Rice Magazine | Winter 2015 by Rice University

The Magazine of Rice University

WINTER 2015

LIGHT COMPOSED James Turrell’s sublime Skyspace is also a unique experimental sound lab for students and a performance space for local and visiting artists. Also: Economics’ new face, a public health mystery, Rice’s Initiative for Students, research and campus news galore.

The Magazine of Rice University

WINTER 2015

Contents FEATURES

ECONOMICS’ NEW COURSE Antonio Merlo is energizing one of Rice’s largest departments. By Franz Brotzen ’80

PICTURE KNOWLEDGE Portraits and profiles of five students and two alumni who exemplify the spirit of Rice’s new Initiative for Students. By Ted Walker

BETTER BIRTHS Tyan Parker Dominguez ’93 unravels data on psychosocial pressures and public health. By Andrew Faught

DEPARTMENTS

S A L LY P O R T 5 P R E S I D E N T ’ S N O T E

S C O R E B O A R D 13

A B S T R A C T 15

S C E N E 20 A R T S & L E T T E R S

FA M I LY A L B U M

Rice student–athlete Precious Knighton ’15 sprints toward graduation and career opportunities. See her story on Page 33. wi n t e r 2 0 1 5 | Ric e M aga z i n e 1

on the web FEATU RED CON TRI BU TORS FRANZ BROTZEN ’80

(“Economics’ New Course”) is a freelance writer living in Houston and former staff writer for Rice University’s News and Media Relations. He holds graduate degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California and has worked as an editor in print and broadcast journalism. JOHN NOVA LOMAX

C L AS S P RO F I L E V IA FL IC K R

Chemistry of Cooking Throughout the fall semester, guest speakers from some of Houston’s best restaurants and eateries, including Chris Shepherd, owner of Underbelly and a James Beard Foundation award-winning chef, stopped by the class CHEM 178: The Chemistry of Cooking to share their culinary methods with the students and open a dialogue on the science behind their tasty creations. Led by Lesa Tran ’07, the Wiess Instructor of Chemistry, students met twice weekly to conduct unconventional laboratory experiments to illustrate the science involved in the composition, transformation and consumption of food. See more: ricemagazine.info/240 —Tracey Rhoades

Follow Rice news and more via the Office of Public Affairs’ social media outlets. From Instagram to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and more, we document the daily goings on about campus and beyond. And don’t forget to check out Rice Magazine’s Twitter feed. To read the current issue online, check out ISSUU.

ISSU U rice.edu/ricemagazine

FLICKR flickr.com/photos/ricepublicaffairs/

TW I T T E R @RiceMagazine

I N STAG R A M instagram.com/riceuniversity

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TRACEY RHOADES

(“Lions? Yes. Tigers? Yes. Bears? You Betcha!”) is the editorial director in Creative Services, who, after more than 20 years at Rice, has earned an oak tree and written and edited A LOT of copy. When she’s not checking spelling and grammar, she attempts to keep up with a basketballobsessed 7-year-old son and firefighting husband. TED WALKER

FO L LOW RI CE U N IVE R SIT Y

YOU T U B E youtube.com/riceuniversity

(“Sight and Sound”) is a senior editor at Texas Monthly magazine. Lomax is a former staff writer and music editor at the Houston Press, and his work has appeared in Spin, the Village Voice, LA Weekly and The New York Times. He grew up about a block from Rice on Institute Lane and can remember seeing Tommy Kramer ’77 throw touchdowns for the Owls and a time when beer was still under 50 cents at Valhalla.

(“Picture Knowledge”) is a writer in the development and alumni relations division at Rice, where he enjoys sharing the impressive work of Rice students with wider audiences. He also is a baseball enthusiast, who has contributed baseball-related essays to Salon, BuzzFeed, Baseball Prospectus and other online publications.

ON TH E COVER James Turrell’s “Twilight Epiphany” Skyspace, located just east of the Shepherd School of Music, has drawn more than 100,000 visitors since opening in June 2012. See story on Page 43. Photo by Tommy LaVergne

forEword The Magazine of Rice University winter 2015 Rice Magazine is published four times a year and is sent to university alumni, faculty, staff, parents of undergraduates and friends of the university. Published by the Office of Public Affairs Linda Thrane, vice president EDITOR

Lynn Gosnell ART DIRECTOR

Tanyia Johnson CREATIVE SERVICES

Jeff Cox senior director Dean Mackey senior graphic designer Jackie Limbaugh graphic designer Tracey Rhoades editorial director Jenny W. Rozelle ’00 assistant editor Tommy LaVergne senior university photographer Jeff Fitlow university photographer Thomas Chen ’16 Intern CONTRIBUTING STAFF

J E F F F I T LO W

B.J. Almond, Jade Boyd, Jeff Falk, Amy Hodges, Brandon Martin, Jana Olson, Chuck Pool, Tracey Rhoades, Jenny W. Rozelle, David Ruth, Mike Williams

Cranes, Crew and Commentary

FTER EACH QUARTERLY ISSUE OF RICE MAGAZINE IS PRODUCED, PUBLISHED, MAILED AND POSTED ONLINE, ONE PIECE OF BUSINESS REMAINS — THE SURVEY.

Since spring 2013, we’ve surveyed readers* to gauge your interest level in the stories we choose and how we go about publishing them. What have we learned? First, you are not reticent <smile> about sharing thoughts on covers, features and departments. These opinions are as varied as you might imagine — one person’s home run is another’s strike out. And whether you correct, congratulate or criticize, your feedback is constructive. A reader profile? Doesn’t exist. We wouldn’t want it any other way. And yet ... we see a trend in the answers to the question “What else would you like to see in Rice Magazine?” The frequent answer is more stories about student life. We agree. In Sallyport, our campus news department, we debut a series on college traditions, take a peek into language tables (which meet at various college serveries) and profile a student-run business that rents and repairs bikes. In Scene, our two-page photo spread, we welcome the return of Rice’s crew team. And finally, we’re testing a tip of the hat to our stellar graduate students via “Six Degrees of Valhalla.” This “nowhere else but Rice” page celebrates academic genealogy and, well, Valhalla. Oh, and don’t feel left out if you’re not in a random survey sample. You can always share your wisdom with us at ricemagazine@rice.edu. *For each issue, we sample about 1,700 alumni, faculty, staff, graduate students and friends. Our return rate has ranged from 6 to 15 percent.

Lynn Gosnell lynn.gosnell@rice.edu

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letters

Reader Response

THE RICE UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

SALLYPORT SENTIMENT

We received two wonderful letters in response to the Page 5 photo of current Rice students in the storied Physics Amphitheater, which is one of the oldest classrooms in continuous use on campus. Thank you for writing.

DEAR EDITOR

Look familiar? Yes — I still remember. The first day of Biology 100 in 1939, Dr. Altenburg asked each student seated in the amphitheater to stand and say his name. From that time onward, he could remember and call each student by name. Very impressive and a great introduction to the Rice Institute! —Grace Picton Wise ’43

In addition to Wise’s handwritten note, we received a long and thoughtful letter from Wilma Slaughter Ogilvie ’45 of West Columbia, Texas, recounting many memories of the Rice Institute during the war years. During that time, she recalls, classes ran year-round and the Rice Institute hosted students enrolled in the Navy V-12 Training Program. Ogilvie was a member of the Owen Wister Literary Society and a resident of Wroxton House, a boarding school near campus. Her future husband, Charlie Ogilvie ’45, was a member of the Rice Knight Owls, “a group made up of mostly Rice students who played for student dances at the Rice Hotel Crystal Ballroom and the Scottish Rite Cathedral” and the Rice Marching Owl Band. These and other memories, she wrote, were inspired by the image of the Physics Amphitheater. 4

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“My freshman economics class was taught there, and a good–looking sophomore named Charles Ogilvie sat right in front of me. There were no ballpoint pens at the time, so to take notes, I used a leaky fountain pen that somehow dripped ink onto the shirt of that young man. This led to a friendship and a love story that resulted in a marriage that has lasted for more than 69 years, with four children, eight grandchildren and 10 greatgrandchildren.”

FALL 2014 READER SURVEY FINDINGS Most-read department: Sallyport (Runner-up: Features) SELECT COMMENTS FEATURES “In Search of Black Ice” Ulyana Horodyskyj ’07 studies climate change in the high Himalaya. “Great pictures, interesting research. It was cool to be temporarily transported to the top of the Himalayas.”

Robert B. Tudor III, chairman; Edward B. “Teddy” Adams Jr.; J.D. Bucky Allshouse; Keith T. Anderson; Doyle Arnold; Laura Arnold; Nancy Packer Carlson; Albert Chao; T. Jay Collins; Mark Dankberg; Lynn Laverty Elsenhans; Doug Foshee; Lawrence Guffey; John Jaggers; Charles Landgraf; R. Ralph Parks; Lee H. Rosenthal; Ruth Simmons; Jeffery Smisek; Amy Sutton; Robert M. Taylor Jr.; Guillermo “Memo” Treviño; James S. Turley; Randa Duncan Williams; Huda Zoghbi. ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERS

David W. Leebron, president; George McLendon, provost; Kathy Collins, vice president for Finance; Klara Jelinkova, vice president for IT and Chief Information Officer; Kevin Kirby, vice president for Administration; Caroline Levander, vice president of Strategic Initiatives and Digital Education; Chris Muñoz, vice president for Enrollment; Allison Kendrick Thacker, vice president for Investments and treasurer; Linda Thrane, vice president for Public Affairs; Richard A. Zansitis, vice president and general counsel; Darrow Zeidenstein, vice president for Resource Development. EDITORIAL OFFICES

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

Send address changes to: Rice University Development Services–MS 80 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 ©February 2015 Rice University

“Superbugs’ Super Foe” Dr. Barbara Murray ’69 combats antibioticresistant bacteria. “I take a special interest in these stories because I was a Rice-Baylor student.”

News and Updates from Campus

ALL-TO-BALL FUN | Whoever said studying isn’t fun hasn’t seen David Nichol’s room, a personal play- and

study ground of wall-to-wall, multicolored entertainment. Nichol, a Brown College senior majoring in computer science, got the idea for the ball pit from an xkcd Webcomic strip. “It’s my favorite comic ever,” Nichol said, “and I just knew that I would have to do it myself.” After calculating how many balls it would take to fill the space, Nichol found a wholesaler

TO M M Y L AV E R G N E

in China and placed the order. The 13,000 balls rolled along on a four-month tumultuous journey across the Pacific

before reaching Houston and Rice, where they now provide an unconventional pad for studying and relaxing. Note: The ball pit has rules! See David Nichol’s ball pit in action at ricemagazine.info/241. —Tracey Rhoades

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LUNCH AND LANGUAGE

FREE TEXTBOOKS Rice-based nonprofit OpenStax College’s free textbooks have saved students more than $30 million and have been adopted 6

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Spanish Table / Mesa de Español

by instructors in more than 1,000 courses worldwide in less than three years. “We set an ambitious goal of reaching 1,000 adoptions by 2015, but as of [October] our books were in use in 1,061 courses,” said Richard Baraniuk, founder and director of OpenStax College and Rice’s Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Instructors and students are eager to use open educational resources (OER), and based on our exponential growth in the past year, we are optimistic that we will reach our goal of saving students $500 million by 2020.” OpenStax College uses philanthropic gifts to produce high-quality, peerreviewed textbooks that are free online

and low-cost in print. Its books have been downloaded almost 1 million times, and more than 5 million people have visited OpenStax College’s website since its launch in February 2012. Read more: ricemagazine.info/243 —Jade Boyd RICE BIKES “On your left!” You’ll hear that courtesy warning often as you walk along Rice’s pebbled sidewalks. As you step to your right, a student on a bicycle zips by, their chains quietly humming. Bicycles are an essential fixture on Rice’s campus and the preferred mode of transportation for many college students. But what happens when a bike breaks down?

