SCIENCE FICTION TO SCIENCE FACT
SPRING 2021
IM AG W M A D R
INED ORLDS E E AL
AN AUTHOR AND BIOENGINEER EXPLORES REAL-LIFE BIO MEDICAL ADVANCES FIRST IM AGINED IN THE REALM OF SCIENCE FICTION.
BY ANTHONY J. MELCHIORRI ILLUSTR ATIO N BY ISR AEL VARG A S
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A few computer chirps later and the tea materialized according to the orders of Captain Picard on the USS Enterprise. While “Star Trek” visions of advanced 3D-fabrication tools appear squarely seated in the realm of science fiction, the field of bioengineering has recently been inundated with equally science fiction-worthy claims of organ printing on demand. Bioprinting, the process of using 3D printers to fabricate constructs made with cells and materials compatible with the human body, has become a popular and increasingly useful tool in biomedical research. We might someday hear a similar command from a doctor in a busy hospital. “Organ, heart, adult male.” And minutes later, a glistening construct of live cells, architecturally sound ventricular walls and a network of blood vessels are ready for implantation. Bioprinting offers the promise of personalized medicine and custom tissues and organs for patients. We could one day theoretically design the geometry of an organ along with its composition of cells, proteins and all the other ingredients that comprise a healthy tissue. This would alleviate the demand on donor organs and tissues, while ensuring new organs are better suited to match the patient’s anatomy and even reduce immune rejection. However, bioprinting has a long way to go before reaching the clinic. While modern-era television shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” would have you
PHOTOS ON PREVIOUS SPREAD: MONSTER BY ARCHIVE PHOTOS, GETTY IMAGES; CAPTAIN PICARD BY CBS PHOTO ARCHIVE, GETTY IMAGES
ALL IT TOOK WAS FOUR W O R D S.
T E A, EARL G R E Y, H O T.”
believe we can already 3D-print blood vessels in minutes for a real human patient, we are years away from anything quite so miraculous. Researchers have made monumental advances in the field, but reality is a far cry from the depiction of bioprinting in popular culture. Bioprinting is often more arduous, slower and more difficult than the beautifully crafted scenes of artificial beings — “hosts” — being fabricated in HBO’s “Westworld.” And that’s exactly why we need bioprinting to keep showing up in science fiction. The beginning of modern science fiction literature is often
SCIENCE FICTION DIDN’T START BY EXPLORING THE
BUILDING THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE Housed in Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative building, the Biomaterials Lab would be right at home in a science fiction novel. It is a core facility home to a wide array of advanced bioprinters, imaging equipment and other instruments that enable advanced biomaterials research. These resources support the work of researchers from Rice and the Houston community in topics ranging from biomimetic models to test cancer therapies to engineered bone and cardiac tissue. Our lab is also part of a multi-institutional effort, along with the University of Maryland and the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, to lead the National Institutes of Health Center for Engineering Complex Tissues. The primary aim of this national resource center is to help grow the 3D-printing and bioprinting community. Additionally, the Biomaterials Lab supports
STARS IN SILVER SPACESHIPS; IT STARTED BY EXPLORING THE MYSTERIES
PHOTO PHOTO BYBY JEFF JEFF FITLOW FITLOW
OF THE HUMAN BODY.
traced back to a fateful bolt of lightning that struck a monster cobbled together from the tissues of the deceased. With that lightning strike, Frankenstein’s monster and the genre were born, thanks to the ingenuity of Mary Shelley. Science fiction didn’t start by exploring the stars in silver spaceships; it started by exploring the mysteries of the human body. Manipulating genes, tissues and organs is a familiar subject in science fiction. Maybe it arises in a theme park full of dinosaurs resurrected from ancient DNA fragments in Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park,” or the prospect of creating replacement living bodies — “sleeves” — to serve as a shell for a transferred human consciousness in Richard K. Morgan’s “Altered Carbon.” In addition to asking important questions — like “Just because we can, should we?” or “What does it mean to be human?” — the scientifically rooted themes threaded through these novels, movies and shows serve another important purpose. They introduce these scientific concepts to others. And with any stroke of luck, they inspire them, too.
ANTHONY J. MELCHIORRI PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE BIOMATERIALS LAB LOCATED INSIDE RICE’S BIOSCIENCE RESEARCH COLLABORATIVE BUILDING.
MARYAM ELIZONDO HOLDS A 3D-PRINTED SCAFFOLD FOR TISSUE ENGINEERING IN THE BIOMATERIALS LAB.
evident in the “info dumps” and scientific predictions present in his novels. Verne was prodigious at engaging scientists and then relaying what he learned to his audience. But the scientific community and the public shouldn’t have to rely purely on laymen novelists and script writers to propagate the myriad of innovative research topics arising from our academic laboratories. Scientists can, of course, write science fiction themselves. Microbiologist Joan Slonczewski is a
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PHOTO CREDIT TK
PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW
projects developing bio-inks — bioprinted materials containing cells — with government, university, nonprofit and commercial partners. We are working with these groups to create and commercialize methods and materials that can be used to regenerate healthy tissues for use in the laboratory and clinic. Since our official opening in 2018, we’ve also hosted a number of workshops, lectures, and demonstrations for researchers and the general public alike. When Jules Verne was writing books such as “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” he often attended academic lectures like the ones our lab hosts. His enthusiasm for scientific research is
prolific author who has, unsurprisingly, tackled topics of biology in her works, along with space travel. Space scientist David Brin not only consults with NASA, the CIA and other organizations, but also explores topics including physics and climate change in his novels. Inspired by other scientists and subjects in my field, I’ve enjoyed carrying on this tradition by weaving bioengineering into several of my book series. At the Biomaterials Lab, we strive to make bioprinting topics just as accessible to others as these science fiction greats have. We’re focused not just on the future of biofabrication science, but also the future of biofabrication scientists. The truth is that the science we do in academic labs is not nearly as inaccessible, cryptic and archaic as it is sometimes depicted in science fiction. For example, the lab hosts an annual internship and boot camp for local high school-aged students. We teach them how to use 3D printers, synthesize biomaterials, perform medical imaging techniques and use mechanical testing equipment to measure the strength of 3D-printed constructs. By the end of the week, the students assembled and tested their own 3D-printed prosthetic hands. Most impressive, they also worked in groups to design and 3D-print osteochondral scaffolds — constructs to support tissue-engineered bone and cartilage for the knee joint — with biomaterials available in the lab. In partnership with Houston’s The Health Museum, we hosted students participating in science innovation camps. These programs involved bioprinting demonstrations and panels where professional and student researchers presented various career pathways. One student raised his hand near the end of a recent career panel. He told us he had no question, but he was thankful for being introduced to the field of biomaterials and bioprinting. His parents had told him he needed to either become a doctor or a chemical engineer in oil and gas. He was ecstatic to find that there was a middle ground — where an ambitious young researcher could help improve people’s health while also exploring advanced engineering topics. He didn’t realize that bioprinting isn’t just science fiction. By making science accessible, we’re training the current and next generation of researchers. They can hit the ground running as reality unfolds to more closely resemble science fiction. And we’re going to need them.
