffolds,” Mikos said, “but this is the first study to examine the performance of these materials in an animal model.”

The researchers implanted two kinds of scaffolds into rabbits. One type was made of a biodegradable plastic called poly(propylene fumarate) (PPF), which has performed well in previous experiments.

The second was made of 99.5 percent PPF and 0.5 percent single-walled carbon

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nanotubes. Nanotubes usually are a thousand times longer than they are wide, but the researchers used shorter segments that have fared well in prior cytocompatibility studies.

While there was no notable difference in performance of the two materials at four weeks, the nanotube composites exhibited up to threefold greater bone ingrowth after 12 weeks. And surprisingly, at 12 weeks, the composites contained about two-thirds as much bone tissue as nearby native bone, while the straight PPF contained only about one-fifth as much.

Mikos said the results indicate that the composites may go beyond being passive guides and take an active role in promoting bone growth. The researchers don’t know why this is, though Mikos postulated that changes in surface chemistry, strength or other factors might be responsible. The team is conducting further studies to find out.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Welch Foundation and Rice’s J. Evans-Attwell Postdoctoral Fellows Program.

—B.J. Almond L E A R N

M O R E :

› › › tinyurl.com/5fwcly

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Rice University graduate student Benjamin Elder displays a disk of cartilage that was grown using a new high-pressure technique.

Think of the body’s most important structural element. Bones, right? Not so fast.

Cartilage, the stuff between the bones, is pretty important, too, since it acts as both a lubricant and a shock absorber during joint movement. Unfortunately, this damageprone tissue can’t heal itself, and injured cartilage often serves as the focal point for arthritis formation.

Cartilage’s stiffness, strength and other mechanical properties derive not from living cartilage cells but from the densely woven matrix of collagen and proteoglycan that surrounds them. This extracellular matrix (ECM) is produced during cartilage development in children, but this ability lapses in adulthood. Tissue engineers have long sought a means of growing new cartilage that can be transplanted into adults, but unfortunately, cartilage is difficult to engineer, in part because it has no natural healing processes to mimic.

Rice bioengineer Kyriacos Athanasiou, whose Musculoskeletal Bioengineering Laboratory has focused on cartilage for more than 10 years, might have found a way around that by applying a little pressure. Actually, a lot of pressure. The new findings are based on three years of data collected by graduate student Benjamin Elder, who is simultaneously earning a doctorate in bioengineering at Rice and a medical degree at Baylor College of

Medicine under Rice and Baylor’s Medical Scientist Training Program.

In the study, Elder took samples of cartilage from calves’ knees, dissolved the ECM and isolated the living cartilage cells, or chondrocytes. The chondrocytes were used to create tissue-engineered cartilage, which was then placed in a chemical bath of growth factors and sealed inside soft plastic containers. The containers were placed inside a pressure chamber and squeezed for an hour a day at pressures equivalent to those at half a mile beneath the ocean’s surface.

“Our knees are filled with fluid, and when we walk or run, the hydrostatic pressure on the cartilage cells in the knee approaches the pressures we used in our experiments,” Elder said. “But in daily activities, these pressures are fleeting, just a second or so at a time.”

Most of the prevailing strategies in tissue engineering attempt to reproduce the conditions that cells experience in the body. Athanasiou said the unconventional

approach of using unnaturally high pressure stemmed from insights gained during years of previous experiments.

“By combining high pressure and growth factors,” Elder said, “we were able to more than triple the biomechanical properties of the cartilage. We’re not sure why they reinforce one another, but we do not get the same results when we apply them independently.”

The process results in an engineered cartilage with properties nearly identical to that of native cartilage. Even better, the new method, which requires no stem cells, holds promise for growing tissues to repair bladders, blood vessels, kidneys, heart valves, bones and more. So far, the process has yet to be tested in live animals, and Athanasiou cautions that it will be several years before the process is ready for clinical testing in humans.

—Jade Boyd L E A R N

M O R E :

› › › tinyurl.com/4u57pt

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A New Catalyst for Students Rice undergrads are well known for their brains and work ethic, and at Rice, they have plenty of opportunities to work side by side with researchers and graduate students in laboratories across campus.

Can a student-produced science journal be far behind? Meet Catalyst: Rice Undergraduate Science Review, dedicated to highlighting and encouraging the undergraduate research experience at Rice.

For a Q&A with Catalyst’s founders, visit: › ›› www.rice.edu/go?id=009 Catalyst on the Web: › ›› catalyst.rice.edu To inquire about receiving copies of Catalyst, e-mail: › ›› catalyst@rice.edu

Catalyst editors, from left: Yohan Moon, Patricia Bacalao, Ye Jin Kang, Lisa Sun and David Ouyang.

The Class of 2008

Rice’s 95th graduating class included 732 undergraduates, 22 undergraduate professionals and 686 graduate students.

The largest number of doctoral degrees — 186 — were conferred, and a number of students graduated with multiple degrees, bringing the total number of degrees awarded to 1,490.

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Students

CC Caroline Collective Debuts in the Museum District Imagine a cafelike collaborative space for developers, writers and independents looking for an alternative to the traditional working office. Rice University graduate students Ned Dodington and Matthew Wettergreen did and, this summer, they launched Houston’s first creative coworking space.

Located at 4820 Caroline St. and dubbed Caroline Collective, the coworking space is Houston’s first, although similar operations already are successful in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Paris, Vancouver, Milan and Buenos Aires.

technical communities. As the global marketplace continues to free professionals from a physical location, more and more people work either as “digital nomads” or from their home offices.

However, many professionals still desire the amenities an office

“The coworking movement strives to combine the relaxed working environment of the home office with a dynamic social atmosphere.”

—Ned Dodington

“The coworking movement strives to combine the relaxed working environment of the home office with a dynamic social atmosphere,” Dodington said. “The model encourages the free flow of projects and ideas and is founded on the belief that working together is working smarter.”

Dodington and Wettergreen’s idea to create a coworking space in Houston met with interest from the city’s creative and

can provide, like conference rooms, networking opportunities, collegial conversations and free Wi-Fi. With the help and support of business partners and Wulfe Urban developers Jeff Kaplan and Adam Brackman, Wettergreen and Dodington secured a 6,000-square-foot space in Houston’s eclectic Museum District, making Caroline Collective one of the largest coworking spaces worldwide to date.

—Jessica Stark

For more information on Caroline Collective, visit: › › › carolinecollective.cc

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By Christopher Dow

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Photographs by Tommy LaVergne

You’d think that Lynn Laverty Elsenhans ’78 might be ready to retire after serving at nearly every executive level in Royal Dutch Shell during her 28-year career there. But Elsenhans isn’t the retiring sort. Beginning this summer, she’s taking on fresh challenges as CEO and president of Sunoco — and as the first woman to lead a major oil company.

It seems like every one of Elsenhans’ experiences has led her to this destination. Her father spent his career in a variety of research and marketing jobs for Exxon USA, and his work kept the family moving between metropolitan New York and Houston. All the moving taught Elsenhans to be adaptable, and her exposure to various high school curricula helped balance her academic strengths. When it came time to investigate colleges, she was immediately attracted to Rice because of its reputation in math, engineering and the sciences.

Elsenhans embraced every aspect of life at Rice. She played on the school’s first women’s intercollegiate basketball team; she was in the Marching Owl Band; she was elected to student government; she was the sports editor for The Thresher; and she was a student representative on the Examinations and Standings Committee. Yet somehow, she still managed to find time to excel in school and become social in a way she’d never been. “For me, it was the total experience, both inside and outside the classroom,” she said. “It was absolutely excellent for me.”

There also were glimmers of the kind of success she would later achieve. “People listened carefully when she spoke,” said Ronald Stebbings, who was master of Jones College when Elsenhans was there. “She gathered her thoughts and had something useful to say.”

After leaving Rice, Elsenhans went straight to Harvard Business School. By the time she finished, she was more than ready to make the leap into the work world. “It sounds corny, but it really mattered to me to work for something that made a difference,” she said. “I couldn’t think of anything that had more of an impact on our society than energy.”

During her tenure at Shell, Elsenhans steadily increased her authority and responsibility. After starting her career at the company’s U.S. headquarters in Houston and then moving to the

nearby Deer Park refinery, she had assignments in virtually every aspect of the company’s downstream business. In 1999, she was made president and CEO of Shell Oil Products East, based in Singapore. Since then, she has served co-currently as president of Shell Oil Company and president and CEO of Shell Oil Products U.S. and, most recently, as executive vice president of global manufacturing for Royal Dutch Shell.

It’s an enviable career trajectory made even more remarkable by the fact that it occurred in an environment that has not always been encouraging to women. “When I first started, there weren’t many women in the industry, and women’s credibility was very much questioned,” Elsenhans said. Much has changed since the early 1980s, thanks, at least in part, to Elsenhans’ success. As she rose in the corporate hierarchy, she made a concerted effort to pave the way for women who followed by mentoring them and helping establish women’s networking opportunities within Shell.