B R A N D O N M A RT I N

Learning a foreign language is a must in today’s interconnected world. At Rice, so-called “language tables” at the residential colleges give students a chance to hone and flex their developing language skills over informal lunches with other students and faculty. Such tables are popping up at the residential colleges around campus; they feature conversations in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Victoria Arbizu-Sabater, a lecturer of Spanish in the School of Humanities’ Center for Languages and Intercultural Communication, organizes a Spanish table at Wiess College. “Mesa de Español” takes place every Monday in the Wiess College commons. “The main point of having the Spanish table is to give students who are learning Spanish the opportunity to go beyond the classroom,” she said. “They come here and they have the opportunity to meet people, native speakers, classmates and a wide range of Rice students who want to converse in Spanish,” she said of the students who seek out the table on a regular basis. “I definitely feel like it’s made me a better Spanish speaker,” said Cary Okerlund ’17, a Wiess College psychology major who has joined the Spanish table. “Especially now because I’m not actually taking a Spanish class, it’s almost vital that I come to the table so I don’t lose my Spanish.” Paige Polk, a Martel College senior majoring in anthropology, found out quickly that all levels of proficiency are welcome at the Spanish table. “I know plenty of people that have come in with just a semester’s worth of Spanish or they’re in the first semester of Spanish and want some extra practice,” Polk said. “People are just talking about real-life things and having a good time.” Watch a Spanish table video: ricemagazine.info/242. —Jeff Falk

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Left to right: Richard Johnson, Mark Ditman and David Brown alongside Jones College's solar panels

awareness. One of the unique events they offer to students is Rice Rides, a monthly ride-along that explores a certain area of Houston. This semester, they will be leading a group of students on the BP MS 150, a two-day, 180-mile ride from Houston to Austin to raise money for the fight against multiple sclerosis. Visit Rice Bikes at their website at bikes.rice.edu, on their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/RiceBikes or on Twitter @RiceBikes. —Thomas Chen ’16 SOLAR, HOORAY! Jones College installed 186 solar panels that will produce clean energy, reduce Rice’s carbon footprint and save the university money. The 50-kilowatt solar installation, which went live in December, will produce enough electricity each year to power six or seven typical American homes, said Richard Johnson ’92, director of Rice’s Administrative Center for Sustainability and Energy Management and professor in the practice of environmental studies in sociology. The project is the brainchild of self-described instigators Johnson and Mark Ditman, associate vice president for Housing and Dining. Read more: ricemagazine.info/244 —Jennifer Evans

J E F F F I T LO W

Richard Baraniuk Founder and Director of OpenStax College

In 2011, Rice Bikes was started as a student-run business in the basement of Sid Richardson College. Since then, the fledgling business has expanded and now operates a storefront and repair shop out of the Hess Private Dining Room in the Rice Memorial Center. As you stroll through the RMC, you’ll notice bikes elevated on repair stands in the Brown Garden across from the Rice Coffeehouse and the grease-covered hands of the students working on them. “Our mantra is affordability,” said Madeleine Pelzel ’18, the marketing manager for Rice Bikes. “There are bike shops in the Houston area that charge enormous amounts for labor and parts,” she added.

Rice Bikes

Bike repairs to fix flat tires and alignment issues run from $5 to $25. “We can charge such low rates for bike repairs simply because we are passionate about bikes,” said Pelzel, who rides around campus on a custom-built stainless steel bike. Rice Bikes isn’t simply a repair shop though. The business rents a fleet of Torker U-District bikes to students on a semester or yearlong basis. They also refurbish abandoned bikes that the Rice University Police Department finds on the campus; after ensuring that the refurbished bicycles are in good working order, they sell them to students at affordable prices. In addition to all these services, Rice Bikes has an active presence on campus as they promote cycling and cycling

LIFELONG LEARNING The Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies’ spring offerings include courses in personal and professional development, languages, nonprofit leadership and more. Love Broadway musicals? Explore the evolution of dance in musical theater (starting March 10) with Debra Dickinson, an artist teacher of opera studies at the Shepherd School. For lovers of great art museums, art historian Kathryn E. Klauber will share the stories behind Paris and London’s unique art museums (starting Feb. 17). Try taming your “monkey mind” with Tibetan meditation taught by Alejandro Chaoul ’06 (starting April 10). Or try your hand at a variety of drawing, painting and photography. Cost, location and other details can be found at glasscock.rice.edu or by calling 713-348-4803 during business hours. wi n t e r 2 0 1 5 | Ric e M aga z i n e 7

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In Brief Allison Kendrick Thacker ’96 has been named one of ‘Houston’s 50 Most Influential Women of 2014’ by Houston Woman Magazine.

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In May, Rice will begin awarding a Certificate in Engineering Leadership to graduates who complete an internship, 10 credit hours of required courses and labs, and a portfolio and final presentation. The program — the first of its kind in Texas and one of just a

We’re No. 4. Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine’s 2015 list of best values among private universities ranks Rice as fourth behind Princeton, Yale and Harvard universities. The rankings cite four-year schools that combine highestquality academics and very generous financial aid packages that make education affordable.

The Rice School of Architecture (RSA) has been named the most-admired undergraduate architecture program in the nation in a survey of

OUR HOUSES

At a conference in Durham, England, last November, Dean John Hutchinson and wife Paula Hutchinson, former longtime college masters at Rice, gave presentations about their experiences with Rice’s residential college system. The Collegiate Way conference drew representatives of 40 universities from around the world to its inaugural gathering to share information about their distinctive student communities. Hutchinson, Rice’s dean of undergraduates and a professor of chemistry, delivered a keynote talk on the roles of faculty in residential college life. Paula Hutchinson spoke about student volunteerism as part of the college system. Both have a deep understanding of the residential college system at Rice: They served as masters of Wiess College from 1994 to 2001 and Brown College from 2003 to 2008. “I know this is a biased interpretation, but many people came up to us to rave about Rice’s system based upon what they learned,” John Hutchinson said. “That left me with the impression that not only do we think we’re one of the best in the world, but a lot of people at the conference agreed.” Read more: ricemagazine.info/245

Rice is engineering leaders, officially.

handful in the United States — is offered through the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership. Read more: www.rcel.rice.edu

Sarah Whiting RSA Dean

78 architecture deans and department heads released recently by DesignIntelligence and the Design Futures Council. The annual ranking also named RSA Dean Sarah Whiting one of the 30 most-admired educators for 2015, as chosen by DesignIntelligence staff “with extensive input from thousands of design professionals, academic department heads and students.”

Fall 2014 RSA faculty, staff and students

TA M I A N D R E W | PA U L A H U TC H I N S O N

Rice Dean of Undergraduates John Hutchinson in Durham Castle

Chief investment officer, vice president for investments and president of the Rice Management Company, Thacker is responsible for managing a $5.5 billion endowment fund. She earned a B.A. in economics with honors from Rice and an MBA from Harvard Business School. The annual distribution from the endowment funds approximately 40 percent

of the university budget. Thacker is actively involved in the Houston community and is a member of the Houston Ballet Foundation Board of Trustees and a member of the executive board of KIPP Houston.

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UNC O N V EN T I O N A L WISDO M

THE SCIENCE TEACHER Alma Moon Novotny, a lecturer of biochemistry and cell biology, knew since she was 10 years old that she wanted to teach science. Since 2000, she has taught at Rice, picking up a George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching in 2012. Recently, Novotny developed and taught Fundamentals of Immunology as a massive open online course (MOOC) on Rice’s edX platform. “Immunology can be very dry, boring and complicated, so what I’m trying to do is make it interesting and memorable and make the content something that’s humorous enough that it sticks.”

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY The main thing is to figure out what’s going on inside of the minds of your students and figure out the most efficient way to get them from A to B. It’s a matter of trying to figure out the problem and what the road block is and how to get around it. I would say the other thing is don’t take yourself too seriously.

A DA M C R U F T

DEVELOPING AN UNDERGRAD IMMUNOLOGY COURSE FOR THE CLASSROOM You can’t teach immunology in a straightforward way, because it’s something that I would call recursive. You have all these very complex systems, and they’re all interacting with one another, and so you have to keep circling back and tying things in. It was one of the tougher things I’ve ever had to put together. ... AND TURNING IT INTO A MOOC When the MOOCs were getting started, I had a hunch that nobody else was teaching this online. It was an unmet need. ‘Ah ha!’ I thought, it doesn’t have to be an unmet need! I knew I would be supplying something that

would be a worldwide resource. Also, people will say that learning something from a MOOC is inferior to learning it in a small classroom with a good teacher. Of course it is! But many classes are too big, or can be taught by people who may not be good teachers. CLASSROOM VS. ONLINE STUDENTS The edX class is different from the Rice one in that you have a lot more people, and therefore a much broader set of problems that you have to overcome. In my immunology course at Rice, I get premeds. It’s obvious why they’re there. On edX, I get a broad range of motivations, almost by definition. (I have 163 different countries sending me students.) Also, you have to do the video lectures without student feedback, which can be kind of tough. TOPS IN PROPS In all my classes, we use a lot of physical models. We do role playing. There’s a CD4 molecule there, and I have some students waving them around and dragging Th cells into lipid rafts. We videotape the Rice class exercise and wi n t e r 2 0 1 5 | Ric e M aga z i n e 9

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TR A D I T I O N S | H A N SZE N C O L L EG E

UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM

continued from Page 9

Of Neckties, Cranes and Gentlemen

HEN HANSZEN COLLEGE OPENED IN 1957, it adopted the moniker “The Gentlemen’s College.” In keeping with the image, Hanszen residents were required to wear jackets and neckties to certain functions, including Sunday dinner and events with distinguished guests. These included the likes of movie star (and soon-to-be California Governor) Ronald Reagan, historian J. Frank Dobie and astronaut (and future Ohio Senator) John Glenn. By the 1960s, however, many Hanszen men began to express doubts about the “tie rule,” recalled Ron Sass, who became master of Hanszen in 1966. “Personally, I didn’t think a great deal about the tie rule one way or the other, but it did serve to focus anti-rule advocates on an issue that was not in any way destructive or disruptive.” But the tie debate did come to a head during Sass’ tenure. “[The students] organized and on one Sunday all of them came to dinner wearing ties, but nothing else,” Sass said. “I came in, along with my family, and sat down as if nothing was out of the ordinary. All of the students got more and more uncomfortable as the meal progressed.” Although awkward at best, the protest was effective — the tie rule was eventually dropped. Another Hanszen tradition arrived early on the morning of Feb. 15, 2001. Students were rousted from their beds as a 120-foot construction crane

being used to build the new Wiess College began to tilt ominously, threatening to topple onto Hanszen. “The Hanszenites were forced to leave their rooms, their belongings, their books, their real clothes, their contacts, their shoes and their dignity and remain safely out of the clutches of the manic crane until the disaster was abated,” wrote Erik Vanderlip ’02, president of Hanszen at the time. Unable to attend morning classes, they responded with a resourcefulness for which Hanszen prides itself. A keg of beer was fetched, music played and Crane Day was born. A backup crane was brought in to lower the unstable crane safely, and students were allowed back into their rooms by 2 p.m. that afternoon. But the men and women of Hanszen continue to honor the memory of their predecessors’ ordeal by staging a Crane Day party every February. —Franz Brotzen ’80

post it online for the MOOC. And animations, some from slideshows — my husband helped me to animate the process of gene rearrangement, one of the more difficult concepts in the course. My foamboard “antibody” is my favorite because it shows where you put together the information from two different parts of the gene, which nobody else’s antibody models do. I had to figure out how to do it myself, because I couldn’t find anyplace that had it. TECHNICAL ISSUES? I know that I couldn’t do this without the crew I have helping me. Often, most of them are Rice undergrads, and they’re very good. Without those guys and their technical knowledge, smarts and willingness to help out, this would not work. NOTES FROM FORMER STUDENTS I have a brag file. Those emails make my day. It’s really nice when somebody comes back and says they couldn’t have survived their med school classes without me. —Jana Olson

TA N Y I A J O H N S O N

Watch Novotny’s video introduction to RiceX: Fundamentals of Immunology here: ricemagazine.info/246.