ENGINEERING REALITY We dream of a day when we can print new cartilage to heal our aching knees or a length of bone to replace one that might be missing due to a catastrophic crash or cancer. Maybe we can even print that portal vein for Dr. Grey of “Grey’s Anatomy.” But we still face grand challenges. For example, many bioprinted successes circulating in the media are really just cobbled together cells and materials no larger than a person’s thumb. They don’t quite function or look like the tissues and organs they’re intended to replace. We need to scale up these constructs and increase their complexity to repair a long bone or create a cardiac patch to fix a heart. Vascularization is also a major roadblock. Any large bioprinted tissue needs an adequate blood supply to keep it alive. Printing resolution is still insufficient and human organs are extraordinarily complicated, comprising an intricate array of extracellular matrix and cells. To truly replicate human physiology, we may have to print at a cell-by-cell level or even smaller, manipulating proteins and other smaller molecules. This past year, researchers using the Biomaterials Lab have accomplished a variety of groundbreaking advances. They developed materials that incorporate natural ceramics that can mimic the bone microenvironment. By selectively 3D printing these ceramics, they can even trick stem cells into acting as if they are in native bone and coaxing them to mineralize a 3D-printed scaffold. Biomaterials Lab users have also developed ways to print flexible hydrogels — soft materials — while incorporating proteins and other factors that help stem cells embedded in the materials to differentiate into relevant bone cells. They have even used machine learning — another topic widespread in science fiction — to help guide the development of techniques and materials to make 3D-printed bone scaffolds more efficient and accurate. Just as we might 3D-print a bone, fiber by fiber, cell by cell, we are slowly building our way to clinical treatments in that same diligent, methodical manner. We need to recruit and train the next generation of scientists to make that happen. Facilities and resources like the Biomaterials Lab are the keys to pursue bioprinting advances and, more importantly, provide an outlet where we can share them
PHOTO CREDIT T K
with others. Places where we can show a high school student who is intrigued by bioprinting thanks to the latest sci-fi flick or TV drama what it actually looks like to be working toward a future where science fiction can finally be fact. That inspired student might someday be the engineer who finally develops the voice-activated replicator that can print a heart with only a vocal command. For now, we’ll continue to explore the future in science fiction and build toward it. Eventually, we can get there. ◆
FICTITIOUS FUTURES We asked Melchiorri to recommend works of science fiction that blend advanced technologies with human truths and shine a light on what our own future may hold. “Nexus” (2012) by Ramez Naam Naam’s real-world experience in humancomputer interfaces comes to life in a thriller packed with excitement and cool technology. The book takes modern-day brain-computer interfaces, such as cochlear implants, to their logical conclusions in a future where biotechnology and computer science merge in a way as inspirational as it is frightening. “Earth” (1990) by David Brin The main plot features adept scientists trying to stop an artificial black hole from annihilating Earth. But a backdrop equally rich in technological predictions includes the prevalence of the internet, spam, email and global warming, among other topics that are spot-on for a book written over 30 years ago. “Severance” (2018) by Ling Ma While “Severance” might be less technological, it deals with the implications of our technologyfocused economy, the fragility of international trade and a raging pandemic. Ma writes an eerily prescient story given the current global situation, even if it is a satirical spin on the plight of millennial workers in a zombielike apocalypse. “The God Organ” (2014) by Anthony J. Melchiorri The core technology that sets off a wild conspiracy featuring scientist protagonists is based off an artificial organ genetically programmed to proactively eliminate disease. In a very real way, the tech is similar to modern innovations in CRISPR and genetically engineered immune cells (CAR-T cells).
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RICE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021
1
30
38
Anthony J. Melchiorri explores real-life biomedical advances first imagined in the science fiction realm.
The new 132-acre Houston Botanic Garden springs into the city’s expanding list of green spaces.
U.S. presidential historian Douglas Brinkley contemplates America’s past to illuminate the crises of today.
Imagined Worlds Made Real
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Planted in Place
Today’s Lesson
PHOTO BY TOMMY LAVERGNE
CONTENTS FEATURES
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PHOTOS BY BRANDON MARTIN, JEFF FITLOW (2) AND MICHAEL NAGIN
RICE MAGAZINE SPRING 2021
DEPARTMENTS Sallyport
13
New Sid Rich building, climate change course, public art app, women’s athletics, Rice Coffeehouse pivots, “Hello, Hamlet!”
Wisdom
21
COVID-19 saliva test, Yousif Shamoo, engineering acetic acid, lessons from Mars, Texas winter storm, faculty books
Alumni
43
Plant lover Maria Failla ’11, Lemond Kitchen gives back, Classnotes highlights, alumni books
Last Look
50
Capturing a stroll through campus.
M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 9
FEEDBACK Our Winter 2021 issue launched online in late January and in print soon thereafter. Here is a sampling of reader responses drawn from emails, our quarterly survey and Google Analytics.
“One for the Books” A Rice student photography club captured scenes of campus life during the fall semester. “Engaging, informative, reassuring.”
“LOVED this story. What a gem of a find. Loved the art and the old school photos sprinkled throughout. Interesting, relevant, coincidental — these stories only come by every once in a while!”
“The excellent photos helped this alumna picture the students and the campus during this pandemic. Now I see what the ‘tents’ look like and the murals on them.” — Martha Rogers ’63 [via email] “I loved the full spread of photos of familiar locations that are different now — but I can see myself there.”
“My favorite article in the magazine — timely and engrossing.”
Most Read Online “Solving the Vaccine Puzzle”
Spring 2021 PUBLISHER
You Enjoyed
“Solving the Vaccine Puzzle” Former roommates and colleagues Barney Graham ’75 and Bill Gruber ’75 have been at the forefront of vaccine development.
RICE MAGAZINE
78%
of survey respondents said that Rice Magazine helps them stay connected to Rice University.
“The Changemaker” Mark Little ’08 builds community relationships to support rural economic development in North Carolina.
EDITOR
Lynn Gosnell ART DIRECTOR
Alese Pickering CREATIVE SERVICES
Jeff Cox, senior director EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Tracey Rhoades ASSISTANT EDITOR
Kyndall Krist PHOTOGRAPHERS
“Loved this story of a Rice alumnus making a local impact with real-world work that touches communities directly — the hardest work.” “I read the whole thing — beautifully written and such an inspiring, down-to-earth story! More articles like this, please!”
81%
said that they learned something new about Rice by reading the Winter 2021 issue.
If you missed any of these stories, go to magazine.rice.edu to catch up.