This year, however, Elsenhans hit a ceiling that was geographic rather than glass. The only place left to go within Shell was to the company’s European headquarters, and for family reasons, she and her husband, John ’74, wanted to remain in the United States. Facing retirement, even if she wasn’t ready to retire, she was asked to take the helm of Sunoco.

“It’s a really good fit for me,” Elsenhans said. “I worked for 28 years in the downstream part of the oil business — oil and chemical products — and that’s what Sunoco does.” It also was good from a personal standpoint because the company’s headquarters are in Philadelphia, which allows the Elsenhanses to remain close to John’s mother, who lives in the Northeast.

Elsenhans assumed her new role in August, but she graciously took a little time to talk to Rice Magazine about energy, women in the corporate world, leadership and, of course, her favorite university.

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Lynn Elsenhans

QA &

Rice Magazine: Energy is one of the most important issues of our day. What is your projection for the oil and gas industry in the mid- to long term?

Lynn Elsenhans: We’re all concerned about the price of energy, particularly gasoline, being driven up by high oil prices. A lot of people don’t recognize that downstream oil companies like Sunoco do refining but not drilling and don’t benefit from the high price of oil. They’ve been put in a bind, too. Energy usage typically follows economic activity, and because the economy is sluggish and product prices are high, people are changing their behavior in the way they drive and heat their homes. Product demand has been down dramatically. At the same time, supplies are getting quite loose because of ethanol and other biofuels mandates. We also have refinery expansions coming on-stream. All of those factors really squeeze the margin for downstream producers like Sunoco and make it quite difficult to make money. That surprises most people, who think that oil companies are making tons of money. The companies that produce oil and gas are making a lot of money, but the downstream companies aren’t.

There are really two pieces to the downstream oil industry. One is the manufacture of oil products, such as gasoline and other fuels. Right now, nearby, non-OPEC sources of supply, such as those in Mexico, are not producing as much as in the recent past, at a time when demand for crude in developing economies is soaring. That’s part of the reason the price of crude oil is going up. In the short to medium term, there will be tremendous pressure on product prices to go up even if the economic environment is not particularly good for the companies that make those products. That will tend to lessen the amount of investment in that part of the business. Over

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time, as the economy improves, we may, in fact, see a shortfall of product, giving us the double whammy of high crude oil prices plus tightness of product creating a tremendous increase in the price of the products. There will be a fair amount of volatility, but that volatility will be around a generally high price, so I don’t foresee consumer prices coming down in any dramatic way.

The other piece of the industry makes petrochemicals: base chemical feedstocks for plastics and other chemical products. I don’t see a very good picture in this part of the business for North American producers unless they are the most competitive and efficient producers. In the past, the industry depended on exporting chemical products, but the new capacity being built in the Asia–Pacific region, where the big demand for the products is, will push those exports back into the U.S. I predict that some refineries and petrochemical facilities will need to shut down.

That’s a tough call for those businesses, and it’s a tough outcome for the communities where those plants are located.

Rice Magazine: What challenge are you least looking forward to as Sunoco’s president and CEO? Lynn Elsenhans: I’m not looking forward to dealing with those politicians who are looking to paint the industry as villains. Sometimes I get the impression that, for political reasons — meaning what they perceive it takes to get re-elected — they don’t really want to understand what our country’s energy challenges are and don’t have the will to do the kinds of things that need to be done for sound energy policy. It can be frustrating to try to get our story out, and that’s compounded by considerable distrust of the industry and almost a tuning out of what the industry has to say.

Rice Magazine: What are the issues that politicians may be unwilling to face?

Lynn Elsenhans: The first one has to do with energy conservation, which is a combination of better energy efficiency and changes in behavior in the way people use the products. While some of that happens naturally as the prices go up, there clearly are ways to encourage people to use energy more efficiently. But as a nation, we haven’t invested enough in new technologies that will make energy usage far more efficient than it is now.

The second has to do with supply. Biofuels are part of the answer, but they aren’t a complete solution, and they make sense only if they are not driving up the cost of food. Sunoco doesn’t drill for oil and gas, but for those companies that do, there needs to be more access. That includes drilling in wildlife preserves, in Alaska and offshore. I don’t understand why we would deprive ourselves of a secure supply based here in this country and continue to depend on parts of the world that aren’t necessarily friendly to our country. The industry knows how to produce oil and gas in a very responsible way with a minimum footprint on the environment, and as a country, we have to let them do that.

Rice Magazine: Can America eventually do without foreign oil?

Lynn Elsenhans: In a word, no. Our appetite for oil is well beyond our ability to produce it from supplies just from the United States, or even from North America as a whole. In the very long term, we might become less dependent than we are today as other forms of energy come on-stream.

Biofuels are a part of a mix that will help extend the life of liquid fuels, but there’s only so much cellulose and waste plant matter that you’re going to

“One of the hardest lessons for me to learn as a leader was the need to give up being right.

If you’re always advocating your position, you aren’t being open to the ideas of others.”

—Lynn Elsenhans

be able to turn into fuel without affecting the food supply and impacting the CO2 balance through deforestation. There’s been a lot of talk about hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells, but that has its own problems. Where do we get the hydrogen? A main solution will be electrification. Predominantly, in the large scale, it’ll have to be nuclear generated.

Wind and solar are great, but they’re not going to be enough to make a significant difference, though they’re part of the mix.

Rice Magazine: When you started in the industry, it was unheard of for a woman to reach the level of president and CEO. Is the glass ceiling being broken or just cracked?

Lynn Elsenhans: Women in all kinds of fields have opportunities for leadership that didn’t exist when I started working. In the energy industry, I cannot think of a role that women don’t participate in, so I think the opportunities are out there. The numbers would suggest, however, that it’s still difficult for women to get to the highest levels, and one of the difficulties is in the ways people interrelate.

Research shows that women leaders tend to be either competent or liked, but rarely both, and that’s a double bind. People don’t tend to trust people they don’t like, and it’s very hard in business to lead if there isn’t mutual trust and respect. It’s also difficult to go forward in a company if you’re not considered competent.

As society gets more comfortable with the notion that women can be tough when there’s a reason to get tough, as well as taking the more traditional supportive role, it will tend to make it easier for women to have top jobs and break that glass ceiling. There have been inroads, but I don’t think we’re there yet.

Rice Magazine: What are the qualities of effective leadership?

Lynn Elsenhans: The critical thing I tell people is to be yourself. Authenticity is incredibly important, and if you’re trying to be someone you’re not, people see that, and it’s the kiss of death. Being self-aware also is important.

Understanding the impact you have on others and being open to feedback. One of the hardest lessons for me to learn as a leader was the need to give up being right. If you’re always advocating your position, you aren’t being open to the ideas of others. Beyond that, a leader has to be more positive than negative and have a vision for the future and a belief that things can be better. People need a reason to believe and hope, and they will not follow a leader who doesn’t have the view that tomorrow will be better than today.

Rice Magazine: Some people define success by how far they rise and how much money they make. How do you define success?

Lynn Elsenhans: How much of a difference I can make to people’s lives. On the personal side, it’s: Who loves you? Who do you love?

Rice Magazine: You’ve lived in a lot of countries and traveled extensively. What are some of your favorite places and why?

Lynn Elsenhans: I really like Indonesia.

The Indonesian people are incredibly friendly, welcoming and gentle, and the colors, music and art are quite interesting and exciting. Bali really is a magical place. Another place that I think is magical is the Rajasthan region in India. It’s where the Taj Mahal is, and it’s the area of India where the Mughal Empire had trade routes from Pakistan down into India. Again, the food, colors and art are

fantastic, and the Taj is just amazing. And I love Italy. There’s probably no place in Italy I’ve been that I didn’t think was just fabulous.

Rice Magazine: You’re a member of the Rice Board of Trustees, and you’re also a major contributor to scholarship funds as well as to the rebuilding of Autry Court. Why is this phenomenal level of service to the university important to you?

Lynn Elsenhans: I have a tremendous passion and deep love for Rice. I had a fantastic experience here as a student. It prepared me extremely well and is a part of my success. I still have relationships with many of the people I met here. A way for me to give back to Rice is to contribute my time and my money. I was fortunate enough to be asked to be a trustee, and I’ve really enjoyed it. The Rice Board is a tremendous group of dedicated and capable people.

In terms of my personal giving, I try to stay tuned to what the university needs, and one of the things we’re trying to do is expand undergraduate enrollment while maintaining the exceptional quality of the students. A big part of our ability to attract students is scholarships, so that’s one of my concentrations.

Also, I was approached by Athletics Director Chris Del Conte to give to Autry Court. I was convinced because I believe that having students of high academic achievement who have the ability and drive to compete in Division I is one of the things that sets Rice apart.

