How Rice created a robust cancer research ecosystem
Margin of Error 18
A low-cost way to improve tumor removal accuracy
Meeting of Minds 20
Investigating how the brain interprets music and dance
Treating the Whole Human 22
Translational humanities are transforming health care
Patients Are People, Too 25
How a bioengineering student shifted his perspective
Lessons of Asilomar 26
A new summit reflects a half-century of biotech
Breaking the Mold 29
Rice’s accelerator takes the lead in the biotech industry
Rebel With a Cause 31
A biotech venture studio partners with academia Living Pharmacy 32 Revolutionizing diabetes treatment with one device Brain Trust 34 Solving real-world problems at the Rice Nexus
Thriving Urban Communities
Our Changing Climate’s Social Challenges 38
A new center tackles coastal industrial challenges
The Common Good 44
Novel scholarship spotlights the role of religion in society
Prophetic City 45
A yearly Houston survey augurs changes at large
Elemental Building Blocks 46
Going global to better understand sustainable design
Physician, Heal Thyself 48 Why ugly language creeps into patient health records
Stacking the Deck 50
A new card game helps envision wild futures
When the Levee Breaks 51
How humanists can help us understand why dams fail
the Scenes In the News 52 Rice researchers in the national news
Head of the Class 53 A peek inside Rice’s core lab facilities and clean rooms
On the Safe Side 56 Former FBI agent Tam Dao on keeping research secure Capital Investments 58 Financing the forefront of innovation and discovery
Age of Smart Materials 60
Charting a path to the technologies of the future Forever Chemicals No More 63
Taking the removal of toxic chemicals from our water supply to the next level
Crossing the Stream 66
A vital podcasting platform for environmental discourse
Cold Plasma, Hot Potential 67
Plasma tech is now tackling greenhouse gas emissions
Exploring New Energy Frontiers 68
Chevron Fellows find sustainable energy solutions
Mending Time 70
The critical role of humanists in advancing “repair”
The Root Cause 72
Addressing food insecurity through social policy work
How They Did It
Saint Foucault 73
How Rice became a global hub for Foucault research
Partnering for Progress 76
Why philanthropic funds increasingly focus on research
Responsible AI
Moral Imperative 78
Rice’s Ethics of Technology program addresses AI’s ethical challenges
Evidence-Based Education 80
New R&D hub at Rice will enable research on learning
Strength in Numbers 84 Connecting health researchers and practitioners on AI
Don’t Get Bent Out of Shape 87
AI predicts how proteins change their shape
Generative AI Could Break the Internet 88 The dire consequences of training AI on synthetic data
Eyes on the Road 90
Sensing flooded roads in real time thanks to AI
AI and Antelope Teeth 93
A more accurate means of identifying fossils
Grok Stars 94
A radical shift in the way we understand neural networks
What’s Next
Public Service 96
Documenting 35 years of science and policy in a new White House archive at Rice
Research Cubed 102
The business of better learning how customers spend their money
Going Global 103
From France to India, Rice’s newest international hubs are partnering with the world’s brightest minds
Out of This World 106
Rice’s rich history of collaboration with the U.S. space program continues today
A Letter From President Reginald DesRoches
At Rice University, research is more than an academic pursuit — it’s a responsibility to serve humanity and tackle the world’s toughest challenges. This commitment to the greater good has driven the university’s mission for over a century, empowering us to explore, innovate and create solutions that meaningfully impact society.
Research keeps great universities in constant motion, enabling us to
generate new ideas, nurture critical thinking, drive economic development and contribute to a better world. At Rice, research also enriches the undergraduate experience, with most students engaging in exciting discovery in and outside of the classroom. From awarding our first doctoral degree only six years after our founding to our growing number of funded research institutes and centers today, Rice has always prioritized impactful scholarly activity.
Our faculty’s breakthroughs exemplify this. Professors Naomi Halas and Peter Nordlander developed a light-powered catalyst for clean hydrogen production, now commercialized by Syzygy Plasmonics. Gang Bao is working with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Dr. Jeffrey Molldrem
to foster collaboration between our two institutions on fundamental and translational cancer research, to develop new technologies for cancer detection and therapy, and to secure external funding in support of further research. And, through the expertise and leadership of Kirsten Ostherr, Rice is dedicated to advancing translational research on human experiences of health and illness with its new Medical Humanities Research Institute.
At Rice University, research is more than an academic pursuit — it’s a responsibility to serve humanity and tackle the world’s toughest challenges.
These are just a few examples of the meaningful research performed at Rice. Within this issue of R3: The Rice Research Review, the university’s new publication highlighting our high-impact research and innovation, you’ll learn even more about our work and how these discoveries are poised to make a difference on a global scale.
Looking forward, we are elevating our research impact, focusing on energy, health, urban communities and data science. By partnering with Houston’s leading institutions, investing in new research initiatives and developing partnerships around the world, we strive to address pressing global issues, ensuring that all communities benefit from our discoveries. — REGINALD DESROCHES
Q&A
A Truly Momentous Impact
Rice Provost Amy Dittmar shares how Rice plans to solve humanity’s most pressing issues
Last October, Rice unveiled its new 10-year strategic plan, Momentous, which focuses on making an outsized global impact while maintaining its distinctively close-knit community.
R3 sat down with Provost Amy Dittmar to learn more about the university’s similarly focused research areas — leading innovations in health, generating sustainable futures and creating thriving urban communities — as well as the underlying catalyst of responsible artificial intelligence (AI).
These key research drivers also comprise the four main sections of each issue of R3, which is devoted to showcasing the world-changing work our researchers, students and scholars do every day to further Rice’s mission of “personalized scale for global impact.”
The new strategic plan positions Rice to become the premier university in the world for teaching and research. What’s driving this vision?
The “and” in that sentence is crucial. What sets us apart is our ability to do both. Rice will be delivering peerless personalized education while also making breakthrough discoveries to transform lives and
better humanity. Rice is already known for its connection between undergraduate education and research. Our ability to work across disciplines and leverage our agile size and interdisciplinary nature means we’re positioned to solve humanity’s most pressing issues in a way only Rice can.
Can you tell us more about the key research areas?
Rice is already widely recognized for producing exceptional foundational and applied research and making life-changing advances toward leading innovations in health, generating sustainable futures and building thriving urban communities. We’re taking advantage of our distinctive culture and nimble approach to develop interdisciplinary approaches unconstrained by silos and organizational structures, all while harnessing advances in responsible AI.
How will responsible AI be a major catalyst for the research done at Rice?
We have a deep well of research experience in AI, but Rice is also a well-rounded institution that has a lot to offer in public policy, ethics,
humanities and the life sciences. So you’ll see this show up as an interdisciplinary effort across the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, the School of Humanities, the Baker Institute for Public Policy, the Wiess School of Natural Sciences — you name it. And in this way, Rice can work together to define the technology, policy and applications to use AI responsibly across many domains and disciplines.
Rice is in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city. What does this mean for our university?
Our location presents endless opportunities for research and collaboration: Houston is the energy capital of America and home to the largest medical center in the world, directly across Main Street from our campus. It boasts the third-highest number of Fortune 500 companies and is also famously the most diverse city in the country. By 2050, the rest of the United States will match Houston’s demographic makeup, which offers a unique opportunity to incubate our impact worldwide. Rice is so fortunate to be rooted in Houston, as Momentous is rooted in our long-standing strengths and areas of expertise.
Provost Amy Dittmar discusses Rice’s new strategic plan at its launch in October 2024.
A Letter From the Executive Vice President for Research
Climate change. Water pollution.
Increasing economic and social disparities. Rising rates of cancer and other diseases. The world is facing unprecedented challenges when it comes to human health and prosperity. At Rice, we are at the forefront of research aimed at advancing solutions to these fundamental problems.
Anchored by its strong collaborative landscape and long history of foundational research, Rice is leading the way when it comes to making innovations in health, creating thriving urban communities and generating sustainable futures — all while finding ways to respon-
sibly apply artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance efforts in those key research areas.
Rice has invested in creating an array of institutes, centers and accelerators structured around these research drivers, all of which work across the university and across the world to tackle such urgent matters as providing greater access to clean drinking water, developing sustainable and recycled materials and fuels to power both established and emerging economies, and creating more energy-efficient software and hardware to address the increasing energy needs of AI and computing, all while implementing that AI in a socially conscious way.
Our faculty work is unconstrained by silos. Over 100 faculty on campus are involved in issues of climate change and sustainability, for instance, in every single one of our schools — humanities, social sciences, business, music, architecture, natural sciences, engineering and computing — and the bulk of our institutes. This means the entire campus is engaged in this vital work. We’re engaged globally, too, as amply demonstrated by Rice Global Paris and Rice Global India.
Rice has also spent decades working with partners in the Texas Medical Center, only a few feet away from campus, to solve fundamental challenges in medicine and health care. Under President Reginald DesRoches’ leadership, we are strengthening these existing partnerships by creating joint institutes with hospitals such as the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Houston Methodist on everything from life-saving detection and treatments to digital health.
Given Rice’s location in Houston and the half-century of work performed by think tanks like our Kinder Institute for Urban Research and the Baker Institute for Public Policy, social issues and urban disparities have also been important fields of research. Houston is a beautiful example of a large metropolis — a huge industrial base with a big, diverse population and a vast socioeconomic spectrum — but, as with other cities across the world, the separation between the haves and the have-nots is increasing. So what can a university do to solve these issues? The answer is that our faculty and students alike can work to understand the core drivers for these kinds of inequalities as we examine these very tough questions and, ultimately, present an array of solutions that benefit all of humankind.
Universities need to engage and inform their publics and stakeholders around these issues, and it’s this mix of fundamental, applied and translational research we’re proud to present in each edition of R3: The Rice Research Review. As you will see in the pages of our inaugural edition, when it comes to solving the most defining set of problems of our lifetime, Rice is doing the research and innovation that will make a real-world difference in service of our nation and humankind at large. Rice is only successful when everyone is successful.
Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience
Rice Advanced Materials Institute
Rice Space Institute
Boniuk Institute
Voting Operations, Technology, Equity and Security
Moody Center for the Arts
Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies
Kinder Institute
Scientia Institute
Chao Center for Asian Studies
Center for African and African American Studies
Digital Health Initiative
OpenStax Accelerator
Ken Kennedy Institute
RESPONSIBLEAI
Rice Research Review
Publisher
Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Executive Vice President for Research
Editor
Katharine Shilcutt
Creative Director
Alese Pickering
Photography + Video
Jeff Fitlow
Brandon Martin
Gustavo Raskosky
Copy Editors
Kyndall Krist
Jennifer Latson
Arie Wilson Passwaters
Tracey Rhoades
Editorial Assistant
Juliana Lightsey ’26
Contributors
Andrew Bell
Silvia Cernea Clark
Sol Cotti
Marcy de Luna
Isabelle Dom
Avery Ruxer Franklin
Glenn Harvey
Amy McCaig
Alex Eben Meyer
Jeremy Miller
Marina Muun
Carrie Noxon
Dan Page
Kelly Peters
Brandi Smith
Student Contributors
Spring Chenjp ’25, Business Administration and English
Sarah Knowlton ’26, English, Linguistics and Medieval/ Early Modern Studies
Juliana Lightsey ’26, Political Science and English
Hugo Gerbich Pais ’25, English and European Studies
THE RICE UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Robert T. Ladd, chair; Elle Anderson; Bart Broadman; D. Mark Durcan; Josh Earnest; Michol L. Ecklund; Terrence Gee; George Y. Gonzalez; Jennifer R. Kneale; Patti Lipoma Kraft; Holli Ladhani; Elle Moody; Brandy Hays Morrison; Asuka Nakahara; Vinay S. Pai; Brian Patterson; Byron Pope; Cathryn Rodd Selman; Gloria Meckel Tarpley; Jeremy Thigpen; Claudia Gee Vassar; James Whitehurst; Lori Rudge Whitten; Randa Duncan Williams; Michael B. Yuen.
ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERS
Reginald DesRoches, president; Amy Dittmar, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs; Stephen Bayer, vice president for Development and Alumni Relations; Paul Cherukuri, vice president for Innovation; Melinda Spaulding Chevalier, vice president for Public Affairs; Kelly Fox, executive vice president for Operations, Finance and Support; Kenneth Jett, vice president for Facilities and Capital Construction; John Lawrence, interim deputy chief investment officer; Caroline Levander, vice president for Global; Tommy McClelland, vice president and director of Athletics; Paul Padley, vice president for Information Technology and chief information officer; Ramamoorthy Ramesh, executive vice president for Research; Yvonne M. Romero, vice president for Enrollment; Omar A. Syed, vice president and general counsel.
How Rice has built on decades of CPRIT funding to create one of the country’s greatest cancer research institutions
BY SILVIA CERNEA CLARK
Houston was already world famous as the home of the largest medical center on the planet. And now Texas is making history as home to the second-largest public funder of cancer research in the U.S.: the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT).
Since its inception in 2007, CPRIT has invested over $6 billion across its various programs — second only to the National Cancer Institute in terms of research funding — which makes Texas one of the top 10 public financiers of cancer research in the world.
Thanks to a series of significant CPRIT awards over the last 14 years, Rice has been steadily advancing cancer research through funded projects, all while recruiting over two dozen investigators who are discovering better ways to treat and prevent the disease.
Rice’s Houston campus sits adjacent to the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical center in the world.
Health Innovations
The TMC3 Collaborative Building at Helix Park
Since 2011, CPRIT awards to Rice have allowed the university to recruit 25 leading cancer researchers and innovators from across the nation.
Since September 2023 alone, this has led to a massively expanded research and innovation infrastructure at Rice that’s included the launch of a biotechnology accelerator and a series of centers and institutes closely aligned with CPRIT goals and priorities:
Rice Biotech Launch Pad, led by Paul Wotton and Omid Veiseh
Rice Synthetic Biology Institute, led by Caroline Ajo-Franklin
Rice Synthesis X Center, led by Han Xiao in partnership with the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine
Center for Nanoscale Imaging Sciences, led by Anna-Karin Gustavsson
Cancer Bioengineering
Collaborative, established in collaboration with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and co-led by Gang Bao alongside MD Anderson physician Jeffrey Molldrem
Center for Operations Research in Cancer, a collaboration with the Institute for Data Science in Oncology at MD Anderson co-led by Andrew Schaefer and Jeffrey Siewerdsen
Together, these initiatives provide an enhanced institutional framework to advance the understanding of cancer, expand collaborations with partners in the Texas Medical Center (TMC) and drive the discovery and translation of breakthroughs at Rice.
“In addition to the kind of collab -
orative work that Rice specializes in doing with its TMC partners, we know that artificial intelligence will also be critical to the future of cancer research,” said Ramamoorthy Ramesh, executive vice president for research at Rice. “Thanks in no small part to generous CPRIT funding, this means Rice is uniquely positioned to make the kinds of breakthroughs so desperately needed as cancer deaths are projected to increase globally over the next few decades.”
Since 2011, CPRIT awards to Rice have allowed the university to recruit leading researchers from across the nation, including Veiseh, Ajo-Franklin, Xiao, Gustavsson and Bao.
During last year’s Ken Kennedy Institute-hosted AI in Health Conference (see “Strength in Numbers,” Page 84), Abria Magee, CPRIT senior program manager, outlined a road map for the future of the agency’s funding priorities, with an emphasis on Product Development Research (PDR), which provides money for projects at Texas-based companies developing novel products or services intended to benefit cancer patients.
“Our purpose is to improve patient care through innovation and product development, while also expanding the life sciences industry in Texas, creating new jobs and providing a direct return on taxpayer dollars,” Magee said. “So far we’ve awarded 80 grants or over $700 million, so that’s almost 70 companies that were either started here in Texas, expanded in Texas or brought to Texas from somewhere else.”
Most companies funded through the PDR program are from the Houston area, Magee noted. And for
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companies relocating to Texas, she emphasized the importance of collaboration with Texas-based academic institutions such as Rice as a key eligibility requirement, specifically noting Houston’s edge as home to the TMC.
Last fall, leaders and researchers from Rice and MD Anderson gathered in the new TMC3 Collaborative Building at Helix Park to celebrate the official launch of the Cancer Bioengineering Collaborative.
“As both institutions continue to make breakthroughs each and every day, this collaborative will really allow us to tackle the complex challenges of cancer care and treatment more effectively,” said Dr. Carin Hagberg, MD Anderson’s senior vice president and chief academic officer. “This collaborative will strengthen each other’s efforts and push the boundaries of what is possible in cancer care.”
Nobel laureate Dr. James Allison, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for developing a method to disinhibit immune cells’ response to cancer, acknowledged the progress made in cancer survival rates while stressing that there is still more to accomplish. Allison, MD Anderson’s vice president of immunobiology and director of the James P. Allison Institute, expressed excitement for the combination of Rice’s engineering expertise with MD Anderson’s clinical insights.
“MD Anderson and Rice are both known to be outstanding [and have] complementary strengths, and it’s about time we put them together,” said Allison.
Read on for more about Rice’s
25 CPRIT-funded scholars and how their work will shape the future of cancer research and innovation.
David Sarlah (2024)
Sarlah’s lab is dedicated to replicating natural molecules in the lab. These molecules, found in plants and various organisms, are often used to create antibiotics or anticancer drugs. His research team is exploring new opportunities to create these molecules with a specific focus on cancer biology. “Our main focus is on streamlining the production of these compounds in the laboratory, making them identical to those made in nature,” Sarlah said. “More than half of the molecules used in cancer therapy today are derived from nature, which resonates with our research well.”
vitro platforms can be formed to better monitor how glioblastoma innervates the surrounding neuronal cells, helping diagnose and treat devastating brain cancer.
Michael King and Cynthia Reinhart-King (2023)
Christina Tringides (2023)
Tringides’ research focuses on developing new materials and neurotechnologies to interface with the nervous system, from the cell to organ levels, for in vivo and in vitro applications. She developed viscoelastic surface electrode arrays out of hydrogels that match the mechanical properties of tissues, allowing for ultraconformable implants to match the brain’s complex architecture without causing compression or damage to the organ. Building on this work, physiologically mimicked complex in
This husband-and-wife pair (King was recruited with CPRIT funds) are national leaders in the biomedical engineering field. “Both are established leaders in bioengineering,” said Gang Bao, A.J. Foyt Family Professor of Bioengineering at Rice. “Cindy has been doing outstanding research on understanding tissue formation and tissue disruption during diseases such as atherosclerosis and cancer. Mike’s research aims to understand important processes in the blood, including cancer metastasis, inflammation and thrombosis.”
Hans Renata (2022)
Renata’s work pursues a hybrid approach to developing cancer drugs by combining contemporary organic chemistry approaches and synthetic biology. “Traditional organic chemistry approaches the preparation of these molecules through purely chemical means, but there are limits to what that can do,” Renata said. “Our strategy is to try to marry the natural ways
“Thanks in no small part to generous CPRIT funding, Rice is uniquely positioned to make the kinds of breakthroughs so desperately needed as cancer deaths are projected to increase globally.” —Ramamoorthy Ramesh
of making molecules to the synthetic way and get the best of both worlds.”
Samantha Yruegas (2022)
Yruegas’ lab focuses on catalytic processes that employ alkaline earth metal complexes that include calcium and magnesium. “These elements are among the top 10 in abundance in the Earth’s crust and have low toxicity, potentially providing safer catalysts for large-scale chemical processes,” Yruegas said. “When you do pharmaceutical chemistry on a large scale, you have to think about how to get rid of impurities such as metals from your drug candidate. These alkaline earth metals are biocompatible, which can dramatically simplify the purification process.”
Mingjie Dai (2022)
Dai’s lab develops state-of-the-art molecular imaging and sequencing technologies to help understand complex cellular states and cell fates from the bottom up. He tries to combine a variety of biophysical, biochemical and computational principles while pushing limits in all directions to improve sensitivity, affordability, multiplexing and throughout. His focuses include super-resolution microscopy, single-molecule protein imaging and single-cell profiling.
Julea Vlassakis (2021)
Vlassakis previously focused on designing tools that provide an understanding of the composition of individual cells and protein interactions. “With CPRIT support at Rice, we have launched exciting projects developing microscale tools for measuring single-cell and single-molecule protein interactions and conformations that drive Ewing sarcoma, the second most common pediatric bone cancer,” she said. “We are fortunate to collaborate with outstanding clinicians and researchers across the Texas Medical Center and beyond in support of our goal to bring targeted therapeutics to Ewing sarcoma treatment.”
Anna-Karin Gustavsson (2020)
imaging tools in the rapidly developing field of 3D single-molecule super-resolution microscopy.
Caroline Ajo-Franklin (2019)
Ajo-Franklin launched the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute (RSBI) last year, which aims to catalyze collaborative research in synthetic biology and its translation into technologies that benefit society. With more than 18 faculty and over 100 students and postdoctoral scholars across the schools of engineering and natural sciences connected to the quickly expanding field of synthetic biology, RSBI plans to connect basic and translational research and elevate Rice’s international visibility in this space.
Gustavsson, who specializes in single-molecule tracking and super-resolution imaging, launched Rice’s Center for Nanoscale Imaging Sciences last year. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in the group of Nobel laureate W.E. Moerner — the first postdoc hired by Moerner since winning the prize the year before. Gustavsson studies the nanoscale structures and dynamics of single molecules inside cells and the molecular mechanisms that drive them, she designs and builds versatile
Vicky Yao (2019) Yao specializes in developing machine learning and statistical methods to better model complex biological circuitry and how its dysregulation can lead to diseases such as cancer. “The research proposed in the CPRIT grant is enabled by the large amount of biological data that has been generated,” Yao said. “By using our modeling approaches with these data, we hope to find new insights into what is going wrong in different cancers.”
Yang Gao (2019) Gao’s research investigates genome instability, a hallmark of cancer. Mutations in many genome maintenance
Health Innovations
genes are correlated with predisposition to cancer. As cancer cells often rely on certain DNA repair pathways for survival, inhibiting these pathways will provide targeted therapy for cancer treatment. Research in his lab focuses on illustrating the 3D structures and working mechanisms of genome maintenance proteins to pave the way for understanding and targeting cancer.
Julian West (2019)
West, a synthetic chemist whose lab designs novel chemical reactions, was one of a dozen upand-coming young scientists featured in Chemical & Engineering News’ 2024 Talented 12. Drawing inspiration from biology, West’s research group has found ways to simplify the production of entire libraries of feedstock chemicals for drug and chemical manufacturers.
Kevin McHugh (2019)
McHugh focuses on biomaterials for drug delivery and regenerative medicine. “If we can reignite the immune system inside a tumor, where it’s normally dormant, we can have immunotherapy that is a lot more effective,” McHugh said.
George J. Lu (2019)
Lu leads the Laboratory for Synthetic Macromolecular
Assemblies at Rice. His research focuses on studying a class of gasfilled protein organelles and applying synthetic biology and microbial engineering to develop innovative applications in biomanufacturing, biogenic materials, ultrasound imaging and more. His lab is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, CPRIT and private foundations such as the Welch Foundation, the Mathers Foundation and the John S. Dunn Foundation.
B.J. Fregly (2017)
Fregly, who was named a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2021, uses computational modeling and simulation of the human neuromusculoskeletal system to design improved surgical and rehabilitation treatments for movement impairments caused by cancer, stroke and osteoarthritis.
epilepsy, immunodeficiency and Alzheimer’s disease.