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TR AV EL I N G OW LS

Burgundy and Provence: A Look at Thomas Jefferson’s France

Incredible India: Taj, Temples and Palaces

Lions? Yes. Tigers? Yes. Bears? You Betcha!

E A R L VA N Z A N T

Traveling Owls have their bags packed — ready to take to the skies, oceans and foreign lands. FROM SAHARA Desert camel rides, to hiking Lewis and Clark’s trips because they are serious about finding a more complete historic trail, to cruising the Baltic Sea, thousands of Rice alumni cultural and historical experience. More than a year later, we still have traversed the globe from top to bottom for more than 40 years. meet regularly for ‘Turkey’ reunions.” When a group of approximately 35 embarked on a one-week trip Since that first Mediterranean vacation in 1970, the program to the island of Majorca in December 1970, the propellers were put has seen many incarnations, including a recent name change from in motion and started what would become a beloved program for the Alumni Travel Program to Traveling Owls and an increased alumni of all ages. While Rice’s alumni office oversaw the planning number of trips from three to six trips a year to 25 slated for 2015. and logistics of that first excursion and those to follow, much of the Dan Stypa, associate director of alumni engagement and the heavy packing was completely volunteer driven. “The travel program’s current administrator, has been first decade of the Alumni Travel Program was met instrumental in growing the program. SEE THE WORLD with mixed success,” recalled Rose Sundin, former “Social media has allowed us to engage THROUGH THE EYES OF TRAVELING OWLS associate director of alumni, who oversaw the travel travelers in ways unlike ever before,” Stypa said. program from 1984 until her retirement in 2012. “From our Travel Tuesday Facebook posts, online “Even then, there was at least one trip a year that had alumni.rice.edu/ photo albums and videos of our faculty members 30 or more participants.” learning-travel/traveling-owls talking about the joys of travel, we are able to more In 1981, as the staff grew, the travel committee internationally connect travelers so that a trip is no was assigned an alumni office liaison to assist with www.youtube.com/ longer an isolated experience but integrated into the itineraries. A year later, five trips were offered user/RiceAlumniTravel larger experience of being a Rice alum.” that included an accompanying faculty member, a While exotic destinations have become more component of the program that has become very www.flickr.com/ sought out over the years, European countries, popular. Over the last several years, faculty-led trips photos/ricealumnitravel including Italy and France, continue to be popular have been offered to a variety of diverse locales, choices. An increase in younger travelers, however, including a first-ever trip to Cuba in 2013, Tibet, and China in mitigated the need for more active itineraries. So, in 2013, a 2014, which was hosted by Rice President David Leebron and new travel approach was taken that partnered Rice with the Y. Ping Sun. Travelers were exposed not only to these unique Houston Zoo. Accompanied by Joseph Flanagan, the zoo’s senior cultures, but also specific historical, scientific and musical aspects veterinarian, eager participants discovered the landscapes of of each region under the guidance of Rice’s experts. Ecuador and wildlife unique to the Galapagos Islands. Earlier in the Lisa Balabanlilar, associate professor of history at Rice, led year, a group traveled to Tanzania, where they partook in a 10-day a trip to Turkey in 2013 that remains one of the highest-rated safari and experienced firsthand the migration of native animals. experiences among its participants. “The travelers were anxious So if you’ve been bitten by the travel bug or are looking to get a sense of the historical narrative and the modern political to reconnect or make new acquaintances, don’t delay — realities,” Balabanlilar said. “Rice alumni are amazing traveling Morocco awaits. companions, and they choose to make these university-sponsored —Tracey Rhoades w i n t e r 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z i n e 11

President’s note

DAV ID W. L E E B R ON

More Than Classroom Experience Higher education is changing. Universities are under increasing scrutiny across a range of issues, and often the overall impression is one of an industry in crisis. Many of the issues that gain the most press, although important and serious, don’t lie at the core of what we do and the education we provide. But it is that very education that has been in a process of change and will continue to be so. What our students expect from their education, and therefore what we must deliver, is rapidly evolving. And while students and their families are, when they have the means, willing to pay substantial tuition, they are rightly demanding that what they get in return prepares them well and in quite different ways than in the past for the lives and careers that lie ahead. Last year, I tried to capture this in a presentation slide titled “Education: The Changing Value Proposition.” It portrayed what I perceived to be the value proposition that students accepted in 1985 and compared it to what I expected it would be in 2025. Originally it contained a warning: “completely fabricated data.” But that didn’t sound ideal for a presentation by a university president, so my staff changed it to “for illustrative purposes.” The point of the comparison was that classroom experience was becoming a much less important (but still significant) part of the overall college experience, and that other elements — leadership, research and entrepreneurial opportunities, civic engagement, international experiences and mentoring — were becoming more significant to students. Later in the fall semester and independent of the presentation mentioned above, Rice’s Student Association conducted a survey to see what was important. It turns out that my prediction of the future was uncanny with one small caveat: the future is now. 12

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Rice must be a leader in this new world of higher education. We must figure out, better than anyone else, how to incorporate these elements into our unique environment. We must dedicate ourselves to giving students the education and experiences that will equip them to be innovative leaders who solve the problems our world confronts. This is in large part what the Rice Initiative for Students, which you can read about on Page 30, is about. A decade ago, as Ping and I considered what we would like to contribute to Rice in addition to the new roles we were privileged to play, several things came together. I wanted to honor the memory of my sister, Kathryn, who succumbed to breast cancer just three years before I became president of Rice. Kathryn was on the one hand an international free spirit who accumulated travel experiences and languages in a remarkable way, learning

to speak Spanish, French, German and Chinese. And on the other hand, she was a financial professional who applied those skills and experiences to succeed in a complex and competitive world. I wanted to capture her spirit and try to make sure that our students would have the kind of opportunities that had shaped Kathryn’s life, and my own as well. In the last decade, the Kathryn Leebron Smyth international travel fellowship has sent 10 students on international experiences that we hope have changed their lives. These students write to us after they return, telling us of the impact their experience has had on them. That’s what the best education does: it opens worlds and changes lives. It fosters lifelong curiosity and develops the reservoir of experience and perspective that enhance our ability to learn at every stage. It positions people to learn and lead. Building on the dedication Rice has always had to the education of our students, it gives them the “Owl Edge.” While many of us will choose to contribute financially, all of us can contribute advice or opportunity. I hope you will join us in this effort to deliver this broader and deeper set of opportunities, as an integral part of a Rice education, to every Rice student.

Education: The Changing Value Proposition These graphs help to illustrate the difference between what students expected from their education in the past and what they — and their parents — expect today.

DIGITAL EDUCATION ENTREPRENEURSHIP INTERNATIONAL CIVIC/COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT MENTORING RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES LEADERSHIP: STUDENT CLUBS, EXTRACURRICULAR

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1985

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For illustrative purposes

Sports News and Profiles

Owls celebrate their Hawai'i Bowl victory at Aloha Stadium.

OWLoha!

C H U C K P O O L | R I C E S P O RTS I N FO R M AT I O N

ice quarterback Driphus Jackson ’16 set a school bowl record by throwing a total of 318 yards and tied a second record with three touchdown passes during the 13th Hawai’i Bowl at Honolulu’s Aloha Stadium. The Owls’ defense held the Fresno State Bulldogs out of the end zone to lead Rice to a 30-6 win. The Christmas Eve victory marked the first time in the history of the Hawai’i Bowl that a team was held without a touchdown.

“Driphus (Jackson) did an incredible job not only managing the game but at times taking it over,” head coach David Bailiff said. “We made some big plays when we needed to and ran the ball late in the game. At times we played smothering defense and gang tackled. That was a good football team we played, and we held them for most of the game.” The win allowed the Owls (8-5) to reach eight

HAWAI’I BOWL 2014 Aloha Stadium, Honolulu RICE UNIVERSITY

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wins in a season for just the ninth time in school history. Jackson was named Rice’s team MVP, and he was the first Rice quarterback to lead the Owls to two bowl victories. The bowl victory was Bailiff’s third in four tries with Rice, matching Jess Neely for the most career bowl victories by an Owls head coach. See more at ricemagazine.info/247. w i n t e r 2 0 1 5 | R i c e M a g a z i n e 13

scoreboard

C-USA Champs! Women’s Soccer “We have to be proud of what we’ve accomplished,” said Nicky Adams, head coach of the Rice women’s soccer team, which claimed their first Conference USA Championship title last November during tournament play in Charlotte, N.C. Senior Gabriela Iribarne scored the winning pair of goals and was named the C-USA tournament’s most valued offensive player. Teammate and fellow senior Ashton Geisendorff was named most valued defensive player. Rice tallied its 11th shutout of the season. Junior Lauren Hughes (Conference USA Offensive Player of the Year), having injured her lower leg, sat out the NCAA Tournament in Austin. Without their leading goal-scorer, the Owls’ outstanding season came to an end with a 3-0 loss to the Texas Longhorns in the opening round. The Blue and Gray registered its lowest loss total and tied the record for most wins in program history, closing out the season at 14-4-3. Hughes, senior Quinny Truong, sophomore Jenny Fichera and junior Holly Hargreaves were named to the National Soccer Coaches Association of America 2014 All-Regional teams. Coach Adams added, “In four years, [the 2015 class] has now won a conference regular season title and a tournament title. They’re the foundation of what our long-term goal is for Rice soccer.” —from Rice Athletics

Rice women’s soccer went 14-4-3 and beat regular season conference champions North Texas (2-0) in the Conference USA Tournament.

New Space in a Historic Place The north end of Rice Stadium will soon undergo a major face-lift thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor and former Rice Owl Brian Patterson ’84, who provided the naming gift for the facility. he $31.5 million project includes a 60,000-square-foot, two-story structure that will house a weight room, a home team locker room, coaching and staff offices, an auditorium, a football team lounge, and areas for training and sports medicine. “While this new addition to Rice Stadium will improve aspects of the fan experience, it is first and foremost, as it should be, an investment for the benefit of our extraordinary student–athletes,” Rice President David Leebron said. The goal is to have the building completed in time for the 2016 football season, with construction planned to start in early 2015. “We’re very grateful to Brian for his generosity,” said Rice Athletics Director Joe Karlgaard. “His naming gift, along with a substantial anonymous gift and additional support from other Rice lettermen and football fans, played an important role in the board’s approval to move ahead with the project. ... We are committed to playing college football at the highest level within the amateur model, and we believe this will be the first in a series of upgrades to our stadium.” See more: ricemagazine.info/248

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Abstract

Findings, Research and more

Rice scientists fired microbullets at supersonic speeds and showed graphene is 10 times better than steel at absorbing the energy of a penetrating projectile.