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Office of Public Affairs Linda Thrane, vice president
Tommy LaVergne, Jeff Fitlow PROOFREADER
Jenny West Rozelle ’00 CONTRIBUTORS
Deborah Lynn Blumberg, Darren Booth, Jade Boyd, Kendall Hebert, Jennifer Latson, Delphine Lee, David Levin, Brandon Martin, Anthony J. Melchiorri, Alex Eben Meyer, Michael Nagin, Thumy Phan, Katharine Shilcutt, Israel Vargas, Kimberly Vetter, Mike Williams INTERNS
Savannah Kuchar ’22 Mariana Nájera ’21 Rice Magazine is published four times a year and is sent to university alumni, faculty, staff, parents of undergraduates and friends of the university. © May 2021, Rice University
FROM THE EDITOR THE RICE UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Robert T. Ladd, chair; J.D. Bucky Allshouse; Donald Bowers; Bart Broadman; Nancy Packer Carlson; Mark D. Dankberg; D. Mark Durcan; Michol L. Ecklund; Douglas Lee Foshee; Wanda Gass; Terrence Gee; James T. Hackett; Tommy Huie; Patti Lipoma Kraft; Holli Ladhani; L. Charles Landgraf; Lynn A. Lednicky; Elle Moody; Brian Patterson; David Rhodes; Jeffery A. Smisek; Guillermo Treviño; James Whitehurst; Randa Duncan Williams; Huda Y. Zoghbi. ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERS
David W. Leebron, president; Reginald DesRoches, provost; Kathy Collins, vice president for Finance; Kathi Dantley Warren, vice president for Development and Alumni Relations; Klara Jelinkova, vice president for International Operations and IT; Kevin Kirby, vice president for Administration; Caroline Levander, vice president for Global and Digital Strategy; Yvonne Romero Da Silva, vice president for Enrollment; Allison Kendrick Thacker, vice president for Investments and treasurer; Linda Thrane, vice president for Public Affairs; Richard A. Zansitis, vice president and general counsel. POSTMASTER
Send address changes to: Rice University Development Services–MS 80 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 EDITORIAL OFFICES
Creative Services–MS 95 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 Phone: 713-348-6768 ricemagazine@rice.edu
IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y PA DDY MIL L S
IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS AT FIRST GLANCE, the features in our spring issue appear to be an eclectic bunch. How do you create a thematic thread out of bioprinting, botanical gardens and Joe Biden’s election? Yet, in these narratives, we can see that bold change happens when imagination is harnessed to purpose. Anthony J. Melchiorri’s opening essay reminds us that scientific inspiration is often found in imagined realms. Melchiorri, a bioengineer and the associate director of Rice’s Biomaterials Lab, is also an author of science fiction novels. This essay explores the progress of bioprinting, including examples of the lab’s groundbreaking biomedical advances, and celebrates the imaginative ideas that inspire tomorrow’s scientists. The story behind the opening of the Houston Botanic Garden during the COVID-19 pandemic started with a dream of Houston as a city that celebrates its environmental and cultural assets. Requiring decades of planning — with lots of Owl involvement — the Houston Botanic Garden is today stewarded by Claudia Gee Vassar ’99. Within its 132 acres, visitors can watch the dream of a greening city grow. Presidential historian, environmental advocate, author and professor Douglas Brinkley has his finger on the pulse of today’s major news currents. As the CNN presidential historian, he provided network audiences with perspectives and opinions on the unprecedented 2020 election. In this issue, he speaks broadly about teaching at Rice, the
legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency and the character and shape of the early days of Joe Biden’s presidency. While Rice operates differently, we continue to move forward in our teaching, research and community engagement, as our department stories attest. Residential students moved into a brand-new Sid Richardson College building, and a major update to Hanszen is on deck. Rice Coffeehouse adapted, and so did “Hello, Hamlet!” Our bioengineers invented a new
Our community continues to explore a brighter future informed by a more open and honest discussion about Rice’s past, dreaming of new possibilities. COVID-19 test, and Rice housed a vaccine clinic in partnership with Baylor St. Luke’s Health. Faculty are exploring solutions for greenhouse gases on Earth and operating rovers on Mars. Our community continues to explore a brighter future informed by a more open and honest discussion about Rice’s past, dreaming of new possibilities. A final note of gratitude: As a Rice Magazine intern for almost three years, Mariana Nájera ’21 has contributed to every issue since Fall 2018. Her contributions have helped build our Sallyport department into a reader favorite, and her editorial skills have improved many a story. She graduates with degrees in anthropology and religion and will go on to pursue a Ph.D. Congratulations, Mariana!
M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 11
PRESIDENT LEEBRON
AN ENGINE OF OPPORTUNITY OVER THE COURSE of its history, two positive ideals have defined the American experiment: governance by the people through democracy and individual liberty, including economic liberty. From the very beginning, the implementation of these ideas was flawed, with the Constitution countenancing both the abomination of human slavery and the exclusion of the majority of the population from participating in the democratic process. Much of our history since the country was formed has been the struggle, not always resulting in progress, to expand the right to participate in our democracy and bring to all people the opportunities provided by our individual liberties. Higher education has played an important role in creating opportunity, especially for those from less privileged circumstances. Talented young people, regardless of their background, had a chance to advance through the accumulation of knowledge and skills. Many of the most renowned private educational institutions were created to serve the elites, but that was not true of Rice, which was free at its founding and for its first half-century. At the same time, at its founding, Rice was exclusionary and explicitly discriminatory and afforded no opportunity to a very large segment of the population, namely Black Americans. In recent years, we have sought to extend opportunity more broadly. In 2018, we launched the Rice Investment,
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making undergraduate education free again (in terms of tuition, at least) for those who come from families with income lower than $130,000 (the 80th percentile). This pathbreaking program garnered national attention, not only for its level of support to lower- and middleincome students, but also for the clarity and transparency of the approach. We have also worked harder through our recruitment programs to find students from a wider range of backgrounds; today, lower income, first generation and underrepresented minorities constitute more of our population. Recently we announced another major expansion of our student body. This follows the 2006–2010 expansion, which was the first significant rapid growth of the university since the expansion in the 1960s. This new decision, which we have begun implementing with this year’s incoming class, was only a decade and a half later. Why grow? There are many reasons. One is the growth and expansion of the population we serve. The population of the Houston metropolitan region in 1930, when Rice was largely an institution that served Texas, was about 360,000. Today we serve the nation and the world, and the population of the Houston metropolitan area alone is over 7 million — about 20 times what it was 90 years ago. Over that time, the Rice population increased only about 5.5 times. Growth also affords an opportunity to increase our resources and expand our faculty and thus the scope of research and teaching endeavors. It also enables us to use our resources more efficiently, given that our physical plant and administrative structures can serve larger populations. But the reasons for growth go beyond geography and finance. Forbes took notice of our decision, writing that other universities should follow Rice’s example: “The Rice plan affords a straightforward path to increasing the socioeconomic diversity of students studying at America’s leading
universities. … If educating more diverse students is a genuine priority, admitting more of them and providing the necessary financial and educational support for their success are the obvious steps that must be taken. … Now, the question becomes, will more top-ranked universities follow Rice’s lead. They should.” Indeed, one of the reasons for the expansion was to extend opportunity, to continue to fulfill the vision of being an engine of opportunity for promising young people, whatever their backgrounds and whatever their means. Of course, as we pursue this growth, we must preserve what has made Rice a distinctive educational environment. These include our supportive culture, attentive professors, a personalized educational experience and the unique residential environment. We must maintain a campus that provides beautiful green spaces and playing fields, even though it is near the center of the fourth-largest city in the country. For Rice, being an engine of opportunity is deeply in our DNA, despite our foundational failures. We must constantly renew and extend that promise. We must also embrace new possibilities, and that commitment to opportunity also underlies in part our expanding online educational offerings. Equally, we are exploring new relationships with community colleges and historically Black colleges and universities. Our first century showed that Rice transforms the lives and possibilities of talented young people. It requires greater resources, which is why funding the Rice Investment remains one of our top priorities. As we approach the second decade of our second century, we must remain as committed as ever to expanding access and possibilities. I often say that ultimately Rice is driven by three overarching and interwoven goals: excellence, opportunity and impact. This growth supports all three.
IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y PA DDY MIL L S
SALLYPORT PHOTOS BY JEF F F I T LOW
CAMPUS NEWS AND STUDENT LIFE
STUDENT LIFE
New Sid on the Block
Under construction since 2019, the new residential college building welcomed Sidizens under continued pandemic protocols. BY SAVANNAH KUCHAR ’22
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HANSZEN’S NEW, NEW WING
SALLYPORT
“M
ORS DE SUPER.” Sid Richardson College’s Latin motto, “death from above,” can carry on as the 50-year-old residential college moves into a new building, but remains the tallest college on campus. Construction began on new Sid back in fall 2019, and by Jan. 18 of this year, it was officially ready to welcome Sidizen residents. Anzilla Gilmore, senior project manager for the building construction, credited the student committee for keeping Sid the tallest college along with preserving other architecturalbased culture elements. “They were consulted to better understand what was important to the college and what program elements needed to be considered in its design,” Gilmore said. “For example, the new building features a nearly 4,000-square-foot terrace, a salute to the floor lobby balconies at old Sid Richardson.” While old Sid was a single 14-floor tower, new Sid now features three connected sections of two, five and 12 floors. The new building also differs in its dining options: Where old Sid featured its own servery kitchen within the Sid Commons, new Sid was built to be the third college connected to Seibel Servery, joining Will Rice and Lovett. Sid magisters Michel and Melanie Achard said these and other changes, like Sid’s first-ever quad space, will require some adjustment from the students. “Each college gets a culture
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from its geography, its architecture and by the way that people adapt to the building,” Michel said. “For instance, in old Sid, what really mattered were the floor lobbies. But the floor lobbies are not that spectacular in new Sid, whereas the common spaces are. The way in which the college is going to have to adjust its culture, habits and places to meet to the new geography is going to be really interesting.” The Achards moved into the building in March. New Sid has the capacity to house 312 students this spring, and its students, including freshman Hanna Frampton, have been gradually moving back to campus and into the building since the start of the semester. Frampton moved into her fifth-floor single in January and said she is enjoying having the college community back together again after Sidizens were spread across north colleges and Wiess last fall. “It’s been good to feel like I have a solid place to say, ‘This is my home,’” Frampton said. “Old Sid has a lot of tradition associated with it. But I’m excited about the prospects of being in this new building and helping set up the new culture here.”
With the new Sid Richardson building finished, campus construction is refocusing on its neighboring college, Hanszen, where a new wing will be uniquely constructed using mass timber. In this kind of building, traditionally used materials like concrete and steel are largely abandoned in favor of wood products. The timber components are fabricated off-site, meaning construction costs and times are reduced, along with noise and environmental impacts. “Aesthetically speaking, the new building will create a harmony with the other two buildings — old Hanszen wing and Hanszen Commons,” said Fabiola López-Durán, Hanszen’s magister. Construction on the new five-story, 165-bed addition is expected to begin after graduation in May, once the currently standing 1957 wing is demolished. Completion is slated for summer 2022.
— S.K.
SALLYPORT
TRADITIONS
To Thine Online Self Be True
“Hello, Hamlet!” continues its quadrennial run with an entirely prerecorded rendition available to stream. WIESS TABLETOP THEATER’S parody of a Shakespeare classic has been reprised roughly every four years since 1967, and though it has always been revised by each new generation to keep jokes and references relevant, it’s safe to say this year’s online show was particularly novel. “It was a lot of innovating as we went along,” said Adrian Almy, the show’s director and a sophomore at Wiess College. “We had a basic idea of what we wanted to do, but whether everything was going to work was very much up in the air until we actually did it.” After the 2020 live performance was canceled last year, the crew began work on a virtual version. Almy, who had joined the writing team in fall 2019, took on the challenge of directing last summer. The team started rehearsing in September and finished filming last November. Almy thinks audiences will find familiarity in the new format. “It’s
“It’s like you’re watching ‘Saturday Night Live’ — the cast is doing everything for the first time when it’s recorded, but the audience isn’t necessarily watching it at the same time.” like you’re watching ‘Saturday Night Live’ — the cast is doing everything for the first time when it’s recorded, but the audience isn’t necessarily watching it at the same time,” Almy said. Aside from a few minor edits, the recorded show kept the same script intended for the 2020 version. Additionally, many cast and crew members returned to reprise their roles on the virtual screen. There was some reshuffling of parts; most notably, Grace Vincent went from playing Gertrude to playing
Hamlet. “It felt so cool to be the first girl to play that part,” Vincent, a Brown College junior, said. All of the scenes were filmed over Zoom, which meant some significant technical challenges. “Most of the videos were shot in tiny dorm rooms,” Almy said. “For instance, Chase Brown [Witch 3] had about 3 feet of space that she could put her green screen in.” After everything was recorded and edited, the final version was ready to go in February. “Hello, Hamlet! 2020” was livestreamed on the Wiess Tabletop Theater YouTube channel beginning Feb. 27 and is still available. — SAVANNAH KUCHAR ’22
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SALLYPORT
ENST/ESCI 201 The Science of Climate Change DEPARTMENT Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences and Environmental Sciences DESCRIPTION Through the study of Earth’s climate variations and how they affected human evolution and history, this course helps students judge the anomalous character of recent climate change, establish its anthropogenic nature and discuss solutions to the current climate crisis.
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SYLLABUS
A Climate Change Toolbox SYLVIA DEE is a climate scientist and an assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences. Her course, The Science of Climate Change, introduces students to the science behind natural and anthropogenic climate change, delving into topics such as climate systems and weather phenomena. Building on her paleoclimate expertise, she teaches students what to expect from our climate futures and how to effectively engage with the human aspects of climate change. “Every single person should walk out of here with the tools they need to explain the science, policy and economics of climate change to anybody they meet,” Dee
said. “It’s such an important topic for students to be equipped to handle because it’s going to affect every single part of our lives.” Alongside lectures and comprehension assignments, students are also required to prepare for a debate with a climate change denier — played by Dee — and learn how to communicate climate science to different audiences. “It’s important to be able to explain yourself in scenarios where the legitimacy of climate change is challenged,” said Charlotte Gidley ’24. “So many times I’ve been met with a comment I know is incorrect, like ‘global warming-schwarming, it’s so dang cold out!,’ and now I know enough
about climate science to explain exactly how that’s wrong.” While passionate about sharing the wonders of paleoclimate and atmospheric science with students from all disciplines, Dee’s primary objective is to prepare students to face the growing climate crisis. “There’s a lot of fear about climate change. There’s a lot of climate anxiety. What I try to do is teach the science so students know what is going to happen, and I also focus on solutions so students walk away knowing this is something we can fix,” Dee explained. “After all, the science is simple. The impacts are serious. But the problem is solvable.”
— MARIANA NÁJERA ’21
STUDENT CLUBS
Art Aptitude
Students design a campus art-finding app.
THERE’S A NEW WAY to tour the growing collection of Rice Public Art across campus, thanks to a studentdesigned app. The Rice Public Art app is an interactive guide to every piece of public art on Rice’s campus. Free and available for download in the Apple store, the app is the result of a close collaboration with the Rice Apps club and the Moody Center for the Arts. From James Turrell’s “Twilight Epiphany Skyspace” and Michael Heizer’s “45°, 90°, 180°” to more intimate pieces like Anny Coury’s “Owl” tucked inside Allen Center, the app’s map feature allows users to embark on
a self-guided circuit of art throughout campus. Users can also access a list of public art pieces arranged in order of proximity to their phone’s location. The app will update as new pieces of public art are acquired and installed. “We are thrilled to have such a welldesigned app for students and campus visitors to discover and engage with Rice’s stellar public art collection,” said Alison Weaver, the Suzanne Deal Booth Executive Director of the Moody Center. “The student developers, designers and product managers have done an outstanding job creating a valuable resource in support of the arts at Rice.” Rice Apps club members are placed on teams and given briefs from realworld clients who need software solutions. The team of student developers responsible for the Rice Public Art app’s creation included eight students who dedicated more than four hours a week to the cause. Developing a fully functional, public-facing app has been a novel adventure for the team. “I’ve never done anything with phones before, so this is new for me,” said Adam Zawierucha ’23. Other team members included Ryan Knightly ’23, Danny Andreini ’20, Ginny Jeon ’21, Nicholas Meisburger ’22, Katherine Ngo ’20, Jiin Rhew ’22 and Ananya Vaidya ’23. — KATHARINE SHILCUTT
ACADEMICS
A NEW MAJOR Current and incoming Rice undergraduates interested in pursuing a major in business will soon have the opportunity. Launching this fall, the undergraduate business major offering from Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business meets the growing demand for a more robust business education from current and prospective students. The program, which won’t have a student cap, boasts a curriculum in leadership and business fundamentals, including accounting, finance, marketing, organizational behavior, strategy and communications. Students will also select from a finance or management concentration, which both provide the knowledge, research and analytical skills to solve a broad array of today’s business problems. — KENDALL HEBERT
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SALLYPORT
ATHLETICS
They Persisted
Female student athletes pivot to safely compete, win and set school records.