I’ve participated in sports throughout my life, and it’s a big part of who I am. In fact, one thing I tell anyone — women, especially — who is interested in going into business and being in leadership is to play a team sport. You learn a lot about yourself and what it means to interrelate with people and to work toward a common objective at the highest levels when you play on a good sports team. Being able to give toward the women’s basketball locker room in Autry was a small way for me to help keep that alive at Rice.

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g c i a k n r C

By Jade Boyd and Christopher Dow

AND OTHER

EARTHY

MATTERS

The past few years have witnessed a number of devastating earthquakes, such as the Great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake in 2004 that generated tsunamis as high as 100 feet, shook the planet by as much as 1 centimeter and triggered other earthquakes as far away as Alaska. That earthquake and others — more recently, several that hit China — have caused billions of dollars in damage and widespread loss of life. While most occurred in Asia, few places are immune. Tremblors have been felt in the United States — not just in expected locales such as California and Alaska, but also in the Midwest.

We may not be able to control cataclysmic earth events, but understanding them can lead to prediction that could minimize their impacts. Rice Earth scientists and others have made some headway toward deciphering how and why earthquakes and volcanic activity take place, and one may just have found a way to predict when a quake is imminent.

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Continental Staying Power Continents seem so substantial that it’s easy to forget they’re simply big chunks of rock floating around on the Earth’s viscous mantle. The movement can lead to earthquakes, but other processes also are at work. Geologists know, for example, that continents have come and gone during the Earth’s 4.5 billion years.

As of now, however, there are more theories than hard data about some of the key processes that govern continents’ lives.

One thing we do know is that continents ride higher than oceans. This is partly because the Earth’s crust is thicker beneath continents than it is beneath oceans. It also is the result of the continents losing their magnesium and calcium to the oceans, leaving behind lighter, silicon-rich rock that is buoyed up by the denser rock beneath the Earth’s crust.

Rice geologist Cin-Ty Lee always assumed that processes deep within the Earth accounted for most of the magnesium loss. One of these pro-

“Weathering occurs in just the top few meters or so of the Earth’s crust, and it’s driven by the hydrosphere, the water that moves between the air, land and oceans,” Lee said. “It appears that our planet has continents because we have an active hydrosphere — if we want to find a hydrosphere on distant planets, perhaps we should look for continents.”

Too Hot to Move The planet Venus provides evidence for Lee’s hypothesis. Venus’ surface, which shows no outward signs of tectonic activity, is bone dry. It also is heavily scarred with volcanoes. Scientists have long believed that Venus’ crust, lacking water to help lubricate tectonic plate boundaries, is too rigid for active plate tectonics. But Rice Earth scientist Adrian Lenardic thinks something else might be at work there.

Conventional wisdom holds that plate tectonics is both stable and self-correcting and that the stresses generated by a flowing mantle help keep tectonic plates

The research team wanted to better understand the differences between the Earth and Venus and establish the potential range of conditions that could exist on Earth-like planets in the solar system and elsewhere in the universe. The findings may explain why Venus evolved differently from Earth. cesses is delamination, in which dense, magnesium-rich magma wells up beneath continent-feeding volcanoes then ultimately sinks back into the Earth’s interior.

Lee already had learned from previous research that about 40 percent of the magnesium in basaltic magma was lost to delamination, but a bit of laboratory serendipity made him take a closer look.

In measuring the lithium content of the granitic rocks, Lee noticed that lithium tends to behave like magnesium, and he realized he could use lithium as a proxy to find out how much magnesium continents had lost due to chemical weathering. He was surprised to find that chemical weathering alone accounted for 20 percent of the magnesium loss.

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in motion. But that view relies on the assumption that excess heat from a planet’s mantle can efficiently escape through the crust. Lenardic has recently completed a study that suggests a planet’s mantle can become less viscous if it heats up. In fact, prolonged heating of a planet’s crust via rising atmospheric temperatures can shut down plate tectonics and cause a planet’s crust to lock in place.

“The heat required is far more than anything we expect from human-induced climate change,” Lenardic said, “but things like volcanic activity and changes in the sun’s luminosity could lead to this level of heating. Our goal was to establish an upper limit of naturally generated climate variation beyond which the entire

solid planet would respond.”

Lenardic said the research team wanted to better understand the differences between the Earth and Venus and establish the potential range of conditions that could exist on Earth-like planets in the solar system and elsewhere in the universe. The findings may explain why Venus evolved differently from Earth.

The two planets are close in size and geological makeup, but Venus’ carbon dioxide–rich atmosphere is almost 100 times more dense than the Earth’s and acts like a blanket. As a result, Venus’ surface temperature is hotter than that of even Mercury, which is only half as far from the sun.

The team discovered that Earth’s plate tectonics could become unstable if the surface temperature rose by 100 degrees Fahrenheit or more for a few million years.

“The time period and the rise in temperatures, while drastic for humans, are not unreasonable on a geologic scale, particularly compared to what scientists previously thought would be required to affect a planet’s geodynamics,” Lenardic said.

One of the most significant findings in the new study is that the atmospheric heating needed to shut down plate tectonics is considerably less than the critical temperature beyond which free water could exist on Earth’s surface.

“The water doesn’t have to boil away for irrevocable heating to occur,” Lenardic said. “The cycle of heating can be kicked off long before that happens.”

The researchers also found that a spike in volcanic activity could accompany the initial locking of the tectonic plates. This might explain the large percentage of volcanic plains that are present on Venus.

Targeting a Tsunami Zone Volcanoes generally seem innocuous compared with the devastating shakings that emanate from subduction zones — places where one tectonic plate slides beneath another and recycles back into the Earth’s molten mantle.

Earthquakes often occur in subduction zones when plates that normally move smoothly across one another lock, causing stress to build.

When the lock breaks and the plates jolt past each other, the sudden release causes the earth to shake. If the

shock occurs beneath the sea floor, it can create a tsunami.

One infamous subduction zone, the Nankai Trough, located on the floor of the Pacific Ocean about 100 miles from Kobe, Japan, has been responsible for numerous earthquakes and tsunamis and likely will cause more.

The morphology of the Nankai Trough interests Rice Earth scientist Dale Sawyer, who was part of an international team that spent eight weeks aboard the new scientific drilling vessel Chikyu collecting data on a particularly troublesome zone deep beneath the trough.

“Earthquakes don’t nucleate just anywhere,” Sawyer said. “While the slip zone for quakes in this region may be hundreds of kilometers long and tens of kilometers deep, the initiation point of the big quakes is often just 5 to 6 kilometers below the seafloor. We want to know why.”

The drilling done by Sawyer and colleagues marked the beginning of a massive project dubbed the Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment.

The project is organized by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), an international scientific research program dedicated to advancing scientific understanding of the Earth by monitoring and sampling subseafloor environments. In addition to drilling across the fault in the Nankai Trough, the scientists also hope to sample the rocks and fluids inside the fault, and they want to place instruments within the fault zone to monitor activity and conditions leading up to the next great earthquake.

Sawyer said scientists with IODP plan to return to the Nankai Trough each year through 2012, with the ultimate goal of drilling a six-kilometer-deep well to explore the region where the quakes originate. If they succeed, the well will be more than three times deeper than previous wells drilled by scientific drill ships, and it will provide the first direct data from this geological region.

Seeking Seismic Signs Rice seismologist Fenglin Niu and his colleaques have used a similar well in California to uncover information that could change quake prediction forever.

The famed San Andreas fault runs through San Francisco and around Los Angeles, and about halfway between the cities lies the town of Parkfield, where the

U.S. Geological Survey has been collecting seismic data for almost 40 years. Niu and his colleagues set up shop there, at the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth, a deep well seismologists use to make direct measurements of the fault.

“Almost everything we know about the deep interior structure of the Earth comes from seismic waves, the elas-

rock. Detecting stress changes before an earthquake has been the Holy Grail of earthquake seismology. Only recently, however, has technology improved sufficiently to make the necessary precision and reliability possible.

In analyzing the data from the new sensors, Niu and his colleagues found that a distinct change occurred in the

Changes in the rock structure are critical for predicting earthquakes. When rocks are compressed, the stress forces air out of tiny cracks, causing seismic waves to travel slightly faster through the rock. Detecting stress changes before an earthquake has been the Holy Grail of earthquake seismology. tic waves of energy that are released during earthquakes,” said Niu, whose work has earned a prestigious Early CAREER Development Award from the National Science Foundation’s EarthScope Program.

Today’s state-of-the-art earthquake warning systems give only a few seconds’ warning before a quake strikes. These systems detect P-waves, the fastestmoving seismic waves released during a quake. Like a flash of lightning that arrives before a clap of thunder, P-waves precede slower-moving but more destructive waves.

In an attempt to obtain readings that would give warning much further in advance of the event itself, Niu and his colleagues employed precision instruments built by collaborators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

These sensors can measure the minute changes in the time — sometimes just tens of billionths of a second — that it takes seismic waves to travel through the rock along a fi xed pathway beneath Parkfield. The instruments are so sensitive that, although they were more than half a mile below ground, they could measure fluctuations in air pressure at the Earth’s surface.