MATERIALS SCIENCE

Microbullet hits confirm graphene’s strength

JA E- H WA N G L E E | R I C E U N I V E R S I T Y

Graphene’s great strength appears to be determined by how well it stretches before it breaks, according to Rice University scientists who tested the material’s properties by peppering it with microbullets. The two-dimensional carbon honeycomb discovered a decade ago is thought to be much stronger than steel. But the Rice lab of materials scientist Edwin “Ned” Thomas proved graphene is on average 10 times better than steel at dissipating kinetic energy. The researchers report in Science that firing microscopic projectiles at multilayer sheets of graphene allowed the scientists to determine just how hard it is to penetrate at the nano level — and how strong graphene could be in macroscopic applications. Thomas suggested the

technique he and his research group developed could help measure the strength of a wide range of materials. While other labs have looked extensively at graphene’s electronic properties and tensile strength, nobody had taken comprehensive measurements of its ability to absorb an impact, said Thomas, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering. His lab found graphene’s ability to simultaneously be stiff, strong and elastic gives it extraordinary potential for use as body armor or for shielding spacecraft.

The study’s lead author is Jae-Hwang Lee, a former research scientist at Rice and now an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Co-authors are Rice graduate student Phillip Loya and Jun Lou, an associate professor of materials science and nanoengineering. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the Welch Foundation supported the research. Read more and see video: ricemagazine.info/249 —Mike Williams

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Academic scientists and fathers One-third of men in academic science are willing to scale back their careers to focus on family life, according to a new study from Rice University, Pennsylvania State University and Southern Methodist University that suggests traditional family roles may be shifting. “Male Scientists’ Competing Devotions to Work and Family: Changing Norms in a Male-Dominated Profession” examines the changing norms of fatherhood and flexible workplaces in male-dominated professions. Elaine Howard Ecklund, Rice’s Herbert S. Autrey chair and professor of sociology and the study’s co-author, said she and her fellow authors were interested in the variation that exists in the family lives of male scientists. “Despite the growing amount of research devoted to women in science, there has been relatively little research on the work-life balance of men in academic science,” Ecklund said. “The majority of existing research on academic men has focused on differences between men and women, leaving us with little information about variation among male scientists. Yet, academic science remains dominated by men, so we need to know if they deal with the same issues balancing work and family life as do women.” The research revealed that one-third of men in academic science largely expect to be involved equally at home and are willing to reduce their work devotion to do so. The study also showed that 64 percent of men interviewed spoke of their desire to be more involved at home and indicated that they make efforts to spend increased time at home. However, 15 percent of respondents chose to forgo child rearing, either by marrying and making a commitment not to have children or by remaining single with no intention of having children. “The men who are forgoing children avoid much work-family conflict by placing work above all other commitments and avoiding what may be the most time-demanding of family commitments,” Ecklund said. 16

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The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and Rice University. Read more: ricemagazine.info/250 —Amy Hodges BIOSCIENCES

Gardeners of Madagascar rainforest at risk A new study by Rice University researchers shows the positive impacts lemurs can have on rainforest tree populations, which raises concerns about the potential impact their disappearance could have on the region’s rich biodiversity. A large proportion of trees in Madagascar’s rainforest have fruits eaten by lemurs. Lemurs in turn disperse the seeds of the fruit trees throughout the forest with their scat. Such dispersal can play a crucial role for a tree species’ ability to regenerate, but effects are poorly understood, especially when there are multiple dispersers. Amy Dunham, an assistant professor of biosciences, and graduate student Onja Razafindratsima set out to detail the symbiotic relationship between fruiteating lemurs and the trees that feed them through a three-year study in a rainforest in southeastern Madagascar.

Razafindratsima, a native of Madagascar, led the study as part of a thesis project she expects to complete early next year. She built a team of local researchers near Ranomafana National Park, the home of Centre ValBio, a research station founded by Dunham’s former Ph.D. adviser, primatologist Patricia Wright. “We have a team of up to 10 local villagers who are trained to do research,” she said. “Their exceptional knowledge of the forest is very important to us when we’re trying to track lemurs and identify seeds and seedlings in a forest with over 300 species of trees.” The research team tracked 24 groups of lemurs over a year without the benefit of radio collars. The study sites were as close as a short hike from Centre ValBio and as far as a two-day trek through steep terrain that entailed camping overnight, Razafindratsima said. Their data from observations, experiments and mathematical models demonstrate that seeds of a common canopy tree have a 300 percent higher chance of sprouting and becoming a sapling when dispersed by lemurs versus simply falling to the ground. The study appeared online in the Ecological Society of America journal Ecology. Rice University, the International Foundation for Science, the Rufford Foundation, Primate Conservation Inc., the Explorers Club, Idea Wild, the Primate Society of Great Britain, the Philanthropic Educational Organization, the Leakey Foundation and the Schlumberger Foundation supported the research. Video: ricemagazine.info/251 —Mike Williams PUBLIC POLICY

An immigration crisis?

Rice graduate student Onja Razafindratsima observes a lemur in a Madagascar rainforest. She led a three-year study to explore the relationship between lemurs and trees.

Is there an immigration crisis on the U.S.–Mexico border? Not according to an examination of historical immigration data, says a research paper from Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “‘Illegal’ Immigration on the U.S.– Mexico Border: Is It Really a Crisis?” was co-authored by William Gruben, a research associate at the Federal Reserve

O N JA R A Z A F I N D R ATS I M A

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R E B EC CA B A R N E S | C O LO R A D O C O L L EG E

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Bank of Dallas’ Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute, and Tony Payan, the Baker Institute’s Françoise and Edward Djerejian Fellow for Mexico Studies and director of the institute’s Mexico Center. It was released in October. The authors examine historical immigration data, the “push” and “pull” factors currently motivating Mexicans and Central Americans to migrate to the U.S. and attempts to explain why current undocumented immigration across the U.S.–Mexico border has been perceived as a crisis. “In recent months, print and television journalists have presented the American public with a ‘crisis’ of illegal immigration on the U.S.–Mexico border,” Payan said. “Much of this recent discussion has centered on Central American children traveling alone and on allegations that they are responding to motivations created by the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. The word ‘crisis,’ however, can have alternative meanings. If a ‘crisis’ of undocumented immigration means a historically large or very rapidly growing flow of undocumented immigrations, the overall national evidence shows today that there is no such crisis. Border Patrol apprehensions of undocumented immigrants attempting to cross the U.S.–Mexico border have in fact plummeted and remain far below levels a decade earlier.” The overall number of unauthorized immigrants apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in 2013 was about 64 percent below that of 2004. Overall apprehensions had increased 26.5 percent between 2011 and 2013. Principal determinants of this decline likely include the almost doubling of Border Patrol personnel over 2004– 2013 and the Great Recession of 2007– 2009, together with its lagged effects. The authors acknowledge that apprehensions of Central American children traveling alone have indeed surged. However, while references to a record of apprehensions of unaccompanied child immigrants are correct, publicly available data for this category only go back to 2010, the authors said. Access the full paper here: ricemagazine.info/252 —Jeff Falk

Rebecca Barnes (front) and Morgan Gallagher conduct hydrology experiments.

EARTH SCIENCE

Biochar alters water flow to improve sand and clay As more gardeners and farmers add ground charcoal, or biochar, to soil to both boost crop yields and counter global climate change, a new study by researchers at Rice and Colorado College could help settle the debate about one of biochar’s biggest benefits — the seemingly contradictory ability to make clay soils drain faster and sandy soils drain slower. “Understanding the controls on water movement through biochar-amended soils is critical to explaining other frequently reported benefits of biochar, such as nutrient retention, carbon sequestration and reduced greenhouse gas emissions,” said lead author Rebecca Barnes, an assistant professor of environmental science at Colorado College, who began the research while serving as a postdoctoral research associate at Rice. Biochar can be produced from waste wood, manure or leaves, and its popularity among do-it-yourselfers

and gardening buffs took off after archaeological studies found that biochar added to soils in the Amazon more than 1,000 years ago was still improving the water- and nutrient-holding abilities of those poor soils today. Biogeochemists at Rice conducted sideby-side tests of the water-holding ability of three soil types — sand, clay and topsoil — both with and without added biochar. The biochar used in the experiments, which was derived from Texas mesquite wood, was prepared to exacting standards in the lab of Rice geochemist Caroline Masiello, associate professor of earth science and a study co-author, to ensure comparable results across soil types. Study co-authors include co-first author Morgan Gallagher, a former Rice graduate student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Rice and an associate in research at Duke University’s Center on Global Change, and Rice graduate student Zuolin Liu. Read more: ricemagazine.info/253 —Jade Boyd

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N E W FACES

ON TEACHING THE MOST URGENT THING IN YOUR LIFE by Jeff Falk AMBER DERMONT

J E F F F I T LO W

NEW FORCE FOR CREATIVE WRITING HAS JOINED RICE. AMBER DERMONT, whose 2012 debut novel, “The Starboard Sea,” was hailed by The New York Times as “engrossing,” “captivating” and “inspired,” began teaching at Rice in fall 2013 as the Gladys Louise Fox Associate Professor of English. Having arrived at Rice from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga., Dermont draws inspiration from the English department’s storied creative writing faculty — Max Apple, Justin Cronin, Larry McMurtry, Marsha Recknagel and Susan Wood. This past year, she’s shared her passion for the written word with Rice undergraduates, including teaching the first seminars in screenwriting at Rice.

Q Creative writing is unlike “normal” academic or technical forms of literature. What do Rice students gain from the creative writing experience? A Teaching creative writing is a very tricky thing. People often mistake any kind of arts program for being dangerous; it seems like this mysterious, mystical thing that you’re doing, when it’s actually very academic and rigorous. To teach someone how to write, I really need to teach them how to read closely, slowly, thoughtfully and reflectively. My hope with my students always is to think about how a student is coming to a text, how they’re studying it, how they’re reading closely and then bringing that into the revision process with their own stories. It can take easily a dozen, 20, 60 drafts before you’ve worked on a story well enough that anyone else should read it, that it should be published and in the world. That’s a very hard thing for college students to understand. They usually write a draft and then they abandon their work. They don’t want to look at it again.

Q So there’s no magic to creative writing? It’s basically a lot of hard work? A Ninety percent of all writing is reading. You read your own story and you listen to it, you pay attention to it, and your story is smarter than you are, and it knows things that you don’t know … and it doesn’t matter what your intentions are. The only thing that matters is the story’s intention. So there is a kind of magical thing that does happen, where the students in listening to their own story develop a sense of empathy for their own characters and the world they’re trying to create. Q Why does empathy matter? A Empathy is what every sociologist, every anthropologist, every psychologist will tell you is really missing in this digital era. [Empathy is] a sense of where our stories come from and how we come to understand and develop a sense of compassion for one another’s lives and to not pass judgment. If you want to be a writer, you really can’t have an ego. You have to always be serving the story you’re trying to tell. You really cannot be a creature of judgments. You have to be able to imagine yourself in any position and to feel the complexity of that situation. Q What else does a student of creative writing need to take to heart? A When you write a short story, novel or poem, it has to be the most urgent thing in your life. If I’m working on a novel manuscript, in order for me to really give myself over to it, I have to live in that world; I have to be present for my characters. Maybe I’m being hard on myself, but that’s sort of what I have to do. I teach my students that urgency: What is the story that you have to tell? What is the story that is so compelling to you, it’ll stop your heart?