The No. 25 ranked soccer team celebrates its C-USA Championship win April 17, 2021, earning a spot in the NCAA Tournament.
BY KENDALL HEBERT
FROM CLASSROOM TO competition, student athletes overcome challenges every day, but the spring 2021 season introduced them to unprecedented obstacles. Between COVID-19 testing protocols and distancing measures, Rice Owls pivoted as a team — on the court, track and field — to discover alternative ways to train, form deeper camaraderie and fall more in love with their sport.
SOCCER
The soccer team entered national postseason play with an impressive 12-2-1 record, victorious in nine straight — eight by shutout — games. The team defeated the University of North Carolina at Charlotte 2-0 to win the program’s third Conference USA (CUSA) Championship and clinched an automatic bid to appear at the NCAA Tournament. “It’s a great sign of progress, but more importantly a fantastic achievement for our current student athletes,” said Brian Lee, the head coach who led the team to a conference title during his second season at Rice, in a postgame interview. “This is wonderful evidence of how much can be accomplished with a collaborative effort from everyone involved with the program.” At press time, the Owls are heading to North Carolina to compete in the NCAA Tournament.
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Guard Jasmine Smith ’22 goes up against a Lady Techster during a winning weekend series at Louisiana Tech in late February.
BASKETBALL
Rice women’s basketball had an impressive 2020–2021 season with a 23-4 overall record. The team placed second in the C-USA Championship and won the Women’s National Invitational Tournament. “They’ve been through more than anybody knows,” head coach Tina Langley said in the season’s final postgame interview. “I’m proud of their resiliency and their character, and the way they stay together.” Her last season at Rice, Langley’s coaching career will continue at the University of Washington. She leaves Rice with an inspiring legacy, having recorded the highest winning percentage in program history (.673) and a 126-61 overall record.
TENNIS
The first team to compete during the COVID-19 pandemic, women’s tennis initially started practicing as singles. “I told them it was an opportunity to work on our cardio,” said head coach Elizabeth Schmidt. “We kept a positive mindset and were dedicated to keeping the team healthy and safe so we could all play the sport we love.” Despite the lack of team-building events this season, Schmidt said the group has grown closer. “When practice and competition become your only bonding opportunity, the team camaraderie gets even better,” she said. “We can be bummed about it, or we can cherish every minute together and represent Rice — and that’s what we chose to do.” Regarding the C-USA and NCAA championships in May, Schmidt said the team focuses on one match at a time. “COVID has taught us to play in the present and not look too far ahead.”
Linda Huang ’21 competes against Southern Methodist University, April 10, 2021.
FORBES PHOTO COURTESY OF RICE ATHLETICS; ALL OTHER PHOTOS BY TOMMY LAVERGNE
VOLLEYBALL
Everything about the Rice volleyball season was different this year — including the semester of competition. Playing their season in the spring instead of the fall, the team missed out on competition for more than a year. “Not being in uniform to play your sport for such a long time impacted all of them,” said head coach Genny Volpe. Despite the evolving training protocols, Volpe said the team kept moving forward and found ways to safely train. “A lot of creativity went into designing individual drills for a close-proximity team sport,” she said. The team worked on ball control, individual skills and watched film to train in new ways. “We focused on the positives and made every moment together count,” Volpe said. Rice volleyball finished at the top of their division in conference play and ended their regular season with a bang, defeating Baylor University (No. 6) and the University of Texas (No. 2) before placing second at the C-USA Championship.
Outside hitter Nicole Lennon ’21 helps secure a win against Louisiana Tech, Feb. 8, 2021.
Grace Forbes ’23 won an individual C-USA title in the 6K race at the championship tournament held Oct. 31, 2020.
CROSS-COUNTRY AND TRACK AND FIELD
While cross-country experienced a one-meet season in the fall, the track and field team started their outdoor season early with a full spring schedule. “We were the sport that was delayed the longest from regular competition,” said head coach Jim Bevan. “We trained for a full year. That’s a long time to go without competition.” At Rice for more than 30 years, Bevan has noticed some silver linings during this challenging season. “We haven’t had our usual team colds and bugs because everybody is being safe,” Bevan said. The team also set new school records midway through the season. “We had one athlete do something that has never been done before because of the way the seasons landed this year,” Bevan said. “Sophomore Grace Forbes earned two All-American honors in a span of four days for both the 6,000-meter cross-country championship and the NCAA 5,000-meter track race.” Forbes also broke a new school record for the 10,000-meter, besting the previous record by nearly 16 seconds.
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“There’s so much work that each KOC [keeper of coffee] is putting into each shift, but we all want to create a community as much as possible.”
STUDENT-RUN BUSINESS
Back at It
Rice Coffeehouse adapts to life in the pandemic. IN NORMAL TIMES, Rice Coffeehouse is packed with students doing homework and chatting with friends, while a long line of undergraduates, graduates, faculty and staff wait eagerly for bagels, frappies, $1 drip coffee and the much-beloved “Nutty Bee.” All that changed in March 2020, however, when COVID-19 forced Rice to shut down most in-person campus activities — and Coffeehouse with it. A year later, Coffeehouse is back up and running, but its operations have undergone unprecedented changes that reflect the realities of life in the pandemic.
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Coffeehouse first opened in the Rice Memorial Center courtyard in 1990, and its initial offerings consisted of black coffee, espresso and Oreos (all characterized by the Thresher as “tolerable”). In the 30 years since, the student-run coffee shop has become a Rice institution and staple of campus life. With its more than 45 employees serving over 200,000 drinks a year, Coffeehouse is Rice’s oldest and largest student-run business (SRB), a category that also includes The Hoot, a latenight food service, and Rice Bikes, a bicycle repair shop. While Coffeehouse was shuttered for the remainder of the spring semester as well as summer 2020, students worked to plan a safe reopening. “We had Zoom meetings over the summer where we were wondering how to make this work,” explained Marcus Tierrablanca ’21, who was the health
and maintenance manager at the time. “It was a time when no restaurants had COVID-19 safety measures, so we started from scratch. It was a huge team effort.” All the SRB management teams were required to design a plan for their businesses that complied with Rice Crisis Management requirements for on-campus, in-person operations, as well as county health department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for operating during the pandemic. Coffeehouse decided to transition to a “grab-andgo” model with online ordering. The café space was closed off to allow social distancing among employees, and careful measures were implemented to minimize contact between employees and customers. “It’s been a learning curve for sure,” said Miguel Luna ’22, Coffeehouse’s current general manager. “But it’s been great to see more and more people coming back to Coffeehouse as they return to campus.” Luna added that plans are being developed to keep the business open during the summer and perhaps partially reopen their café space in the fall. “There’s so much work that each KOC [keeper of coffee] is putting into each shift, but we all want to create a community as much as possible,” said Brendan Wong ’21, the general manager in 2020. “Not just for the employees, but for Rice as a whole, because we know how much community is needed these days.”