Rosa Uribe (2017)
Uribe’s work has revealed that arti ficial gene expres sion of the human oncogene MYCN in nervous system stem cells of the zebrafish embryo leads to drastic changes in the genes that are “on” or “off” in those stem cells, revealing a previously unappreciated consequence of early oncogene expression in developing embryos. As MYCN is a leading factor implicated in the formation of neuroblastoma, a devastating pediatric cancer, this discovery illuminates abnormal molecular events that occur due to MYCN elevation, possibly setting the stage for the neuroblastoma manifestation.
Han Xiao (2017)
Isaac Hilton (2017)
Hilton’s lab has created multiple new technologies to understand and control human cancers. One tool dubbed CRISPR-DREAM (for CRISPR-dCas9 recruited enhanced activation module) is enabling better and safer therapies and more accurate disease models to address so-called haploinsufficiency disorders, which cause a number of hard-totreat conditions such as cancer,
Xiao founded Rice’s Synthesis X Center last year, the culmination of a grassroots effort that began seven years ago when his Rice research group began collaborating with Baylor researchers at the Duncan Cancer Center. “At Rice, we are strong on the fundamental side of research in organic chemistry, chemical biology, bioengineering, nanoscience and AI-based drug discovery,” said Xiao. “Starting at the laboratory bench, we can design and synthesize therapeutic molecules and proteins with atom-level precision, offering immense potential for real-world applications at the
“MD Anderson and Rice are both known to be outstanding [and have] complementary strengths, and it’s about time we put them together.”
—Dr. James Allison
bedside. That’s really unique in the Texas Medical Center.”
Omid Veiseh (2016)
Veiseh co-leads the Rice Biotech Launch Pad and was principal investigator of a $45 million Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health grant awarded in 2023 to rapidly develop sense-and-respond implant technology that could slash U.S. cancer-related deaths by more than 50%. “The research Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh is doing in leading this team is truly groundbreaking and could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives each year,” said Rice President Reginald DesRoches. “This is the type of research that makes a significant impact on the world.”
Natasha Kirienko (2015)
Kirienko and her Albert Einstein College of Medicine collaborator, physician-scientist Marina Konopleva, have discovered potential new drugs that work in concert with other drugs to deliver a deadly one-two punch to leukemia. A recently published study in the journal Leukemia highlights these drugs’ promise and the innovative methods that led to their discovery.
Gang Bao (2014)
Bao and MD Anderson’s Molldrem lead Rice’s Cancer Bioengineering
Collaborative.
Bao, a highly regarded, groundbreaking cancer researcher and the CPRIT senior scholar in cancer research at Rice, was drawn to Rice in part because of the opportunities to work with colleagues in the BioScience Research Collaborative building and with researchers and clinicians in the TMC. “One thing I really like is that this building is right in the Texas Medical Center,” Bao said.
Aryeh Warmflash (2014)
naturally occurring molecules and contributed to advancements in cancer treatments and other areas of medicine. “In terms of contributions to society and the young generation, the field of synthetic organic chemistry is uniquely essential and continues to advance,” Nicolaou said.
José Onuchic (2011)
Warmflash’s research focuses on quantitative studies of signaling dynamics and spatial pattern formation during embryonic development and in the cancer microenvironment. Last year, his team received a $1.6 million grant from the NIH to advance knowledge of embryonic patterning and contribute to the future of regenerative medicine.
K.C. Nicolaou (2012)
World-renowned synthetic organic chemist Nicolaou, a pioneer of total synthesis, has earned global recognition for his distinguished work in chemical synthesis, vital for advancements in medicine, materials science and chemical biology. He has synthesized nearly 200
Onuchic was named to a lifetime post with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Francis in 2020 and presented with the 2023 Founders Award presented by the Biophysical Society. His work with computational models at the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics has investigated decision-making on biological networks with particular emphasis on cancer and metastasis. The most important result involved the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). In regular situations, the EMT circuit has only two stable states, but, under stress, he predicted that a third hybrid state arises, which allows cells to travel through the blood as clusters. Cancers that have large clusters are much more aggressive, a theoretical prediction that has been demonstrated experimentally.
AFFORDABLE ACCESS
Margin of Error
A low-cost, high-speed, slide-free cancer pathology system developed by Rice and MD Anderson wins an $18 million ARPA-H grant aimed at improving tumor removal accuracy
BY CARRIE NOXON
Every year, nearly 2 million Americans are newly diagnosed with cancer. For solid tumors, surgical removal is often the first option. But, during surgery, it can be difficult to tell where a tumor ends and healthy tissue begins — an area referred to as the margin — due to a lack of contrast. The difficulty with identifying the margin can result in a patient undergoing multiple surgeries to remove an entire tumor successfully.
A new cancer pathology system from Rice and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center aims to make tissue margins easier to see and improve success at removing
tumors entirely the first time.
A Rice-led multi-institutional research collaboration won an award of up to $18 million over five years from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop and validate a new system for improving tumor removal accuracy for two types of cancer: breast and head and neck cancer.
Called AccessPath, the novel, affordable, slide-free cancer pathology system will help surgeons know whether they have completely removed tumors during surgery by enabling rapid, automatic tumor margin classification of resected tumors. AccessPath
was one of several projects funded through the ARPA-H Precision Surgical Interventions program as part of a broader $150 million Cancer Moonshot initiative under the Biden-Harris administration.
“Because of its low cost, high speed and automated analysis, we believe AccessPath can revolutionize real-time surgical guidance, greatly expanding the range of hospitals able to provide accurate intraoperative tumor margin assessment and improving outcomes for all cancer surgery patients,” said Rebecca Richards-Kortum, the Malcolm Gillis University Professor of Bio -
engineering at Rice and co-director of the Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies, who is the lead principal investigator on the project. Ashok Veeraraghavan, chair of Rice’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science, is a co-PI on the project.
“Precise margin assessment is key to the oncologic success of any cancer operation,” said Dr. Ana Paula Refinetti, an associate professor in the Department of Breast Surgical Oncology at MD Anderson and one of the lead surgeons PIs on the project. “The development of a new low-cost technology that enables immediate margin assessment could transform the landscape of surgical oncology — particularly in low-resource settings, reducing the number of repeat interventions, lowering cancer care costs and improving patient outcomes.”
AccessPath researchers include Veeraraghavan and Tomasz Tkaczyk, a professor of bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering at Rice. The team at large is working to solve key technical challenges in tumor removal, making care for surgical pathology patients timelier and more convenient, ultimately improving patient outcomes.
Ensuring complete tumor removal involves determining whether there is any residual cancerous tissue left at the edge of the resected area. Because it requires specialized equipment and expert personnel, the use of surgical pathology to ensure negative tumor margins is especially limited in low-resource settings in the U.S. and other countries.
Health Innovations
The AccessPath system is intended to be an affordable end-to-end system for immediate digital pathology of resected tumors, with the potential to greatly expand the range of hospitals able to provide accurate intraoperative tumor margin assessment and improve outcomes for all cancer patients treated with surgery.
The AccessPath system includes three key technological advancements:
» A novel, rugged, high-resolution microscope design with a large field of view and extended depth of field that can image tumors rapidly
» The optimization of inexpensive, fast-acting, effective fluorescent stains for dying tumor margins
» Establishing fast and accurate artificial intelligence algorithms to read the imagery to classify margins as positive or negative
By solving these technical challenges, AccessPath aims to significantly cut the cost of pathology equipment and streamline analysis for negative tumor margin classification in order to deliver immediate pathology assessments.
“These efforts build on Rice’s long-standing relationship with MD Anderson to prevent, detect and treat cancer and ultimately save lives,” said Amy Dittmar, Rice’s Howard R. Hughes Provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “Rice is focused on leading innovations in health and medicine to address disparities, and I commend our researchers for their leadership on this critical project.”
Health Innovations
Pianist Chelsea de Souza wears a portable EEG cap while improvising variations on musical themes. Activity relayed by the EEG cap is visualized and projected onto the screen above her in real time.
OSCILLATIONS
Meeting of Minds
Composer Anthony Brandt investigates how and why the human brain responds to music
BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT
In October 2024, classical music fans at Houston’s Miller Outdoor Theatre were treated to a concert unlike any other seen on the stage at Hermann Park. During a performance of Anthony Brandt’s “Diabelli 200” by Musiqa, both the conductor and pianist wore mobile brain-body imaging caps that captured their electroencephalogram (EEG) data, which was displayed live on a large screen above the orchestra in visualizations created by multimedia artist Badie Khaleghian.
As the chamber musicians played, the audience could see exactly how the brains of the conductor and pianist were responding not just to hearing the music but to the act of directly performing and engaging with it.
“Neuroscience has learned more about the human brain from music than any other human activity, and one of the reasons is it literally uses every part of our brain, from physical motion to memory to emotion to the feedback loop between perception and action,” said Brandt, professor of composition and theory at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music
and artistic director of contemporary chamber music ensemble Musiqa. “All of those things are engaged by music, and so it is an incredible resource for science — for understanding our inner lives.”
Brandt has long worked with the University of Houston’s BRAIN Center, led by Cullen Distinguished Professor Jose Contreras-Vidal, to reverse engineer the brain and develop new interfaces that allow it to communicate directly with external devices like robots, exoskeletons or prosthetic devices like the EEG caps developed by Contreras-Vidal and his team.
The “Diabelli 200” collaboration, inspired by Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations,” marked the first time a conductor wore full-scale neuroimaging equipment during a live performance, but Brandt and Contreras-Vidal have conceived other performances together including one that debuted at The United Nations’ AI for Good global summit in Geneva in May 2024.
Presented in Switzerland, their “Meeting of Minds” was a blend of choreography, dance and scientific experiment. Once again, an audience was able to see how dancers’ brains responded throughout the performance through visualizations designed by Khaleghian, a doctoral candidate at the Shepherd School, that deciphered live data from their EEG caps.
“The first generation of neuroscience was essentially about figuring out what all brains have in common,” said Brandt. “But in the process of doing that, scientists discovered that, actually, brains are incredibly impacted by culture and
experience, and the arts are one of the most exceptionally powerful and revealing ways of studying that.”
Brandt has been interested in the intersection of the arts and neuroscience throughout his career. In 2017, he co-authored the book “The Runaway Species” with New York Timesbestselling writer and neuroscientist David Eagleman, a wide-ranging exploration of human creativity that seeks to understand how and why our brains are able to create and innovate. And recently, Brandt traveled to Indonesia thanks to funding from Rice’s Medical Humanities Research Institute (MHRI) to investigate how traditional gamelan music and dance interacts with the mind, using those same EEG caps.
“Tony’s project is so exciting because he’s doing research that brings music and neuroscience together, and one of his great insights is that music is very culturally specific, but a lot of neuroscience treats Western European classical music as if it’s universal,” said Kirsten Ostherr, the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English and founding director of the MHRI (see “Treating the Whole Human,” Page 22). “He had this realization that looking at music and the mind in different cultural settings might yield incredibly important insights.”
“This is all part of a larger undertaking to understand the role of culture in how brains respond to music, creativity and other forms of stimulation, which could have all kinds of important impacts on understanding music as a tool for therapy, for regenerative medicine and just for understanding how the brain works,” Ostherr said.
PARADIGM
Treating the Whole Human
The Medical Humanities Research Institute is the only institute in America focused on translational humanities research in health care
BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT
A unique opportunity was presented to Rice bioengineering students last summer through Rice’s Medical Humanities Research Institute (MHRI): eight weeks of clinical immersion with physicians at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) and the Texas Heart Institute figuring out the barriers to good outcomes for patients with tracheostomies, those undergoing peritoneal dialysis and those who require pediatric hemodynamic monitoring. In most cases, the patients were children or infants.
Sanjay Soni, a junior bioengineering major, said that when he and his cohort initially looked into the high infection rates for peritoneal dialy-
sis, their first engineeringfocused instinct was to try to design a solution to detect infections earlier. However, when they interviewed nephrologists and patient caregivers — usually the childrens’ parents — they learned the real issue was not the technical design of the dialysis equipment, but the environmental and educational factors affecting patients at home.
Some of the caregivers, Soni said, didn’t speak English as a first language, which presented a barrier to understanding advice for taking care of the catheter site. Others were distressed at having to handle such delicate medical equipment and
SHIFT
“A lot of things in medicine are nuanced elements of a person’s care that are not easy to quantify. You have to look at the whole human to really understand what matters most to their health outcomes.” —Kirsten Ostherr
faced anxiety over potentially worsening their childrens’ complex health issues due to their inexperience.
“It clicked for me that this is something you wouldn’t see if you’re an engineering team, because there’s very little research done about the emotional aspect of how humans interact with devices,” Soni said. “The biggest hint you would find of this problem existing is that there are disparities in the levels of infection rates — and even if you saw that, you would think, ‘Oh, maybe the design of the catheter site isn’t improved enough.’”
Through observations on rounds with doctors and conversations with the patients’ caregivers, Soni and other Rice students discovered that factors that often seem intangible, like emotion, actually play an enormous role in how parents are able to care for their children after they’re discharged with a very complex diagnosis, placing incredible pressure on the parents.
“Emotion is a factor that is not usually included in engineering design or even in clinical care in an explicit way, and yet it’s the most important thing to the parents,” said Kirsten Ostherr, the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English and founding director of Rice’s MHRI. “It really infuses a humanist perspective into what could be a very technical kind of process, and the students were able to identify that and ask, ‘OK, how can we bring this into the way we think about engineering design?’”
There is nothing quite like Rice’s MHRI, which is the only research institute in the U.S. solely focused on translational humanities research in health care settings.
“It’s a really exciting new initiative to bring humanities research into medicine in a robust, sustained way, so we can build on the collaborations we already have with partners in the Texas Medical Center (TMC) and really elevate the kinds of contributions that humanities can bring to health care,” Ostherr said.
The MHRI builds on years of partnerships established by the medical humanities program at Rice, which grew out of demand for medical humanities courses first taught at Rice in 2006.
“A lot of students decide to go into medicine because they want to be working one-on-one with people, helping them feel better,” said Melissa Bailar, MHRI executive director, associate director of the medical humanities program and a senior lecturer in medical humanities.
“But then in their premedical degree program and in medical school itself, there’s such an emphasis on the sciences that the human aspect was getting lost in the mix,” Bailar said. “Our students were interested in having classes, talks and events related to how people experience medicine, whether as practitioners or patients or caregivers.”
This interest produced a popular medical humanities minor, and in 2019 a groundbreaking medical humanities program that provides humanities majors with a facilitated pathway to attending The University of Texas McGovern Medical School. After they successfully finish the program and meet its requirements, Rice students gain immediate admission to McGovern Medical School.
Along the way, Ostherr and her colleagues across the university
forged collaborations with nearly every hospital in the TMC, creating opportunities for faculty and students to pursue humanistic-oriented work. Medical humanities students are required to do a research practicum with a TMC partner, in fact.
“From the start, a key component was these practicums in which students are working with institutions in the TMC or other local organizations related to health,” Bailar said.
Other projects included students embedding for yearlong projects on research teams with TCH, Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Ethics and Health Policy and the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center.
“These students were doing incredible research projects that were making a big difference in patients’ lives by paying attention to things like the ways people talked about their lived experience,” Ostherr said. “But those projects were not being developed into bigger research undertakings, and we saw that an institute would give us the opportunity to build the structure to have sustainable, long-term relationships where we could really make a huge impact with the work we do.”
That led to the official creation of the MHRI in 2023. And in under a year, the institute had already convened some of the world’s leading international researchers for a two-day workshop at Rice’s Paris campus (see “Going Global,” Page 103) in May 2024 to address the main questions posed by the institute itself: how social, cultural and ethical forces shape patients’ lived experiences, why health care must treat the whole person, and what medical humanities can do to make
Health Innovations
medical interventions more equitable, effective and accessible.
Paul Checchia is a pediatric intensive care physician and cardiologist at TCH. And for the last 10 years, Checchia said, he’s been associated with “anything that I can get my hands on when it comes to the combination of medical humanities and Rice University.”
Checchia’s undergraduate degree in English literature has provided a crucial narrative lens he applies every day to better understand his patients and their needs.
“Medicine is really just listening to somebody’s story and trying to then piece together what’s wrong with them,” Checchia said. “Every single patient has a story to tell.”
As a physician who’s long advocated for the humanities within medical education, Checchia was excited to work with Ostherr. He’s helped create a TCH working group to brainstorm research project ideas with the MHRI and is currently the inaugural MHRI clinician fellow, collaborating on a new project with TCH and Houston Methodist on delirium research.
“We don’t want any patient, especially not a child, to be in pain,” Checchia said. But one of the side effects of pain medication is delirium. And delirium is only well studied in adults before they reach an advanced age.
“Delirium is a long-term problem, and everything in health care wants to be very short term, and we lose that story,” he said. “How can we listen to the story of the caregivers and piece together what is delirium?”
Rice students have been inter -
viewing patients, their families and other care team members, and have begun to build a story around that data to create a better long-term understanding of what delirium looks like at all ages so it — and pain — can be better managed.
Checchia has worked at other institutions where universities enjoyed similar geographic proximity to a large medical center. “But nobody seems to take advantage of it in the same way as Rice,” he said.
“Rice is very vibrant and innovative and has its eyes on the future, right at the time when the medical center is saying, ‘Well, what can we do next?’” he said. “We’ve learned to cut straight and sew straight, but now we have to do everything else right, and this is part of that ‘everything else.’”
For Bailar, another strength of the MHRI is its location at a top-tier research university that is not affiliated with a medical school, which opens up the possibility to work with a variety of medical schools, hospitals and health organizations.
“Having a close affiliation with the TMC means we can see how the work we’re doing is implemented into clinical practice, into medical research, into the way studies are designed, into the way the technology is designed,” she said.
In the year since it was launched, the MHRI has dramatically expanded the work already being done through the medical humanities program.
In addition to other clinical immersion programs, Rice undergrads have been working with TCH physicians on projects regarding pain perception in the pediatric intensive
care unit and inclusion of patient narratives in the electronic medical record. Its Sawyer Seminar series has brought six lectures to campus to critically examine emerging digital health technologies. And plans for future research summits like the one in Paris are already underway.
“We’re going to change health care,” Bailar said. “We’re going to change the world, really, in terms of the idea that health is not only a biological issue, but that health is about the whole person — and that’s a radical shift in perspective.”
Ostherr, too, is optimistic about the much-needed paradigm shift taking place that the MHRI is uniquely poised to advance.
“A lot of things in medicine are nuanced elements of a person’s care that are not easy to quantify,” she said. “You have to look at the whole human to really understand what matters most to their health outcomes.”
After she presents on the MHRI’s work, she said, audience members will often come to her and share their own medical experiences.
“They’ll say, ‘My mom had a bad health care experience,’ or ‘My doctor had a terrible bedside manner and I just don’t feel like I can trust them,’” Ostherr said. “People want a trusting relationship with health care but feel that it’s broken — and people see the work we’re doing as a pathway to rebuilding that trust.
“It’s incredibly exciting to be doing this work at this time, because it seems that the time is ripe,” Ostherr continued. “People are ready for it, and we’re in the right place to be doing it.”
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
Patients Are People, Too
Hamza Saeed’s bioengineering work considers the very human side of medicine
BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT
Hamza Saeed always planned to become a physician. It’s why he came to Rice and majored in bioengineering. Saeed already knew being at Rice meant being next door to the world’s largest medical center. What he didn’t know was that Rice’s medical humanities courses would change his entire perspective on practicing medicine.
For Saeed, this paradigm shift began with a course called Health Horror/Body Horror.
“Typically you don’t see those two words directly next to each other,” Saeed said.
Saeed was hooked, and he began enrolling in all the medical humanities classes he could.
This also led Saeed to sign up for a first-of-its-kind practicum last summer: the clinical immersion and health care inequities program created by Rice’s Medical Humanities Research Institute (see “Treating the Whole Human,” Page 22) that offered students observation rounds with physicians at the Texas Children’s Hospital and the Texas Heart Institute.
During the eight-week course, Saeed and his student cohort exam-
ined issues around pediatric hemodynamic monitoring as they identified unmet needs that exacerbate disparities in patient outcomes.
“It let me see behind the veil in a way that just isn’t possible with a textbook,” Saeed said. “There’s nothing like an attending showing you how a child’s Berlin heart pump works by letting you hold one in the palm of your hand.”
Through his summer rounds with physicians, Saeed was also confronted with the very human side of medicine.
“At the end of the day, the human body is not just a machine,” Saeed said. “That’s something that sometimes gets missed in the traditional curriculum because we keep trying to reduce medicine down to something that it’s not. Patients are people, with thoughts, emotions, feelings.”
The problems encountered over the summer practicum were adapted into senior capstone projects for other bioengineering majors. Saeed helped create reference materials for those students as they learned about cardiac ablation and bias, asking whether or not a device used to treat atrial fibrillation in patients is designed with inclusivity in mind. How could it fail, for instance, when used in lower resource institutions in an area where English is not the first language?
“I’m just addicted to the idea that I could make a difference in the field of medicine — and just an M.D. wouldn’t have that same impact,” said Saeed of the ways humanities-oriented thinking has transformed his approach to health care. “Maybe I could be the next Denton Cooley.”
Hamza Saeed
“We live at a time when there is a great anti-science attitude developing in society and government. It is very important that the way we move does not offend this situation any more. Is there a chance that in this issue we can be allowed to be trusted to regulate ourselves?”
—Sydney Brenner, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, February 25, 1975
SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY
Lessons of Asilomar
Rice organizes a 50th anniversary summit at Asilomar to address modern biotech concerns
A group of 140 scientists made history 50 years ago as they gathered on the California coastline for an intense debate of the existential and moral implications of early biotechnology research. The 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA marked one of the first times scientists independently convened to discuss creating guidelines that would facilitate safe and protected experimentation with rDNA technology, which could unintentionally create harmful or deadly pathogens.
BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT
The conference took place a half-year after a moratorium was
declared on rDNA research, championed by such experts as Paul Berg, a pioneer in biochemistry who helped organize the Asilomar gathering. Among the attendees were Nobel laureates James Watson, Sydney Brenner, David Baltimore and Joshua Lederberg, as well as a press corps and a contingent of Soviet researchers. Discussions at Asilomar resulted in the 1976 creation of the NIH Guidelines for Research Involving Recombinant DNA Molecules. Half a century later, Rice — a modern leader in synthetic biology research — has organized a 50th
PHOTO: ALAMY
The TM3 Collaboritve Building at Helix Park
Maxine Singer, Norton Zinder, Sydney Brenner and Paul Berg at the 1975 Asilomar Conference.
anniversary conference on the site of the original Asilomar conference in Pacific Grove, California.
The summit, titled “The Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology” will be held Feb. 23-26, 2025, and will address five current research issues fraught with their own questions about responsible use in the face of potential hazards: artificial intelligence, pathogens research and biological weapons, deployment of biotechnologies beyond conventional containment, new frontiers in synthetic cells and framings of biotechnology.
Luis Campos, Rice’s Baker College Associate Professor for History of Science, Technology and Innovation, spearheaded the Spirit of Asilomar conference. It will feature working group sessions and address global perspectives for its 300 attendees, who are drawn from 80 universities (half American and half international), a dozen parts of the United States government, a dozen agencies from around the world and 100 other research institutes, foundations, organizations and corporations.
“The focus of the conference is to do work, not just to inform and educate,” said Campos, who worked with colleagues at Stanford University and the Science History Institute to convene the gathering.
“We want to take advantage of the legacy of the meeting and the mythical name of this event to get people to see this is not the kind of classic, typical meeting you might expect,” Campos said. “We’re looking at questions that cross the realm of scientific and social concerns.”