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Renewed Crew Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Imagine waking up before 5 a.m., meeting friends in the Sallyport, driving 45 minutes to Clear Lake for a 90-minute workout and then driving back to campus in Houston rush-hour traffic, five to six days a week. Sounds ridiculous, right? That’s exactly what Rice Crew, the university’s rowing club team, was doing until volunteer coaches David Alviar and Mike Matson ’12 embarked on a mission to move the team’s on-water home closer to campus. Working with the Buffalo Bayou Partnership and the Texas Dragon Boat Association, the coaches spent hundreds of hours with other volunteers to construct a boathouse and a dock along Buffalo Bayou on Houston’s east side. While the Rice rowing team has been around since 1987, the former practice location and Hurricane Ike put the team out of commission for a few years. Since its return, team membership has tripled and now boasts about 25 members. Looking forward, the coaches hope to have the first U.S. duo in four years — and the first Texan duo — to compete in the trans-Atlantic race called the Talisker Whiskey Atlantic Challenge, a 2,700-mile rowing race from the Canary Islands near the coast of Africa to Antigua in the Caribbean in December 2015. Follow the team at ricecrew.org. See more: ricemagazine.info/254

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Interview by Franz Brotzen ’80 Photos Tommy LaVergne

Economics’ New Course Antonio Merlo, the George A. Peterkin Professor of Economics, joined Rice last summer. As the new chairman, he was charged with expanding and improving the department. With 200 undergraduates majoring in economics (the largest undergraduate major at Rice) and about 40 doctoral students, these changes are certainly in the spotlight. One of Merlo’s innovations is the Rice Initiative for the Study of Economics, or RISE. We sat down recently with Merlo to learn about RISE, plans for the department to build a specialty in applied economics, his loyalty to Italian soccer and why he is “a big believer in hitting the ground running.” Highlights from the interview, edited for clarity and space, follow.

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Q What factors drew you to Rice? A I was presented with a vision. Nowadays, you hear a

lot of universities talking about interdisciplinary research and the focus on the intersection of many different disciplines. One thing that I found extremely refreshing was to hear President Leebron say that you can’t be strong in interdisciplinary research unless you have strength in the core disciplines that determine this intersection. Rice is a fantastic university. And if you want to stay a top university, you have to make an investment in a top economics department. I was given free rein and a mandate to implement this vision. And, let’s not discount the most important thing. It’s fine when people tell you, “Here is a blank canvas. Paint it.” Then they tell you, “Sorry, you’ve got to go find the resources to do it yourself.” [Leebron] said, “Here are the resources you’re going to need in order to find the colors you need to build the department and make Rice proud of its economics department.” I don’t think it’s just about building an economics department; it’s about making the presence of economics felt across many campus departments. It’s certainly an opportunity to make a difference in the field I love.

I don’t think it’s just about building an economics department; it’s about making the presence of economics felt across many campus departments. 24

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How does the new economics initiative fit into this vision? Q

A RISE is a five-year program for investing in research and

teaching in economics at Rice. It’s like a global effort to raise the level of the discourse on economics on campus. Nowadays, no matter what your profession is, no matter how you want to position yourself, it’s so critical for people to be exposed to deep critical thinking in economics and basic understanding of economic principles.

Areas of expertise political economy public economics bargaining theory and applications empirical microeconomics

Q What are the specific components of RISE? A We’re hiring new faculty. You can’t energize a place without

the bodies for doing it, so this department is growing. My mandate was to add 10 new members to the existing faculty. We’re rethinking the curriculum — both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. What do we want students to learn? How do we want to convey this energy coming out of a new department that is ambitious and really wants to establish itself and play in the big league and not be on the

fringes of the discipline? How do we structure our program and our teaching? So that’s the second component. The new curriculum will be launched in the fall semester 2015. And we’re building bridges across campus. The most immediate one is with the Jones School. Kerry Back, [the J. Howard Creekmore Professor of Finance] at the Jones School, an economist by training, is now a joint member of our department and the business school. We are going to do something quite bold — require all doctoral students

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I’m trying to bring not just exceptional scholars, but exceptional human beings.

and development economics. Flavio Cunha researches the economics of education and investment in human capital. My area of expertise is political economy and bargaining theory. Hulya Eraslan studies political economy and bargaining theory, but also corporate finance. So the set of questions is very broad, but the methodological approach is the same. I’m trying to bring not just exceptional scholars, but exceptional human beings. I want [to hire] somebody who is invested in the common cause of building, who buys into the vision, but also has the personality that is really conducive to making a small department feel a lot larger than it is. You go after building a team, you have something that is more longlasting — the synergies make the team feel like a presence.

The department offers two undergraduate majors — economics and mathematical economic analysis. Why? Q

in economics to take a course in finance, because we want the students we produce to be well-versed not just in a basic understanding of the economic side of things but in finance as well. They are so intricately related, interconnected in financial markets and markets for goods and services. That’s a clear example of the types of bridges that RISE is about. Also, we’ll take advantage of the unique opportunities we have in Houston. The goal is to launch a new 12-month professional master’s degree in energy economics, which is going to be unique, not just in this country but in the world. It’s a natural thing to do because we’re in Houston. With the recent approval of the Faculty Senate, the new degree program also will launch next fall.

You’re known as a scholar of political economy. You brought four new scholars to the department initially. What strengths are they bringing? Q

A Three of my colleagues from the University of

Pennsylvania came with me and then one from Johns Hopkins University. The approach that all these people who came here have in common is this notion of taking both economic theory very seriously and econometrics and data analysis very seriously. None of [us] are necessarily married to a question or a subfield. We are married to sort of a way of approaching the way we think about economics. And so these people can ask a question in labor economics one day and health economics the next day and political economy and industrial organization, you name it. They have the tools and the foundation and knowledge to tackle the big questions that really are important. People refer to this as applied microeconomics. Every person I hired shares this [approach]. Xun Tang, my colleague from Penn, his area of expertise is auctions. Ken Wolpin is a pioneer in the domain of labor economics

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A This is part of the department’s history. The idea is keep

the distinction, but make it very clear what these two majors are about. The mathematical economics major should be for two types of people: the people who want to go on to graduate school in economics and the people who are interested in getting highly technical, demanding jobs, like for example, if you want to go to Wall Street and work for some high-tech finance industry. So what you’re going to learn when you take that particular major is going to be how to use mathematics and statistics at high levels to solve technical economic problems. Now suppose, on the other hand, that you’re a preprofessional, interested in just working in the labor market in general, you’re interested in working for the government, you’re interested in economics issues, then you should be an econ major.

What are your plans for bringing in visiting scholars? Q

A Having a very active intellectual life in the department

— where you bring in speakers, visitors, host conference events — is another way of just showing the enthusiasm and enlarging the set of people that are involved in the enterprise. I want the excitement of what’s going on here to be larger than what’s defined by the set of people we can hire. So, you bring in top scholars and ask them to come here and spend some time, interact with colleagues, interact with the students, present their work. Q How are you getting the word out? A I’m a big believer in hitting the ground running. I visited

all the different residential colleges and talked to the students. So every Wednesday I had lunch at a different college, and

I went there to say, “You guys may be curious what RISE is and what I’m doing coming into the chair of the economics department, so let me tell you what I’m doing. Then let me hear from you, what would you like to see out of this process.” I’ve given numerous talks on campus not only about my research, but about RISE, what it’s about. I went in front of the Rice Student Association. I interact pretty much with every administrator on campus, the deans and provosts, president, vice presidents. Information is critical to make them buy into the excitement and understand what’s going on.

How will people outside the department notice these changes? And how will you measure success? Q

A You couldn’t possibly go to a conference in economics

last summer and not hear people talk about Rice. “What’s happening at Rice?” People have noticed. And the hope is that they will keep noticing. But you have to be constantly pushing the frontier and trying to improve the program, investing in the students, investing in research. So the momentum is there, but now we’ve got to continue doing it.

I want to be accountable. That’s the nature of the job. I’m actively engaged in reaching out to all the alumni and trustees and whoever is willing to listen, to try to convince them to buy into this great opportunity. I guess a lot of people feel energized by the initiative, regardless of whether it’s their field or not, which I think is very important. Rice is really a remarkable place in that respect. It’s a university where people genuinely want to see one another succeed. As for success, we are going to go up in the rankings. There is no question about it. I can’t just tell you everybody in economics knows how to measure things and then tell you we’re not going to pay attention to the measurements. So my goal is to do something unique that the profession is going to recognize and value. And, the hope is [employers] are going to hire a Rice Ph.D. as opposed to a graduate from another place. And again, that’s the loop, the sign of success. They start mimicking you, imitating you, hiring your students, try to hire your faculty — that’s success.

Does your Italian heritage affect your outlook on economics? Q

A Absolutely. The main reason why I am a political

economist is because I grew up there. I was born and raised in Milan. I graduated from Bocconi University. At that time it was the only private university in Italy. If you look at Italian economists of my generation or older working in the United States, they all come from the same university. There was this notion of producing the students who were interested in staying in academia and going abroad. The degree I got was really a social science degree, that is, economics, political science, sociology, mathematics and statistics combined. It’s very different than in the U.S. My entire outlook on research has always been how institutions shape the outcomes we have, how can we design better institutions. So certainly growing up in Italy had a huge impact on the way I look at economics and economic questions.

Knowing that you were raised in Milan, we have to ask: AC Milan or Inter Milan? Q

A Inter. I was in Madrid when Inter won the Champions

League with José Mourinho [against Bayern Munich in 2010]. It was actually funny. I went through all possible scenarios to get a ticket for the game and ended up getting a ticket through a friend who works for the Department of Treasury in Spain. It was front row, very close to the pitch. It was all reserved, so I show up with my Inter shirt, a true fan, and they say, “Sir, these seats are reserved.” And I say, “Yes, they’re reserved for me.” LEARN MORE ABOUT RISE HERE: ECONOMICS.RICE.EDU/RISE

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Faculty

Rice University’s Department of Economics

With its faculty of nearly two dozen, Rice’s Department of Economics in the School of Social Sciences is well prepared to provide its undergraduate and graduate students with the skills necessary to maneuver through the constantly changing globalized economic environment. By coupling new faculty members and the launch of RISE (Rice Initiative for the Study of Economics) with their already effective cutting-edge research and exceptional teaching, the department is equipped to expand its curriculum and address all areas of economics.