— MARIANA NÁJERA ’21
PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW
WISDOM
INNOVATION IN THE LAB, THE FIELD AND THE CLASSROOM
COVID-19
A Prototyping Year Pays Off A new COVID-19 saliva test invented by Rice bioengineers paves the way for testing in low-resource settings. BY LYNN GOSNELL
IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y T H U M Y P H A N
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WISDOM Research Fund and the U.S. Agency for International Development and went to work prototyping. By late fall, they’d begun a clinical study and were preparing to participate in Rice’s on-campus COVID-19 monitoring. When the pandemic struck in March 2020, Natoli and Kathryn Kundrod ’20 were both finishing up their doctorates in bioengineering — Natoli’s research focused on sickle cell disease and Kundrod’s was on cervical cancer detection. Each had been drawn to Rice’s bioengineering program because of its focus on innovative translational research. “Kathryn and I both were interested in translational research; if we could be in the field implementing things, that’s what we wanted to be doing,” said Natoli. The pandemic provided just such an opportunity. Bit by bit, Natoli, Kundrod and their teammates in the Richards-Kortum lab worked through every supply chain issue and technical challenge, coming up with innovative solutions along the way, like a heating unit made with off-the-shelf components costing about $250 to process LAMP tests. By late March, the team had completed more than 8,000 LAMP saliva tests for its clinical trial. “Our team of students, staff and faculty has risen to the challenge of safely implementing a new testing method toward the goal of keeping our campus safe. It’s been incredible to see people’s commitment and effort to make this test work,” said Kundrod. At press time, the team had applied and was waiting for emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
O
ON A COOL EVENING in March, the crack of ball on bat filled the air during baseball practice at Rice’s Reckling Park. Coaches and players chattered, and an occasional fly ball escaped over the nets. And while pandemic protocols were fully in play, there was a fair amount of spitting going on near the first baseline. Inside the Roost — in normal years, a popular concession venue for baseball fans — undergraduate and graduate research assistants were administering a new type of COVID-19 test that requires a saliva sample. Instead of swabbing nostrils, test-takers fill a plastic tube with warm saliva, seal it, then place it gingerly in a cooler. Later, the cooler full of samples will be sent to a campus lab for processing. The saliva test uses a technology called loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) to detect fragments of genetic material from the virus that causes COVID-19. LAMP testing works in a way that’s similar to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology behind the nasal swab test. (PCR tests have been in use on campus since last
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The LAMP saliva tests are simpler, faster and more affordable, while also proving just as accurate for outbreak prevention. August.) The problem is, PCR tests are costly and more complex to process. The LAMP saliva tests are simpler, faster and more affordable, while also proving just as accurate for outbreak prevention. Outside the Roost, sitting at a table, Rice postdoc Mary Natoli ’20 is explaining how this LAMP test came to be invented by Rice bioengineers in collaboration with researchers from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Researchers in the lab of Rebecca Richards-Kortum, director of the Rice 360º Institute for Global Health, along with longtime collaborator Kathleen Schmeler at MD Anderson, saw a pressing need for a COVID-19 test for use in lowand middle-income countries. They secured funding from Rice’s COVID-19
Rebecca Richards-Kortum is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor and director of the Rice 360º Institute for Global Health. Kathleen Schmeler is a professor of gynecologic oncology and reproductive medicine at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW
At the Roost, sophomore Reed Gallant fills a tube with a saliva sample to be tested for COVID-19 using LAMP technology developed at Rice.
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with the help of President David Leebron and Provost Reginald DesRoches, shapes the strategic plan for the university’s research enterprise and how best to carry it out. Endless Supply of Ideas People at Rice have enormous creativity, so there’s a huge number of ideas running around campus, most of which are good. The question is, how do you build on these ideas, how do you implement them, how do you actually make them happen? Over time, Rice has gotten very good at doing this and is on pace with becoming one of the world’s major research universities. This is great, except that we have to be able to support that growth and continue to make it easier for faculty, staff and students to be successful. That’s why making sure they have the right instrumentation, resources and operational support is so important and continues to be one of my main goals.
UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM
The Experimentalist Yousif Shamoo in his own words INTERVIEW BY KIMBERLY VETTER
H
OW ARE STARS FORMED? Why do I exist? How do atoms assemble into molecules and then into life itself? These are just a few of the questions Yousif Shamoo mulled over during his formative years in Kentucky and Connecticut. From a young age, he was fascinated with the natural world. One of his favorite pastimes was looking at a book about bugs and hunting for them in his backyard like treasure. “I absolutely love to learn,” he said. Shamoo’s passion for knowledge is what led him to pursue a career in academia and research, and it’s ultimately why he became Rice’s vice provost for research almost seven years ago. In this capacity, he spends a lot of time learning about the research that faculty, staff and students are interested in and want to pursue. Based on what he finds, Shamoo,
IL LU S T R AT IO N S B Y DA R R EN B O O T H
Dual Perspective I came to my job as assistant vice provost of research with the mindset of both a professor and a researcher. I have been in academia now for more than 20 years, and although I don’t currently teach [Shamoo is a five-time Brown Teaching Award recipient], I still have an active research group studying the evolution of multidrugresistant bacteria. I sit on the National Institutes of Health’s Health Genetic Variation and Evolution Study Section, and because of my background, I bring a
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WISDOM
materials, whether you are a scholar or a company. If we succeed at that, it’s a win for Rice and for the city of Houston.
very data-driven approach to my position. [Shamoo is ranked among some of our top faculty in terms of research funding.] I want to see ideas and test those ideas. And I’m very willing as an experimentalist to move on when things don’t work out. Interdisciplinary Approach One of the most exciting things that’s changed on our campus over the last several years is that everything is becoming interdisciplinary. Twenty years ago, you could tell the difference between a physicist, a chemist and a mechanical engineer. Today, I’m not so sure that’s true. Look at machine learning. It essentially permeates every single discipline. Everything we do is in some way related to the materials we have to do them with, whether it’s the microscope in our labs or the computer we’re using to analyze big data. Rice really excels at interdisciplinary research. It’s something we can work with and take advantage of for the foreseeable future. Across the Board At Rice, we all do some type of research. We might call it scholarship. We might call it research. To me, it’s the intellectual pursuit of ideas, whether it’s Shakespeare, music, architecture, computer science or bioengineering. Historically, the emphasis of the Office of Research has been almost entirely on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). One of my first actions
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At Rice, we all do some type of research. We might call it scholarship. We might call it research. To me, it’s the intellectual pursuit of ideas, whether it’s Shakespeare, music, architecture, computer science or bioengineering. as vice provost of research was to broaden this definition to include all aspects of scholarly and creative works on campus. To put action to those words, we have set up creative venture funds to support disciplines outside of STEM such as music, architecture and the humanities. Just last year, I added a significant amount of funding to a creative venture fund dedicated to race and anti-racism. This kind of support will continue to grow, especially with the ongoing move toward interdisciplinary research. For example, with every advancement of technology, you have to understand the impact to society. I think we can do more in this space. It’s an open area of investigation
that involves not just the people creating the technology, but economists, psychologists, social scientists and humanists as well. Crown Jewels To continue to grow and become more visible on the global research stage, we have to continue to have centers of excellence like the Baker Institute, Rice 360°, OpenStax, the Shepherd School of Music and the Welch Institute for Advanced Materials. These are some of our crown jewels. Areas where I think we are ripe for growth and have significant opportunity include engineering, medicine and, of course, advanced materials. We want Houston to be the place to go for advanced
Continued Growth What is most impressive is that we have continued to strengthen our research enterprise without sacrificing our educational mission. We have amazing undergraduate and graduate students. We’ve got excellent professors, many of whom teach, serve our research enterprise and hold leadership roles. Rice is a pretty special place in this way. Maintaining Momentum Since COVID-19 reared its head over a year ago, research at Rice has moved forward and, for the most part, [the pandemic] hasn’t impacted our progress. We’ve continued to do very well in terms of securing funding for projects, and we’ve plowed ahead with work on existing projects despite the various safety constraints implemented on faculty, staff and students. With that said, I do worry about the emotional cost of the pandemic, especially on students. COVID-19 has changed the way we work. You can’t just sit outside, eat lunch next to your friends and freely exchange ideas, which means people aren’t learning as quickly and they are experiencing some level of social isolation. It’s like everybody’s working in an Antarctic ice station. We will eventually leave that metaphorical station, come back and recover, but it will take some time.