The conference was sponsored in part by Rice’s School of Humanities,
the Ken Kennedy Institute, the Rice Sustainability Institute and the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute (RSBI), the latter of which houses a Ph.D. program in Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology — a cross-disciplinary program unlike any other in the U.S.
“The Spirit of Asilomar summit is a rare and crucial opportunity to engage with leaders bringing in diverse perspectives on the ethical and social questions that are part and parcel of disruptive technologies such as synthetic biology,” said Shalini Yadav, RSBI’s executive director. “These dialogues are timely and essential for ensuring that our innovations not only advance science but also address challenges facing humanity in a responsible and inclusive manner.”
RSBI is sponsoring six Rice graduate students to attend as well as four scholars from minority-serving institutions in the southern U.S., aligning with RSBI’s support of in -
clusivity in science and the participation of early-career researchers in ethical discussions around synthetic biology. This is especially important as one of the criticisms of the original Asilomar conference was its exclusion of young scientists.
The 2025 Spirit of Asilomar conference was preceded by four international conferences on the history of science policy related to genetic engineering organized by Campos in 2023 and 2024.
“What we’re trying to do with the Spirit of Asilomar is to find a way to change the conversation from thinking about these things as science and technology issues alone to thinking about them as social and political issues at the same time,” Campos said. “That space in between is something I’m trying to build here at Rice — and Rice has the resources to take this beyond the campus and to make it a national and international conversation with Rice at the center.”
Luis Campos
Innovation
“There are
multiple
choke
points
that
stop innovation from
coming out of a university. One of them is that the
technology’s not ready;
that’s why we
created the Rice Biotech Launch Pad.”
— Paul Cherukuri
Breaking the Mold
Rice takes the lead in the biotech industry with creations meant to help patients faster than ever before
BY JULIANA LIGHTSEY ’26
Rice is rebelling against the traditional role of an academic institution, according to Paul Cherukuri, vice president for innovation. New methods of developing research into full-fledged products ready to help patients — and help them faster than ever before — are situating the university at the forefront of the biotechnology industry.
Rice’s Biotech Launch Pad was introduced in September 2023 as an accelerator designed to help guide Rice researchers through the complicated processes of funding health and medical technological breakthroughs, performing clinical trials and, finally, creating full-fledged companies based around their products. According to Cherukuri, who is also a member of the Biotech Launch Pad’s advisory council, this has positioned Rice to be a leader in the
increasingly important biotech field.
“The Biotech Launch Pad was created to de-risk the development of technology that was invented at Rice, to get it to a stage so that it could get launched into the real world,” Cherukuri said.
The accelerator, which is headed by Omid Veiseh, a professor of bioengineering, and Paul Wotton was made possible through funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and Rice.
Although the initial launch of the accelerator focused more on the academic aspects of facilitating biotechnology innovation and development, the Biotech Launch Pad has since branched out: Late last year, it established RBL LLC, a venture creation studio located in the Texas Medical Center’s new Helix Park (see “Rebel With a Cause,” Page 31). RBL is designed to create companies out of the technologies developed through the Biotech Launch Pad, uniquely solving some of the problems that can accompany the innovation process.
“There are multiple choke points that stop innovation from coming out of a university. One of them is that the technology’s not ready; that’s why we created the Rice Biotech Launch Pad,” Cherukuri said. “The other one is that it’s not commercially viable, and that’s why we’re creating RBL LLC.”
Through RBL, biomedical technol-
“Ten years from now, I think people will say, ‘Why didn’t we think of that?’ We broke the mold and we helped people faster than ever thought possible. I think that’s what we’re going to be known for.” — Paul Cherukuri
ogy developed at Rice can branch out into multiple companies for practical use in the medical field, bridging the gap between scientific discovery and the commercial realm.
“That’s why RBL needs to be created,” Cherukuri said. “Because after you have the patent, the patent doesn’t mean anything until you put it into a company that can then have a CEO as well as a scientist working together to develop the product.”
According to Cherukuri, the speed at which the Biotech Launch Pad and RBL LLC facilitate technological development and successful biotechnology startups is what makes the Rice-based initiatives stand out.
“Investors are looking at this going, ‘This is something different, this is not traditional academia,’ and that’s why I like the name RBL,” he said. “We’re rebelling against tradition.”
Compared to a more hands-off approach taken by most universities after the research and development stages of technology, Rice sets itself apart through its involvement in the rapid creation of companies and facilitation of investment in the products of such deep tech.
“The target is two to three companies every year from RBL. So within the first year, we’re going to be in the top tier of universities that are creating companies,” Cherukuri said.
Starting a company that survives is extremely hard, he said. “And our companies, I think, will be known as something you can bank on, you can depend on. That’s the Rice brand.”
One example of cutting-edge technology coming out of the Biotech Launchpad is Rx On-site Generation Using Electronics (ROGUE), an im -
plantable device that contains cells that can produce the drugs needed to remedy Type 2 diabetes or obesity within a patient’s body (see “Living Pharmacy,” Page 32). The technology was developed in the lab of Veiseh, who also serves as faculty director of the Biotech Launch Pad.
Another unique aspect of the Biotech Launch Pad is its ability to convene a vast variety of individuals involved in each step of a technology’s development, ensuring a quality product for patients. The accelerator connects researchers, clinicians, developers and investors to guarantee every step of the process is conducted in the best way possible.
“One of the things about the Biotech Launch Pad is that it is driven by a clinical need, directly informed by practicing physicians in the Texas Medical Center,” Cherukuri said. “They tell you, ‘I know my patients over here would benefit from it.’ So our faculty and students invent the technology that patients need. Those same clinicians get to speak to the engineers who are developing it, so that the technology gets developed to a stage where you overcome all the issues to make it rock solid.”
Cherukuri said these interdisciplinary connections are vital to the success of biotechnology innovations.
“In order to make something, you have to be able to reproduce it a thousand times, without error. That’s where clinicians come in, to help you do that,” Cherukuri said. “The business side of it is really driving the financial sustenance of that company. You put those two together, and then you get a bona fide company that takes off.”
Thanks to the deep levels of collaboration through the Biotech Launch Pad, Cherukuri said the researchers themselves will have ample opportunities for involvement and oversight as their technology is transformed into a commercially viable product.
“Many times, the students at Rice who invented the technology want to be a part of the company,” Cherukuri said. “So they take it all the way through to development, and I think that’s the wonderful thing about it. You’re now getting students to think bigger than just the invention.”
Cherukuri noted that a fundamental distinction of the university’s new initiatives are the ways in which they promote creativity and entrepreneurship — values that Rice emphasizes at all levels of education and research.
“Rice doesn’t just teach students who will then go get a job in the real world, we train students to create their own job,” Cherukuri said. “That’s essentially what we’re doing at the Biotech Launch Pad and across our university.”
When he considers the future of the Biotech Launch Pad and RBL LLC, Cherukuri said that the ventures are setting up both Rice and Houston to be on the front lines of biotechnology research and commercialization.
“Ten years from now, I think people will say, ‘Why didn’t we think of that before?’” Cherukuri said. “With RBL, we broke the mold, and the world will see that we have helped treat people with better therapies faster than ever thought possible. I think that’s what we’re going to be known for.”
Rebel With a Cause
With RBL LLC, Rice fast-tracks the biotech journey from bench to bedside
BY SILVIA CERNEA CLARK
To be on the cutting edge of biotech means creating something brand-new — and at Rice, that’s not only devices, but the means to take those life-saving technologies to market as quickly as possible.
The pioneering RBL LLC, launched last fall, is committed to rapidly building companies based on the tech developed at Rice’s very own Biotech Launch Pad.
RBL’s mission is to fast-track the journey “from bench to bedside” by leveraging a large portfolio of over 100 patents from Rice faculty, bringing together world-class scientists
and engineers with experienced business executives to launch companies in Houston’s thriving biotech innovation environment.
The Rice Biotech Launch Pad, also established last year, will continue to provide RBL with fully developed and de-risked technologies from Rice’s life sciences portfolio, serving as a steady pipeline of biotech innovations for new ventures.
“This is a pivotal moment for Houston and beyond,” said Paul Wotton, executive director of the Rice Biotech Launch Pad and RBL’s managing partner. “Houston has rapidly emerged as a global life sciences powerhouse, blending cutting-edge research with early clinical applications at Rice and the city’s world-renowned hospital systems.”
Located in the Texas Medical Center’s dazzling new Helix Park, RBL bridges the gap between academic biotech discoveries and the clinical care market. This location offers a wealth of opportunities to collaborate with the world’s premier clinical centers, corporate partners and global investors — all within the same complex.
“Investors from across the nation are recognizing Houston’s potential, and with RBL, we’re building on that momentum,” Wotton said. “We’ll not only amplify the work of the Rice Biotech Launch Pad but expand our reach across Texas, creating opportunities for biotech ventures statewide and driving growth for the biotech industry as a whole.”
RBL was co-founded by an elite team of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and investors, including Wotton; Omid Veiseh Rice professor of bioengineering and faculty
“Investors from across the nation are recognizing Houston’s potential, and with RBL, we’re building on that momentum.” —Paul Wotton
director of the Rice Biotech Launch Pad; Jacob Robinson, Rice professor of electrical and computer engineering; and Dr. Rima Chakrabarti, a physician scientist and venture capital investor with KdT Ventures.
RBL will have a far-reaching impact, said Rice President Reginald DesRoches, as it opens a “new chapter” in how universities engage with the biotech industry.
“By forging a direct pipeline between our world-class research with clinical and commercial experts, we’re at the forefront of life sciences innovation,” said DesRoches. “RBL will enable us to tackle some of the most pressing health care challenges globally by working with our partners in the Texas Medical Center to make therapeutics more accessible and affordable, while strengthening our leadership in Houston’s dynamic biotech innovation ecosystem.”
The creation of RBL at Rice was spearheaded by Paul Cherukuri, Rice’s chief innovation officer, and Veiseh, who recognized the need for launching a commercial entity to create multiple startup companies faster from newly developed biotechnology.
“RBL provides a powerful platform to translate high-impact scientific discoveries into therapies that will dramatically improve patient outcomes,” Veiseh said. “Our goal is to rapidly bring Rice’s pioneering research into the clinic, delivering lifesaving solutions to patients around the world.”
It’s a venture that not only accelerates the commercialization of our innovations but also sets a blueprint for other universities looking to maximize the real-world impact of
their discoveries, said Cherukuri — and one that universities everywhere should aspire to replicate.
“RBL is a game-changer,” Cherukuri said. “For Rice, Houston and the entire global biotech community.”
Scan this QR code to see more on how RBL will enable Rice to make therapeutics more accessible and affordable on a global scale.
to health issues that interfere with remembering to take their daily dosage of insulin, patients with Type 2 diabetes (T2D) can easily become noncompliant — which can quickly result in serious health complications and death.
But what if a person no longer needed to self-administer insulin? And what if refrigeration was no longer necessary for storing it? Instead, what if those patients’ bodies could produce insulin on demand?
Rice’s Biotech Launch Pad is now leading the commercialization effort for Rx On-site Generation Using Electronics (ROGUE), a self-contained, durable implantable device that houses cells engineered to produce T2D and obesity therapies in response to patients’ needs.
Living Pharmacy
Rice’s Biotech Launch Pad leads the commercialization effort for a durable implantable device that will revolutionize the cost and treatment of Type 2 diabetes
BY SILVIA CERNEA CLARK
Insulin is expensive. Insulin is fragile. And due to a long list of reasons that can range from unpredictable schedules to a fear of self-injection
ROGUE is the result of a multiuniversity research team that secured an award of up to $34.9 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) last year to accelerate the development of a bioelectronic implant designed to improve adherence for obesity and T2D treatment while reducing development and manufacturing costs.
“ROGUE’s innovative design combines efficient biological manufacturing, long-term durability and patient-friendly features that have the potential to transform the landscape of biologics delivery,” said Omid Veiseh, professor of bioengineering and director of the Rice Biotech Launch Pad. “With the Biotech Launch Pad leading the clinical translation and commercialization efforts, this funding will allow us to expedite the development and clinical trials of this trailblazing technology, making it accessible to patients sooner.”
INSULIN ON DEMAND
Innovation
Carnegie Mellon University leads the team of researchers driving the accelerated development and testing of ROGUE, which functions as a “living pharmacy” designed to make biologic drugs, or biologics — a rapidly expanding group of therapies derived from living cells — accessible in the body on demand. With a target cost of goods below $1,000 for at least one year of therapy, ROGUE aims to significantly lower the costs of biologics-based treatments.
ROGUE uses closed-loop bioelectronics to support, monitor and adjust drug production and dosing as well as communicate with pa-
tients. The implant will be recharged using a wearable device weekly or even less frequently, eliminating the need for managing daily, weekly or monthly medication administration, storage and restocking. This technology is designed for rapid and cost-effective deployment via a minimally invasive procedure in an outpatient clinic.
Paul Wotton, in-house entrepreneur and executive director of the Rice accelerator, will work to ensure the evolution of this technology from research to clinical translation to an independent company.
“With the Biotech Launch Pad, our
goal is venture creation in parallel to the groundbreaking research at Rice and its collaborating institutions,” Wotton said.
Including backing for ROGUE, this team of researchers has received over $100 million through cooperative agreements from ARPA-H and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for two other “living pharmacy” projects — THOR and NTRAIN.
“This level of support speaks volumes to just how transformative these innovations could be, and how important it is to facilitate their translation,” Wotton said.
This effort is funded under ARPA-H’s REACT program and includes funding for a first-in-human clinical trial for patients facing obesity and T2D. The trial preparation is slated to begin in the fifth year of the six-year project.
Other Rice co-principal investigators include Jacob Robinson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and bioengineering who leads integration efforts for the project in line with the focus on clinical translation and commercialization, and Oleg Igoshin, a professor of bioengineering and biosciences and associate chair of the bioengineering department who oversees pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics modeling.
ROGUE is a collaboration between multiple institutions, including Rice; Carnegie Mellon; Northwestern University; Boston University; Georgia Institute of Technology; University of California, Berkeley; the Mayo Clinic; and New York City-based Bruder Consulting and Venture Group.
THE PLACE TO BE
Brain Trust
The Rice Nexus at the Ion is transforming the way universities partner with industries to solve real-world problems
BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT
Last November, the sunlight-filled central atrium of the Ion was packed for two solid days as scientists, doctors, venture capitalists, space start-up founders and space flight operators convened for the inaugural In-Space Physical AI Workshop, a collaborative event between NASA, Purdue University and Rice Nexus. Over 200 experts from across industry and academia alike — from the Texas Space Commission to Baylor College of Medicine — gathered for
panels, workshops and networking to discuss everything from the design of reusable spacecraft to the impact of long space journeys on astronauts’ health.
“It was an amazing cross section of people, who are all accomplished in their own fields, and it creates an incredible brain trust,” said Sanjoy Paul, executive director of the Rice Nexus. “We ended the conference with three groups of people brainstorming new ideas for which they
Architectural renderings of the Rice Nexus at the Ion in Houston
“There’s no reason why Rice cannot transform the ecosystem of Houston in a big way.” — Sanjoy Paul
will be writing proposals to the Department of Defense or the National Science Foundation. You can’t ask for anything more.”
The Nexus is Rice’s premier innovation factory, launched last fall, offering state-of-the-art facilities, guidance and mentoring for testing and launching new ventures by Rice faculty and students. Designed to de-risk, develop and deploy new technology, the Rice Nexus aims to bridge the gap between the university and commercial markets by fostering partnerships with key corporate, government, community and venture capital (VC) firms. And the wildly successful In-Space Physical AI Workshop is just one example of how the Nexus is creating an intentionally collaborative environment to solve real-world issues.
“There’s no reason why Rice cannot transform the ecosystem of Houston in a big way,” said Paul. “Rice has everything — connections to the space industry, to the medical industry, to the energy industry — and there’s just so much that we can do for Houston in those areas.”
Theodore Levitt, the Harvard scholar who brought us the term “globalization,” said it best: “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” That’s exactly what’s happening at the Rice Nexus at the Ion.
The Ion itself — a repurposed historic building in the heart of Houston’s 16-acre innovation district — is already a hive of entrepreneurial activity on Main Street. Its six floors are nearly 100% occupied by some of the nation’s leading firms and exciting new start-ups: Occidental, Activate and Fathom Funds moved in
Sanjoy Paul, executive director of the Rice Nexus
Innovation
late last fall, while the Ion’s strategic partnerships with organizations like Chevron, Microsoft, Aramco, Baker Botts, ExxonMobil and Woodside Energy have made it a hub for hard tech innovation and entrepreneurship.
Last fall, Rice moved its very own innovation space into the Ion with the Nexus, which spans 10,000 square feet across two floors. It offers not only a huge variety of stateof-the-art prototyping tools but also the comprehensive entrepreneurial support and funding to grow and launch Rice hard tech startups — of which there are now 10 housed in the Nexus, alongside three VC firms.
“That’s a lot,” said Paul, whose experience as head of research and development for Accenture and work in Bell Laboratories led him to this new role at Rice in 2024. The space at the Nexus is, in part, inspired by the innovations on display at places like Bell Labs and the MIT Media Lab.
When visitors enter the first level of the Nexus, they’re greeted with some Rice’s own creations — for instance, a device that captures heart sound digitally without requiring clinically trained staff and sends a phonocardiogram signal to the cloud. There, sophisticated AI models can analyze the signal for early detection of rheumatic heart disease (RHD), the most commonly acquired heart disease in people under age 25, primarily in lowor middle-income countries. RHD is rare in high-income countries, but it still poses a health challenge, and there is a lack of data on its impact within the highest-income regions.
“More than 300,000 people die every year across the globe due to RHD,” said Paul. “Now we can cap -
ture heart signals with this device, analyze the signals using AI and figure out with a very high probability that a person has RHD — it’s a game changer.”
The Nexus will also serve as a gateway for industry partners to bring problems to Rice for faculty and student researchers to crack. Traditionally, academics have pursued their own research silos, while industry has struggled to map its own problem areas onto research that’s already being performed in universities, instead relying on expensive consulting firms.
“That’s where we come in,” Paul said. “We can leverage Rice students and faculty to work on those problems, which is a new approach entirely. We can solve their problem at a fraction of the cost of consultants, and with much higher quality people.”
He cited Axiom Space as an example of an industry leader Nexus is already working with to solve the issue of maintaining critical data centers in space. Axiom, which is currently constructing the world’s first commercial space station, is also creating low-Earth orbit data centers to store and process data captured in space and serve as disaster recovery sites.
“One of their biggest problems right now is cybersecurity,” said Paul. “So we gave them a proposal of what we can do for them in cyber defense, and they were really, really excited.”
And as the Nexus continues to find more areas to collaborate with corporate leaders, its incubator space will also grow new companies based
in part on solving complex industry issues. Each startup in the Nexus is afforded one year of support, which includes office space in the Ion, access to VC firms and an incredible array of prototyping equipment.
Two of those newly established climate tech companies created by Rice faculty are already making waves: Solidec, founded by Haotian Wang, recently signed a licensing agreement and won a $100,000 grant from Rice to continue its work manufacturing chemicals and fuels using only air, water and renewable electricity — in essence, producing chemicals and fuels without carbon emissions. Coflux Purification, co-founded by Rafael Verduzco and Pulickel Ajayan, also won an $80,000 grant from Rice for its instream remediation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances from water and was, along with Solidec, selected as one of the inaugural Houston cohort of the Activate Fellowship for 2024.
And this is just the beginning.
“I want people to think, ‘Wow, the Nexus is the place to be,’ because they realize that if they come here, they will be successful,” Paul said. Within the next five years, he expects 25% to 40% of the start-ups incubated here will become fully-funded companies of their own.
“Between these companies and the venture capitalists coming in, putting in money, people will actually be able to talk, interact, contribute — all in this buzzing, living space,” Paul said. “What we want to do is to keep changing the innovation landscape, because so much is coming out of Rice, and this will be a continuously thriving place to be.”
Thriving Urban Communities
Thriving Urban Communities
Galveston Island after Hurricane Beryl in 2024, a rare July hurricane and the earliest Category 5 Atlantic storm on record.
CRUCIAL CONVERSATIONS
Our Changing Climate’s Social Challenges
At Rice’s new Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience, Houston serves as an incubator for tackling coastal industrial challenges head-on
BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT
In October 2024, catastrophic flash floods killed more than 200 people overnight in Valencia, a major industrial region and port city in Spain. It was the worst natural disaster in the country’s history, the result of a destructive weather system called DANA that’s growing more frequent due to climate change. Meanwhile, the death toll from Hurricane Helene surpassed 230 people across six states, making it the deadliest mainland U.S. hurricane since Katrina in 2005. Milton came
Dominic Boyer and Jim Elliott on the banks of Houston’s Buffalo Bayou
PHOTOGRAPH BY GUSTAVO RASKOSKY
“What happens if you have millions of people living next door to already quite dangerous industrial facilities that are now increasingly vulnerable to climate change?” — Dominic Boyer
hot on Helene’s heels, intensifying to a Category 5 twice due to an overheated Gulf of Mexico. And just three months earlier, Beryl killed 22 people in Houston — a rare July hurricane and the earliest Category 5 Atlantic storm on record. Estimated damages from these events along with Hurricane Francine, now hover at $95 billion and counting.
Rice’s Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience (CFAR) launched in the midst of these storms, and its co-directors quickly found themselves in national news conversations in The New York Times, Newsweek, PBS and, most recently, The Atlantic (see “In the News,” Page 52). The topic? What the future holds for coastal industrial areas and, crucially, what can be done to advance and support more equitable forms of adaptive resilience in such areas in the years and decades ahead.
“We’re trying to help coastal cities adapt to climate change, specifically coastal industrial communities,” said Dominic Boyer, professor of anthropology and CFAR co-director alongside Jim Elliott, the David W. Leebron Professor of Sociology. “Our colleagues in the natural and engineering sciences here at Rice have been pioneering new tools and hard infrastructures; we need to innovate equally in the social sciences to meet our climate’s growing social challenge.”
What sets coastal industrial communities apart from other coastal areas is the fact that, as in Houston, they’re home to both people and industrial facilities housing chemicals and other pollutants, which are just
as vulnerable to flooding and hurricane strikes as low-lying housing.
“What happens if you have millions of people living next door to already quite dangerous industrial facilities that are now increasingly vulnerable to climate change?”
Boyer asked. “Miami, for instance, will face all sorts of pain as sea level rises — it’s a much more dire situation long term for them — but they don’t have to worry about petrochemical facilities exploding, or storms releasing millions of gallons of toxic materials onto local lands and into local waterways.”
Coastal zones only occupy about 20% of the world’s land surface, but they are home to more than 40% of the global population. Currently, 2.15 billion people worldwide live in near-coastal zones and 898 million live in low-elevation coastal zones, and these numbers are only projected to increase.
Yet coastal areas also carry disproportionate risks for those who call them home, including the constant threat of hurricanes, storm surges, erosion and flooding — whether due to sea level rise or other natural disasters. All of this is now exacerbated by climate change, but the consequences are not borne evenly.
Calculations by CFAR show that nearly 3,000 facilities registered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for having large amounts of dangerous chemicals onsite were located in the direct cones of impact during hurricanes Helene and Milton. CFAR’s goal is to advance and support more equitable forms of adaptive resilience emerging from the twin challenges of climate
change and social inequality. These efforts include developing new projects and partnerships to address the spread of hazardous chemicals into nearby communities, disproportionately home to lower-income residents and communities of color.