KERRY BACK

J. Howard Creekmore Professor of Finance

RICHARD BOYLAN

Professor of Economics

DAGOBERT BRITO

George A. Peterkin Professor of Political Economy

RESEARCH INTERESTS RESEARCH INTERESTS

Asset pricing, market microstructure, derivative securities and auction theory

JAMES BROWN

Professor of Economics RESEARCH INTERESTS

Measurement error in spline estimating equations, multiparty bargaining strikes and wages in the printing industry, and substance abuse among adolescents

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Law and economics, political economy, game theory and experimental economics

JOHN BRYANT

BRYAN BROWN

Reginald Henry Hargrove Professor of Economics and Statistics

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Optimal tax theory, economics of defense, energy economics, and law and economics

FLÁVIO CUNHA

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Specification, estimation and prediction in nonlinear models; estimation and inference in random optimization models; and modeling and testing efficiency of forward exchange rates

MARC DUDEY

Henry S. Fox Sr. Professor of Economics and Professor of Management

Associate Professor of Economics

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Labor economics, economics of education, health economics, economic development and growth and policy evaluation

Industrial organization

Banking and monetary theory, economics, epistemological and ontological foundations, coordination, asymmetric information, strategic uncertainty and special projects

MAHMOUD EL-GAMAL

Professor of Economics and of Statistics; Chair of Islamic Economics, Finance and Management

HÜLYA ERASLAN

Professor of Economics RESEARCH INTERESTS

Political economy, game theory and corporate finance

MALCOLM GILLIS

University Professor, Ervin Kenneth Zingler Professor of Economics and Professor of Management

RESEARCH INTERESTS

International economics and finance, econometrics, behavioral economics, and Islamic law and finance

Fiscal theory and policy, economic development, environmental policy and natural resources

VIVIAN HO

James A. Baker III Institute Chair in Health Economics and Professor of Economics RESEARCH INTERESTS

Health economics and industrial organization

NATALIA SIZOVA

TED LOCH-TEMZELIDES

Professor of Economics

ISABELLE PERRIGNE

Professor of Economics

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Energy economics, R&D and economic growth, economic theory, financial economics, macroeconomics, energy and the environment

XUN TANG

Assistant Professor of Economics

Associate Professor of Economics

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Econometrics and asset pricing

Econometrics and industrial organization

PETER HARTLEY

George and Cynthia Mitchell Chair in Sustainable Development and Environmental Economics and Professor of Economics RESEARCH INTERESTS

Energy economics; energy and growth; and money, credit and banking

ROBIN SICKLES

Reginald Henry Hargrove Chair in Economics and Professor of Statistics

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Empirical industrial organization and applied microeconometrics

KENNETH WOLPIN

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Applied econometrics

GEORGE ZODROW

Distinguished Research Professor and Lay Family Chair in Economics

Allyn R. and Gladys M. Cline Chair of Economics

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Tax reform in the U.S. and developing countries, state and local public finance, and computable general equilibrium modeling of the effects of tax reforms

Labor market and education and demographic decisions of individuals in dynamic settings

RESEARCH INTERESTS

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PETER CABE

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ECEIRAS ’16

PICTURE KNOWLEDGE words TED WALKER + photos JULIE SOEFER

Every Rice student’s story unfolds in ways they may never have anticipated, thanks to opportunities made available by a supportive Rice community. The Initiative for Students gives Rice alumni, parents and friends the chance to shape these stories as they are written.

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Each year, they arrive — hundreds of new Rice Owls, recently fledged from homes and high schools, ready to learn and experience more of the world. It’s our privilege, responsibility and challenge to inspire them to go beyond their initial expectations. In the following pages, we present portraits and profiles of five current students and two alumni who epitomize the spirit of the Initiative for Students by embracing a world of possibility at Rice and beyond. While each student’s story is unique, the common thread is opportunity. From research experiences to mentorships, scholarships and internships, every new opportunity opens the door to a potential future.

The Initiative for Students seeks to expand these opportunities and strengthen these connections for all students through a new level of alumni engagement; increased student aid; investments in new teaching and research opportunities, grants and fellowships; and hands-on learning experiences both at home and abroad that connect to and reinforce their academic work. As the initiative begins, we look to these extraordinary works in progress to ask, “What does it take to hone every Rice student’s Owl Edge?” Hint: It takes a parliament. OWLEDGE.RICE.EDU

RESEARCH PETER CABECEIRAS ’16

biochemistry and cell biology major + cancer researcher (Seen on Page 30) With the support of Rice, Peter Cabeceiras has been able to take advantage of research opportunities that move him toward his goal to pursue advanced degrees in both medicine and research. In the lab of Lynda Chin, professor and chair of the Department of Genomic Medicine at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Cabeceiras helped discover that a common mutation in melanoma can inhibit the success of certain cancer treatments and is working with a group to develop more effective therapies for that mutation. Cabeceiras also is helping to enhance radiation

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treatments for pancreatic tumors, along with Cullen Taniguchi, an assistant professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at MD Anderson. “Rice has access to the Texas Medical Center and one of the best cancer centers in the world,” said Cabeceiras. “I can take things I learn at Rice and apply them to solve realworld problems next door.” Rice’s dynamic faculty and productive partnerships mean that students like Cabeceiras don’t have to go far to experience the basic science and cutting-edge translational research that sets Rice apart.

M E N TO R S H I P

PRECIOUS KNIGHTON ’15

sprinter + health sciences major + mentee TERRENCE GEE ’86

businessman + alumnus + leadership mentor Two Owls, the sprinter and the businessman, talked career plans and leadership skills every two weeks for almost a year as a part of Rice’s Student–Athlete Development program. Precious Knighton hoped to build her portfolio of professional experience. She took Terrence Gee’s cue and earned an internship at a corporate real estate firm. Outside the comfort zone of her health sciences major, she used her leadership lessons wisely. “I learned how to negotiate business deals and how to work with clients,” Knighton said. “I approached each day ready to learn. Certainty is less important than curiosity. Terrence taught me that.” “My goal,” said Gee, “has been to help Precious and all of the student–athletes I work with understand how their work at Rice translates into a powerful set of tools for the business world. What might feel like a highly focused set of activities is actually building the experiences, relationships and attributes that translate to a manager and a leader.”

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SCHOLARSHIP ADRIAN MEDINA ’16

Air Force ROTC cadet major + psychology major + scholarship student By combining a Rice education with a commitment to serve in the Air Force, Adrian Medina is working toward a future that is up in the air. “I hope to be a pilot after graduation,” he said. “Whatever comes next, whether I spend 30 years in the Air Force or

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pursue a second career after my commitment, I’ll be ready. In that way, Rice provided me a life.” Scholarship support makes it possible for Medina to attend Rice, where he will be the first person in his family to graduate from college. His mother worked several jobs to support him and

his siblings as a single parent. “The opportunity to be at Rice and the support I get, together it has lifted a huge burden from her,” he said. With the groundwork he’s laying at Rice, Medina will have all the runway he needs to take off and soar.

LEADERSHIP SOPHIE EICHNER ’16

architecture major + interdisciplinary convener + “Soundworm!” aficionado Sophie Eichner is at home among the talking yellow tubes. She should be, as a convener of the architecture students, engineering students, Rice Public Art staff, arts patrons and facilities administrators who collaborated to bring “Soundworm!” from design to completion. It’s the first student-created public artwork of its kind at Rice. “I wasn’t the designer,” Eichner said, “but I was interested in bringing the people together to ensure that ‘Soundworm!’ came together regardless of my role.” Speakers built into the tubes play audio from microphones across campus, bringing input from many places together into a single experience. The same could be said of Eichner, who also has used her skills as a convener to co-lead the Rice Architecture Mentoring Program, connecting alumni with students to share career insight and experience. “Many students find internships and make contacts that help them figure out what they want to do,” said Eichner. “You start things here and there, you meet people here and there, and they all connect at some point.”

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G LO B A L I M PACT ALEXA JUAREZ ’14

Rice 360° graduate fellow + Beyond Traditional Borders alum + global health engineer This shiny metal box, about the size of a toaster, has logged thousands of miles in the hands of Alexa Juarez. Juarez recently made an 18-hour journey from Houston to Blantyre, Malawi, where she field-tested the device and garnered input from the doctors and nurses who work in the low-resource settings where it will make a difference. 36

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“I love working with the experts who will use this device every day,” said Juarez. The AutoSyp’s springs and ratchets pump carefully regulated doses of IV medications and fluids to maternal and neonatal patients. The low-cost, yet reliable, device needs little power to keep its lifesaving mechanisms working even in places without consistent electricity.

“If you build a sustainable device,” Juarez said, “it has a life and a legacy beyond you. I think my time at Rice shaped who I am today by giving me the resources to make an impact on the world.”

CHAMPION SCHOLAR MICHAEL SHASHOUA

economics graduate student + water polo champion As goalie for the University of Pennsylvania’s strongest-ever club water polo team, Michael Shashoua played under a passionate, strategic coach who was a former member of the Italian national team. As a graduate student, Shashoua has a mentor who is one of the top economists in his field. The coach and the economist are the same person: Antonio Merlo, Rice’s new chair of the Department of Economics. When Merlo left Penn to elevate economics at Rice, he brought his goalie with him. At Rice, Shashoua, a former Fulbright scholar and four-time NCAA water polo champion, hopes to apply economic models to immigration policy, using IRS data to understand how immigrants in Houston make decisions and seek employment. “I am fascinated by the role of immigrants,” he said. “My father came to the U.S. after fleeing Iraq for Israel. He built a business and raised his family here. His experience showed me how people search for a common link.”

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38â&#x20AC;&#x192;

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words Andrew Faught photos Tommy LaVergne

Better Births Tyan Parker Dominguez ’93 works to unravel the data behind a troubling public health issue — African–American women of all economic classes have unusually high infant mortality rates and at-risk pregnancies. Her findings

EDEL RODRIGUEZ

point to the chronic stressor of racism. The contractions came early and often. So did the headaches. For Austin nonprofit worker Eva Roberts, each of her four pregnancies developed with unerring, and unsettling, similarity. All of her children were born preterm, and none was heavier than 4 pounds, 15 ounces. Roberts’ second child, son Delbert, arrived 14 weeks early. At 1 pound, 13 ounces, the infant spent four precarious months in the neonatal intensive care unit. Today, Delbert is 25 and healthy.

“It was stressful,” recalled Roberts, who works for AIDS Services of Austin, which supports those affected by HIV and AIDS. “I started my prenatal care early and I was eating right. I took all of the right precautions and felt that everything should have gone well.” For Parker Dominguez, it’s a familiar refrain. A clinical associate professor of social work at the University of Southern California, Parker Dominguez has worked for nearly two decades to crack a public health riddle that long has vexed

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Racism is always a loaded term. We don’t like to think about it, and we don’t like to be reminded of our sordid history and that it still exists.

researchers. Why do African-American women, including Roberts, face twice the risk of experiencing pregnancies that result in early delivery, low birth weight or even infant death? National Vital Statistics show that black infants are twice as likely to die in the first year of life as white infants. “Given all of the advances we’ve had in public health and neonatal medicine, we’re still seeing this disparity,” said Parker Dominguez, who was a member of the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services’ Advisory Committee on Infant Mortality from 2011 to 2013. “The mystery part of it intrigues me and keeps me engaged.” Among researchers, a consensus is developing that “psychosocial stresses,” such as racism, play a unique role in African-American pregnancies. While everything from socioeconomics and education to preexisting conditions and access to health care are thought to influence birth outcomes, they don’t provide a satisfactory explanation for disparities that have existed since data was first collected more than a century ago, Parker Dominguez said. Across the African-American stratum, birth outcome disparities have held stubbornly and uncannily constant. Neither do genetics explain the problem. African immigrant women have “much better” birth outcomes than American-born black women, said Parker Dominguez, an African-American mother of three whose own children were born preterm. She first started studying the problem while attending graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. There she read “Bad Outcomes in Black Babies: Race or Racism?,” the landmark 1991 study by pediatricians Richard Davis and James Collins. The idea that racism impacts birth outcomes isn’t without its critics, and “there are always going to be naysayers,” Parker

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Tyan Parker Dominguez ’93 studies the impact of psychosocial pressures — like racism — on African-American women’s pregnancies and births.