WISDOM NANOTECHNOLOGY
COVID-19
Catalyzing Change
RICE’S VACCINE HUB
PHOTOS BY 123RF.COM
Researchers transform a greenhouse gas into valuable acetic acid.
RICE ENGINEERS are turning carbon monoxide (CO) directly into acetic acid — the widely used chemical agent that gives vinegar its tang — with a continuous catalytic reactor that can use renewable electricity efficiently to turn out a highly purified product. The electrochemical process by the labs of chemical and biomolecular engineers Haotian Wang and Thomas Senftle of Rice’s Brown School of Engineering resolves issues with previous attempts to reduce CO into acetic acid. Those processes required additional steps to purify the product. Along with vinegar and other foods, acetic acid is used as an antiseptic in medical applications; as a solvent for ink, paint and coatings; and in the production of vinyl acetate, a precursor to common white glue. The Rice process builds upon the Wang lab’s reactor to produce formic acid from carbon dioxide. That research established an important foundation for Wang, recently named a Packard Fellow, to win a $2 million National Science Foundation grant to continue exploring the conversion of greenhouse gases into liquid fuels. The environmentally friendly reactor uses nanoscale cubes of copper as the primary catalyst along with a unique solid-state electrolyte. In 150 hours of continuous lab operation, the device produced a solution that was up to 2% acetic acid in water. The acid component was up to 98% pure, far better than that
produced through earlier attempts to catalyze CO into liquid fuel. “We’re taking waste gases we want to mitigate and turning them into a useful product,” said Senftle. “It’s a nice example of engineering on many levels, from integration of the components in a reactor all the way down to the mechanism at the atomistic level. It fits with the themes of molecular nanotechnology, showing how we can scale it up to real-world devices.” The next step in development of a scalable system is to improve upon the system’s stability and further reduce the amount of energy the process requires, Wang said. Details appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. — MIKE WILLIAMS
In a partnership with Baylor St. Luke’s Health, a vaccine clinic opened at Rice Stadium March 15, with appointments available for all eligible Houstonians. In the week prior to that opening, qualifying Rice community members were given a week of access through a soft launch of the site. Duncan College sophomore Abinav Sankaranthi, a student emergency medical technician, took advantage of this opportunity as part of the Phase 1A group. “Getting the vaccine was a streamlined process of checking in, filling out paperwork, showing medical insurance and finally getting vaccinated,” Sankaranthi said. The clinic, which has moved to Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative on Main Street, has the capability to administer up to 1,000 Pfizer vaccine doses a day and is expected to stay open through July.
— SAVANNAH KUCHAR ’22
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WISDOM
WE DON’T KNOW ...
What Mars May Reveal About Earth’s Beginnings
Planetary geologist Kirsten Siebach is part of the team operating the Perseverance rover on Mars. THERE ARE TONS OF NAGGING questions I’m hoping we can answer with our work: What was its climate like when Mars had water on its surface? Why was that water there? What was the atmosphere made of, and how thick was it? Basically, I think all of my research boils down to trying to recreate what it was like to stand on the surface of Mars 3 1/2 billion years ago — because those answers translate very closely to the question of what Earth was like in its early days, when life was just emerging. It may seem counterintuitive, but by analyzing rocks on Mars, we can actually learn more about the early Earth than we can by studying rocks here on our own planet. That’s because we have plate tectonics, which constantly
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recycles the Earth’s crust. As plates collide, they slide underneath each other, and old rock at the surface moves down into the mantle where it melts. In the process, it erases any history of the planet’s beginnings. Plate tectonics has enabled life to thrive on Earth for an extended period of time. It’s critical to keeping the atmosphere at a certain density and keeping the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere at a certain level, which let complex life evolve. Today, our planet has become dominated by life and is completely altered by it. Life puts oxygen in our atmosphere. It has changed the way rivers flow. It’s actually really hard to imagine the time before life emerged on Earth, since everything we see is affected by
life in some way. Mars, on the other hand, gives us that chance to ask what our planet looked like before life began and could tell us what Earth might look like today if life never took hold. It’s a pretty fascinating idea — having to go to another planet to reflect back to the origins of life on our own — but I love puzzles, and Mars is one of the biggest puzzles there is. Luckily, the rovers and orbiters we’re using give us a pretty good set of tools to try and solve it, which is why I’m so excited that NASA chose me to be a part of the Perseverance mission. — AS TOLD TO DAVID LEVIN Kirsten Siebach is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences.
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WISDOM ENGINEERING
The Explainer
We asked Daniel Cohan, who studies air, climate and energy at Rice, to explain what factors led to February’s cascading power failures in the wake of extreme winter cold. AFTER AN ARCTIC BLAST blew through Texas and nearby states in February, millions were left without electricity, heat and water for days or even weeks. In Texas, more than 100 people died, and property damage was estimated in the billions.
PHOTO BY 123RF.COM
Q. What were the chief reasons the Texas grid did not meet the demand for electricity during the winter storm? A. Every single component of the power supply was producing less than expected at precisely the same time as demand was hitting an all-time peak for a Texas winter. More than all other factors combined was the fact that natural gas failed to generate as much electricity as expected exactly when we needed it most. We saw how mutually vulnerable gas and electricity systems are to each other. One piece of the problem was that the electrical compressors needed to compress gas and keep it moving through the pipeline system lost power and stopped working. That created cascading problems — gas power plants weren’t producing power, which meant that electrical compressors in the gas system went down, which meant there was even less gas supplied to the power plants. Q. What actions could have prevented this series of events? A. There’s a lot that could have been done to head off some of these
problems. It appears the regulators and companies involved in both the gas and power systems hadn’t listed electrical compressors as priority critical infrastructures — what you need to make sure power doesn’t get shut off. There’s gas production that happens in North Dakota and Siberia. There are ways to weatherize and protect gas supply systems, but at a cost. With the cost of natural gas so cheap in recent years, many companies neglected investments that would have protected the system. Q. What’s the difference between “winterization” and “weatherization?” A. Our gas, power and water systems are vulnerable to a wide range of extreme events. The majority of those come in summertime — heat, drought, floods and hurricanes. Steps taken to prepare us for the next Arctic blast won’t necessarily prepare us for other extreme events. For many of those other events, the climate science is quite clear — climate change is likely to make them worse and more frequent. To focus all of our attention on winter-
ization won’t prepare us adequately for the full spectrum of extreme events to come. Q. What role can individual consumers play? A. We all have a role to play. One of the biggest stressors that our water systems faced was that pipes were bursting all over town, causing the water pressure to go down and adding extra strain on our water system, just at the time when they were struggling to get that power to operate. If we were using more efficient heating systems in better-insulated homes, we would have been able to get through the storm with far fewer blackouts. Not enough attention is going to how we make our homes more resilient, efficient and weatherized. — INTERVIEW BY LYNN GOSNELL Daniel Cohan is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. This interview was recorded in early March and has been edited for clarity and length. An expanded version can be found at magazine.rice.edu.