Creating these types of collaborations is crucial, said Elliott, and something that social scientists like himself and Boyer understand is truly vital for CFAR’s mission of improving the well-being of all groups and communities facing uncertain coastal futures.
“Our big thing is thinking about how to advance needed innovations from the social side,” Elliott said. “Effectively, we’re asking, ‘What if we put the social challenge of climate change in the center, and then reached out to architects, engineers and climate scientists, rather than the other way around? What might that do to help create and support more equitable tools for adaptive resilience?’”
One of the tools that’s already sparked attention nationwide is a map created by CFAR research scientist Phylicia Lee Brown that displays toxic industrial facilities at high risk for flooding. It spotlights the potentially devastating environmental and health impacts that rising flood risk can have on local communities by plotting every major polluter in the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory estimated to be at elevated flood risk.
“Here is where the federal government has identified facilities that handle large amounts of hazardous chemicals known to be harmful to human health, and here you can see
The concentration of industrial facilities, hazardous materials and storage infrastructure in the Houston Ship Channel are uniquely vulnerable to our changing climate.
“There are unique hazards here with the ship channel, where we have an enormous concentration of industrial facilities, hazardous materials and storage infrastructure vulnerable to our changing climate.” — Jim Elliott
that each one has a flood risk score, showing the likelihood of its site flooding over the next 20 years,” said Elliott, pointing to the interactive online map. “So people can search and say, ‘OK, where do I live and are there flood-prone polluters nearby that merit attention during — but ideally before — the next storm?’”
Results from the tool show, among all U.S. counties, that Harris County is No. 1 in the nation in terms of the number of such flood-prone facilities. It is also No. 1 in terms of the average flood risk score associated with each facility.
Tools, of course, are one thing. Action is another. So CFAR is also teaming up to help imagine and advance solutions. Some of these partnerships include collaborating with natural scientists and engineers to pursue large-scale grants to promote and fund equitable, interdisciplinary interventions alongside
those living and working in at-risk communities. Other efforts include partnering directly with local community organizations to develop initiatives from the ground up. These efforts are becoming even more important as the climate itself becomes more unpredictable. The day we sat down to discuss the new CFAR map of large industrial facilities with elevated flood risks, a Houston thunderstorm blew in unexpectedly — as swift and sudden as the May derecho that barrelled into the Bayou City with winds up to 100 miles per hour, causing the release of nearly 2,500 pounds of pollutants when plants lost power in the storm. Relentless rains trapped us inside a cafe on campus, giving us even more time to contemplate the uncertain future ahead.
Storms like the one we waited out that day make Houston an ideal incubator for such discussions,
research and action. So, too, do its massive population and petrochemical complex, much of it situated along Houston’s ship channel, the largest port by tonnage in the U.S.
“There are unique hazards here with the ship channel, where we have an enormous concentration of industrial facilities, hazardous materials and storage infrastructure vulnerable to our changing climate,” Elliott said. “But even more vulnerable are the residents living nearby, who face not only the rising risk of storms but also the toxic tides those storms potentially carry, deposit and spread over larger and larger areas of Houston.”
Boyer recalled a conference he’d attended not long ago in the Netherlands for the 150th anniversary of Rotterdam’s ship channel — the largest in Europe.
“Rotterdam is more or less the Houston of the Netherlands, where all kinds of industrial, chemical and petrochemical activity is happening in close proximity to residential populations. The conference organizers brought together community members, politicians, designers, architects, artists, social scientists — really, everyone — to ask, ‘How should our nearby coastal industrial communities evolve to meet the challenges of our times?’” Boyer said. “What should the next 150 years look like?”
Having a public dialog like this has never really happened in the U.S., he said. And this, too, is what CFAR now exists to help advance.
“In Houston especially, it seems like it would be a good time to have that conversation,” Boyer said.
A map created by CFAR research scientist Phylicia Lee Brown displays toxic industrial facilities across the U.S. at high risk for flooding.
Thriving Urban Communities
CHAPTER & VERSE
The Common Good
Rice’s Religion and Public Life Center builds common ground through cutting-edge scholarship
BY AVERY RUXER FRANKLIN
The debate about the role of religion and how it promotes — and impedes — the common good transcends time and geography. And at a time when rising polarization and deepening insecurities are plaguing nations across the globe, it’s never been more important to understand the role of religion in public life.
In 2024, Rice’s Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance launched its new Religion and Public Life Center
(RPLC) with the goal of using research on religion to build common ground for that common good.
“Religion is often seen as a contributor to conflict and inequality, but we know that religion also offers important sources of community, identity, meaning and morality that bring people together around visions of a better world,” said Rachel Schneider, director of the RPLC, associate director of academic programs at the Boniuk Institute and
assistant research professor of religion.
“We also know that far too often discussions of religion’s social, political and public role lack nuanced understanding of religious people, communities and traditions,” she said. “Instead, conversations remain locked in stereotypes and generalizations.”
The center will produce cutting-edge scholarship that will investigate how religion shapes and is shaped by the world, and how religion motivates human action. As a hub for multidisciplinary research, training and public engagement, the RPLC builds on 14 years of successful work of the Religion and Public Life Program, which began in 2010 under the Boniuk Institute’s founding director and Rice sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund.
“Religion rarely receives the same academic attention that other social and cultural forces receive,” Schneider said. “We need focused and expansive research that adds value to public discourse and upholds the highest values of the university: intellectual integrity, research excellence, critical inquiry and free exchange.
The RPLC — along with collaborators and like-minded scholars across Rice, a private research university that is located in one of the most culturally diverse and religiously rich cities in the nation — is poised to deliver just that.”
“This year, the Kinder Houston Area Survey focuses on the Houston of tomorrow.”— Ruth López Turley
Prophetic City
The Kinder Institute’s annual Houston Area Survey augurs change across America
BY AMY MCCAIG
From its humble beginnings as a simple phone survey of Houston residents conducted in May 1982, as the city recovered from its blistering post-oil-boom recession, the Kinder Institute for Urban Research’s annual Houston Area Survey has grown over four decades to become one of the most important longitudinal studies conducted in the United States.
At first, only 500 residents were surveyed; today, that number has
expanded to 5,300 as Houston itself has grown into the nation’s fourthlargest city — one that Houston Area Survey founder Stephen Klineberg christened “the prophetic city” for the way in which its demographic and economic trends often predict those of America at large.
The yearly unveiling of the survey has now become a large-scale event, attended by hundreds of Houstonians eager to hear its latest results. This past summer, Kinder Institute Director Ruth López Turley shared those anticipated highlights from the 43rd annual survey with a packed ballroom at the Hilton Americas in downtown Houston.
“This year, the Kinder Houston Area Survey focuses on the Houston of tomorrow,” Turley said. “And there is no better place to think about the future than Houston because the nation’s future happens here. In fact, the nation’s demographics projected for the year 2050 are already here in Houston.”
SURVEY HIGHLIGHTS
87% of residents believe Houston should lead the world in transitioning to alternative energy sources
81% said the energy transition was necessary to economic prosperity
75% said the top priority for the energy sector in Texas should be expanding and improving alternative energy sources
50% said they already use artificial intelligence (AI) tools at work
60% said AI will result in job losses in Houston in the next five years
7% were very worried or extremely worried about their job being eliminated by AI in the next five years
60% were either worried, very worried or extremely worried about the impact of climate change on the region
84% think it is at least somewhat likely climate change will have a negative impact on their health and well-being in the next 10 years
70% said local and state officials, federal agencies and large businesses and corporations should be doing more to fight climate change
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRANDON MARTIN
Downtown Houston along Buffalo Bayou
Thriving Urban Communities
TEAM EFFORT
Elemental Building Blocks
Going global to seek a greater understanding of sustainable design and infrastructure
BY ANDREW BELL
June in Barcelona: The scent of fresh croquetas rose along the Carrer del Parlament, tourists wandered among the lofty spires of La Sagrada Familia, and Rice engineering and
architecture students convened for the School of Architecture’s inaugural Global Workshops series, an initiative designed for faculty to bring students to locations across the world where they are conducting research or creative projects.
The inaugural cohort of 2024 Global Workshops included summer programs in Barcelona led by assistant professor of architecture Juan José Castellón and assistant teaching professor Kalil Erazo and crossed multiple continents in its first iteration. Workshops also took place in Mexico City and Singapore, with more planned for this coming summer.
“We are visiting places, meeting people and trying to build a common platform for this interdisciplinary
pedagogical experience, and the students are responding really well,” said Castellón, a 2024 Forge Prize finalist.
The transdisciplinary workshop in Barcelona was titled “Building Ecologies: The Five Elements,” in which students were encouraged to seek a greater understanding of sustainable design and infrastructure worldwide. Their goal: imagining resilient and adaptable communities that can better cope with the effects of climate change and extreme natural events while also understanding the role of current societies as part of a broader natural environment and planetary community.
Partnering with the La Salle School of Architecture, Rice students ventured throughout Barcelona to learn about new materials, design
The inaugural cohort of 2024 Global Workshops included summer programs in Barcelona, Spain.
and ecology, and how these factors correlate with the city’s culture and tradition by visiting manufacturing companies, industrial, material and architectural heritage sites and urban infrastructures.
“Prior to the trip, the most I knew about architects was that they drew buildings that looked nice but were complicated to engineer,” said Connor Bird, a civil engineering student at Rice. “In a few of my classes, we had even talked about the occasional struggles between architects and engineers and the balance that has to be found in the real world.”
That balance was found on the trip, Bird said. “Working with and exploring Barcelona alongside architects opened my eyes to the beauty of buildings and allowed me
to understand the profession on a much deeper level,” he said.
Students also benefited from learning hands-on construction of prototypes in collaboration with local manufacturers and experts in different disciplines. Rice faculty, too, provided lectures along the way: Professor Qilin Li spoke on water infrastructure, and Erazo discussed the role of engineering and multidisciplinary collaboration in a contemporary scenario. Both Li and Erazo are from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice.
“Approximately 40% of the total energy consumption of all sectors in the United States is attributed to residential and commercial buildings with roughly 25% from embodied carbon and 75% from opera-
tion,” Erazo said. “This implies that engineers and architects can have a considerable impact to achieve the sustainability goals that are urgently needed. It is also clear that a multidisciplinary perspective is needed, with new efficient materials that can reduce the infrastructure embodied carbon and novel architectural designs that allow optimizing the use of light, water and air to minimize operation emissions.
This multidisciplinary perspective was the foundation of the Building Ecologies workshop. During one session, students developed strategies to understand what sustainable design looks like for an engineer and an architect before collectively discussing and finding strategies.
“They would have never reached the same result if they would have analyzed things with only the students from engineering or architecture,” Castellón said. “When they were together, they were enriching the conversation with their different perspectives and learning from each other, so it’s a much richer kind of academic exchange and more holistic.”
The success of the workshop and the extremely positive feedback from students has encouraged him to lead and explore more interdisciplinary courses on campus as well, he said.
“We want this to be the model of a new education paradigm and not the exception,” said Castellón. “For this purpose, we are working together in the development of similar initiatives in line with Momentous: Personalized Scale for Global Impact, the 10-year strategic plan at Rice.”
Thriving Urban Communities
UNCONSCIOUS BIAS
Physician, Heal Thyself
Doctors are more likely to use negative language describing Black and Hispanic patients in electronic health records
BY AMY MCCAIG
Stupid. Unkind. Cringe.
These aren’t the kinds of words you’d hope to see used by a physician to describe a person in that patient’s electronic health records. And yet, according to a new study by Rice researchers, doctors are far more likely to use this kind of negative language when describing Black and Hispanic patients.
The study titled “Examining Linguistic Differences in Electronic Health Records for Diverse Patients With Diabetes: Natural Language Processing Analysis” analyzed the medical records of Black, white and Hispanic or Latino patients who were seen by 281 physicians in a large metropolitan area. The researchers were interested in whether or not doctors showed bias in their language choices when describing patients in post-visit reports.
The kind of bias present in those language choices can easily result in further bias toward those same patients and unequal treatment of people simply seeking to live healthier lives and receive vital medical attention, the study’s authors suggested. The study was published
in JMIR Medical Informatics and was supported in part by a grant from the Rice Race and Anti-Racism Research Fund.
“Previous studies have shown that care providers’ biases may be part of the reason for racial disparities in health,” said Eden King, the Lynette S. Autrey Professor of Psychological Sciences at Rice and one of the study’s lead authors. “We wanted to know whether we could detect such biases in the language providers use in health records, and we did.”
The summaries from doctors for Black and Hispanic patients contained significantly more negative adjectives (such as “unkind,” “negative” or “stupid”) and significantly more fear and disgust words (such as “intimidate,” “attack,” “cringe” and “criticize”) than those for white, non-Hispanic patients. The notes for Hispanic or Latino patients included significantly fewer positive adjectives (such as “supportive,” “kind,” “great” and “nice”), trust verbs (such as “affirm,” “advise,” “confide” and “cooperating”) and joy words (such as “admiration,” “elated,” “glad” and “pleased”) than those for white,
non-Hispanic patients.
King and her fellow researchers hope their work will enable physicians and other researchers to identify and mitigate bias in medical interactions with the goal of reducing health disparities stemming from bias.
“Understanding that providers’ language may indicate bias points to an opportunity to interrupt it,” King said. “If we can perfect algorithms to detect such bias, we can raise awareness in the moment of the patient-provider conversation. That awareness may be enough to encourage more equitable health care.”
Co-authors of the study include Isabel Bilotta, Deutser; Scott Tonidandel, Belk College of Business, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Winston Liaw, Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine, University of Houston; Diana Carvajal, University of Maryland, Baltimore; Ayana Taylor, University of California, Los Angeles; Julie Thamby, Duke University School of Medicine; Yang Xiang, Peng Cheng Laboratory; Cui Tao, Mayo Clinic; and Michael Hansen, Baylor College of Medicine.
Thriving Urban Communities
BACKCASTING
Stacking the Deck
A new card game encourages students to envision wild potential futures
BY BRANDI SMITH
The hallways of Rice’s Herring Hall buzzed as students considered the challenges laid out before them.
“What are we going to eat?”
“They need a way to collect algae.”
“They’ll use ski lifts for transport.”
The students arranged in clusters on the floor were deep in discussion about the worlds they were creating through the card game More&More. Players draw six cards from different categories then select a role card, such as an artist, child, pet, religious leader or architect.
“You play together, you make a provisional world your little group can agree on,” said Marina Zurkow, one of the co-creators of the game along with interactive media artist Sarah Rothberg. “Then you inhabit a role. You might uncover problems or new details. You tell the story of your world, hopefully to other groups doing something in parallel.”
This collaborative and reflective process, known as backcasting, allows players to envision a desired future then work backward to identify steps to achieve it. Joseph Campana, the William Shakespeare Professor of English and director
of Rice’s Center for Environmental Studies (CES), often uses the game as a pedagogical tool in his classes.
“It really helps cultivate a critical imagination for the future,” Campana said. “In fact, it has been one of the students’ favorite things — and for some of them, the absolute favorite thing.”
Campana learned about More&More several years ago when he met Zurkow, a longtime collaborator with social science and humanities scholars at Rice, at her exhibition at Houston’s DiverseWorks Arts Space.
“We started talking about what it would mean to make it more accessible to many,” Campana said, explaining that thanks to support from CES and Princeton University’s Blue Lab,
More&More is now available to play online as well. “From there, we started exploring some other expansions, the most recent of which is this version of the system focused on energy.”
Casey Williams, an environmental studies lecturer at Rice, worked closely with Zurkow, Rothberg and other scholars to develop the game’s energy deck. This expansion introduces challenging scenarios such as giant flywheels powering the grid and communal public kitchens and bathrooms.
“Energy has been a research focus of mine for several years,” Williams said. “We wanted a game that would authorize players to be their own experts, to affirm the expertise and knowledge they already have about energy and bring that to the game.”
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
When the Levee Breaks
Sarah Davidson maps out how humanists play a vital role in examining how dams fail — and how they fail their communities
BY HUGO GERBICH PAIS
’25
When a dam fails, most would turn to scientists and engineers. But what happens when the problem isn’t concrete and steel? The interdisciplinary work conducted by Sarah Davidson, a Rice senior majoring in history, illustrates that humanists play a vital role in understanding how economic development and the built environment can impact society. In other words, in examining how dams fail their communities.
The Ituango hydroelectric dam — the largest dam in Colombia — was not on Davidson’s radar when she came to Rice or when she was selected as an Elizabeth Lee Moody Research Fellow in the Humanities and Arts. It was Rice assistant professor of history Laura Correa Ochoa, whom Davidson had cold-emailed in March 2023, who suggested that she should consider researching the project.
“I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, except that I wanted it to be
a history project, and [Correa Ochoa] suggested I look into this dam,” Davidson said. “I was very interested because I had been doing projects on environmental justice and infrastructure and how it affects people in the surrounding communities.” Her project, titled “The War for Hidroituango: The history of violence, power, and hydroelectric energy in Antioquia, Colombia,” combines archival materials, government documents, newspaper articles and photographs. It traces the dam’s history and impact from its original conception in 1950 to its eventual opening in 2022 — a period that was marred by paramilitary activity, displacement, massacres, engineering failings, corruption and flooding.
Davidson said she wanted her project to be digital and public-facing. She settled on using ArcGIS StoryMaps, a software she discovered at Rice that allows its users to
create interactive multimedia digital exhibits. “A lot of the [impact of the dam] is hidden in these lengthy government documents and reports, and [ArcGIS] allowed my findings to be more accessible to the public,” said Davidson.
The complexity of Colombia did not stop Davidson’s research. “[Studying] Colombia can be so tricky, and she seems so unfazed by it all. She was just like, ‘Yeah, I’ll go to the archive and figure it out,’” said Correa Ochoa.
The Moody fellowship allowed Davidson to spend a summer researching the dam, which included a visit to Medellin, Colombia. “Being there helped me to get a broader cultural perspective,” said Davidson. “Just talking to people there about what had been going on for the last 60 years and the conflict that had happened within the city and the surrounding area helped.”
Sarah Davidson
Behind the Scenes
In the News
Rounding up Rice researchers’ work in the national news media
BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT
Work from Rice professor Aditya Mohite and his team was featured on the cover of Science in June. Mohite’s breakthrough on developing new chemistry and design principles uses specifically designed 2D perovskites with the same lattice parameter as the 3D perovskites to create durable and efficient solar cells that retain over 97% of their performance after 1,000 hours.
“The rains look like they’re going to be the big issues. But as I always say, the real disaster comes after the actual climatic event,” Rice professor Jim Elliott told The New York Times in a story following
Hurricane Francine’s strike at the Louisiana coast, where more than 240 industrial facilities were at risk of flooding. This risk was demonstrated in a newly developed interactive map from Rice’s Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience (see our story on Page 39 for more), which Elliott co-directs with Rice professor Dominic Boyer.
“We’re taking inspiration from what already happens in nature. But now we’re getting more of a say in how the story plays out,” Rice research scientist Ana Santos told The New Yorker, which visited campus to find out how scientists like James Tour are developing new weapons in the arms race between bacteria and biotechnology. Santos
joined Tour’s lab after reading in Nature that scientists on the cutting edge of nanotechnology at Rice had developed “molecular machines” that could potentially do everything from helping deliver drugs to destroying dangerous cells.
“The web is becoming increasingly a dangerous place to look for your data,” Rice graduate student Sina Alemohammad told The New York Times in an article on how artificial intelligence contamination affects image models (see our story on Page 88 for more). Alemohammad and his colleagues published their findings at the 2024 International Conference on Learning Representations in a paper titled “Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MAD.”
“Really, it comes down to building out stronger poles, stronger switches, having systems that can better sense where the outages are, so crews can respond more quickly,” Rice professor Dan Cohan told NPR’s Marketplace post-Hurricane Beryl. Much of the country’s existing power infrastructure needs to be replaced, Cohan explained, as most of the power grid Americans use today was built more than a half-century ago.
“These metals are infinitely recyclable. We need better designs that make it easier to get into the batteries,” Rice professor James Tour told Wired. Finding methods to recycle lithium-ion batteries in a more sustainable and cost-effective fashion are among Tour’s research out-
put at Rice. One way the U.S. could improve its battery recycling ecosystem is to standardize battery designs with new regulations, Tour said, which could help streamline processing.
“Part of what interested us in Iceland in the first place was the paradox. How do people feel about the loss of ice when Iceland is the name of your country?” Rice professor Dominic Boyer told The Washington Post. Boyer and fellow Rice professor Cymene Howe organized the world’s first funeral for a dead glacier, Iceland’s Okjökull, and co-produced a new documentary about its demise. The funeral in Iceland spurred glaciologists to not just assess glacier retreat but also count dead glaciers, Howe told the Post.
CORE FACILITIES
Head of the Class
Rice’s Shared Equipment Authority houses the cutting-edge equipment and people necessary to make research breakthroughs a reality
BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT
Ding! Oversized elevator doors open onto a cavernous underground space that hums with energy, a faint orange glow emanating from the clean room space ahead. Walking closer to the facility, you see museum-style placards affixed to the
windows that provide a self-guided tour of sorts and gallery views into the massive clean room beyond.
“This is a Class 100 (ISO 5) certified facility with over 2,800 square feet under filters. It houses 30-plus instruments and eight wet bench
chemical workstations, providing access to technologies from the semiconductor and microfabrication industries,” reads one of the placards. More signs just like it line the hallway as far as the eye can see, hallmarks of an institution that’s
One of Rice’s Class 100-certified clean rooms
Behind the Scenes
1. The Space Science and Technology Building was originally built in 1966 as the nation’s first dedicated space science department.
rightly proud of its advanced laboratory spaces — and this clean room is just one of them.
Across Rice, underneath buildings like the Space Science and Technology Building (1), the 250,000-square-foot, newly built Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering Science (2) and the 477,000-square-foot BioScience Research Collaborative (3), you’ll find the vast network of facilities that make up Rice’s Shared Equipment Authority (SEA).
A dozen core lab facilities comprise the 30,000-square-foot SEA. It is spread across eight campus buildings, managed by a large team of experts and overseen by an 18-member faculty governance board drawn from 10 stakeholder departments.
More than 1,500 researchers —
2. The Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering Science is home to the Rice Advanced Materials Institute and the WaTER Institute among other innovation spaces, core labs, classrooms and conference facilities.
both within Rice and from outside the university — use its scanning electron microscopes, DNA analyzers, high-temperature furnace, wafer polishers, 3D laser lithography systems and other cutting-edge equipment every year. Want to use a Elionix e-beam lithography system to etch something that’s only 7 nanometers in width? This is the place. Need to use a Titan, the world’s most powerful, commercially available scanning transmission electron microscope to conduct research at the atomic level? Come to Rice.“We exist to make research at Rice more effective, to make sure this equipment serves everybody,” said Tim Gilheart, the SEA director of operations. “We’re a force multiplier.”
Gilheart oversaw the 2018 renovation of the Space Science and
30,000 square feet of SEA-managed laboratory and support space core lab facilities in eight buildings across Rice 12 managed resources (instruments and built-in facilities)
Technology Building that added 6,000 square feet of clean room space and 2,500 square feet of Class 100 (ISO 5) space — so clean it boasts less than 100 particles per cubic foot of air. He has also spent 17 years at Rice watching with pride as the university has invested millions of dollars into creating a network of such facilities dedicated to serving research scientists like himself as well as students. There are very few barriers to undergraduates using these multimillion-dollar labs, he noted, in keeping with Rice’s traditional emphasis on providing exceptional undergraduate research opportunities.