Changes in the rock structure are critical for predicting earthquakes. When rocks are compressed, the stress forces air out of tiny cracks, causing seismic waves to travel slightly faster through the

rock before each of the minor Parkfieldarea earthquakes during the test period.

A measurable change preceded a magnitude 3 quake by 10 hours. This was the largest local event during the observation period. A smaller but closer magnitude 1 temblor five days later was preceded by a signal about two hours before the quake.

“We’re working with colleagues in China and Japan on follow-up studies to determine whether this physical response can be measured in other seismically active regions,” Niu said. “Provided the effect is pervasive, we still need to learn more about the timing of the signals if we are to reliably use them to warn of impending quakes.”

The study’s other co-authors include Paul Silver of the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Rice graduate student Xin Cheng and LBNL scientists Tom Daley and Ernest Majer. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Rice, the Carnegie Institution and LBNL, and it appeared in the journal Nature.

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HistoricBuilding

With its largest-ever freshman class and the continuation of its green-friendly building campaign, Rice University is making history in more ways than one. “The ‘John and Anne’ Grove” spreads its peaceful beauty near the south colleges, vegetated roofs are sprouting up across campus, and the new 103,000-square-foot David and Barbara Gibbs Recreation and Wellness Center is taking shape.

Across campus, the excitement is building.

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A Grovey Kind of Love It may have culminated this summer with a revitalized green space near the south colleges, but it started with romance. In April 2006, a million-dollar gift from John ’63 and Anne d’Olier Mullen ’64 through the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund financed the beautification of the quadrangle bordered by Rice’s inner loop on the north, Sid Richardson College on the south, Baker and Will Rice Colleges on the east, and Hanszen College on the west.

Filled with formal rows of cedar elm and live oak trees and appropriately called “The ‘John and Anne’ Grove,” it is where the Mullens met and where their friendship evolved into true love.

“I first noticed Anne when she walked out of the grove into the Hanszen quad in fall 1960,” John said. “We soon became close friends, and one of our favorite places to talk was up in the branches of Rice’s majestic oaks. This gift is to all the other Johns and Annes who will meet on the Rice campus and form enduring friendships.”

Over the years, the grove began to suffer from poor drainage and mosquitoes, and students gradually began seeking other places to gather.

“This is an area that has been underdeveloped and a little bit ignored,” said Facilities, Engineering and Planning (FE&P) Project Manager Larry Vossler, “so the Mullens wanted to do something to give back.”

During the renovation, FE&P tackled the grove’s problem of standing water by installing new drains. They also replaced the concrete sidewalks with decomposed granite paths, which now extend down the center of “The ‘John and Anne’ Grove” and along its edges. FE&P chose to use the permeable granite material to help safeguard the health of the existing trees, some of which were planted in the 1930s.

“With the age and beauty of the Grove, we wanted to do everything possible to ensure that the trees continue to flourish,” Vossler said. “Decomposed granite is better for the trees’ roots, since it lets air and water get through.”

Over the years, a few of the original trees had become diseased and were removed. FE&P replaced them with six cedar elms and four live oaks — in addition to planting a number of crepe myrtles alongside Will Rice and Hanszen Colleges — and the pervious paths will benefit them as well. St. Augustine grass was planted on either side of the center path.

Seating has not yet been placed in the area, but FE&P has turned to south college residents for input regarding their preferences. No decisions have been made, but the students are leaning toward picnic tables or benches with backs in hopes of using the grove as a peaceful place to eat, study or converse with friends.

“Our goal was to turn ‘ The “John and Anne” Grove’ into a more accessible oasis for relaxation and recreation,” said Vossler.

“I’d say we’re there.”

—Merin Porter

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Building for a Healthy Mind and Healthy Body Rice University students already are adept in the gymnastics of the mind: Soon they’ll have a new place to master the athletic pursuits of the body.

Scheduled to open in August 2009, the David and Barbara Gibbs Recreation and Wellness Center will offer state-of-theart workout and health facilities and will house everything from competitive swimming and billiards to nutritional counseling and meditative classroom space. Rice broke ground on the two-story, 103,000-square-foot building on April 22.

Upon its completion, the Rice Wellness Center will relocate from its current location next to Brown College. The Recreation and Wellness Center’s $41 million price tag will be funded solely through philanthropy. “We are particularly grateful to David and Barbara Gibbs for making the lead gift for this historic project,” said President David Leebron. “We also want to thank Ralph O’Connor and Carl Isgren for their generous gifts.”

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Taking the Heat As rooftop gardens grow, energy usage shrinks

Most roofs are built to keep water out, but the green roof slated for several new Rice buildings will actually drink it in. That’s because the roof — which recently debuted over the South Plant’s electrical room and will also be added to Duncan College, the Collaborative Research Center and the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen — is actually a garden.

The roof employs low-maintenance vegetation that is planted in a special growing medium, which sits on layers of drainage and aeration material, insulation, roofing membrane and structural support.

The vegetated roof’s exceptional insulating powers will help reduce the buildings’ energy consumption, minimize storm-water runoff,

limit damage from hailstorms and provide a habitat for songbirds and other native animals and insects.

“As vegetated green roofs cover our buildings, we’ll reduce our energy consumption, our flooding and even the outdoor temperatures in summertime,” said Director of Sustainability Richard Johnson. “At the same time, we’ll have helped restore ecosystems disrupted by human development. That’s a future I think we can all get excited about.”

The landscape of today’s green roofs varies from utilitarian stretches of grass to elaborate elevated parks, and Rice is experimenting with different plant species to determine which perform best in Houston’s scorching rooftop environment. The lessons learned atop Rice’s newest buildings will help others in the Houston area choose optimal plantings for their vegetated roofs, which is exactly what Johnson is anticipating.

“My hope is that when someone flies over Houston in an airplane 10 years from now, they’ll be able to look down at all the native landscape on our rooftops and wonder where all the buildings went.”

—Merin Porter and Susann Glenn

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Green as Grassroots

RSGBI

The Rice Student Green Building Initiative may have started small, but it has big plans for sustainable construction on campus.

By Merin Porter

An odd thing happened in autumn 2006: Despite the changing weather and the natural push toward dormancy, something green grew. It was a tiny seed of an idea planted in the fertile soil of junior Stephanie Squibb’s mind. It grew along with Rice University’s Vision for the Second Century plan for a million square feet of new campus construction, until finally, it flourished into the Rice Student Green Building Initiative (RSGBI), a conscientious campus club that gives students the opportunity to help build grassroots awareness of and interest in environmentally friendly building techniques.

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[

Stephanie Squibb • Niki vonHedemann • Sabina Bharwani

]

“When you take three young women like these and give them a fairly simple project, they find ways to increase the scope of the project. They get ambitious.”

—Richard Johnson

“As an architecture student, I have been progressively interested in environmental and sustainable issues,” said Squibb. Her focus on “green” architecture began when she was a student in the spring 2006 Environmental Studies class co-taught by Director of Sustainability Richard Johnson and Professor Paul Harcombe, who has since retired. As part of a team assigned to research green options for a Jones College restroom renovation project scheduled for that summer, Squibb and classmates Niki vonHedemann ’08 and Sabina Bharwani ’07 explored the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, a U.S. Green Building Council program that provides a benchmark for the design, construction and operation of environmentally friendly buildings.

What these incredibly bright students did next came as no surprise to Johnson.

“When you take three young women like these and give them a fairly simple project,” he said, “they find ways to increase the scope of the project. They get ambitious.”

The women compiled their research into a PowerPoint presentation and began showing it to friends, as well as to the presidents of Rice’s residential colleges. Before long, they were showing it to Rice’s college masters, too.

“They attended a meeting of all the college masters and got them to recommend that the new residential colleges, which at that point were just dreams, be ‘green’ buildings,” said Johnson.

Recognizing that the grassroots effort had legs, he and Harcombe invited Associate Vice President of Facilities, Engineering and Planning (FE&P) Barbara White Bryson and Vice President for Administration Kevin Kirby to attend the students’ final class presentation on green building. After the presentation, something special happened: Bryson and Kirby stood up and announced to the class that Rice would build not only the new residential colleges according to LEED standards, but all other future campus structures as well.

“Of course, that’s not the kind of decision you just pull out of a hat, so clearly they had been talking about this already,” said Johnson. “But what Stephanie, Niki and Sabina were able

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to do is build grassroots awareness and support among Rice students and those faculty members serving as college masters, who were very important in helping decide what was planned for the new colleges.”