Dominguez said. “I welcome it as an opportunity to educate people around the complexity of the issue. “Racism is always a loaded term,” she added. “We don’t like to think about it, and we don’t like to be reminded of our sordid history and that it still exists. Even in an academic setting, it still challenges our thinking. It still is to an extent controversial, but I think people are more open to thinking about the social determinants of health.”

A Breakthrough Study

Parker Dominguez’s 2007 paper, “Racial Differences in Birth Outcomes: The Role of General, Pregnancy, and

“That perception piece is incredibly important,” she said. “You might second-guess yourself, as in ‘Did that really happen? Am I crazy?’ You can start to make excuses for other people’s behavior, or just let things slide, resigning yourself to the fact that racism is just a part of everyday life — like being overlooked while waiting in line or being followed in a store.” Parker Dominguez said the findings were robust and “stood up, even when we took into account all of these other things,” such as the stress of job loss or a death in the family, anxiety about the pregnancy, or medical risk and socioeconomic factors. “It indicated to us that we were picking up a unique stressor that seemed to have a unique effect. Racism is a chronic stressor based on an immutable personal characteristic, so the threat is always potentially there. Maintaining a hyper-vigilance against it can be costly. The body’s stress response never fully disengages. Over time, that can lead to wear and tear on your physiological system, which places you at a higher risk for health problems,” Parker Dominguez said. “African-American women, for example, are more likely to develop hypertensive disorders while pregnant, which puts them at higher risk for premature delivery.”

A Singular Purpose

Racism Stress,” is hailed as a seminal contribution toward understanding and ultimately conquering the problem. In that study, unlike in past research that asked pregnant African-American women whether they had ever felt they had been a target of overt racism, Parker Dominguez posed more specific questions to elicit experiences that were perceived to be racist. She queried women about exposure to racism during childhood and adulthood, and she asked about direct experiences and “vicarious racism” — such as witnessing or hearing about a family member being mistreated because of skin color. Both dynamics have been associated with birth outcomes.

Parker Dominguez’s interest in social justice traces back to her days at Rice when, as a member of Will Rice College, “I discovered that I was intrigued by the nature of social relationships, social power and social institutions. I could dedicate my life to helping to make the world a better place.” She ended up triple majoring in philosophy, sociology and policy studies, and she took part in campus outreach efforts. Parker Dominguez helped develop the “College 101” program to bring inner-city high school students to campus for an overnight taste of college life. With the Rice Student Volunteer Program, she also volunteered at Houston’s Star of Hope Mission homeless shelter, the Houston Area Women’s Center and Family Services of Greater Houston, where she co-led support groups for teenagers in at-risk families. These weren’t Parker Dominguez’s only life-forming moments at Rice; she also met her future husband, Manuel Dominguez Jr. ’91. Manuel taught at-risk youth in Los Angeles’ schools before the couple’s recent move to Austin, where Parker Dominguez now teaches exclusively online via the USC School of Social Work’s Virtual Academic Center. It’s her research on African-American birth outcomes that has allotted Parker Dominguez’s life its singular purpose. Her work isn’t just revolutionary, it’s bold, said Atlanta activist and educator Fleda Mask Jackson, founder of Save 100 Babies. The organization was created in 2008 to find solutions to assure better birth outcomes among African-American women. “Clearly, when you move from a discussion of whether it’s about health care, poverty or neglect of oneself, to link it to societal issues or racism and sexism — that’s courageous,” Jackson said. “The research isn’t to negate individual

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responsibility, but it moves it into another domain. The disparity is still there, but Tyan brings passion and expertise that can bring this challenge more to the forefront.” Parker Dominguez since has worked to find solutions, particularly through churches. African-Americans have long been wary of the medical community, she said, jaded in part by the U.S. government’s Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which doctors refused to treat infected patients during a clinical study that lasted from 1932 to 1972. Churches, meanwhile, are considered a trusted and vital part of the African-American community. Parker Dominguez used a $25,000 grant from the March of Dimes to work with the Pasadena, Calif., Church of God to highlight birth disparities. She did that by promoting a health fair and helping to develop an eight-week support group in which women were encouraged to talk about stressful experiences, coping skills, and ways to foster their own emotional, physical and spiritual health. She now is consulting with the City of Austin Health and Human Services Department to develop and evaluate a community health worker intervention program, in which trained workers can work with pregnant and nonpregnant African-American women alike. The goal is to educate and connect them to resources to promote healthy pregnancies. Roberts, for her part, has joined Undoing Racism Austin, an attempt to stamp out discrimination by raising awareness. “I’m extremely optimistic,” she said. “You want to teach your child at a young age that racism exists, but that they can overcome it and go far in life.”

[At Rice] I discovered that I was intrigued by the nature of social relationships, social power and social institutions. I could dedicate my life to Tyan Parker Dominguez and Eva Roberts work with African-American women in Austin to promote healthy pregnancies and births.

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helping to make the world a better place.

arts & letters

creative ideas and endeavors

Sight and Sound Tucked into the concrete structure of James Turrell’s soaring Skyspace is an acoustic system that Rice student composers are using to explore the interplay of sound and light.

TO M M Y L AV E R G N E

rchitecture is frozen music, and music is liquid architecture, or so said the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It’s hard not to see the truth in those analogies at artist James Turrell’s “Twilight Epiphany” Skyspace. Its 72-foot-square white roof seems to float above a grassy hill that calls to mind a low-slung Mayan temple. Inside the berm, a cozy room lined with pink granite benches invites visitors to ponder the heavens through an opening, or aperture, in the ceiling. The whole effect is best experienced in the morning or evening twilight. That’s when an LED-light sequence created by Turrell projects colorful hues onto the ceiling, dragging the sky to earth.

The goal, in Turrell’s own words, is “to create an experience of wordless thought.” And now, on occasion, an experience of sound. Thanks to Turrell, Shepherd School Dean Robert Yekovich and Kurt Stallmann, associate professor of composition and theory, Turrell’s 73rd Skyspace is the first of his structures to feature a fully integrated sound system. On a gray and blustery November morning, Stallmann and I roamed the Skyspace, which since opening in June 2012 has drawn more than 100,000 visitors. When asked if he ever thought he would be so lucky as to have a James Turrell Skyspace at

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arts & Letters

his students’ disposal when he came to Rice from Harvard’s faculty 12 years ago, “Never!” he exclaimed, even before the whole question was out of my mouth. Thanks to a sort of valley effect created by Turrell’s bowl-shaped construction, it was a little hard to hear Stallmann over the roar of traffic on South Main and in the Texas Medical Center and the burbling of a fountain a hundred yards away. However, neither sound was audible outside the confines of “Twilight Epiphany.” The ambient roar Stallmann and I were talking over is conducted by the structure’s ceiling, which sometimes acts as a listening device for conversations outside the structure, Stallmann said. “Because of [the Skyspace’s] overhang, it conducts sound as much from the outside in as it does from the inside out. What’s amazing about that fountain is that it affects the sound in here. You can’t hear it during the day, but at night the noise floor drops down because there’s less traffic, and suddenly you can hear it very clearly. Actually, you can feel it. It’s amazing.”

Brochstein ’55, chair of the Rice Art Committee. Together, they came up with a vision around how audio could be integrated into the Skyspace design. Then the dean worked closely with acousticians, the design team and the artist to realize this vision. Today, a total of 12 speakers and two subwoofers are tucked away inside the walls and under the built-in benches inside the Skyspace, invisible to all. While other Skyspaces have served as venues for live musicians, this is the first to serve as something like a canvas for the sound paintings of the students and faculty at the Shepherd School — an organic, electromagnetic extension of their creativity. “As an artwork, the Skyspace itself is firmly rooted in the present — in terms of its visual design and use of technology — while also borrowing from ancient human traditions,” Stallmann said. “Think of the mounds of earth surrounding the structure and the activity of looking to the heavens for inspiration and solace.” Shepherd School doctoral student and composer Shane Monds sees it as both futuristic and deeply rooted in the past: A New Dimension “The idea of making artwork that interThe idea to combine music with the acts with the sun, that is an idea that is as typical features of a Turrell Skyspace was old as time.” discussed initially by Turrell and Yekovich Stallmann believes that while the over dinner in 2008. Amid discussions Shepherd School “does an exceptional job about where to site the new Skyspace, the of preserving Western cultural traditions of dean threw out an idea. How would Turrell music through live performance and study,” feel about the idea of music just as vital to a music school SOUND AND LIGHT played in the space as a kind are “studies in the present of interesting link to the and near future of music.” music.rice.edu/ Shepherd School of Music? “A music composition calendar/index.shtml Yekovich was thinking department offers a music about acoustic music initialschool something similar ricemagazine.info/255 ly, but knowing of Turrell’s to what a research and interest in John Cage and other composers development department offers to a of electronic music, the idea evolved. corporation,” he said. Soon enough, he and Stallmann began discussing ways to go about wiring the Sound Experiments Skyspace for sound. “We thought it would As the early years of musical programbe crazy for us to have a space like this ming within “Twilight Epiphany” have and then have to hang speakers [during shown, the space is a study in paradox, caevents],” Stallmann said. “Aesthetically, pable of eliciting memorable performancit would destroy what Turrell was trying es from artists who compose specifically to create.” for the space or those who simply wing it. As a result, Yekovich convened a series In 2013, through an Arts Initiatives of conversations with Turrell, benefactor Fund grant from Rice, Stallmann curated Suzanne Deal Booth ’77, and Raymond a series of events that served as something

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like range-finders for the Skyspace. First, he collaborated with John Sparagana, Rice’s Grace Christian Vietti Chair in Visual Arts and professor and chair of the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts, to bring the German multireedist and visual artist Peter Brötzmann to campus. Brötzmann performed live with light sequences (without the space’s sound system) before ushering the audience to a campus gallery opening of his visual artworks. Brötzmann’s performance was improvisational and extremely responsive to the surrounding environment, in contrast to performances within the Shepherd School itself, where “everything about the sound is controlled,” Stallmann said. “But out there, you are just part of the Houston soundscape. ... There was this great moment when Brötzmann was out there playing and this dog started barking and for a minute there it was like they were having this little conversation.” Brötzmann took the Skyspace’s outside-in effect and ran with it. It called to Stallmann’s mind another such example from the fall 2013 season, when the Shepherd School hosted the Symposium on Architecture, Acoustics and Music. “One of our guests, the acoustician Alban Bassuet, made a presentation using the Turrell Skyspace sound system that included an ambisonic [sonically three-dimensional] recording of children playing in a French schoolyard. Bassuet was demonstrating how, with this type of recording, he could create an aural illusion of sounds coming from outside the space, beyond the perimeter of the walls surrounding us.” Just then, Dean Yekovich entered the Skyspace, having missed Bassuet’s description beforehand. “When the recording started to play, the dean turned to me and asked, ‘Do you think we should go out and ask the kids to keep their voices down?’ I can’t think of better proof of concept.” Stallmann also collaborated with David Dove from Houston-based Nameless Sound to bring the composer/ guitarist Michael Pisaro, long a Turrell devotee, to campus. Pisaro came to Houston months before his performance

arts & Letters

Left to right: Shane Monds, doctoral student and composer; Chapman Welch, electroacoustic music specialist; and Kurt Stallmann, associate professor of composition and theory, in the Rice Electroacoustic Music Labs, better known as REMLABS. Shepherd School of Music students use REMLABS to compose music for James Turrell’s “Twilight Epiphany” Skyspace.

to study the Skyspace. His work, composed for the occasion, was broadcast through the sound system. “Basically this whole past year has been a series of explorations on how to use the space and how to control the space,” Stallmann said. He would like to see the Skyspace epitomize the creative arts at Rice. Creativity is, in essence, the act of bringing something into being that did not exist before, a process facilitated by the Skyspace. The Rice grant made possible six events in the Skyspace, drawing hundreds of audience members and bringing together music, architecture, visual art, Rice public art, nonprofit presenting organizations in Houston, and visiting artists from both coasts of the United States and from Asia. “Sustained work of this kind can turn this vision of the Skyspace as a hub of creative activity into a reality,” Stallmann hopes.