But the SEA is more than just massive microscopes and nanofabs, he’s quick to point out. After all, someone needs to monitor those
150+ 130+ $2.2M 10
billable resources (instruments) per year in operational expenses (administrative, maintenance and service) with similar revenues
instruments cost at least $1 million each, representing an $18 million-plus asset value, with maintenance costs at $1.5 million per year
“We have incredibly good scientists who know their job and know the science, and they are the lifeblood of this whole thing. Instruments are great, but they don’t work without people.” — James McNew
undergrads, someone needs to know how to maintain each delicate piece of equipment, and someone needs to oversee the complex 24/7 ecosystem to ensure professors and scientists are able to access the labs when needed.
“This organization is not just the machinery,” Gilheart said. “It’s also the people. The average level of expertise on this team is more than 20 years.”
The SEA has grown from an unprepossessing one-person lab with one piece of equipment to a 24-person team during its 24 years of its existence, recalled James McNew, professor of biosciences and faculty chair of the SEA Board.
“When I came here in 2000, I needed to do some hardcore cell biology and needed electron micros -
3. The BioScience Research Collaborative hosts 10 floors of research labs, centers, classrooms and auditoriums, including an entire floor dedicated to biomedical informatics.
Today, Rice’s SEA technical staff is composed of 21 research scientists with an M.S. or a Ph.D. in their field, with a team of three administrators who keep the entire operation functioning smoothly.
“The SEA is the people who run it,” said McNew. “We have incredibly good scientists who know their job and know the science, and they are the lifeblood of this whole thing. Instruments are great, but they don’t work without people.”
copy — and there was a relatively new transmission electron microscope literally across the hall from my lab, which was part of the reason I came,” McNew said. “It was a good recruiting tool.”
Back then, McNew recalled, Rice excelled when it came to purchasing equipment but hadn’t yet poured the resources into the staffing it needed to maintain those important recruiting tools. And so over the course of the next two dozen years, he, Gilheart and a committed team of Rice researchers and faculty members began recruiting employees in earnest to ensure that for every magnificent microscope or maskless photolithography system, personnel were in place to keep them up and running while also teaching others how to use them.
And as Rice continues to invest in both the people and the instruments themselves, Gilheart said, he’s continually blown away by the discoveries taking place within the experimental fabrication facilities, the laboratories and the new innovation spaces across campus.
“We can make all kinds of things here — we could make a classic silicon transistor, for instance, but that’s not interesting. That’s not research,” Gilheart said.
“Here, we’re going to make a transistor in some weird material that was synthesized in one of our material science labs, or we’re going to take silicon and make some new embedded photonic device that detects nitrous oxide in the blood that has never existed before, that nobody has ever tried before,” he said. “That’s what we do at Rice.”
internal users (Rice researchers) external users (researchers from other institutions as well as commercial/ industrial users) 24 18 24 20+ 1,150+ 350+
years of organizational history members on the faculty governance board, drawn from at least 10 stakeholder departments people on the team, including three administrators and 21 technical staff years is the average amount of relevant experience on the technical staff
PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW
Tam Dao
“The goal of research security here is to protect the intellectual property (IP) of Rice.” — Tam Dao
On the Safe Side
Four questions for former FBI agent Tam Dao, Rice’s head of research security
BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT
Tam Dao leads Rice’s Office of Research Security and co-hosted two important events at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in 2024: the first workshop funded by the National Science Foundation on research security May 22 to 23 and a dialogue between leadership from the FBI and AAPI leaders on discrimination toward Asian American academics June 6. Both events brought together colleagues from across the world who are invested in keeping their institutions’ research safe and secure.
What’s your background?
Before I came to Rice last June, I was an assistant professor on the tenure track at the University of Houston in the counseling psychology program. I spent a number of years there and then transitioned to the FBI, where I have been for the last 12 years working various types of violations — mostly counterintelligence and espionage-type matters.
How does counterintelligence and espionage relate to research?
Espionage, as we know, has been going on forever, which is foreign governments in many cases targeting information kept at a confidential or classified level. There has been a slight transition within the last 10 or 12 years in that foreign governments continue to target confidential and classified information, but they’ve also started to target research — which is not necessarily classified — including the fundamental research and cutting-edge research that’s often found inside academic institutions or health care settings.
What is research security?
It’s not a new concept, but it’s evolving. The goal of research security here is to protect the intellectual property (IP) of Rice, and that encompasses a number of things, including the know-how or the means to do
certain things. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be a tangible product that we put safeguards around, like a Coca-Cola formula, which is easy to protect because we know exactly what that IP is. In the context of academia, a lot of times, our ideas are not tangible. So our job is to identify that IP and then try to protect it or safeguard it from both domestic and international threats.
What drives you to do this work?
Rice has produced great research for years, and something that always amazes me is how smart people are and what incredible things they develop and accomplish here. Rice hired me and another FBI agent, Paul Zukas, who works with me as the director of research security, because we bring a lot of experience from the FBI. This has allowed us to provide education, awareness, risk mitigation and risk management to help our faculty collaborate with overseas partners and entities. Collaboration is the bread and butter of how we succeed, so our job is to help our faculty collaborate in a way that is done with integrity and based on the values and principles that have driven the research ecosystem for decades. We provide awareness and education in order to decrease the burden on the principal investigators so they can keep working on their amazing projects and research.
FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY
Behind the Scenes Capital Investments
Four ways the Division of Operations, Finance and Support is positioning Rice at the forefront of innovation and discovery
BY ISABELLE DOM
The Shared Equipment Authority that oversees Rice’s vast network of core lab facilities is just one portion of the university that’s received significant investments in the past few years thanks to the Division of Operations, Finance and Support (OF&S), led by Executive Vice
Infrastructure
The new 30-year campus plan includes the creation of a cutting-edge research “neighborhood” on campus, new on-campus graduate student housing and strengthened ties with the Texas Medical Center.
The Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering Science and the Ion are two recent examples of investments made by Rice to ensure the campus is equipped with cutting-edge research facilities, providing makerspaces and prototyping labs to accelerate new technologies.
Technology
Rice has committed $7 million to its Center for Research Computing, enhancing its capabilities by offering three high-performance computing systems and tripling its storage capacity. This accelerates research while attracting top-tier teaching talent and saves the university substantial startup costs for new faculty members.
A recent partnership with NVIDIA is providing artificial intelligence training through an in-kind donation of $25,000.
President Kelly Fox. By providing essential infrastructure, technology, financial support and a talented workforce, OF&S plays an active role in ensuring the success of the university’s premier research initiatives and Rice’s position at the forefront of innovation and discovery.
Finance
Strategic investments are vital to supporting Rice’s premier teaching and research initiatives. OF&S, in collaboration with the Office of the Provost, designed a new model to create a more agile university budget that’s better equipped to support research endeavors.
Through this new budget model, Rice was able to allocate $21.7 million to faculty startups and lab renovations and $8.3 million to research centers and institutes in fiscal year 2025.
People
Rice is investing $20 million over four years to enhance employee pay and benefits, boosting its appeal as an employer and attracting top talent.
Expanded professional development opportunities, including specialized programs in research administration, ensure that current and incoming staff are well equipped to support the university’s research mission.
Sustainable Futures
Sustainable Futures
MATERIAL WORLD
The Age of Smart Materials
The Rice Advanced Materials Institute charts a path to the technologies of the future
BY SILVIA CERNEA CLARK
How many materials in your smartphone can you name? For most of us, the answer reveals a curious gap. We’re surrounded by technology but rarely pause to
consider the elementals making it possible. This blind spot is a testament to modern materials’ success — they’re so embedded in our daily lives they’ve become invisible. But as Lane Martin, director of the Rice Advanced Materials Institute (RAMI), argues, it’s now time to refocus on them.
“Materials are more often understood as the passive substrate of technology, rather than technology itself,” Martin said. “But if we glance back in time, we find that materials define whole eras of human history — a reminder of just how critical a role they serve in shaping civilization. I think we now live in the era of smart, responsive materials.”
At Rice, materials research has a long and storied legacy. In 1985, Richard Smalley and Robert Curl used lasers to vaporize graphite,
giving rise to a form of carbon known as buckminsterfullerenes, or buckyballs — a feat that earned them the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1996. This discovery is telling of a strong and diverse research community and a culture of innovation and collaboration that continues to this day. RAMI builds on this legacy and seeks to bring together the talent and infrastructure that will shape the future of the field while continuing to make history.
“To address the big societal challenges of our time, we need real innovation in materials,” Martin said. “That’s what RAMI is here to do.”
The world is facing a generational opportunity to rethink how we power, connect and sustain society. From next-generation microelectronics that are frugal in their power consumption to materials that clean
pollutants from air and water, RAMI aims to meet these pressing challenges, unlocking new capabilities by arranging atoms in ways science has never done before.
It’s all in alignment with Rice’s larger strategy to build sustainable futures — particularly crucial for coastal cities like Houston — and part of the university’s broader momentum as Rice embarks on its 10year strategic plan. RAMI’s mission centers on three major research areas: materials innovations for energy systems and efficiency; next-generation electronics and photonics; and environmental stewardship.
Energy Systems and Efficiency
The dominant paradigm for energy is shifting away from fossil fuels toward a more heterogeneous landscape. In a diversified energy future, the need for materials that can capture, convert, store and transport energy will continue to grow.
“Some estimates suggest that within the next decade or two, the demand for battery power could be 120 times higher than it is today,” Martin said, adding that storage does not have to just mean batteries.
“There are other ways to store energy — as heat, or in a chemical form, or in electrostatic form, as electrons in a device,” he said. “We also want to invest in ways to convert energy from one form to another, and really just drive up the efficiency of the whole spectrum of the energy resources. We want to make sure we get all we can from each unit of energy we produce.”
Efficiency also means recovering wasted energy. Martin cites projects
on materials that can convert heat into usable electricity, conjuring images of “power beaming” — transmitting energy via laser to hard-toreach devices or even charging your phone’s battery with body heat.
“It might sound like science fiction, but with the right materials, it is achievable,” Martin said.
Next-Generation Electronics and Photonics
Computing is a critical factor for the future of energy. “If we don’t change how we do computation, some projections show that within a decade, computing could consume as much as 30% of the world’s energy production,” Martin said.
This unsustainable trend demands radical innovation. RAMI aims to invent materials that drive down power consumption, voltages and costs, enabling faster, energy-efficient electronics.
“When you look at just how much our experience with technology has changed in the past two decades alone, this progress would not have been possible without large-scale, atomic-level control over materials synthesis,” Martin said.
To make semiconductors, manufacturers have to create pristine versions of materials like silicon, and the devices that do the computation can now be as small as just a few nanometers across. The placement of even one or two atoms in those volumes can change how the device functions. Current technology based on complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS) is running up against limitations inherent in their very atomic structure.
“Going beyond CMOS means designing new material systems that operate on a whole different paradigm and enable us to do our computation faster, with less energy use, and to do it in interesting ways that maybe gives us multifunctionality, such as storing data in the very devices doing the computation,” Martin said.
Environmental Stewardship
“In the past, we didn’t design materials with their second or third life in mind,” Martin said.
RAMI researchers are now developing systems for recycling, upcycling and replacing rare or toxic materials with materials that capture pollutants, reduce carbon emissions and even transform carbon dioxide into new (and useful) products, reflective of a global reckoning with the lifecycle of materials.
“We’re thinking about clean air, water and soil for future generations,” Martin said. “RAMI is keenly interested in figuring out how to design advanced materials and systems that harness a wide range of phenomena in our environment and energy sources therein to steer history onto more sustainable paths.”
Rice is home to world-class labs that probe the very limits of matter in extreme forms like ultracold plasmas, or grown, atom by atom, into layers with precise and intricate geometries. It also happens to be one of the critical sites for the birth of supercomputing as well as a contemporary hub of critical expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and computer science and engineering.
Sustainable Futures
This gives RAMI an edge, as applying modern lessons from AI and ML to materials will have a transformative impact. From accelerating the discovery and design of new materials to processing the staggeringly large datasets generated by modern experiments, such approaches will increasingly enable researchers to fine-tune their efforts and access insights with greater ease.
“A single graduate student at a synchrotron can generate an excess of 30 terabytes of data in a week,” Martin said, referring to a type of particle accelerator that uses powerful light beams to analyze a wide range of materials, from solar cells to ancient scrolls. “AI can help us squeeze every drop of insight from that data — something no individual can do by themselves.”
To achieve its mission, RAMI is supercharging interdisciplinary research by investing in human and physical capital — hiring new faculty across disciplines, recruiting new postdoctoral fellows and supporting undergraduate research to cultivate the next generation of scientists.
“Materials scientists and computing and AI experts often speak different languages, but when we find common ground, that’s where real innovation happens,” Martin said.
Supported by a gracious gift from the Welch Foundation, RAMI hopes to recruit world-leading researchers keen to work in the vibrant interdisciplinary community at Rice. And RAMI’s collaboration with Rice’s Shared Equipment Authority (SEA) ensures that the university will serve as a world-leading site with the cutting-edge infrastructure to support premier research and teaching.
“RAMI is really honored and lucky to be a resident of one of the newest buildings on campus, the Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering and Science — a beautiful space that really was designed around this concept of interdisciplinary research endeavor,” Martin said. “That speaks to the heart of what RAMI is.”
Materials may not be the first thing to come to mind when thinking of cutting-edge technologies. One might think instead of smart phones, satellites and particle accelerators, or advanced algorithms and catalysis. However, Martin argues it’s time to refocus on materials as a core part of “advanced” technology.
“Smart, responsive materials are not just a part of, but absolutely central to the technologies of the future,” he said.
Lane Martin pictured in the RAMI lab at Rice University
Forever Chemicals No More
Rice’s WaTER Institute and its new PFAS Alternatives and Remediation Center are taking the removal of toxic chemicals from our water supply to the next level
BY SILVIA CERNEA CLARK
Access to safe drinking water is a major limiting factor to human capacity. And providing access to clean water has the potential to save more lives than doctors, said Pedro Alvarez, Rice’s George R. Brown Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Thanks to decades of research that have culminated in the creation of two vital entities working to make our water safer across the world — the Water Technologies Entrepreneurship and Research (WaTER) Institute that was launched in January 2024 and, now, its new Rice PFAS Alternatives and Remediation Center (R-PARC) — Rice is uniquely positioned to take on these challenges.
“Across the world, we’re seeing
more serious contamination by emerging chemical and biological pollutants, and climate change is exacerbating freshwater scarcity with more frequent droughts,” Alvarez said. “The Rice WaTER Institute is expanding research and alliances in the water domain that were built by our NEWT Center, which was very productive in launching startups and training about 200 graduate students to address these water security concerns.”
Alvarez serves as both NEWT director and director of the WaTER Institute. He is joined in his efforts by Michael Wong, Rice’s Tina and Sunit Patel Professor in Molecular Nanotechnology, chair and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and leader of the WaTER
FRESH WATER
Sustainable Futures
Institute’s public health research thrust; and James Tour, Rice’s T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of Chemistry and professor of materials science and nanoengineering.
The WaTER Institute boasts a foundation of advancements in clean water technology research and applications, established during the decadelong tenure of the Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT) that was funded by the National Science Foundation.
As part of the WaTER Institute, R-PARC will leverage its history of expertise and take full advantage of recent institutional investments, including an array of advanced analytical equipment dedicated to the remediation and removal of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
“We are the leaders in water technologies using nano,” said Wong. “Things that we’ve discovered within the NEWT Center, we’ve already started to realize will be great for real-world applications.”
R-PARC is also the result of multiyear, multimillion-dollar collaborative efforts with the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), spearheaded by Tour in 2021 with a graphene synthesis project. It was followed by a series of studies that deployed flash Joule heating (FJH) in a range of applied contexts; the conversion of PFAS-containing firefighter foams and PFAS-contaminated carbons from water purifiers into nontoxic substances; and soil decontamination.
This body of research enabled the development of three spinoff companies, demonstrating the translational capacity and potential for
Pedro Alvarez
“Cleaning water is the most important engingeering contribution of the 21st century ... but we have not won this war yet.” — Pedro Alvarez
real-world impact catalyzed by the collaboration.
“We’ve had a long-standing collaboration with the Army Corps of Engineers, particularly the environmental group there, and we’ve published a number of papers together, including on PFAS destruction and soil remediation,” said Tour. “We hope to expand on this work through this PFAS-dedicated center at Rice.”
Last year witnessed a major shift in the U.S. regulatory landscape when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued unprecedentedly stringent limits on the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS as a way to tackle drinking water contamination.
“More than 200 million Americans could have PFAS in their tap water, and for decades Americans have been exposed to toxic ‘forever chemicals’ with no oversight from their government,” said Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook when the limits were announced in April 2024.
The EPA’s new limits set the maximum contaminant level at 4 parts per trillion for two of the most common PFAS — among the most protective health limits on PFAS in drinking water worldwide.
“For reference, that represents four drops in 1,000 Olympic pools, such a low concentration that it is very difficult to measure and even more difficult to attain,” said Alvarez. “Meeting these new standards will not be possible without technological innovation both in terms of mitigation and sustainable alternatives.”
R-PARC will bring together top researchers, industry leaders, policy experts and entrepreneurs to foster
collaboration and accelerate the development of innovative solutions to several PFAS challenges, including comprehensive PFAS characterization and risk assessment; contaminated site remediation; wastewater treatment infrastructure upgrades; and the development of non-PFAS materials and products.
“The challenge of PFAS cuts across several of the four major research trajectories that define Rice’s strategic vision,” said Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Rice’s executive vice president for research and professor of materials science and nanoengineering and physics and astronomy. “R-PARC will help focus and amplify ongoing work on PFAS remediation at Rice.”
Rice unveiled R-PARC last summer during a visit to campus by an ERDC delegation led by agency director David Pittman, who also serves as the director of research and development and chief scientist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE).
“The sky’s the limit,” Pittman said of the growing partnership between Rice and USACE. “There’s a lot more work out there to be done, and you help our nation by helping us do what we do.”
In addition to underscoring the potential for an enhanced collaboration on research in national security priority areas, the ERDC visit also reinforced the need for an expanded partnership between Rice and ERDC.
“PFAS decontamination and replacement will require sustained, long-term effort,” Wong said. “We need better ways to detect and identify PFAS compounds, we need sustainable ways to break down PFAS like photocatalysis technology,
for example, and we need to design non-PFAS that can replace PFAS in products. R-PARC will serve as a gathering point for discovery and innovation and as a training ground for the next generation of researchers and entrepreneurs.”
And as the demand for clean, safe drinking water continues to rapidly increase across the world, the WaTER Institute will keep working toward the rapid deployment of technologies designed to make sure the whole world has access to the water it needs.
“Cleaning water is the most important engineering contribution of the 21st century, in the sense that it is largely responsible for increasing life expectancy of Americans at birth from 47 in the year 1900 to 78 today,” Alvarez added. “But we have not won this war yet. We still have 43 million Americans who don’t have access to clean, reliable water from municipal systems. Our water infrastructure is unable to meet the growing challenges of treating emerging pollutants. We can do a lot better, and technology can be a very important part of that solution.”
Scan this QR code for a behind-thescenes look at the work performed at the Rice WaTER Institute and interviews with its researchers.
Sustainable Futures
POPULAR PODCASTS
Crossing the Stream
How ‘Gulf Streams’ became a vital platform for environmental discourse in and beyond Houston
BY BRANDI SMITH
Gathered around the microphones in one of KPFT’s Houston studios, Weston Twardowski, Haley Schultz and Alondra Torres discussed the impact of the coal-powered W.A. Parish plant in Fort Bend County for Episode 42 of “Gulf Streams,” the weekly radio show co-produced by Rice and local Pacifica Radio affiliate KPFT 90.1 FM.
“I’m very concerned about the public health hazard that Parish poses to the community, to the environment, to the employees there,” said Torres, Air Alliance’s climate justice coordinator, who described the plant as “the most dangerous and polluting
coal plant in all of Texas.”
Since its launch in October 2023, “Gulf Streams” has explored a wide range of topics including the history and environmental impacts of meat production, urban heat and health risks, Houston’s biodiversity, artists creating work inspired by climate change and how urban planning can help fight that climate change.
“Because the Center for Environmental Studies (CES), where I’m based, has really strong relationships with a number of community organizations, we’re very aware of various things that are happening,”
said Twardowski, associate director of CES and a lecturer in environmental studies at Rice.
Produced in collaboration with the School of Humanities-hubbed CES and the Rice Sustainability Institute’s EcoStudio, “Gulf Streams” has become a vital platform for environmental discourse in and beyond Houston.
“I like to say that the show is about 60% Houston or Texas content and then about 20% to 30% is U.S. content more broadly,” Twardowski said. “So we do think globally on the program, and we often are in conversation with scholars and experts from all over the world.”
Twardowski credited the show’s success to its granular approach to environmental coverage, a niche that is often overlooked.
“This is critical knowledge,” Twardowski said. “This is information that we need to have to keep ourselves safe and to know how we can live our lives in a little bit better, environmentally cleaner way.”
Four “Gulf Streams” episodes hand-picked by Weston Twardowski you should listen to right now:
Episode 1
“Creosote”
Episode 35
“How We Get Around: Transportation’s Role in Greener, Better Cities”
Episode 42
“The W.A. Parish Coal Plant”
Episode 49
“River on Fire”
Weston Twardowski interviews Alison Weaver, “executive director of Rice’s Moody Center for the Arts
Plasma technology has potential applications to make better batteries, transistors and other critical materials for energy technologies.
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Cold Plasma, Hot Potential
Woodside-Rice Decarbonization Accelerator pioneers plasma technology to tackle greenhouse gas emissions — without the high energy costs
BY MARCY DE LUNA
In January 2024, Rice partnered with Woodside Energy, Australia’s largest oil and gas developer, to create the Woodside-Rice Decarbonization Accelerator, a project dedicated
to advancing new strategies to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The fiveyear, $12.5 million initiative focuses on transforming carbon dioxide and methane into practical industrial products using innovative cold plasma technology, with the goal of bringing these solutions to market within the next few years.
The accelerator celebrated its first anniversary in January with a Rice-hosted event in Houston to showcase the project’s advancements: It’s been busy developing novel ways to convert carbon-based emissions into valuable products, including batteries, transistors and other technology essential for the energy sector. Unlike traditional carbon-reduction techniques that often require energy-intensive heating processes, this initiative employs cold plasma — a nonthermal approach that allows chemical reactions to occur at room temperature, maximizing energy efficiency and enabling easier scalability.
“Our partnership with Woodside
Energy has propelled us into a new frontier of materials science, enabling us to manipulate materials at the molecular level to unlock new possibilities using plasma chemistry,” said Paul Cherukuri, vice president for innovation and chief innovation officer at Rice. “This collaboration has been instrumental in establishing this groundbreaking capability in the U.S.”
Rice’s campus is now home to a world-class plasma chemistry facility equipped with 10 plasma reactors for developing various potential materials applications based on Woodside’s investments. Using this technology, researchers have already made headway in refining cold plasma technology and adapting it for creating new uses.
“We’re using nonthermal plasma to convert carbon-based molecules without the high energy costs typical of heating processes,” said Aditya Mohite, faculty director for the Rice Engineering Initiative for Energy Transition and Sustainability.
The approach has enabled the university’s lab to bring its technology closer to the market, emphasizing the scaling of the technology for widespread application. Beyond reducing emissions, plasma technology has potential uses in steelmaking, recovery of critical minerals from waste streams and feedstocks, water purification and other advanced manufacturing processes.