Expertise on Tap Despite the larger scope of the LEED initiative, Squibb, vonHedemann and Bharwani hadn’t forgotten about the Jones College restroom renovation project. Johnson and Harcombe connected the students with FE&P Project Manager Ken Thompson, who asked for the students’ input regarding new faucets. His criteria were that the faucets have a single handle and input line and be well made, ADA compliant and within the price range of $125 and $130. As a result of the students’ recommendation, Thompson chose a more efficient faucet than the one originally under consideration — reducing Jones College’s water usage by around 175,000 gallons per year and saving the university approximately $1,200 annually.

“The purpose of this project was to minimize the lifetime ecological footprints of the products and replacements in as many ways as possible,” Squibb said, adding that the students also suggested that the old sinks and fixtures be reused or recycled instead of being thrown away. As a result, the sinks were donated to a local Habitat for Humanity supply store, and the metal fixtures were recycled as scrap.

Squibb calls her experiences eye-opening.

“I began to recognize the level of student interest in green building and the potential opportunities for connecting students with green building efforts and education on campus,” she said.

“I felt that a student group on campus that embraced that focus and was acknowledged by the Student Association would be beneficial.”

Squibb decided to complete independent study courses on sustainable building practices throughout her senior year, during which Johnson and Harcombe encouraged her to pursue her idea of organizing the RSGBI. The club held its first meeting in

“I feel that

sustainable issues surround us at all levels.

The RSGBI allows students to be involved in these decisions and encourages them to help shape the future.”

—Stephanie Squibb

December 2006, and Squibb offered an introduction to the 10 or so students who attended.

“I explained that the group was a great way to learn about sustainable issues, network with architects and engineers within the community and become more involved with design decisions made about the buildings on campus,” Squibb said. She also discussed ways in which the organization would allow students to be involved in sustainable issues. These included education through guest speakers and organized tours, engagement and input during the design process of new buildings and selected renovations, and implementation by providing labor and other assistance to support the campus’s green building goals.

Ideas Into Action The club held three meetings in spring 2007, further developing its mission statement, electing officers and creating a Listserv that quickly gained nearly 70 subscribers. Squibb, who received her bachelor of arts in architecture that semester, knew she would be pursuing a bachelor of architecture degree at Rice. Since she would be completing her architectural preceptorship in New York at Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, the club elected Alex Tseng as its president for 2007–08.

“Alex has been absolutely great for taking ideas and turning them into actions,” said Squibb, whose plan for a LEED training program Tseng executed. More than 40 students from architecture, engineering and even ecological and evolutionary biology attended the first set of classes, which were taught in spring 2008 by Rice alumnus and LEED-accredited professional Guyton Durnin ’06.

“We started the LEED Certification Class mainly to raise student awareness in sustainability issues and to allow those students who want to gain more knowledge in sustainable design to become professionally accredited,” said Tseng, adding that the U.S. Green Building Council generously provided the class’s

training materials. The students who took and passed the LEED for New Construction Professional Accreditation exam before the end of the semester enjoyed the financial support of Rice’s schools of architecture and engineering, the director of sustainability and local architecture firms. This support covered half of the $300 exam fee for each student who passed the exam. Tseng noted that several students have expressed interest in taking the class next year, which not only means that it will need additional sources of funding, but also indicates that its popularity isn’t likely to dwindle.

Among the other projects that RSGBI has fostered are the Green Dorm Initiative, which encourages students to adopt sustainable lifestyles in their dorms; the Advocacy Task Force, which helps the club stay connected with other campus environmental organizations; a lecture series that brings architects involved in sustainable design to campus for the benefit of club members; and site visits to green buildings in the Houston area.

Today, seven RSGBI board members help administrate and coordinate “green” events, and 150 members benefit from their efforts. Despite the fact that the club was started with the Vision for the Second Century’s construction efforts in mind, Tseng says that it will still be here long after the last construction worker has left campus.

“The RSGBI has a special status as an organization that seeks to work from the inside out,” Tseng said. “We want to cultivate advocates among the Rice student body who will be equipped to guide future development at Rice and to encourage others to participate.”

Squibb agreed. “I realize this is a pivotal time with all the current construction, but I feel that sustainable issues surround us at all levels,” she said. “The RSGBI allows students to be involved in these decisions and encourages them to help shape the future.”

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By Merin Porter

The Entrepreneur Next Door Rice alum David Zumwalt may have a penchant for making history, but his keen sense of humor and passion for family have kept the former MOB member as down-to-earth as ever.

People still talk about it today: a human “cockroach” so enormous, so irreverent that it crawled into the Rice history books and has nested there to this day. It made its debut on Texas A&M University’s Kyle Field on Oct. 25, 1980, the same day the Owls beat the Aggies 10–6, when the Rice Marching Owl Band (MOB) — which prides itself on never actually marching — gave onlookers a halftime show to remember. It wasn’t the first time David Zumwalt ’81, a former MOB member who helped pull off the stunt, made history — but it was certainly one of the most memorable.

“I was a Drum Minor in the MOB my senior year, pregame announcer and a part of the scriptwriting team,” said Zumwalt, a Baker College member and fellow who serves as executive director of the University of the Virgin Islands Research and Technology Park (RTPark). Orchestrating the insectile spectacle taught him some lessons he still relies on. “Challenges such as designing and executing a halftime show both Rice and Aggie partisans find entertaining, while ‘desecrating’ Kyle Field with a cockroach and leaving the field to a standing ovation, are no less complex than most any in business life.”

It’s a claim Zumwalt is well qualified to make, since he has founded and directed several technology and communications companies over the past two decades. The most notable among these is CNet Inc., a software services business that merged with publicly traded, multinational Glenayre Technologies in 1997. (Glenayre later sold the CNet name to the well-known media company that now holds it.) Zumwalt also served in founding and executive positions for technology and telephony companies such as Privacy Inc., GoComm Inc. and Exceleron Software Inc.

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His fascination with telecommunications, technology and software began in the late 1970s, while he was pursuing his bachelor of science in electrical engineering at Rice. Zumwalt apprenticed with Southwestern Bell when the company was planning and rolling out electronic switching in its north Texas offices, and he became fascinated with the upcoming divestiture of AT&T and the imminent deregulation of the industry.

Path to the Future Competitive telecommunications was in its infancy when Zumwalt graduated from Rice and joined Compucon Inc. The company actively supported the development of terrestrial microwave and satellite communications networks — and it also supported Zumwalt’s nascent entrepreneurial ambitions. He left the company to form CNet with fellow alumnus Scott Greenwell ’82, and the two “faced all the struggles, panics, stresses and joys of growing that business over an 11-year period in a dynamic environment.”

To succeed in the chancy venture, Zumwalt drew on the life skills he honed at Rice: patience,

persistence, leadership, an appreciation for delayed gratification — and diplomacy.

“Untangling roommate incompatibilities, grappling with multicultural and religious issues, testing the limits of on-campus capacity, and the inevitable privacy concerns that arise in a co-ed college all served up very useful skills for later application,” he said.

He also credits some of his favorite Rice faculty and staff members with helping him develop personally and professionally. Physics professor Harold Rorschach, who made Rice history as the first nonresident associate of Jones College when it still housed only women, was, Zumwalt said, “an outstanding and approachable Rice professor, especially for wide-eyed and disoriented freshmen.”

Through Professor Patricia Reiff’s instruction, he discovered a passion for astronomy and space science, and Baker College master Jeff Kurtzman reignited Zumwalt’s love for music. History professor Charles Garside brought out his very best manners, and Zumwalt said he still uses sociologist Bill Martin’s “days behind for the undergraduate” equation. (“Who knew sociology had equations?”)

He remembers other Rice faculty and staff members with fondness, too: political science professor Gilbert “Doc C” Cuthbertson, who taught Zumwalt’s favorite class at Rice; Bert Roth, the “archetypical and original” director of the MOB; and faculty resident associate Maria Leal, who liked the way he sang in the shower — although Zumwalt said he didn’t realize his voice was carrying.

While these Rice friends helped him discover and develop latent passions and interests, it may have been Zumwalt’s freshman chemistry class that most affected his future path. Fresh out of high school and with a straight-A record, he planned to take the world of elements and electrons by storm — until he earned a 30 on his first chem test.

“That did plenty to make me rethink my career

aspirations, not to mention my opinion of my scholastic aptitude,” he said. “Rice quickly demonstrated to me that achievement and excellence are in abundance, and there’s always someone more talented and gifted, more committed and hard working, or just plain smarter than you.”

Zumwalt said that while his time at Rice improved his discipline and focus, it also softened some of his competitive drives. Since then, he’s learned that even the best-laid plans sometimes sink under the tumultuous waves of market conditions, capital restraints and simple bad luck. But Zumwalt also has learned to measure success in language that doesn’t include “big houses” or “bank accounts.” His yardstick for success comprises two words: “Always try.”

“I have learned that a very thin line separates failure from success, so how we live and how we handle failure say much about how we handle success. There are any number of ways to keep score, but I believe success is less an outcome and more a way of living.”

That’s one reason why, in 2005, Zumwalt agreed to the challenge of nurturing the fledgling RTPark. After more than two decades of entrepreneurship, he was ready for something new.