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A Student Laboratory

Stallmann and I adjourned to an indoor mock-up of the Skyspace sound system inside REMLABS (Rice Electroacoustic Music Labs) with all the speakers arranged just as they were outside, albeit with none of the bones of Turrell’s structure. It’s

there that Stallmann and electroacoustic specialist Chapman Welch teach students how to compose for the space. For the Shepherd School students, “Twilight Epiphany” has become something akin to their church and their proving ground all rolled into one. In addition to composing works for performance inside, many of them serve as docents for the six-evenings-a-week celebrations of nightfall in the Skyspace. “That’s so gratifying,” said Emily Stein, assistant director of Rice Public Art and the manager of the Skyspace, “because they know the Skyspace inside and out. They have composed works of art for this work of art.” The students have seen their compositions performed within the Skyspace. And outside, too, notably in the case of percussionist and doctoral student Brandon Bell ’05, who took advantage of the space’s outside-in acoustics to stage a performance of John Luther Adams’ “Inuksuit” with some 40 percussionists positioned all over the field and inside the space. Monds said the existence of “Twilight Epiphany” helped him cement his decision to enroll in the Shepherd School. “I am a big fan of James Turrell’s work and there’s the Skyspace, directly linked with an electronic music studio. For compos-

ers to get to write for the space is a really great opportunity.” His composition “Air Carved by Light” — in Stallmann’s words, “a fusion of light and sound that uses a computer to analyze light values that determine the harmonies heard through the sound system” — has been performed twice with the possibility of a third performance upcoming in the spring. “I was hoping to mimic Turrell in that he has these long, seemingly unchanging, things that actually are changing,” Monds said. “At some point you are noticing that your perceptions are changing. Some of it is being brought on by the artist, and over time it becomes more and more apparent. So that is what I was trying to do with sound, a perceptual feeling of sound, instead of light.” Sound and light, the past and the future, sunrise and sunset: society has come to think of these concepts as opposite or unrelated. The Skyspace brings on a sort of synesthesia, drawing forth what is eternal and true about all these things. “Architecture has always been acoustic,” said Monds. “This just makes more of a direct connection between architecture and acoustics, but they are always intertwined.” —John Nova Lomax

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arts & Letters

A Comic Elegy for Austin’s Built Environment In his first work of fiction, architect David Heymann weaves a series of short stories — by turns comic and wistful — of a young architect who fails to dissuade his clients from their follies. The trick is, the narrator (presumably, an alter ego of the author himself) manages to evoke Austin’s “ambrosial charm” and to deliver his critique with neither sentimentality nor polemic. Instead, Heymann’s stories marry the keen eye of a natural historian with a writer’s gift for lyrical detail. To appreciate this book, it helps to have a stake in Austin’s past — preferably one longer than an undergraduate’s fouryear residency — as well as its future. From Mount Bonnell to Lake Travis to Deep Eddy, Heymann reminds readers of the human scale of Austin’s unique

places, even as this scale falls away to development and destruction. Heymann is the Harwell Hamilton Harris Regents Professor in Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. Describing himself as a “classic faculty brat,” Heymann grew up in Houston where his father, Dieter Heymann, was a professor of geology and geophysics at Rice. Heymann attended Rice from 1978 to 1981 before moving to New York to finish his degree. He is married to Sandra Fiedorek ’80. —lynn gosnell

Author Q&A “My Beautiful City Austin” (John M. Hardy Publishing, 2014) by David Heymann of it. My favorite is probably “Patterns of Passive Aggression,” which segues from a barbecue dinner with architects at the Salt Lick to a disquisition on whether Austin is actually a city to a description of Barton Springs to a hellish client request on Lake Travis. I like the constant tone of uncertainty that keeps undercutting the landmarks, and the balance of idealism and cynicism.

Is the unnamed narrator a kind of alter ego? Yes and no. I certainly share his understanding of Austin and the concerns he brings to what is happening. But the commissions are fictional. In my own architectural work I’m a lot better at finding innovative design alternatives for similar motivations.

Your dad was a geologist. Did you grow up sort of paying particular attention to the natural world?

How important is it to construe a house “in words first,” as the unnamed narrator mentions in one chapter? It is especially important if you hope to find the key set of desires to unlock the design of a better building.

Do you have a favorite of the stories in your book? I like each one for different reasons. Writing “Keeping Austin Weird” was an incredible kick: I laughed constantly while I was writing parts

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Read more about the book and author at www.david heymannauthor. com

Not fair! I have so many fond memories of each. That said, my wife, Sandy, and I visited my brother in Austin when our son, Walter, was 6 months old. He took us to Barton Springs and carried Walter out in the water. Walter’s reaction was one of pure bliss. So, OK: Barton.

There’s a brief and comic scene set at Rice about “late-night stoner parties atop the biology building.” How about another Rice story? As an architecture student at Rice, I was once crossing the main quad to Anderson Hall when I was run into from behind by a bicycle ridden by [then-President] Norman Hackerman. He clearly had not been looking, and he must have been lost in thought because his always somewhat stern visage did not relent as he surveyed me sprawled on the ground under his front wheel. I was in such awe that my immediate reaction was to apologize profusely for the trouble I had caused. He didn’t say a single word before riding off, and my respect for him only increased.

—lynn gosnell

P I L A R PA L AC I Á

Very much so. I’ve always been a crazy birder. But my love for natural landscape is certainly related to my dad, [professor emeritus of geology and geophysics and adjunct professor of chemistry] Dieter Heymann, being at Rice. His specialty was chemistry, and his interest was space. He often had meteorites around when I was a kid. We camped for most of every summer and long weekends during the year throughout Texas and the West. His Ph.D. students would meet us in out-of-the-way places. They would lay for hours under the stars and call them out by number, which was magic for me.

Several of the stories reference Austin’s spring-fed pools. So, we have to ask: Barton Springs or Deep Eddy?

arts & Letters

Books and music Nothing but the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I edited by Gordon Hughes and Philipp Blom (Getty Publications, 2014)

This poetically titled volume accompanies the exhibition “World War I: War of Images, Images of War” at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Gordon Hughes, the Mellon Assistant Professor of Art History at Rice, co-edited the collection with independent scholar Philipp Blom. They gathered essays on 14 modernist artists, including George Braque, Kathe Kollwitz and Max Ernst, whose work was shaped by the brutal conflict many experienced firsthand. Both editors contributed additional essays. Hughes considers the lingering psychological trauma of war in an essay on English poet and novelist Robert Graves, who was wounded in the Battle of the Somme. (Graves was listed as a casualty in the London Times, which grieved his friends and family greatly — until Graves sent a correction that he was in fact recovering in an English hospital.) Hughes makes a case for why we should care about World War I and the artists who lived and reflected it back to the public, then as well as now. Those living in or visiting Los Angeles have the opportunity to view this exhibition through April 19, 2015. —Lynn Gosnell

Fantasy

Common Thread

The Christmas Horn

This suite of solo piano fantasies by Parker, professor of piano at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music, includes works by Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann as well as a new arrangement by William Hirtz and former student Calogero Di Liberto ’06. Available via iTunes and CD Baby www.jonkimuraparker.com.

Recorded and produced by Houston Public Media, this album includes original arrangements for wind quintet. Houston-based WindSync’s musicians include Rice grads Garrett Hudson ’11, flute; Erin Tsai ’09, oboe; and Tracy Jacobson ’10, bassoon. For information on recordings, tours and more, visit www.windsync.org.

VerMeulen is a professor of French horn at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music and principal horn of the Houston Symphony. Shepherd School horn students, known as the Rice Horn Crew, contributed to these arrangements of Christmas tunes for horn octet. Available from VerMeulen Music LLC and digitally from iTunes and Amazon.com. vermeulenmusic.com.

WindSync

Jon Kimura Parker

Numa: An Epic Poem with Photo Collages by Katrinka Moore ’76 (Aqueduct Press, 2014)

Linked poems tell the story of a shape-shifting numen called Numa. The book is part of a paperback series that explores questions raised by feminist science fiction. Moore is the author of two previous poetry collections.

William VerMeulen and the Rice Horn Crew

Generating Hope: Stories of the BeauSoleil Louisiana Solar Home by W. Geoff Gjertson ’92 and Dege Legg (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2014)

The BeauSoleil Louisiana Solar Home, designed and built by students and faculty, was one of 20 models selected for the 2009 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C. The 800-square-foot, energy-efficient home was recognized for market viability. Beyond its winning design, the book tells the story of a home that “embodies the hearts, souls, ingenuity, way of life, and spirit of the Cajun and Creole people of South Louisiana.” Gjertson is a professor of architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

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family album

Rice Homecoming: 1970 by

Melissa Fitzsimons Kean ’96 Centennial Historian

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As fit the rapidly changing times, the 1970 Rice Homecoming marked a real departure from the past, in several ways. Efforts to engage the returning alumni in the ongoing life of the campus replaced the traditional emphasis on history and nostalgia. Discussions of current Rice problems included a panel on the college system, which was in some turmoil. Presentations about the state of academic programs supplemented the cocktail party, buffet dinner and football game. (It wasn’t a good year, but we managed to upset Cal, 28–0.) Although there was controversy about some of the changes — particularly the Rice Players’ production of Jules Feiffer’s dark comedy “Little Murders” — they were largely received with approval. For most of Rice’s early history, campus royalty was crowned in the spring at the annual May Fete. Only after World War II did the autumn homecoming become the venue for these coronations. In 1970, for the first time, the student body elected a homecoming king, Robert Duncan ’71, along with the traditional homecoming queen, Cathy Brown ’71. This photo captures the spirit of that era as well as any I’ve seen — the queen and king were going through the motions of a time-honored convention, half-seriously and half in jest. President Norman Hackerman and ARA President Bill Ballew ’40 look bemused. It’s a very particular moment. It’s 1970.

Left to right: Rice President Norman Hackerman, Cathy Brown ’71, Robert Duncan ’71 and Bill Ballew ’40, ARA President

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Semester’s end is both exhilarating and exhausting for Rice students. With roughly four days to prepare for eight days of finals, it’s not uncommon to see students catching a few winks in buildings across campus. Centrally located and open 24 hours during finals week, Fondren Library provides the perfect environment for students to study, complete assignments and pull all-nighters. For the third year in a row, various breeds of therapy pets have been brought in to help bleary-eyed coeds unwind before finding another comfy chair or couch to take a much-needed catnap. —Tracey Rhoades