“The Woodside-Rice Decarbonization Accelerator represents a bold new direction in research methodology,” Cherukuri said. “This approach delivers rapid, actionable insights, unlocking immediate potential for industry impact.”
Sustainable Futures
INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY
Exploring New Energy Frontiers
Chevron partners with the Rice Sustainability Institute to support students’ groundbreaking research in sustainable energy solutions
BY MARCY DE LUNA
Since the discovery of the Spindletop oil well in 1901 that sent 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day gushing into the air for nine days straight — a discovery which also injected an estimated $235 million, or $7.9 billion in today’s money, into the Texas economy that year as a result — Houston has been widely recognized as the energy capital of the world. Over a century later, Houston is now poised to become a new leader in this space as the energy transition capital of the world.
A new fellowship funded by Chevron in partnership with the Rice Sustainability Institute underscores that commitment by providing $10,000 each to 10 Rice graduate students for the 2024–25 academic year, supporting their groundbreaking research in energy-related fields.
“This exciting new partnership between the RSI and Chevron represents a significant step forward in
our shared commitment to advancing sustainable energy solutions,” said Rice President Reginald DesRoches at a September 2024 reception announcing the inaugural cohort of fellowship recipients. “Through our combined efforts, we are not only empowering our students but also contributing to a more sustainable and innovative future.”
The fellowship recipients are researching solutions to some of the world’s most pressing energy challenges, from recycling lithium-ion batteries to producing eco-friendly hydrogen alternatives to fossil fuels. Their work focuses on creating real-world, scalable solutions to transform the energy landscape.
“This fellowship supports students working on a wide range of topics related to scalable innovations in energy production that will lead to the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions,” said
“This exciting new partnership between the RSI and Chevron represents a significant step forward in our shared commitment to advancing sustainable energy solutions.” — Reginald DesRoches
Carrie Masiello, director of the RSI and the W. Maurice Ewing Professor of Bioengineering, Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences.
Masiello also highlighted the fellowship’s diverse group of applicants, which spanned 10 departments and four schools at Rice. “It’s important that we recognize the importance of intellectual diversity to the kind of problem-solving we have to do as we accomplish the energy transition,” she said.
Chris Powers, vice president of carbon capture, utilization and storage and emerging business at Chevron New Energies, is a Rice alumnus who recognizes both the importance of innovation and the importance of investing in young researchers whose work will transform not only Houston but the world.
“I’m excited to support emerging leaders like you all in this room, who are focused on scalable, innovative solutions because the world needs them,” Powers said. “Innovation and collaboration across sectors and borders will be key to unlocking the full potential of lower carbon energies. And it’s groups like you, our newest Chevron Fellows, that can help move the needle when it comes to translating, or evolving, the energy landscape for the future.”
Ramamoorthy Ramesh, executive vice president for research at Rice, congratulated the cohort on their fellowships as well as their commitment to exploring new energy frontiers. “These Chevron Fellows will question what exists today and discover the new tomorrow,” he said. “We want to be very good citizens, very good partners with Chevron, and do what is right for the planet.”
2024-2025 RICE CHEVRON ENERGY GRADUATE FELLOWS
Xi Chen, a Ph.D. student in materials science and nanoengineering, uses microwave-assisted techniques to recycle lithium-ion batteries sustainably.
Enina Egiebor, a Ph.D. student in chemical and biomolecular engineering, works on solar-driven technologies to produce green hydrogen, an alternative to fossil fuels.
Miriam Gammerman, a Ph.D. student in Earth, environmental and planetary sciences, studies soil minerals’ role in the global carbon cycle to improve carbon storage.
Wesley Hungbui, an MBA student, develops financial models to encourage investment in sustainable energy projects.
Alexander Lathem, a Ph.D. student in applied physics, researches carbon-free methods to produce ammonia, a key agricultural fertilizer.
Ziran Wang, a Ph.D. student in civil and environmental engineering, studies power grid resilience in response to natural disasters and system failures.
Ahmad El Gazzar, a Ph.D. student in chemical and biomolecular engineering, focuses on renewable fuels and carbon-capture technologies.
Zina Deriche, a Ph.D. student in chemical and biomolecular engineering, works on improving the efficiency and safety of solid-state batteries by using metal-organic frameworks.
Travis Seamons, a Ph.D. student in systems, synthetic and physical biology, focuses on engineering soil microbes to enhance the removal and storage of greenhouse gasses in the soil.
Stan Kannegieter, a Ph.D. student in economics, explores the monetary and environmental benefits of investing in soil organic carbon sequestration on agricultural land.
WRITING TO HEAL
Mending Time
The Humanities Research Center explores the critical role of humanists in addressing the world’s pressing concerns through the theme of “repair”
BY BRANDI SMITH
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the world looked to its scientists for a solution as they raced to develop vaccines. Then it was the social scientists’ turn to apply their expertise as vaccine rollouts were developed and managed. But what happened next was surprising: Arguably the biggest challenge to protecting the world from COVID-19
“Repair encompasses future aspirations — the prospect of remediation, refurbishing, restoration. It’s about more than fixing what’s broken; it’s about understanding the deeper causes of that brokenness.” — Kathleen Canning
was many people’s resistance to using vaccines at all.
For Graham Bader, director of Rice’s Humanities Research Center (HRC), this situation revealed the critical role of humanists in addressing the world’s pressing concerns.
“Scholars in the humanities are thinking about history, about beliefs, about ideology and values,” Bader said. “If you don’t have humanists working together with scientists and public officials — figuring out not just how to develop and distribute a vaccine, but how to understand why people would hesitate to use it and how to speak to them about it — then things begin to fall apart.”
This realization became particularly poignant for Bader when he was asked in spring 2021 to join the HRC’s faculty council, just as the center began to rethink its purpose and direction. The result of this introspection is a renewed HRC, which, working together with Dean of Humanities Kathleen Canning, has adopted the theme of “repair” through 2025.
Founded in 1987 as the Center for the Study of Cultures, the HRC has long been a hub for innovative and interdisciplinary research within the humanities and arts. Over the years, it has become an incubator for cross-disciplinary collaboration, engaging faculty, students and postdoctoral fellows in research that transcends traditional academic boundaries.
Today, the HRC is a vibrant center that fosters dialogue not only within Rice but also with institutions across the Houston area and beyond. It has also become home for postdoctoral scholars from human-
ities departments, programs and centers, providing them with space to work, meet and collaborate across fields.
“One of our central goals is to raise the visibility and impact of our scholarship and public engagement,” Bader explained. “We’re really trying to bring people together and connect our research to key issues in the world around us.”
The theme of repair, introduced by the HRC for the 2023–2024 and 2024–2025 academic years, is a reflection of this mission.
“To think about repair means to consider not just present conditions but past circumstances of things and systems that we recognize as broken,” Canning said. “Repair encompasses future aspirations — the prospect of remediation, refurbishing, restoration. It’s about more than fixing what’s broken; it’s about understanding the deeper causes of that brokenness.”
For Gabriela Garcia, the HRC’s associate director, the theme of repair represents a new chapter for the center. Having worked in humanities research centers at Northwestern University and Tulane University, Garcia brings a wealth of experience and a fresh perspective to Rice.
“We’re interested in embracing and contesting the concept of repair,” Garcia said. “It’s a way to facilitate conversations around what connects us most.”
This theme is being explored through a series of events, workshops, discussions and public lectures, including a keynote by acclaimed author and MacArthur Fellow Maggie Nelson attended by over 150 members of the Rice and
Houston communities to engage with the concept of repair, offering insights from Nelson’s own experiences as a writer and scholar.
The HRC is also sponsoring a number of student and faculty initiatives that explore and expand on ideas of repair. One such project is “Agatha Babino’s Story: A Narrative of the Formerly Enslaved,” an exhibit at the Heritage Society organized by Dionne Babineaux, a Ph.D. student in history. The exhibit, which delves into Babineaux’s family history during and after enslavement, marks the second HRC-supported project she has undertaken, following her successful organization of a free screening of the short film “Beaumont’s Black History — In Moving Pictures” at Rice Cinema.
Another project, “Guadalupe Maravilla: Mariposa Relámpago” is being organized by Erika Holum, a Ph.D. student in art history. This interdisciplinary exhibition will offer the Rice community an immersive experience, highlighting the themes of illness and healing that are central to Maravilla’s work.
Additionally, the HRC has backed the “Writing to Heal: U.S. Latine Narratives on Mental Health” speaker series organized by Luziris Pineda Turi, which ties into her popular course on the same subject, and the Memory Studies Reading Group led by Claire Branigan and Mary Grayson Brook, which fosters transnational discussions on memory through monthly readings for advanced undergraduates, graduate students and faculty.
“It’s an exciting time to be at Rice and at the HRC,” Garcia said.
Sustainable Futures
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
The Root Cause
BY SPRING CHENJP ’25
As an ice hockey player in high school, Calla Doh realized she played and felt different depending on what she ate before games. Three years later, her interest in nutrition would lead her to spend two months in India researching causes and solutions to maternal and child malnutrition. As one of 14 World Food Prize Borlaug-Ruan interns nationally, Doh was matched with the nonprofit S M Sehgal Foundation and worked in the Haryana state’s Nuh district.
“There is a much bigger and more pressing problem that I saw, which was food insecurity,” said Doh, who is majoring in environmental science with a concentration in ecology and evolutionary biology and is minoring in poverty, justice and human capabilities.
Through her research, which included surveys, interviews and analysis of foods villagers recalled eating, Doh found access to nutritionally rich food was one determinant of malnutrition in women and children.
“Most of these households were farming households,” Doh said. “Despite high yields of different pro -
duce, there wasn’t enough of those micronutrient-rich foods translated into women’s consumption patterns — partly because, we hypothesized, people would sell them in order to receive disposable income rather than consume it, which makes sense given the stark economic inequality prevalent throughout the region.”
Cultural taboos also played a role, Doh said.
“Culturally, there were some food restrictions and food taboos that prevented women from eating specific types or entire groups of food during their menstruation, for example, that would limit the amount of micronutrients they were able to get,” Doh said.
One solution Doh recommended was diversifying farmer income streams.
“Within agriculture, they have
farming, animal husbandry and kitchen gardens,” Doh said. “The Sehgal Foundation wants to help farmers not only strengthen those agricultural sources of income, but also connect them with other nonagricultural sources of income generation.”
Doh emphasized that when addressing cultural taboos, empowerment was key for long-lasting change.
“How do we balance preserving this culture and acknowledging and respecting people’s cultural roots while conveying the importance of nutrition?” Doh said. “One way to do this is focusing more on the health and implicit benefits that people can receive, from your mood to your ability to work — focusing on empowering people rather than shaming them.”
Calla Doh tackles nutritional equality and food insecurity by bridging science and policy work
PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFF FITLOW
Callah Doh
How They Did It
Saint Foucault
Niki Kasumi Clements explains how Rice became a global hub for research on seminal French philosopher Michel Foucault
BY SARAH KNOWLTON ’26
In April 2024, Rice held a conference honoring the 40th anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault. But according to Niki Kasumi Clements, the architect of the conference, the philosopher still makes an impact from beyond the grave.
“This dude is still one of, if not the most cited person in any field,” said Clements, the Watt and Lilly Jackson Associate Professor of Religion.” He has an outsized cultural impact in terms of how his work has been
Michel Foucault
How They Did It
used to mobilize for LGBTQ rights. In the words of David Halperin, we have St. Foucault — basically the patron saint of gayness.”
Under Clements’ stewardship, Rice has become a hotspot for research on Foucault across a variety of disciplines, despite its distance from his native France.
“It is funny that Rice has become a hub for Foucault studies, in part because it’s not in France, but also because there aren’t a lot of hubs in France either,” Clements said.
“Foucault is really excluded from departments of philosophy in France, and it was in the United States that Foucault became really popular and prominent.”
Clements cited cultural opposition as a reason for the dearth of Foucault study in his home country. His analyses of power and subjectivity in society, as well as his identity as a gay man, made him a controversial figure.
“In the U.S., the emergence of different kinds of area studies were shaped through Foucauldian analysis of power, and that’s part of what allowed me to bring people together at Rice, because we do have the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality here,” Clements said.
“We’re dealing with a much more complex and progressive way of thinking about sexual politics, queer politics and identity.”
Clements began work on Rice’s first Foucault conference with James “Jim” Faubion, the Radoslav A. Tsanoff Professor Emeritus.
“Originally, Jim and I were trying to do this conference with 10 people of different disciplines on Foucault’s book ‘Confessions of the Flesh,’ be-
Niki Kasumi Clements
“Rice is not just in Houston. Rice is globally relevant when it comes to Foucault, which is amazing.”— Niki Kasumi Clements
cause it was the secret volume on early Christianity that wasn’t published when he died,” Clements said. “It was released in 2018 and then published in 2021 in English translation, so the occasion then was that book.”
The first conference was scheduled for April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, so it was held virtually — which actually boosted Rice’s prominence in Foucauldian studies.
“That virtual platform increased the international scope of who we are able to invite, and people are now watching these videos all over the world, citing them,” Clements said.
The most recent conference was held in honor of Foucault’s death in 1984. It not only commemorated the philosopher’s work, it also examined ways in which his ideas relate to the present moment.
“How do we think about Foucault’s influence 40 years out?” Clements said. “How do we use his tools while also critiquing his own epistemic limitations as a white, bourgeois man coming of age in France — which was a notable colonizer country? He’s not talking about race in a robust way, so how do we engage his work while also moving beyond where he was 40 years ago?”
The event featured a variety of perspectives on Foucault’s work from around the world, hosting speakers from the U.S., France, Brazil and England. Clements said she often works with international scholars on conferences.
“I have colleagues who write to me from all over the world, and they invite me to go give talks,” said Clements, who’s recently been doing so in Morelia, Mexico, at
the University of California, Berkeley, and in Paris. She also trains fellow researchers in using Foucault’s archives, housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which is one of Clements’ areas of expertise.
“I’ve become, bizarrely, a world specialist in his archives — this strange little American who’s just obsessively transcribing,” Clements said. “I have over 5,000 pages of transcriptions of his books over the last 10 years [of his life] that never got published, but that he was working through.
“There are six different collections in the Foucault archives, and the biggest one has 105 boxes. Inventory is not organized chronologically or conceptually, and it’s full of inaccuracies,” Clements continued. “It’s only by literally going in and doing this research, transcribing at a rapid pace whenever I could over the last five years, that I was able to not only figure out what he was up to for his last decade, but also find books that he said he destroyed.”
Clements is devoted to sharing her archival knowledge and transcriptions with other Foucault scholars worldwide.
“I don’t feel protective about it,” Clements said. “I want more people to be doing it, and especially when they’re bringing this back to their countries. Imagine how this is reshaping research all around the world — how this is happening in so many different academic conversations that wouldn’t have necessarily intersected.”
With this international reach, Clements said she hopes to further expand Rice’s work as a center of
Foucault research, particularly through the Rice Global Paris Center (See “Going Global,” Page 103). She’s currently in talks with Vice President for Global Caroline Levander about creating a Foucault event in France.
“I want to bring graduate students from all over the world to train them in the archives, bring these other specialists into the Rice Paris Center to give seminars and training, and use that as a proof of concept for how Rice is not just in Houston — Rice really is global in this way,” Clements said. “Rice is globally relevant when it comes to Foucault, which is amazing.”
Clements attributes Rice’s global relevance to the assistance of her graduate students in the Department of Religion. These students are crucial in helping create conferences to maintain and grow Rice’s connections to Foucault scholars.
“They’re the ones who took up my call when I asked for volunteers,” Clements said. “It was graduate students who, over the last month before the conference and especially on-site for those days, were doing all the work so I could be intellectually present — guiding and hosting and also running around. But they made sure to save me a sandwich and tell me to eat.”
Rice’s global presence is also impactful for these students, Clements said.
“They’re deeply brilliant intellectual creators and contributors,” she said. “It was amazing for them to know that this is a world stage they can feel proud to be a part of.”
How They Did It
FINANCING SOLUTIONS
Partnering for Progress
Private support of research can return exceptional value to companies and universities alike
BY JEREMY MILLER
Researchers at Rice are tackling some of the world’s most critical issues, with growing support from private foundations and companies.
“A significant percentage of our philanthropic funding at Rice — almost half in the past year — was from organizations focused on Rice research,” explained Stephen Bayer, vice president of development and alumni relations.
“Foundations are looking for people who are singularly focused on finding solutions,” said Katie Cervenka, assistant vice president for corporate and foundation relations. “They want people who can present innovative strategies or approaches to addressing complex, seemingly unsolvable problems.”
A prime example, Cervenka explained, is NEST360, an international organization devoted to ending preventable newborn deaths in African hospitals. A finalist for the MacArthur Foundation’s inaugural 100&Change competition, NEST360 has secured over $140 million in nonprofit partnerships.
Companies, too, are increasingly attracted to the range of offerings
found at Rice, where research partnerships often lead to expanded relationships across campus.
“Rice research can return exceptional value to companies, which can be further enhanced through recruiting our students, licensing our technology or accessing Rice’s advanced training or professional education programs,” said Leah Aschmann, director of corporate relations.
Aschmann noted that in recent
years, Rice has made an effort to streamline its processes so companies can more easily engage with Rice across a range of activities.
Bayer is enthusiastic about expanding support for Rice researchers: “With the launch of our new strategic plan and significant investments in a strong network of research centers and institutes, I am confident that private support of research will continue to grow.”
INNOVATION
OCFR
Rice’s Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations (OCFR) takes a comprehensive approach to engaging companies, focusing on research, gifts and mutually beneficial partnerships across recruitment, continuing education, commercialization and innovation. By advancing all forms of potential engagement, OCFR plays a central role in strengthening Rice’s research enterprise.
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BALANCING ACT
Moral Imperative
Rice’s Ethics of Technology program aims to address the ethical challenges posed by AI
BY BRANDI SMITH
When Robert Howell contemplates the future of artificial intelligence (AI), he foresees a world where an app might guide your moral decisions just as Google Maps helps you navigate a road trip.
Though he explored the provocative idea in a 2014 paper titled “Google Morals, Virtue and the Asymmetry of Deference,” this isn’t just a thought experiment for Howell, chair of Rice’s philosophy department and the Yasser El-Sayed Professor of Philosophy. Instead, it’s a harbinger of the pressing ethical dilemmas that AI presents and a perfect example of why philosophy has become integral to the conversation about technology.
“Imagine an app that tells you, ‘Here’s what you should do,’” Howell said. “Something uniquely human is being offloaded onto AI. We need to recognize the danger of offloading important intellectual, emotional human work onto artificial intelli-
gence in such a way that it actually vitiates our own humanity.”
This idea of “Google morals” serves as a gateway into Howell’s broader exploration of AI and tech ethics.
“Philosophy is a natural fit in the conversation about technology ethics,” said Howell, who is spearheading Rice’s Ethics of Technology program. “Technology moves quicker than our reflection on its ethics, but the goal is to at least improve the response rate and do some anticipatory thinking.”
In addition to teaching, Howell is also fostering interdisciplinary collaborations on the topic of technology ethics. He works closely with Rice colleagues, including Moshe Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering, and assistant teaching professor of computer science Rodrigo Ferreira, to address the ethical challenges posed by AI.
“Philosophers have spent a lot of time asking these questions and learning the false pathways,” Howell said, noting that this expertise allows philosophers to guide the conversation more effectively, helping society avoid unproductive or harmful directions. “Engineers know what the next product is, but philosophers think about ethics. It’s a pretty helpful partnership.”
For Howell, AI ethics can be broken down into three critical areas: the development of AI, its deployment and its use, each area presenting distinct ethical challenges that
demand careful consideration. When it comes to the development of AI, Howell emphasized the importance of privacy and intellectual property considerations.
“One of the challenges we have is ensuring that our students can use AI tools without losing their intellectual property,” Howell said, explaining the concern that AI systems could absorb student input. “Suddenly, you’ve lost your property and it could reappear in someone else’s document.”
Beyond privacy, there’s the issue of bias in AI training data. Howell pointed out that AI can inadvertently perpetuate societal inequalities if it’s trained on biased or unrepresentative datasets.
“Making sure that AI isn’t trained on racist data or data that overrepresents one segment of the population is crucial,” Howell said, adding that ethical boundaries for AI development must include rigorous oversight to prevent such biases from taking root.
Once AI is developed, the next challenge is how to deploy it ethically. Howell raises concerns about the integration of AI into widely used platforms like Microsoft Word or Gmail.
“What are you doing to this population’s ability to express themselves if you integrate AI into Microsoft Word?” Howell asked.
The potential consequences of such integration include a diminishment of personal expression and creativity, particularly if users become overly reliant on AI for writing
“Technology moves quicker than our reflection on its ethics, but the goal is to at least improve the response rate and do some anticipatory thinking.”
— Robert Howell
and other tasks.
Howell also highlights the ethical implications of AI tools like ChatGPT, which have become ubiquitous despite their potential for misuse.
“The deployment of AI requires a careful balancing act between innovation and ethical responsibility,” Howell said.
Perhaps the most nuanced area of AI ethics is its use by individuals. Howell said he believes that too much emphasis is often placed on companies and developers, when in fact, users also bear significant ethical responsibilities.
“We need to think about what our obligations are as users,” Howell said, falling back on his example of the potential danger that lies in offloading important intellectual and emotional work onto AI, which could, in turn, erode our humanity.
“If we’re using AI for things that require deep thought, we might be offloading an important project of self-construction and development.”
The philosophy department is committed to exploring those questions and concerns via courses such as Technology, Society and Value, which is offered every semester, ensuring that students are equipped to navigate the complex ethical landscape of the future.
“We’re having really fun conversations,” Howell said. “It’s pretty rare that philosophy gets to deal with ripped-from-the-headlines topics. This gives us an opportunity to see where the rubber hits the road.”
Robert Howell
LEARNING CURVE
EvidenceBased Education
A first-of-its-kind research hub at Rice created with a $90 million NSF grant, SafeInsights protects student privacy while making large-scale information about learning available for research
BY AVERY RUXER FRANKLIN
Since 2012, OpenStax has transformed education through technology — first by creating peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks available for free in digital formats and in print, for a fraction of the cost of typical college textbooks. Now, a new project will once again pave the way for transformational learning and education research.
In 2024, Rice’s OpenStax was awarded $90 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to build and lead SafeInsights, a research and development (R&D) hub that will benefit tens of millions of students and their instructors across all educational levels. This five-year project is the NSF’s largest single investment in R&D infrastructure for education at a national scale.
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R&D is a powerful mechanism for improving educational outcomes, yet it remains difficult to conduct large-scale, reliable research that yields strong results for students and teachers. SafeInsights will enable extensive, long-term research on the predictors of effective learning while protecting student privacy.
“We are thrilled to announce an investment of $90 million in SafeInsights, marking a significant step forward in our commitment to advancing scientific research in STEM education,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan.
There is an urgent need for research-informed strategies capable of transforming educational systems, Panchanathan stressed. “By investing in cutting-edge infrastructure and fostering collaboration among researchers and educators, we are paving the way for transformative discoveries and equitable opportunities for learners across the nation.”
Funded through NSF’s Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-2 program, which places it alongside other critical infrastructure for scientific discovery such as telescopes and supercomputers, SafeInsights represents the largest research award in Rice’s history.
According to national polls conducted by the Data Quality Campaign, 86% of teachers recognize the importance of research in effective teaching. However, the majority of teachers must individually piece together research-informed teaching and learning strategies, often with limited resources.