“When I was approached with the opportunity to apply my past experiences to the greater challenge of economic development in a commercially crucial but financially stressed region, I found it hard to resist,” he said. “I also sensed this was something I had been called to do.”

The Challenges of Economic Development The RTPark was born in 2002 out of the U.S. Virgin Island’s search for untapped resources that could provide opportunities for the region’s outstanding businesspeople. Agriculture and tourism had been the major pillars of the local economy, but those sectors offered few opportunities for the island’s rising young business and technology stars.

“The result was a ‘brain drain’ from the Caribbean basin, as many of the region’s outstanding talents relocated to the mainland to pursue better opportunities. This robbed the Caribbean of many gifted leaders who might otherwise be contributing more directly to the future of these islands.”

When key decision makers from government, academia and commercial enterprise came together to search for a potential panacea to the USVI’s commercial woes, they quickly found it in the islands’ role as a significant switching center for subsea fiber networks.

“The USVI is home to one of the very largest concentrations of bandwidth in the hemisphere, and a significant amount of Internet and voice traffic is carried through our switching facilities,” Zumwalt said. “In a way, the USVI is to global data what Memphis is to the delivery of overnight packages.”

work behind the scenes — organizing capital resources, identifying prospective partners and honing its business model, among other things — its recent progress has won it a place in the sun.

“In 2007, we secured a breakthrough agreement with Global Crossing to provide data center solutions for tenants and partners — to which we’ve added key alliances for telecommunications and managed services — and we are negotiating with strategic partners for e-commerce transaction processing capabilities,” Zumwalt said. “We currently have a television station as a tenant, with additional tenants and partners on the way.”

Another Path to the Future

“Many tilt at windmills as they work hard to shape careers and families to match their dreams and expectations. Life, however, molds us on its own timetable and in many unexpected ways.”

—David Zumwalt

To capitalize on this bandwidth, the islands’ local leaders worked together to “design an engine that could focus the region’s many assets to foster a vital, growing and globally competitive new technology sector in the economy.” The resulting RTPark provides a physical hub for technologycentered businesses interested in establishing operations in the area. It leverages the islands’ fiber connectivity and encourages workforce development through strategic partnerships and significant local tax incentives.

Although the park conducted much of its early

While Zumwalt is happy about his successes as head of the RTPark, they are not his proudest accomplishments. That distinction falls to his thirdand fifth-graders, Emerson and Maggie, and to his wife, Emmy ’85. (Zumwalt does, however, admit to being proud of “the rather unusual distinction” of appearing in Playboy magazine: “April 1981, page 15, in the huge pink bunny suit, related to a MOB halftime show.”)

The importance of family is a consistent theme in Zumwalt’s story. He sold CNet in 1997 in pursuit of a schedule that was more conducive to a strong family life. One of his favorite places is a Singaporean hotel where he and Emmy learned their first child was on the way. And, most days, he drops his kids off at school on the way to work and is home again in time for dinner. If he must work at home in the evenings, he waits until Maggie and Emerson have gone to bed.

Zumwalt says his wife and children “continually inspire me, in the words of Jack Nicholson, to ‘try to be a better man.’” He also credits his father and fellow alumnus Gary Zumwalt ’57 and his mother and grandfather with being highly influential.

“They passed on many qualities for which I am profoundly thankful: my father’s temperament, patience and sense of fairness; my mother’s persistence, faith and strength in the face of adversity; and my paternal grandfather’s quintessential example of what every man truly aspires to be — a humble, loving father, grounded in faith, who led an exemplary career and actively sought ways to be of service to others.”

While Zumwalt strives for that kind of excellence, he’s not afraid to let go of the wheel, either — and he encourages Rice students to do the same.

“Many tilt at windmills as they work hard to shape careers and families to match their dreams and expectations,” he said. “Life, however, molds us on its own timetable and in many unexpected ways. Don’t be afraid to let it shape you.”

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Amanda Wallace was awarded the Rice University Art Gallery Director’s Choice award.

Launch into New Space Student shows are nothing new for Nancy Hixon. After almost 30 years with the Blaffer Gallery, the art museum of the University of Houston, she’s seen and installed enough student art to fill the Louvre. But that doesn’t mean Hixon isn’t excited every time she works with students. “I find it interesting to learn what they’re reading, who they’re studying with and what artists they’re influenced by,” Hixon said. “I want to see where they take their work.”

Hixon served as the juror for “LAUNCH: Rice Student Art Exhibition 45.” “Nancy is one of the most respected arts professionals in Houston and she has so much experience working with students,” said Rice Gallery Director Kim Davenport.

“Working closely with such a gifted

In her statement about the work, Wallace wrote, “When you are away at college, you are absent from the many moments experienced by your family.

You also miss the changes that have taken place in areas that were once familiar to you. These photographs are

in the gallery during the opening. “There was a huge attendance, and not everyone could see the speakers, so we brought in a 12-foot ladder,” Davenport said. Each professor giving an award would climb up to look out over the crowd.

The “ladder podium” became a tradition and was used until a few years ago when the student award ceremony was moved to the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts’ new quarters in the Rice Media Center. Beginning next year, the student art exhibition will be held there — a fresh start signaled by this year’s exhibition title, “LAUNCH.” “It has been fun to organize the student art exhibitions over the past 13 years,” Davenport said. “However, we

“The Media Center is the place on campus where art is being made every day, where the art students gather and where the department’s identity and sense of community lie.”

—Kim Davenport

curator and having the opportunity to recognize outstanding creative students are some of the great rewards for the gallery staff.”

One of those outstanding students was Amanda Wallace, who was awarded the Rice University Art Gallery Director’s Choice award for “Back Home,” a series of photographs she took of friends, family and the neighborhood where she grew up.

Accompanying each photograph was a small story about the person or place depicted.

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the beginning of a way of representing these two experiences.”

“LAUNCH” also was something of a special occasion for the Rice Gallery staff and one of many turning points in the gallery’s long history.

“When I came to Rice, the student show looked very different than it did this year,” Davenport said. “In the past, visual arts faculty selected works from all classes and among all years of study, which were hung in the gallery salon style.”

The lively visual cacophony was complemented by the awards ceremony held

realize the need for students to reclaim the sense of ownership they had for the show when the art department was located in Sewall Hall, right up the stairs from the gallery. The Media Center is the place on campus where art is being made every day, where the art students gather and where the department’s identity and sense of community lie. It’s exciting to think about this change reinforcing the vitality of the arts at Rice.”

—Kelly Klaasmeyer

Arts

Memories from Dust

When artist Mark Fox decided to move from Cincinnati, Ohio, to New York City, he knew he had a problem. His 6,000-square-foot studio in Cincinnati was full of stuff, but his new space in New York was only 400 square feet. He realized he’d have to get rid of a lot of what he owned, but somehow, he just couldn’t bring himself to eliminate everything entirely. So he drew it all.

“Dust,” Fox’s Summer Window installation for Rice Gallery, was filled with black ink drawings of almost all the items Fox once owned, such as a vacuum cleaner, Christmas lights, C-clamps, a stuffed lizard, a toy horse, desk chairs, a ladder, a giant fan and even a stray corncob holder.

He cut the drawings into the shapes of the objects, painted their backs fluorescent green and mounted them on wires that extended from a wall constructed just behind the gallery window.

“All my prior work was about manipulation and about how people move or control things, collect things,” Fox explained.

“Now, I was being denied movement by the things I owned; the things kind of owned me in a way.”

The massed images seemed to float and swirl in space like the vortex of a tornado — sparse in the center with dense clusters at the edges, as if some force was sucking all of Fox’s possessions into oblivion. The luminous green paint on the backs of the drawings reflected against the wall behind them, creating the ominous atmospheric effect he saw as a boy when he witnessed a tornado’s destructive funnel cloud.

“After I drew things, there was an assessing process,” Fox said. “The stories behind the objects I owned came back as I drew them.”

In the end, Fox may have jettisoned a dumpsterful of stuff, but he got to keep his memories in images that produced a fantastic installation.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer

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Trio Destino: Rachael Young, bassoon; Hilary Abigana, flute; and Amy Chung, clarinet.

For the fifth year in a row, musicians from Rice University took center stage at one of the best-known venues in the country: the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Eight students from The Shepherd School of Music participated in the Kennedy Center’s Conservatory Project, which was designed to introduce audiences to the top young musical artists from the nation’s leading undergraduate and graduate conservatories, colleges and universities. Students from The Shepherd School, which was one of the project’s founding participants, have been selected to perform every year since the program’s inception in 2004.

“This year was one of our strongest concerts yet,” said Gary Smith, associate dean of music. “The opportunity for our extraordinary musicians to play at the Kennedy Center — the national face of performing arts — is rewarding and invaluable for them and for The Shepherd School.”