Through SafeInsights, the education research community will generate research-informed insights
about teaching and learning for educators, institutions and learning platforms to use to create tailored programs, pedagogies and policies that will equip learners to thrive.
“Education R&D opens up opportunities to better understand how students learn in different contexts,” said Richard Baraniuk, SafeInsights leader, OpenStax director and Rice professor.
“Learning is complex,” Baraniuk said. “Research can tackle this complexity and help get the right tools into the hands of educators and students, but to do so, we need reliable information on how students learn. Just as progress in health care research sparked stunning advances in personalized medicine, we need similar precision in education to support all students, particularly those from underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds.”
To accomplish its objectives, SafeInsights has a world-class, experienced team with OpenStax at Rice in addition to 40 partners and 39 collaborating institutions nationwide, including AEM Corporation, Arizona State University (ASU), Center for Open Science, Digital Promise, Future of Privacy Forum, Georgia Institute of Technology, Morehouse College, National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships, Tapia Center for Excellence and Equity in Education, TERC, The University of Chicago, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), Washington University in St. Louis and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, ASSISTments, EdPlus at ASU, CourseKata, Infinite Campus Inc., iSTART, Quill.org, TERC’s Data
Arcade, UPenn’s Massive Online Open Courses, Western Governors University and The Writing Pal. By instrumenting large-scale digital learning platforms for research, SafeInsights will capture a comprehensive picture of the learning process currently unavailable to researchers, including information from past academic experiences that can be paired with what is known about current learning processes, said Baraniuk.
For example, a research study could reveal what strategies are most effective for middle school students struggling with reading comprehension in algebra to prepare them for success in high school and college. SafeInsights makes it possible to conduct comprehensive research studies while safeguarding privacy, added Baraniuk. These studies can be replicated and expanded across different platforms, enabling a deeper understanding of the multitude of factors that influence learning outcomes, leading to the development of more effective, evidence-based teaching methods and tools.
“By design, SafeInsights stringently protects student privacy through an innovative architecture that makes large-scale information about learning available for research without revealing that protected information to researchers,” said J.P. Slavinsky, executive director of SafeInsights. Instead, researchers will develop study plans and analysis software to operate within digital learning platforms. This software will access learning information through secure data enclaves to produce aggregate insights about learning. The aggre -
“Just as progress in health care research sparked stunning advances in personalized medicine, we need similar precision in education to support all students, particularly those from underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds.” —
Richard Baraniuk
gate knowledge will undergo careful human oversight to check that it contains no identifiable student information before being returned to researchers, ensuring that all data remains secure within the original platforms and educational institutions, Slavinsky said.
OpenStax has become the world’s largest publisher of free, open education resources, and with SafeInsights, it’s poised to become the most important resource available to
researchers nationwide working to improve learning outcomes for each and every student in the classroom.
“SafeInsights represents a pivotal moment for Rice University and a testament to our nation’s commitment to educational research,” said Rice President Reginald DesRoches. “It will accelerate student learning through studies that result in more innovative, evidence-based tools and practices.”
Prior awards from the NSF, Institute of Education Sciences (R305N210064), individuals and philanthropic funders like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, Walton Family Foundation, Valhalla Foundation and William & Flora Hewlett Foundation equipped OpenStax with the experience and capacity to lead this major R&D effort. Looking ahead, SafeInsights will collaborate with funder networks to leverage this national R&D infrastructure and grow its reach. To learn more about SafeInsights and support for its future work, visit safeinsights.org.
Richard Baraniuk, SafeInsights leader, OpenStax director and Rice professor
Strength in Numbers
The Ken Kennedy Institute’s annual AI in Health Conference continues its mission of connecting researchers, engineers, clinicians and entrepreneurs at the forefront of the AI revolution
BY KELLY PETERS
In September 2024, the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology passed nine bipartisan bills aimed at ensuring American leadership in artificial intelligence (AI). The same month, Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute hosted its third annual AI in Health Conference. It’s an increasingly important conference for both researchers and practitioners who are well aware of the need for continued regulatory guidance on its deployment in health care, where rapidly evolving applications intersect with concerns in transparency and reliability.
Over 470 participants convened in Houston for three days of invited speaker sessions, technical talks and workshops intended to reinforce the transformative potential of
AI and underscore the importance of responsible AI implementations in health care to impact providers and patients at the global scale.
“AI has the potential to revolutionize health in ways we could scarcely imagine a decade ago, from improving diagnostic accuracy and treatment personalization to optimizing hospital operations and supporting public health initiatives such as disease surveillance and prevention,” said Lydia Kavraki, the the Kenneth and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computing and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute.
Rice President Reginald DesRoches noted the conference’s importance as an event that “provides an opportunity not only to discuss and celebrate the remarkable strides made but also to pose the questions that AI researchers and AI innovators will need to address for the next wave of breakthroughs — and the waves beyond — that will lead us toward a healthier, more equitable future for all.”
Since its launch in 2022, the AI in Health Conference has become a vibrant forum for engaging experts in academia, medicine and industry. The conference takes place at the Bioscience Research Collaborative in Houston — a facility that bridges the Rice campus with the world’s largest medical center to foster interdisciplinary and interinstitutional innovation. This year, the conference program committee included 23 members from
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the Texas Medical Center (TMC) and local industry and was chaired by Ben Hu, associate professor of computer science at Rice.
Many TMC institutions were represented in the program lineup, along with presenters from the National Institutes of Health “All of Us” Research Program, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, Yale University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University and the University of Texas at Austin, among many others. The program featured 14 invited speaker sessions, two panels, 17 lightning talks and over 70 poster presenters.
The conference explored a variety of AI systems, applications and foundational models in neuroscience and neurotechnology, imaging and diagnostics, patient interaction and behavioral health, and bioinformatics and genetic analysis. Sessions also highlighted ethical considerations and challenges of implementation such as data privacy, model bias and error detection.
“It is essential that we thoughtfully navigate these complexities,” said Kavraki. “This conference provides a platform for leading minds to engage in shaping the future of AI in health.”
The Ken Kennedy Institute also collaborated with the Institute for Data Science in Oncology at MD Anderson, NVIDIA,
Mark III Systems and Rice’s Medical Humanities Research Institute to provide opportunities for extended learning, offering specialized workshops that examined implications of AI on health equity and an understanding of computational tools used for disease prediction, diagnosis and treatment.
As research amplifies translational AI innovation in health, it becomes increasingly vital to make space for ongoing dialogue and critical evaluation of technology — and the policy that governs it — to improve real-world health outcomes. By harnessing collective expertise at forums like Rice’s AI in Health Conference, researchers and practitioners can collaborate to pave the way to transform health care and patient outcomes through responsible innovation.
The next AI in Health Conference is scheduled to take place in Houston Sept. 22–25, 2025.
TECH TALKS
Included among the many events at the Ken Kennedy Institute’s AI in Health Conference were technical talks on topics grouped into four main categories: AI in bioinformatics and genetic analysis, AI in patient interaction and behavioral health, AI in imaging and diagnostics, and AI systems and ethical considerations. Below, a sampling of talks from each category highlights the breadth of coverage at the conference:
Disparity in Prediction of Bacterial Vaginosis Using Machine Learning
Rapid CD4 + T Cell Quantification Using an AI-Enabled Microfluidic Platform
Who Communicates Better?
A Study on Clinician and AIGenerated Responses to Frequently Asked Patient Questions
Pilot Study on Clinician-AI Collaboration in Diagnosing Depression From Speech
Predicting Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor Pneumonitis in Lung Cancer Patients Using Deep Learning and Baseline CT Scans
Scan this QR code to watch videos from the AI in Health Conference
A Fully Automated Deep Learning-Based Post-Operative Brain Tumor Segmentation
When Accuracy Becomes Passé: AI Ethics for the Coming Era of Exceptional AI
Mitigating Hallucinations in AI-Driven Medical Diagnosis: A Patient-Centric, Multimodal Framework With DomainSpecific Expertise
PREDICTING THE FUTURE
Don’t Get Bent Out of Shape
Rice researchers teaching AI about frustration discover a new way to predict how proteins change their shape
BY MARCY DE LUNA
Scientists have found a new way to predict how proteins change their shape when they function, which is important for understanding how they work in living systems. While recent artificial intelligence (AI) technology has made it possible to predict what proteins look like in their resting state, figuring out how they move is still challenging.
In a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Rice professor Peter Wolynes and his colleagues in China combined information about protein energy landscapes with deep-learning techniques to predict these movements.
Their method improves AlphaFold2 (AF2), a tool that predicts static protein structures by teaching it to focus on “energetic frustration.” Proteins have evolved to minimize energetic conflicts between their parts, so they can be funneled toward their static structure. Where conflicts persist, there is said to be frustration.
“Starting from predicted static
ground-state structures, the new method generates alternative structures and pathways for protein motions by first finding and then progressively enhancing the energetic frustration features,” said Wolynes, the D.R. Bullard-Welch Foundation Professor of Science.
The researchers tested their method on adenylate kinase and found that its predicted movements matched experimental data. They also successfully predicted the functional movements of other proteins.
“Predicting the structures and motions of proteins is integral to understanding their functions and designing new drugs,” Wolynes said.
The study also examined how AF2 works, showing that combining physical knowledge of the energy landscape with AI not only helps predict how proteins move but also explains why the AI overpredicts structural integrity, leading only to the most stable structures.
The energy landscape theory is a key part of this method, and suggests that while evolution has sculpted the protein’s energy landscape where they can fold into their optimal structures, deviations from a perfectly funneled landscape that other -
wise guides the folding—called local frustration—are essential for protein functional movements.
By pinpointing these frustrated regions, the researchers taught the AI to ignore those regions in guiding its predictions.
Using a frustration analysis tool, researchers identified frustrated and therefore flexible regions in proteins. Then, by manipulating the evolutionary information in the aligned protein family sequences, the researchers taught the AI to recognize these frustrated regions, enabling accurate predictions of alternative structures and pathways between them, said Wolynes.
“Integrating AI with biophysical insights will significantly impact future practical applications, including drug design, enzyme engineering and understanding disease mechanisms,” Wolynes said.
Other authors include Xingyue Guana, Wei Wanga, and Wenfei Lia at Nanjing University; Qian-Yuan Tang at Hong Kong Baptist University; Weitong Ren in the Wenzhou Key Laboratory of Biophysics at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences; and Mingchen Chen at the Changping Laboratory in Beijing.
Generative AI Could Break the Internet
The first peer-reviewed work on AI autophagy demonstrates the negative consequences of training AI systems on synthetic data
BY SILVIA CERNEA CLARK
Training generative artificial intelligence (AI) models requires not only a tremendous amount of computing power and energy — it also calls for a constant and vast amount of data. So much data, in fact, that developers are already running up against supply limitations.
Enter synthetic data — or, perhaps not.
Using synthetic data to train future generations of AI models may seem like an alluring option to Big Tech at first. AI-synthesized data is cheaper than its real-world counterpart and is virtually limitless in terms of supply. It poses fewer privacy risks. And in some cases, it may even improve AI performance.
In most cases, however, what synthetic data actually does is drive the AI mad.
“The problems arise when this
synthetic data training is, inevitably, repeated, forming a kind of a feedback loop — what we call an autophagous or ‘self-consuming’ loop,” said Richard Baraniuk, Rice’s C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Baraniuk and his team with the Digital Signal Processing group at Rice has found that a diet of synthetic data can have significant negative impacts on generative AI models’ future iterations.
“Our group has worked extensively on such feedback loops, and the bad news is that even after a few generations of such training, the new models can become irreparably corrupted,” Baraniuk said. “This has been termed ‘model collapse’ by some — most recently by colleagues in the field in the context of large language models (LLMs). We, however, find the term ‘Model Autophagy Disorder’ (MAD) more apt, by analogy to mad cow disease.”
Mad cow disease is a fatal neurodegenerative illness that affects cows; its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is also fatal and caused by consuming infected meat. A major outbreak in the 1980s and 1990s brought attention to the fact that mad cow disease proliferated as a result of the practice of feeding cows the processed leftovers of their slaughtered peers — hence the term “autophagy,” from the Greek auto-, which means “self,” and phagy — “to eat.”
“We captured our findings on MADness in a paper presented in May at the International Conference on Learning Representations,” Baraniuk said.
The study, titled “Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MAD,” is the first peer-reviewed work on AI autophagy and focuses on generative image models like the popular DALL-E 3, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Department of Energy.
“We chose to work on visual AI models to better highlight the drawbacks of autophagous training, but the same mad cow corruption issues occur with LLMs, as other groups have pointed out,” Baraniuk said.
Baraniuk and his team studied three variations of self-consuming training loops designed to provide a realistic representation of how real and synthetic data are combined into training datasets for generative models:
Fully synthetic loop: Successive generations of a generative model were fed a fully synthetic data diet sampled from prior generations’ output.
Synthetic augmentation loop: The training dataset for each generation of the model included a combination of synthetic data sampled from prior generations and a fixed set of real training data.
Fresh data loop: Each generation of the model was trained on a mix of synthetic data from prior generations and a fresh set of real training data.
Progressive iterations of the loops
“Without enough fresh real data, future generative models are doomed to MADness.” — Richard Baraniuk
revealed that, over time and in the absence of sufficient fresh real data, the models would generate increasingly warped outputs lacking either quality, diversity or both. In other words, the fresher the data, the healthier the AI.
Side-by-side comparisons of image datasets resulting from successive generations of a model paint an eerie picture of potential AI futures. Datasets consisting of human faces become increasingly streaked with gridlike scars — what the authors call “generative artifacts” — or look more and more like the same person. Datasets consisting of numbers morph into indecipherable scribbles.
“Our theoretical and empirical analyses have enabled us to extrapolate what might happen as genera-
tive models become ubiquitous and train future models in self-consuming loops,” Baraniuk said. “Some ramifications are clear: Without enough fresh real data, future generative models are doomed to MADness.”
To make these simulations even more realistic, the researchers introduced a sampling bias parameter to account for “cherry-picking” — the tendency of users to favor data quality over diversity, i.e., to trade off variety in the types of images and texts in a dataset for images or texts that look or sound good.
The incentive for cherry-picking is that data quality is preserved over a greater number of model iterations, but this comes at the expense of an even steeper decline in diversity.
“One doomsday scenario is that if left uncontrolled for many generations, MAD could poison the data quality and diversity of the entire internet,” Baraniuk said. “Short of this, it seems inevitable that as-to-nowunseen unintended consequences will arise from AI autophagy even in the near term.”
In addition to Baraniuk, study authors include Rice Ph.D. students Sina Alemohammad, Josue CascoRodriguez, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun and Hossein Babaei; Rice Ph.D. alumnus Lorenzo Luzi; Rice Ph.D. alumnus and current Stanford postdoctoral student Daniel LeJeune; and Simons Postdoctoral Fellow Ali Siahkoohi.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) models trained on synthetic data generate outputs that are progressively marred by artifacts. In this example, the researchers trained a succession of StyleGAN-2 generative models using fully synthetic data. Each of the five image columns displays a couple of examples generated by the first, third, fifth, seventh and ninth generation model, respectively. With each iteration of the loop, the cross-hatched artifacts become progressively amplified.
SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
Eyes on the Road
With OpenSafe Fusion, Rice engineers have developed an AI system for real-time sensing of flooded roads
BY ANDREW BELL
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that over 50% of all flood-related drownings occur when a vehicle is driven into hazardous floodwater, and such roadway-related incidents remain a leading cause of flood fatalities nationwide. Yet limited flood-reporting tools have made it difficult to evaluate road conditions in real time.
Existing tools — traffic cameras, water-level sensors and even social media data — can provide observations of flooding, but they are often not primarily designed for sensing flood conditions on roads and do not work in conjunction. A network of sensors could improve situational flood level awareness; however, they are expensive to operate at scale.
Engineers at Rice have developed a possible solution to this problem: an automated data fusion framework called OpenSafe Fusion. Short for Open Source Situational Awareness Framework for Mobil-
ity Using Data Fusion, OpenSafe Fusion leverages existing individual reporting mechanisms and public data sources to sense quickly evolving road conditions during urban flooding events, which are becoming increasingly frequent.
Jamie Padgett, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor in Engineering and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, together with Pranavesh Panakkal, a postdoctoral researcher in civil and environmental engineering, analyzed data from nine sources in Houston before developing the comprehensive framework for the automated data system in their research study titled “More eyes on the road: Sensing flooded roads by fusing real-time observations from public data sources,” published in the journal Reliability Engineering & System Safety.
“While sources directly observing flooded roads are limited, urban centers are replete with sources directly or indirectly observing flooding or road conditions,” Padgett said.
Padgett and Panakkal hypothesized that an automated system combining insights from these real-time sources could potentially revolutionize flood situational awareness without significant investment in new sensors.
“This study offers communities a pathway to equitably sense and respond to urban stressors such as flooding using existing data sources,” Padgett said. “It builds off of and is inspired by our longtime collaboration with colleagues in the
“Considering ... climate-exacerbated weather events, the frequency and intensity of floods could increase in the future, so we need a solution to better respond to flood events and their impacts on infrastructure.”— Jamie Padgett
SSPEED Center at Rice, who have been developing state-of-the-art flood alert systems. Here we focus on flood impacts on transportation infrastructure and understanding how other data sources can complement information from flood models, especially with respect to impact on roadways and safe mobility.”
The framework uses data from sources like traffic alerts, cameras and even traffic speed, and leverages machine learning and data fusion to predict whether a road is flooded or not.
The value of such data sources was evident during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, as many people in Houston — including emergency responders — resorted to manually examining data sources to infer probable road conditions to overcome the lack of reliable real-time road condition data.
To test the OpenSafe Fusion process, the researchers used historical flooding data observed during Harvey to recreate the scenario in
the framework, consisting of around 62,000 roads in the Houston region.
“The model was able to observe around 37,000 road links, which is around 60% of the network that we considered, and that is a significant improvement,” Panakkal said.
Other data sources that could be used in the framework include: water-level sensors, citizen portals, crowdsourcing, social media, flood models and a factor the study refers to as “human-in-the-loop.”
This last source is especially important, Panakkal said, as the human element of OpenSafe Fusion allows for responsible artificial intelligence (AI) usage.
“We do not want a system that is fully automated and without any human control,” Panakkal said. “The model may make a wrong prediction, which could endanger community members who decide to risk travel based on this prediction. So we designed safeguards based on responsible AI usage. This need for responsible AI in such tools is still
an open area for further work, and we hope to dig deeper as we test our methods in the future.”
The study also considered flooding impacts on community access to critical facilities such as hospitals and dialysis centers during a natural disaster.
“This gives community members or emergency responders an understanding of which roads are flooded and how to safely navigate to a location,” Panakkal said.
Padgett said the researchers hope to pursue extensive testing, validation and exploration of how communities with different scales and resource availability could use this framework to better sense road conditions during a flood.
“Considering climate change impacts and climate-exacerbated weather events, the frequency and intensity of floods could increase in the future, so we need a solution to better respond to flood events and their impacts on infrastructure,” Padgett said.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEFF FITLOW
Jamie Padgett
Pranavesh Panakkal
TRANSFER LEARNING
At the Intersection of AI and Ancient Antelope Teeth
AI technology accurately identified prehistoric African animals more than 90% of the time
BY AMY MCCAIG
The evolution of ecosystems in Africa is of major relevance to understand what shaped our own evolution as humans, right down to our teeth — teeth that can tell anthropologists what our prehistoric ancestors on the savanna ate and why.
“Our prehistoric ancestors were highly dependent on resources available in different habitats of African savanna ecosystems,” said Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, visiting professor of anthropology at Rice. “Using fossil mammals — highly specialized in their adaptations to different habitats — to reconstruct these landscapes has been the most used
method to interpret their ecology.”
But identifying those mammals by their teeth has not always been straightforward, and was subjected to a high degree of expert knowledge and bias — until recently.
Now, a new Rice study of the remains of prehistoric and modern African antelopes has demonstrated that artificial intelligence (AI) technology accurately identified animals more than 90% of the time compared to humans, who had much lower accuracy rates.
Identifying these animals and their habits helps paint a broader picture of ancient ecosystems. And thanks to
this technology, whose application to paleobiology is pioneered in Domínguez-Rodrigo’s lab, archaeologists have been able to analyze information far more quickly and accurately.
“This will enable us to understand past environments but also understand better modern landscapes too,” said Domínguez-Rodrigo, who is also co-director of Madrid’s Institute of Evolution in Africa and professor of prehistory at the University of Alcalá in Spain.
The study, “African bovid tribe classification using transfer learning and computer vision,” appeared in a recent edition of Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, co-authored by Juliet Brophy, Gregory Mathews, Marcos Pizarro-Monzo and Enrique Baquedano. It outlines the groundbreaking AI technology used to analyze prehistoric livestock remains.
“These AI methods are a revolution for the studies of paleobiology and human evolution in particular,” Domínguez-Rodrigo said. “We are working already on doing things that archaeologists have been unable to do, from screening landscapes as they were millions of years ago and discovering new sites, to identifying the specific carnivore types that were interacting with humans, to a better understanding of how fossils were modified by all of them.”
This all sheds light, said Domínguez-Rodrigo, on how the ecology of the time affected the evolution of mammals, including humans, who over the past 2 million years have become highly interdependent.
“The consequences to reconstruct how evolution shaped humans cannot be overstated,” he said.
Composite images of teeth from five different antelope tribes analyzed and identified by artificial intelligence
Responsible AI
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
Grok Stars
New computer science research from Imtiaz Humayun and his team has completely changed the way we understand how neural networks learn
BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT
In the seminal 1961 science fiction novel “Stranger in a Strange Land,” Robert Heinlein coined a word with a meaning that’s expanded far beyond anything Heinlein could have imagined at the time: “grok,” or to understand a thing so innately, so intuitively, that you essentially merge with that thing to create an entirely new form greater than the sum of its parts.
Grokking made the leap from science fiction to computer science culture in the early 1980s, when it began to be employed to describe a feeling of being so deeply immersed in coding that programmers had essentially entered a new worldview,
transforming their entire understanding of programming.
And now, a discovery at Rice has led to a similarly radical shift in the way we understand neural networks and the way they are also able to grok. This research suggests neural networks — machine learning models that use a network of interconnected nodes to process data in a way that mimics the human brain — can learn
and generalize better than previously thought. It’s a phenomenon with potential to drastically improve artificial intelligence (AI) training efficiency by reducing the long hours and massive amounts of computing power necessary to train them.
“When we got those grokking results showing that this is so widespread, it was hard for us to believe,” said Rice Ph.D. student Imtiaz
PHOTOGRAPH
Imtiaz Humayun
“We quadruple-checked everything because it completely changes the way we understand how neural networks learn.”— Imtiaz Humayun
Humayun, who co-authored the 2024 paper “Deep Networks Always Grok and Here Is Why” with Rice Ph.D. alumnus Randall Balestriero and Rice professor Richard Baraniuk. “We quadruple-checked everything because it completely changes the way we understand how neural networks learn.”
Their research provided the first evidence that grokking, or delayed generalization, in a deep neural network (DNN) occurs long after achieving a near-zero training error. Previous studies reported the occurrence of grokking in specific controlled settings, such as DNNs initialized with large-norm parameters or transformers trained on algorithmic datasets, but Rice researchers demonstrated that grokking is actually much more widespread.
This discovery runs counter to previous beliefs that if you overtrain a neural network, it will overfit, or get worse at a task across time. However, Humayun, who is also a student researcher for Google, and his team found that you simply need to give the AI more time to learn. And at a certain point, a phase shift happens. The neural network suddenly groks. Even more fascinating is the fact that this happens across all neural networks: large language models, facial recognition models — Humayun and his team tested everything they could.
“And we saw that for all the combinations we tried, neural networks — when you keep on training them — change their mind, and they start grokking and generalizing instead of just overfitting,” he said. “The way it learns internally undergoes a phase change during training, for
some reason that we are yet to completely understand, but that ends up giving us a much more robust network toward the end.”
This is not the first dramatic discovery Humayun has made alongside Baraniuk, the C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, professor of computer science and director of OpenStax. Last year, Humayun was also co-author of a paper with Baraniuk; Rice Ph.D. students Sina Alemohammad, Josue Casco-Rodriguez and Hossein Babaei; Rice Ph.D. alumnus Lorenzo Luzi; Rice Ph.D. alumnus and current Stanford postdoctoral student Daniel LeJeune; and Simons Postdoctoral Fellow Ali Siahkoohi that demonstrated the previously unimagined negative consequences of training AI systems on synthetic data — work that quickly made headlines across the world (See “Generative AI Could Break the Internet,” Page 88).
“I’ve learned so much from Rich B,” said Humayun, referring to Baraniuk with the affectionate nickname used by all of Baraniuk’s students. “He does what he calls wish-driven research, asking us to start from somewhere and look for bizarre connections. It’s harder to go out of the box rather than starting somewhere far outside of the box.”
During his undergraduate years in Bangladesh, Humayun became fascinated with AI after dabbling in it for robotics competitions. He realized his fellow students needed Bengali datasets if they wanted to train AIs in their native language, so Humayun established a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating AI datasets in Bengali and open sourc -
ing them through competitions. Instead of just a few students working on Bengali technologies, soon there were over 10,000, all competing for bigger and better prizes. Last year, Humayun hosted a competition on Kaggle with a $53,000 prize, supported by Google, which resulted in the current state-of-the-art Bengali speech recognition AI model.
“That’s one thing that drew me to Rice,” said Humayun. “Rich B has OpenStax, this nonprofit venture that’s changing the world and has a really high impact — and I have my nonprofit — plus his research was something that I was really interested in, and I was like, ‘That’s where I want to be.’” (See “Evidenced-Based Education,” Page 80)
Now in his sixth year at Rice, Humayun is eager to see what else he can accomplish alongside Baraniuk before he graduates. He wants to understand the phase change that enables neural networks to grok so researchers can make it happen earlier — “so we don’t need to have megatons of carbon emissions before we end up grokking,” Humayun said. He’s also been excited to see his Ph.D. research, which was once largely theoretical, become more practical by the day. And he’s enthusiastic about witnessing a Nobel Prize in physics finally awarded to AI researchers (John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their fundamental discoveries in machine learning).
“This is such a positive thing, because the world will be using exponentially more AI soon,” Humayun said. “It’s inevitable. And through these Nobel Prizes, it’s just being made explicit how much AI is meaningful to humanity in general.”
What’s Next
ON THE RECORD
Public Service
The new White House Scientists Archive at Rice documents the intersection of science and policy across 35 years of American presidents and their science advisers
BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT
For as long as there has been a President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) — which, in its current incarnation, has existed since it was chartered by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 — the papers, memoranda and other crucial documents that trace these scientists and their work at the White House has been almost entirely inaccessible by researchers, let alone the general public.
Now, however, the White House Scientists Archive has been established at Rice thanks to years of tireless work by Baker Institute for Public Policy scholar Kenneth Evans;
Kirstin Matthews, the director of the Baker Institute’s Science and Technology Policy Program and the Center for Health and Biosciences’ Biomedical Research Program; and Neal Lane, former science adviser to the president during the Clinton administration and longtime Rice faculty member.
A fully digital repository of those important documents, the archive also contains hours of oral histories with PCAST members from 1990 to the present day, contextualizing the documents as well as providing an important jumping-off point for researchers looking to explore the thousands of records that have been hand-collected via presidential libraries and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
“One of the things that made me immediately excited about the project when I heard about it is that I would have loved to have had something like this when I took the job as sci-
FROM FAR LEFT:
Draft PCAST meeting agenda dated September 17, 1998, annotated by President Clinton’s science adviser, Neal Lane. Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library
A memorandum from Neal Lane to President Bill Clinton with a written response from Clinton to Lane concerning gene patents. Source: William J. Clinton Presidential Library
A memorandum from John H. Gibbons, President Clinton’s first science adviser, transmitting a PCAST report on the U.S. magnetic fusion program to President Clinton. Source: William J. Clinton Presidential Library
What’s Next
ence adviser,” said Lane, the senior fellow in science and technology policy at the Baker Institute and professor emeritus of physics and astronomy, who was director of the National Science Foundation from 1993 to 1998. Lane served as Clinton’s science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) from 1998 to 2001, and quickly discovered that finding information about his predecessors’ activities could only be done on a piecemeal basis.
“Maybe somebody wrote a book or had an article in a magazine, and of course staff would help put things together — but I would have liked to have had access to real research that was done on original data and manuscripts and documents, and Dr. Evans has run all over the world tracking down documents that are as original as you can get your hands on,” Lane said. “I got really excited because there was nothing in existence where you could easily find what you might need in order to get a synthesis of how science policy has changed over time or to encourage scholars to do research on it.”
Presidents do a lot of things, as Lane put it. Yes, they make decisions about science and technology policy, but when it comes to collections of materials, you’re much more likely to find archives on national security or economic affairs. That’s where Evans came in.
Evans has spent the last five years trekking to presidential libraries and federal archives, filed countless FOIA requests and written numerous grants to support the work of gathering every bit of information he could find about the PCAST and its activi-
ties over the last 35 years.
“PCAST works at the nexus between science and policy, helping presidents understand why science matters and how science can inform decisions in the White House,” said Evans, a Baker Institute scholar in science and technology policy who now serves as the program manager and co-founder of the White House Scientist and Science Policy Dynamic Digital Archive (shortened to the White House Scientists Archive) alongside Matthews. “PCAST is unique among federal advisory committees because of its direct access to the president, the preeminence of its membership, and its broad mission to advise on all aspects of science and technology policy. PCAST offers
an interesting case study for understanding the changing authority and policy impact of scientific expertise.”
TOP: Photograph depicting John Holdren, science adviser to President Barack Obama and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), and Eric Lander, cochair of PCAST, speaking with President Obama in the outer Oval Office. Source: National Archives Catalogue
BOTTOM: Photograph depicting a meeting of PCAST in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. From left to right at the table: D. Allan Bromley, chair of PCAST; President George H.W. Bush; Bernadine Healy, vice co-chair of PCAST: and Harold T. Shapiro, vice co-chair of PCAST. Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library
TOP: Sticky notes communicating changes and transmission of the PCAST report “Science, Technology and National Security” to and from White House chief of staff John Sununu. Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library
BOTTOM: Draft of a letter from President Clinton to science adviser Neal Lane and PCAST member John Holdren concerning the establishment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. Source: William J. Clinton Presidential Library
What’s Next
The result of all those years of document-gathering is an archive that aims to provide researchers with access to primary source materials, enhancing the study of presidential science advisers and synthesizing historical data to understand the evolution and impact of science policy over time.
And although the archive itself is brand-new, Matthews said they’re already learning from the information as they accrue it, such as the discovery that early PCAST documents were clearly not written for public audiences.
“They were much more academic in their writing and language,” said Matthews. “But over time scientists have learned so much more about communicating what they’re doing for the public — it’s more engaging for a broader audience.”
Shortly after Matthews arrived at the Baker Institute as a fellow in 2003, she helped organize an event that would prove pivotal for the eventual creation of the White House Scientists Archive: a 65th birthday celebration for Lane, which was attended by many notable figures in science and policy, including nearly every science adviser for the U.S. president, past and present. Allan Bromley, Jack Gibbons, Rosina Bierbaum, Jack Marburger, John Holdren and others whose names would eventually make up the bulk of the White House Scientists Archive spoke at the event, which produced a book seeking to bridge the gap between science and society.
“I always wanted to do more and lean into Dr. Lane’s experience within OSTP, but there were just the two of us back then,” Matthews
said. “When Dr. Evans came into the program in 2016, that was one of the first things we started focusing on — understanding and really looking at how PCAST works — and the project just kept growing and growing as time progressed. But I don’t know if we would have really focused on the White House if Dr. Lane wasn’t here.”
Lane was instrumental in encouraging fellow White House scientists to contribute their personal papers and oral histories, which illuminate the reams of documents contained in the digital archive housed at Rice’s Woodson Research Center in Fondren Library.
“That’s the power of Neal Lane,” said Amanda Focke, head of special collections at the Woodson Research Center, who collaborates with Evans and a slew of Rice students to process the oral histories and other documents in order to create the digital collection. It’s an archive that will not only provide important scholarly opportunities for students and researchers alike for years to come, she said; it’s one that could only have happened at a place like Rice.
“Rice has been known from day one for science and engineering,
LEFT: Photograph depicting U.S. President Clinton and Neal Lane discussing documents in the White House’s Red Room. John Podesta, White House chief of staff, stands behind Clinton to his right. Source: Neal Lane papers, Woodson Research Center
RIGHT: Note from D. Allan Bromley to President George H.W. Bush to thank him for hosting PCAST at Camp David for the council’s inaugural meeting in 1990. Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library
plus there’s a deep tradition of policy study here, and Fondren Library has the infrastructure to house that and make it accessible for the long term, so I think there are a lot of reasons why pulling it together here makes sense,” Focke said.
In the long term, the archive plans to incorporate additional oral histories, AI-assisted data management and a database for scholarly study that’s being created by Rice students as part of a Fondren Fellows program. And one of the most exciting things moving forward, Matthews said, is the fact that the archives will constantly be replenished with each new presidential administration.
“Once the PCAST turns over within an administration, that’s when we’ll try to capture things, maybe with an oral history of a couple people, pulling more detailed information from their experiences, collecting those into the archives,” said Matthews. “There will always be more to keep adding to the collection.”
As part of the Baker Institute’s spring programming for 2025, Evans and Matthews are planning an event, titled “Science and the American Presidency,” at the Baker Institute that will feature a panel of U.S. presidential science advisers, including Lane, Alondra Nelson and Kelvin Droegemeier. It will be moderated by former Rice librarian Charles Henry. The event will also spotlight materials from the White House Scientists Archive through an exhibit hosted in Doré Commons in Baker Hall that will run throughout the spring.
“We are continuing to collect people’s papers, people’s documents — stuff that’s sitting in their garage or
attics,” Evans said. “We want to raise awareness of the archive and what we hope will become a national hub for people to send all archival materials related to U.S. science and technology policy. So in addition to me traveling around the world, we hope people will donate to Woodson as part of their permanent collections next to Neal’s papers and many others.”
Lane believes the archive, which
would have once been of such use to him as a brand-new presidential adviser himself, will also serve an important purpose beyond research on science policy as it grows over time.
“Hopefully it will be helpful to the State Department and ambassadors and envoys and others within the presidential administrations,” he said. “That would be a nice service to provide.”
What’s Next
CUSTOMER
SERVICE
Research Cubed
Rice’s newest center wants to better understand customer needs for businesses and nonprofits alike
BY AVERY RUXER FRANKLIN
Customers are the primary source of cash flow for any organization, for-profit or nonprofit. Naturally, said Vikas Mittal, attention should be paid to what makes those customers want to give their money to the organization.
That’s why Rice has launched its newest center, housed within the Jones Graduate School of Business: the Center for Customer-Based Execution and Strategy (C-CUBES), led by Mittal, the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing.
“A strategy based on customer needs enables organizations to achieve their financial and nonfinancial goals by fostering higher customer value and employee engagement,” Mittal said.
To that end, C-CUBES is dedicated to researching, understanding and sharing customer-centered concepts and practices that inform strategy planning. It will serve as a hub for research scholars, business executives and nonprofit leaders to improve customer value, employee engagement and shareholder returns.
“In our mission to provide rigorous, research-backed academics and insights to our students, we are home to the best and brightest scholars,” said Rice Business Dean Peter Rodriguez. “With strong relationships across key industries such as energy, health care, education and technology, C-CUBES is uniquely positioned to leverage its research advantage for the benefit of the larger community in greater Houston and beyond.”
“The center will touch all major business disciplines — accounting, finance, operations, organizational behavior, marketing and strategy — and is the first of its kind,” said Ramamoorthy Ramesh, executive vice president for research.
“C-CUBES will amplify research focused on critical technologies such as quantitative analysis and AI,” Ramesh said.
The Jones Graduate School is nationally recognized for faculty scholarship as well as faculty members’ focus on the real-world applications of their research. The new center’s advisory board includes Rodriguez; Isabelle Perrigne, the Reginald Henry Hargrove Professor of Economics; and Chris Jones, CEO of Swagelok Southeast Texas.
The center’s research affiliates draw on the expertise at the business school and include professors Jaeyeon Chung, Dhruv Grewal, Ashwin Malshe, Alessandro Piazza, Sonam Singh and Michael Tsiros. Through its research, the center’s ultimate goal is to reimagine strategy planning and execution in organizations by examining, informing and improving legacy methods.
FOREIGN
POLICY
Going Global
From France to India, Rice’s newest international hubs provide bases for strategic partnerships with the world’s brightest minds
BY JULIANA LIGHTSEY
’26
“Personalized scale for global impact” is the tagline of Rice’s recently announced 10-year strategic plan, Momentous. The university is already well on its way to making that global impact a reality through initiatives in Paris, France, and Bengaluru, India.
“I love the strategic plan’s tagline,”
said Caroline Levander, Rice’s vice president for global. “We’ve committed to being the world’s premier research and teaching university, and that means we’ve got to make our presence felt in the world with this very distinctive identity. That’s my job.”
It’s a demanding mandate, but Rice is already off to a strong start.
One of the ways Rice aims to situate itself on the international stage is through its presence in two important countries: France and India. Launched in 2022, the Rice Global Paris Center is its first international campus and serves as a European hub — a location crucial to the longterm goals of the university.
“Paris is the only city in the world that is home to all of its countries’ top 100 universities,” Levander said.
The Paris Center offers a range of opportunities for Rice researchers and faculty to engage with an
international network of academics, enabling collaborations like the partnership with Université Paris Sciences et Lettres for research and innovation, launched in May 2024. The Paris Center also offers a home for high-profile conferences, of which it has already hosted 29 since 2023.
One such event, the Art and Science of Total Synthesis of Natural and Designed Molecules for Biology and Medicine symposium, took place at the Paris Center in October 2024. The event attracted many of the world’s leading organic chemists and included lectures from Nobel laureates alongside Rice’s own K.C. Nicolaou, professor of chemistry and pioneer in the field of total synthesis.
“That’s the company we want to keep, and that’s important as Nobel Prize communities think about where the talent is — they remember Rice, they remember Nicolaou,” Levander said. “It’s about being in
What’s Next
the right place for our faculty.”
Beyond the opportunities provided for faculty at the Paris Center, a primary objective of the Paris campus is offering undergraduates an international experience.
“Paris has already doubled the number of our students studying abroad, with a goal for 2025 of yet another twofold increase,” Levander said. “Rice students will be working in a world where they are going to have to travel internationally, so we must provide them with international experience to help them succeed.”
Paris is an ideal place for students to get that chance through summer courses offered by the center, tucked into the historic Marais district on the right bank of the Seine.
“Of the students who went to Paris this past summer, over 75% had never been out of the U.S. before,” Levander said. “Paris is a great place to start; it’s user-friendly and beautiful, so their first international experience is very positive.”
Rice Global has also set its sights on India. In 2019, Rice and the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur partnered on a center for research, and in 2023, Rice announced its strategic collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru.
Last fall saw the official launch of Rice Global India, a strategic initiative committed to advancing its contributions to India’s rapidly growing education and technology sectors. The university hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Nov. 18, 2024, at its new hub in Bengaluru, India’s third-largest city and center of the country’s high-tech industry. This milestone creates the same possibilities as the Rice Paris cam -
pus for collaborations with top-tier research and academic institutions in the region.
“Paris, for us, is about academic reputation-building and student experience,” said Levander. “India is about a wildly vibrant new market that’s very eager for top-quality education and research partnerships.”
There aren’t currently any top 100 universities in India. Yet, Levander noted, there is a deep desire for premier educational opportunities.
“It’s a different ecosystem, but there’s a huge number of Indians of student age who need top quality education and aren’t able to find it in India, because the population growth has outstripped the educa -
tional infrastructure,” she said. Bengaluru shares similarities with Rice and Houston, which made it a strong candidate for a partnership. One of Rice’s great strengths has historically been its engineering and other STEM programs, Levander said, and the new Virani Undergraduate School of Business launched at Rice in October 2024 signals a significant investment in business education. India, too, is very focused on STEM, engineering and business.
“We selected Bengaluru because it’s so aligned with Houston: Chevron is opening up a headquarters in Bengaluru, and a lot of Houston businesses are setting up shop there,” Levander said. “It’s a way to
Rice Global Paris
“Paris, for us, is about academic reputation-building and student experience. India is about a wildly vibrant market that’s very eager for top-quality education, and that has compelling opportunities for research innovation and entrepreneurial engagement.”
— Caroline Levander
extend what we’re doing here, in an environment where we can be even more entrepreneurial.”
India is a budding market for entrepreneurship — a priority for Rice, especially when it comes to developing commercial products from faculty research.
“India has an appetite for startups,” Levander said. “Our faculty researchers are excited because of the speed and scale at which ideas can be brought to market. India is a nation that’s moving very fast, and we want to capture that speed.”
Rice’s long-term goals for their India partnerships, however, extend beyond just the city of Bengaluru.
“When we call the program Rice Global India, we’re referencing the entire nation,” Levander said. “Although we’re based in Bengaluru, we will have deep and meaningful engagement in Kolkata, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad — it’s
really a network.”
Rice hopes this will also boost recognition among prospective students across India.
“We’re very focused on opportunities to create student pipelines in India, where there’s a massive and growing student population, so we see India as a means to diversify our student body,” Levander said.
Although the university’s global initiatives in India and Paris differ in execution, Levander said each aligns with the goal of Rice Global: ensuring that Rice’s reputation for academic excellence reaches beyond the U.S.
“When I travel around the world and talk about Rice, people say, ‘Wow, this is a breath of fresh air,’ particularly the research priorities of our strategic plan,” Levander said. “Those ideas are what all of these countries have prioritized. It’s a great story, and we just have to get that story out there.”
RICE GLOBAL PARIS
BY THE NUMBERS
680 conference participants from across the U.S., Europe and Asia in 2024
10 summer and spring break programs at the Rice Global Paris Center in 2024 for
188 students, 75% of whom received financial assistance
29 conferences and workshops in 2023 and 2024
16 conferences and workshops already planned for 2025
6 additional events organized by the Rice Global Paris Center in summer 2024, including two Olympics receptions
Rice Global India
What’s Next
MOON SHOTS
Out of This World
Rice’s rich history of collaboration with the U.S. space program continues to this day
BY MARCY DE LUNA
Solar Activity and Space Exploration
David Alexander, professor of physics and astronomy, director of the RSI and executive committee member of the Texas Aerospace Research and Space Economy Consortium, specializes in solar physics and exoplanetary science.
a half-century of experience in space plasma physics. Reiff is a leading expert on space weather, a phenomenon shaped by the sun’s activity that includes auroras, solar flares and cosmic rays.
Home to the Rice Space Institute (RSI), Rice has been a key partner in space exploration since the founding of NASA in 1958. Its rich legacy of collaboration with the U.S. space program also includes such historic milestones as former President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 speech at Rice Stadium, which set the nation’s course toward becoming a leader in space exploration.
Ahead of the upcoming lunar and Martian missions, Rice’s faculty have already been offering their expertise in solar physics, space weather, astronaut training, Mars exploration, space robotics and much more.
Alexander’s research extends across the broader landscape of space exploration, including discoveries made from the International Space Station (ISS) as well as the potential for future developments at Houston Spaceport, an urban commercial spaceport, and the Texas Space Commission, which promotes innovation across the state’s civil, commercial and military aerospace domains.
“Every day, space exploration and discovery are providing new technologies, capabilities and knowledge that expand our knowledge of the universe and help pave our next steps into space,” Alexander said.
Space Travel and Space Weather
Patricia Reiff, professor of physics and astronomy and associate director of outreach programs at the RSI, has more than
With the sun reaching the solar maximum period, intense solar flares and radiation storms can impact missions in space. Reiff emphasizes the importance of predicting space weather to ensure astronaut safety.
“This year, we’ve even seen rare and beautiful auroras in Texas,” Reiff said. “We provide shortterm but highly accurate predictions of space weather.”
Mars Surface and Rover Operations
Kirsten Siebach, assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences, is a key member of the Mars Perseverance rover team, whose mission is to explore Jezero Crater on Mars in search of signs of ancient life and to collect samples that may contain evidence of microbial life. Siebach studies Mars’ water history and surface activity, providing critical insights into how Mars can inform our understanding of Earth.
“The geology and surface of Mars offer clues to its past and offer us a new perspective on the history and future of our planet,” Siebach said. “Missions like the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover and future Mars Sample Return are invaluable for planetary science.”
Space Robotics and Autonomy
Lydia Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, is a pioneer in robotic autonomy, including space robotics. Her work includes developing motion-planning systems for NASA’s humanoid robot, Robonaut 2, which was used aboard the ISS in 2011 as the first humanoid robot in space.
“Robots will play a crucial role in space missions, from maintaining spacecraft to exploring distant planets where humans cannot safely go,” Kavraki said.
AI in Space Exploration
Sanjoy Paul, executive director of Rice Nexus (see “Brain Trust,” Page 34) and director of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Houston Institute, focuses on the role of AI in space missions — including its role in enabling more efficient de-
cision-making and enhancing robotic operations. His research explores how AI can monitor the health of astronauts and help power the ISS; the use of cybersecurity in in-space computing or edge data centers in space; and the analysis of data collected on the moon and Mars.
AI has the potential to revolutionize the space industry by improving the design, operation and maintenance of spacecraft, space stations and rovers, according to Paul. “AI can
also advance space exploration, improve astronaut health and create innovative applications in agriculture and space medicine,” he said.
Astronaut Health and Performance
John DeWitt, director of applied sports science, spent over 20 years at NASA’s Johnson Space Center focusing on astronaut health. His work includes developing strategies to prevent muscle and
bone loss in space, which is critical for long-term missions like those to Mars. DeWitt’s expertise spans astronaut health before, during and after space missions.
“I’ve spent more than two decades working on astronaut health, conducting experiments on the ISS and in parabolic flights to understand better how the body adapts in space,” DeWitt said.
Astronaut Teamwork and Training
Eduardo Salas, the Allyn R. and Gladys M. Cline Professor of Psychological Sciences, is an expert in teamwork dynamics, including how astronauts can optimize performance in the extreme conditions of long-duration space missions such as those to Mars.
“Successful space exploration depends on well-functioning teams that can overcome the unprecedented challenges of long-duration space travel,” Salas said.
Astronaut Jim Newman ’84, one of 16 Rice faculty and alumni to serve as an astronaut or NASA administrator, pictured aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1993
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Gold Standard
Rice celebrated a milestone in its scientific history in December 2024 by displaying the Nobel Prize medals of late Rice chemistry professors Robert F. Curl ’54 and Richard Smalley. Curl’s Nobel medal will soon have a permanent home at Rice, where it will serve as a lasting symbol of the transformative work conducted on campus and the university’s commitment to advancing discovery.