This year’s participants Sadie Turner, harpist were Trio Destino (graduate students Hilary Abigana, flute; Amy Chung, clarinet; and Rachael Young, bassoon), harpist Sadie Turner ’08, and the Jasper String Quartet (graduate students John Freivogel, violin; Sae Niwa, violin; Sam Quintal, viola; and Rachel Henderson, cello). In the spring, the Jasper String Quartet won the Grand Prize and Audience Prize at the Plowman Chamber Music Competition and the Grand Prize at the Coleman Chamber Music Competition. This fall, they are studying with the Tokyo String Quartet at Yale University.

Other participating schools were Northwestern University School of Music, Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, Berklee College of Music and Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

Return to the Kennedy Center

—Jessica Stark

Photography: David Long

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Arts

“The opportunity for our extraordinary musicians to play at the Kennedy Center – the national face of performing arts – is rewarding and invaluable for them and for The Shepherd School.”

—Gary Smith

Sam Quintal, viola; Rachel Henderson, cello; Sae Niwa, violin; and John Freivogel, violin

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Shepherd School’s Stallmann Earns Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship If there is a way for a composer to write music for walking on cloud nine, Kurt Stallmann will probably find it. And for good reason. Stallmann, the Lynette S. Autrey Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at The Shepherd School of Music, recently was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which placed him among an elite group of professionals who have demonstrated stellar achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

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A piece for cloud nine might have to wait a while, however. Stallmann hopes to spend 2009 producing creative works that use electronic and computer-generated sounds in concert with live instruments and in live performances. He’s also considering forming a new ensemble to explore musical dialogue using computers and acoustic instruments.

“One thing that will remain very important to me,” Stallmann said, “is interdisciplinary work involving other mediums — video, dance, light, movement.”

become more aware of the world around them — experiencing the familiar, everyday world as something vivid and fresh — and consequently re-engaging and reconnecting them with their surroundings.”

“Breaking Earth” built on Stallmann’s history of pioneering works. He devotes his energy to the synthesis and connection of the many mediums available to composers today and creates works for acoustic groupings, acoustic/electronics groupings with interactive elements, environmental sounds and purely synthetic sounds.

‘Breaking Earth’

Passing It On

Stallmann’s multidisciplinary work incorporating performance, fixed and interactive electronics, and visual elements has earned him the attention of a number of national organizations and foundations. Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program commissioned his latest exhibition, “Breaking Earth.” For that innovative work, Stallmann collaborated with filmmaker Alfred Guzzetti to create a palette of images, spaces and sounds.

The installation, which ran last spring at Houston’s DiverseWorks Art Space, featured five screens of projected high-definition video and multiple channels of audio. At first, sounds and images were recognizable items from the natural world, like woods, sea, wind, streams and stone. Elements then slowly shifted into one another and transformed into an abstracted landscape of consciousness.

“We set out to blur the lines of reality around the things we hear and see every day,” Stallmann said. “We really hope this work has the effect of motivating people to

Another of Stallmann’s passions — perhaps his greatest — is teaching.

“I urge my students to look inside themselves to find out what it is they want to contribute to the artistic landscape as it exists in the world today,” Stallmann said.

“That requires a knowledge of what is out there to begin with and an understanding of how the past has led to the present.”

Stallmann hopes to be able to pass on to students his knowledge of that landscape — the very landscape his work is significantly impacting. He said that while connections and talent are important, they can take a person only so far.

“Hard work completes talent,” Stallmann said. “This is something that most people don’t understand. It takes a lot of courage and determination to commit oneself to very personal ideas.”

Stallmann’s ideas earned him the honor of presenting his piece “SONA — Sounds of Houston: Wind, Rain, Trains” as the closing work of the 2008 Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS)

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National Conference. The organization is devoted to music that involves electronic and digital generation of sound materials for performance. This year, he was also presented with a SEAMUS President’s Award for his contributions to the organization.

The Shepherd School Influence Given Stallmann’s incredible talent and cutting-edge vision, it’s likely that he will be remembered as a hero and mentor to many.

He already is helping artists and musicians of the next generation leave their marks on the world.

“One thing we try to encourage at The Shepherd School is the development of the creative imagination and a sense of artistic responsibility — learning to commit oneself to seeing ideas through to completion,” Stallmann said. “Students have to become convinced that their ideas and the quality of their ideas are important. Without that conviction, it is hard to invest the many hours of work necessary to bring those ideas into the world.”

Stallmann credited The Shepherd School and its administration for fostering an environment so conducive to artistic development and collaboration.

“Our students are wonderful and the environment is very stimulating. Dean Robert Yekovich is an accomplished creative artist himself, so the support offered by the administration is outstanding,” Stallmann said. “Rarely have I seen a school where colleagues are more supportive of one another and where there is such a genuine sense of teamwork.”

—Jessica Stark

Arts

The Sound of Summer Music Summertime is camp time at Rice, where summer programs range from the academic and scientific to the athletic and recreational — and include one offering that fills the air with the sound of music.

The music camps were created by Rachel Buchman, a lecturer in music and head of The Shepherd School of Music’s Young Children’s Division. Buchman wanted to encourage children ages 2 through 9 to explore music through singing, rhythm games, creative movement, improvisation, musical storytelling, and the building and playing of percussion instruments.

“I come from years Throughout the weeklong camps, the children develop their innate musicianship of conservatory and understand music through joyful experitraining, so I know ence. And the kids aren’t the only ones who that the serious benefit. Current and former Shepherd School students who lead the weeklong camps often elements of music discover that the experience rekindles the making can often spark that first led them to music.

“I come from years of conservatory trainget exaggerated. ing, so I know that the serious elements of It is nice to be music making can often get exaggerated,” reminded of why said Juliette Javaheri ’05, who was among the camp’s seven teachers. “It is nice to be we are all here in reminded of why we are all here in the first the first place — to place — to have some fun.” have some fun.”

Javaheri first began working with The Shepherd School’s Young Children’s Division —Juliette Javaheri in 2006 when Buchman asked her to observe some classes.

“Rachel’s enthusiastic approach to music is contagious,” Javaheri said. “She is always reminding us that the kids are here in the summer to have fun.

And boy, do they have a good time. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find another group of kids getting so fired up by a piece of classical music — sharing with one another their thoughts and feelings about a selected recording or live performance.”

Buchman has spent more than 25 years “The camps are teaching music to young people, from open to everyone toddlers to doctoral students in the U.S., — not just Rice Germany, England and Israel. Researching people — so they the connections between children and music, she found that singing encourages brain keep me plugged and language development and is one of in to community the most essential educational activities a needs.” parent can do with a child.

While the summer programs build on —Rachel Buchman her research interests, they also offer her a way to stay connected to the Houston community and her students.

“The camps are open to everyone — not just Rice people — so they keep me plugged in to community needs,” Buchman said. “They’ve become a wonderful way for me to keep in touch with Shepherd School alumni and for them to come back to Rice to share their marvelous energy and creativity with the children of Houston.”

A Scholarship Recipient’s Journey Abroad

For Tyler Barth ’08, studying in Asia was an opportunity for constant discovery, both in the classroom and beyond.

While dining out with one of his teachers in Japan, Barth offered to pay for their meals, but his teacher pointed to a sign written in Japanese. “It was an old phrase that meant the older give to the younger,” Barth said. “She said she would pay for me to do these things now, but later I would also have to give to the young. I realized that’s how scholarships work.”

With scholarship support, Barth was able to spend two summers and an academic semester abroad in Asia. After his freshman year, he participated in Rice’s NanoJapan program, and as a junior, he studied at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and took part in a summer program at National Taiwan University. Recently he received the Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship, which will allow him to return to HKUST to study computer science, a field which he hopes to pursue in graduate school.

Looking back, Barth believes that studying abroad was a critical component of his Rice education. With financial support, he was able not only to attend Rice, but also to extend his undergraduate education overseas.

Rice University • Office of Development–MS 81 P.O. Box 1892 • Houston, TX 77251–1892 713-348-4600 • www.giving.rice.edu

—Jessica Stark

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‘The Things They’ve Done’ When Professor of Architecture William Cannady talks about his former students, it sounds like he’s talking about his own children. He recounts memories of them as “kids” while at Rice and tells stories of their school projects. But most of all, he speaks of their accomplishments.

Cannady’s new book, “The Things They’ve Done,” is in that same vein. It offers a brief history of the Rice School of Architecture (RSA) from 1912 to 2007 and profi les the heralded careers of 68 alumni who attended Rice between 1964 and 1998.

Cannady began by making a list of the many students he had taught at Rice since early 1964. Senior faculty added more names to the list, and recommendations from alumni yielded others.

“There were many students who

narratives express a connection to the campus, classmates, faculty and activities at Rice and, according to Cannady, are the most interesting part of the book.

“Themes started to develop among students who were in school during the same period of time,” Cannady said. “You can see that what you taught them has affected them and, in many cases, shaped their careers. That wasn’t a surprise to me but was a reassurance that the time faculty spend conceiving, developing and delivering curriculum matters in the long run.”

For example, William Caudill, director of RSA from 1961 to 1969, had a pragmatic and team approach to design. Under his leadership, faculty members devised studio projects that explored planning and real estate development and exposed students to engineers, photographers and artists. Alumni in the “Caudill era” include three real estate developers, a commercial photographer, an urban designer and two public officials, in addition to practicing architects and designers.

Jack Mitchell, dean from 1978 to 1989,

“You can see that what you taught them has affected them and, in many cases, shaped their careers.”

— William Cannady

stood out as undergraduate and graduate students whom we knew had excelled in the professional realm,” Cannady said.

“There are other alumni who should have been included, but either we didn’t have their contact information or they chose not to respond.”

The key to the selection process was based on identifying a diversity of occupations and locations around the world. The profiled alumni studied under seven administrations of the school starting in 1964, when Cannady started teaching at RSA, and pursued about 25 different career paths. They represent approximately 5 percent of RSA’s graduates.

Cannady asked each alum to write a short narrative on something memorable about their time at Rice. The

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and his faculty affected the paths of many RSA alumni who chose to go into academia and hold faculty positions at architecture schools around the world. The 1997 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture annual meeting of 105 schools included RSA alumni holding leadership positions on 11 different campuses.

“This book demonstrates the many careers that a Rice student can develop through the study of architecture,” Cannady said. “The traditional and not-so-traditional career paths.”

Along with architects and designers, RSA has turned out artists, photographers, teachers, deans, government officials, real estate developers, corporate executives, spacecraft designers, urban designers, authors and even an actor/producer.

—Jessica Stark

ON THE

Translation and the Word If you thought that Judas’ betrayal of Jesus was firmly established long ago, last year’s National Geographic translation of the Coptic Gospel of Judas might have given you pause. The translation caused a sensation because it portrayed Judas not as a villain but as a friend of Jesus who acted on Jesus’ request to betray him.

Like most religious studies scholars, April DeConick, the Isla Carroll and Percy Turner Professor of Religious Studies at Rice, was instantly intrigued. Not content to simply read the translation, she obtained a copy of the original to read for herself, and that’s when she began to have doubts about the accuracy of the National Geographic team’s work. Her doubts were serious enough that she undertook her own translation, which confi rmed for her that the National Geographic’s version was in error and led her to write her own book on the subject, “The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says” (Continuum, 2007).

DeConick said many scholars and writers have been inspired by the National Geographic version.

“Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion,”

by Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor in Religious Studies (University of Chicago Press, 2007)

“Border Ransom,”

by Pat Carr ’54 (TCU Press, 2006)

“Judas is a frightening character. For Christians, he is the one who had it all and yet betrayed God to his death for a few dollars. For Jews, he is terrifying, the man whom Christians associated with the Jewish people, whose story was used against them for centuries. ” —April DeConick

Bookshelf

“It appears to have something to do with our collective guilt about anti-Semitism and our need to reform the relationship between Jews and Christians following World War II,” she said. “Judas is a frightening character.

For Christians, he is the one who had it all and yet betrayed God to his death for a few dollars. For Jews, he is terrifying, the man whom Christians associated with the Jewish people, whose story was used against them for centuries.”

But DeConick contends that the Gospel of Judas is not about a “good” Judas or even a “poor old” Judas. It is a gospel parody about a “demon” Judas written by a group of Gnostic Christians who lived in the second century.

“Once I started translating the Gospel of Judas and began to see the types of translation choices that the National Geographic team had made, I was startled and concerned,” DeConick said. “The text very clearly called Judas a ‘demon.’”

DeConick’s book has ignited a fresh round of fierce debate on the subject, but that’s something she was prepared for.

“The fi nding of this gospel has been called one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the past 60 years,” she said. “It’s important that we get this right.”

— Christopher Dow

“Literature-Based Activities for Integrating Mathematics with Other Content Areas,”

by Robin A. Ward, clinical assistant professor for the Rice University School Mathematics Project (Allyn & Bacon, 2008)

“Breaking Free: How to Work at Home with the Perfect Small Business Opportunity,” by Brian Armstrong ’05 (Lulu, 2007)

“Science Without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives,” edited by Angela N. H. Creager ’85, Elizabeth Lunbeck and M. Norton Wise (Duke University Press, 2007)

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WORDS AND PHOTO BY TOMMY LAVERGNE

If you love Rice baseball as much as I do, it doesn’t get much better than going to Omaha for the College World Series. No matter what the outcome, you know the team worked hard to get this far, and this year was no exception. With the program’s seventh trip to the CWS since 1997, and third consecutive trip, the Owls registered another sensational season.

Rice won at least 42 games for the 14th-straight year on the way to another Conference USA regular-season championship, and the team members garnered a number of individual awards for their performance on the field and in the classroom. Rice had a sky-high rating power index from the NCAA, which allowed the team to showcase the renovated Reckling Park to record crowds for the Regional and Super Regional rounds of the NCAA Tournament.

And for the 2009 season, Head Coach Wayne Graham and his staff will return a host of talented young players and are bringing in one of the top recruiting classes in the nation.

There’s a sad part to the term “next season,” because a lot of these fine young men will move on. Some have graduated, and some might live out their dreams by taking a chance in the pro ranks. But no matter where they go or what they do, the character of these ballplayers will never cease to amaze me.

For complete coverage of the 2008 College World Series, including a photo gallery, visit: ››› tinyurl.com/ 5ahlza

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Sports

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AAwarded Class Act Rice’s Cole St. Clair earns top honors for all-around excellence “I am honored to receive this prestigious award with such a rich history. I know that a lot of effort was expended in the voting process by the dedicated Rice fans and my friends and family, and I truly appreciate their efforts.”

—Cole St. Clair

More information about St. Clair, Rice baseball and other Owls athletic teams can be found at: ››› www.riceowls.com

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Rice University pitcher Cole St. Clair ’08, who returned for his senior year after being drafted by Major League Baseball and helped lead the Owls into this year’s College World Series (CWS), has been selected as the winner of the 2008 Lowe’s Senior Celebrating Loyalty and Achievement for Staying in School (CLASS) Award in the baseball division. The award, chosen by a nationwide vote of coaches, media and fans, is presented annually to college baseball’s outstanding NCAA Division I senior student–athlete.

The nation’s premier tribute to college seniors, the CLASS Award identifies personal qualities that define a complete student–athlete, such as good character and excellence in the classroom, in the community and on the field.

“I am honored to receive this prestigious award with such a rich history,” St. Clair said. “I know that a lot of effort was expended in the voting process by the dedicated Rice fans and my friends and family, and I truly appreciate their efforts.”

Since moving to the bullpen full time in March, St. Clair became one of the nation’s most dominating closers, posting a Conference USAleading 10 wins with a 2.09 earned run average in 21 relief appearances.

During that span, he held opposing hitters to a .204 batting average. His strong performance down the stretch played a big role in Rice winning its Super Regional and earning its third consecutive trip to Omaha for the prestigious CWS. St. Clair, an economics major at Rice with a 3.22 GPA, received his bachelor’s degree May 10. His classroom achievements include becoming a three-time Conference USA Commissioner’s Honor Roll member. He was also named the recipient of the 2008 Bob Quin Award, given to the senior Rice student–athlete who best exemplifies leadership and academic and athletic excellence.

In the community, St. Clair has raised money for a local Houston neighborhood center to sponsor a family for Christmas. He also assisted with the baseball team’s clothing drive for the Star of Hope Foundation in Houston. While in Omaha, he visited with and gave advice to several young men from the Omaha School for Boys, a residential group home for at-risk school-age boys.

“Our great experiences at Rice were burned in our memories, and I know the same thing is going on now.

That’s what I want to help facilitate.”

—Clint Johnson

Honoring the Past, Creating Opportunity in the Present As a professor with more than 30 years of teaching experience at the University of Central Arkansas, Clint Johnson ’64 knows the value and importance of undergraduate research. In memory of his aunt, Elizabeth Johnson Duncan, who made his graduate education possible, and in honor of the Rice professors who influenced his career as an educator, Johnson has created the Elizabeth Johnson Duncan Endowed Fund for Undergraduate Research through a charitable remainder unitrust. To read more about Johnson’s gift to the university and the experiences that inspired it, please visit www.giving.rice.edu/giftplanning.

To learn more about this fund or about making charitable gifts to Rice through your estate, please contact the Office of Gift Planning for gift illustrations and calculations tailored to your situation.

Phone: 713-348-4624

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E-mail: giftplan@rice.edu

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Web site: www.giving.rice.edu/giftplanning

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Rice University President David W. Leebron and University Representative Y. Ping Sun stand in front of National Stadium after attending the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics.

They were in Beijing as special guests of the Chinese Minister of Education, who issued only 12 such invitations worldwide, and just two in the United States.