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WISDOM NOW READING
Faculty Books
The Emperor Jahangir
Power and Kingship in Mughal India Lisa Balabanlilar I.B. Tauris, 2020
John S. Chase — The Chase Residence
David Heymann ’82 and Stephen Fox ’73 University of Texas Press, 2020
MODERN ARCHITECT John Saunders Chase Jr. was ahead of his time in nearly every way. In 1952, he became the first African American graduate of the University of Texas School of Architecture; two years later, he became the first African American to be registered as an architect in Texas. And when he designed and built a home for his family in Houston’s Oakmere neighborhood in 1959, it was the city’s first modernist house with a true interior courtyard, write David Heymann and Stephen Fox. In “John S. Chase — The Chase Residence,” Heymann, an architecture professor at UT Austin, and Fox, an architectural historian and lecturer at the Rice School of Architecture, trade off in two essays about the Chase residence itself and Chase’s architecture more generally. Chase and
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his wife gravitated toward Houston as a place to live and work because it offered more economic opportunity than other Southern cities, although still systematically segregated. And while segregation meant that Chase was limited, in the 1950s and 1960s, to a “small-town, community focus,” Fox writes, that focus expanded when legal segregation was dismantled in the later 1960s. Then Chase began to receive public commissions from Harris County and the city of Houston. He designed a number of jaunty, ebullient public buildings, including libraries, health centers and a fire station, along with several impressive buildings on the Texas Southern University campus. “Chase’s buildings embraced a future that he was determined should be better than the past,” Fox writes. — JENNIFER LATSON
THE INTRIGUE, violence and debauchery that characterized Emperor Jahangir’s ascent to the throne could have been a “Game of Thrones” plot. The fourth leader of the Mughal Empire, Jahangir was eclipsed in fame by both his father, Akbar the Great, who extended the empire’s reach across the Indian subcontinent, and his son, Shah Jahan, who would go on to build the Taj Mahal. His own insecurities may have exacerbated the cruelty that marked his path to the throne, which entailed, among other things, the castration and public flaying of disobedient courtiers, a brutal elephant fight, and the murder of his father’s closest friend and confidant. But there was more to Jahangir than brutality, as Rice historian Lisa Balabanlilar’s new biography demonstrates. Once enthroned in 1605, he
WISDOM
softened some of his hard edges — although no one could ever describe him as a softie. “To be sure, it was a violent age and the emperor was not exempt from the standards of the time,” Balabanlilar writes, before describing how Jahangir punished a thief by having him torn apart by dogs. The emperor was also an adept politician and a supporter of the arts who helped usher in a golden age in Mughal painting. He was a surprisingly thoughtful memoirist as well. Balabanlilar draws extensively from Jahangir’s diary, in which he recorded the events of his reign along with intimate musings on his life, including his struggles with alcoholism and opium addiction, his love for his family, his passion for hunting and his anxiety over establishing the legitimacy of his rule.
— J.L.
Mapping an Atlantic World, Circa 1500 Alida C. Metcalf
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020
Leadership Reckoning
Can Higher Education Develop the Leaders We Need? Thomas Kolditz, Libby Gill and Ryan P. Brown ’93 Monocle Press, 2021
IN A WORLD increasingly chock-full of leadership development programs, the Doerr Institute for New Leaders stands out because of its data-driven approach, focus on undergraduate students and commitment to improving leader development in higher education. In “Leadership Reckoning: Can Higher Education Develop the Leaders We Need?,” the Doerr Institute’s Thomas Kolditz, founding director, and Ryan P. Brown, managing director for measurement, are joined by leadership consultant and executive coach Libby Gill in an exploration of leadership development initiatives focused on college students. “Universities do not typically use evidence-based leader development strategies, nor do they measure the outcomes of their efforts to develop
THE MOMENT WHEN the “Atlantic World” first appeared on European maps marked a sea change in world history — literally and figuratively. After 1500, “people, plants, pathogens, products and cultural practices” began crossing the Atlantic Ocean, drastically altering life throughout Europe, Africa and the Americas. “Why was so much invested so quickly in exploring, developing, and risking lives and fortunes in the distant lands of the western Atlantic?”
students as leaders,” the authors explain. “But by being measurement focused, we can ensure the most efficient system of development.” In each chapter, the authors explore specific evidence-based techniques for leadership development in depth, showing how they contribute to students’ improved self-satisfaction and increased participation in leadership roles. The authors also share concrete examples of the efficacy of the Doerr Institute’s four principles: leader development is a core function of the university; use evidence-based techniques; employ professional leader developers; and measure outcomes ruthlessly. At Rice, results are impressive: between 30% and 40% of undergraduates take part in Doerr leadership programs throughout their four years. — MARIANA NÁJERA ’21
asks Alida Metcalf, the Harris Masterson Jr. Professor of History, in “Mapping an Atlantic World, Circa 1500.” “So many of the supposedly inexorable events depended on new and startling decisions, such as the willingness to cross the ocean, the visualization of sources of wealth in places known only recently, the desire to create religious missions in unfamiliar regions, the belief that colonies could thrive at great distance, or the eagerness to
invest in unpredictable and untested enterprises.” Metcalf argues that one explanation for the sudden eagerness to jump on the Atlantic bandwagon lies with the early maps that helped explorers, evangelists, traders and colonizers envision an interconnected Atlantic World. Illustrated with 50 historical maps, Metcalf’s book demonstrates how early modern cartographers became agents of change who shaped the course of centuries to come. — J.L.
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Planted in Place From a seed of an idea, a major new addition to the Houston landscape has blossomed along Sims Bayou, turning an underutilized golf course into 132 acres of ecosystems, horticultural displays and walking trails. By Deborah Lynn Blumberg Photos by Tommy LaVergne
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N MID-SEPTEMBER, HOUSTONIANS craving time away from home set out for an island southeast of downtown adorned with hibiscus and firecracker plants, Brazilian grape trees and Mexican skutch maples (a rare but tough sugar maple). The Houston Botanic Garden had just opened its doors, and visitors arrived to stroll among plants that reflect Houston’s wide array of cultures. They passed kumquat, plum and orange trees and then sat in quiet contemplation amidst bamboo and cacti. On Sims Bayou, an offshoot of Buffalo Bayou near Hobby Airport, the 132-acre oasis is the culmination of nearly two decades of planning by Houston garden advocates, conservationists and philanthropists. On the site of a former golf course, the botanic garden adds to Houston’s expanding list of green spaces, celebrates the city’s diverse cultures and was made possible in large part by Rice alumni. From early days when the newly formed nonprofit began looking for the perfect piece of land to its current leadership, Rice graduates have been a driving force behind efforts to bring a botanic garden to the country’s fourth-largest city. “Every major city has a botanic garden,” says Claudia Gee Vassar ’99, the garden’s president and general counsel, who worked in corporate and commercial real estate law and
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then as a nonprofit consultant before joining the garden in 2016. Local conservationists, donors and garden enthusiasts were keen for Houston to join the ranks of top cities across the world — from Denver to New York to Singapore — that are home to such renowned, educational and beautiful spaces. Houston’s garden came to fruition as the city in recent years has pushed Above: The alcoves to move beyond its reputation as are located in the a flood-prone concrete jungle by Corner of Curiosity, creating more green spaces. which highlights interesting plant Recently, both public and morphology — the private money have funneled physical form and into projects including Bayou external structure of plants — inviting Greenways 2020 , a $220 visitors in with million public-private partcaptivating colors nership to develop 3,000 acres and unusual, largerthan-life shapes. of land into a network of city parks and trails. The openRight: Claudia Gee Vassar, ing of the botanic garden also president and coincided with the unveiling general counsel of 100 acres of open space at of the Houston Botanic Garden, the new Clay Family Eastern stands in the Glades at Memorial Park, plus Global Collection the construction kickoff for Garden.
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Memorial Park Conservancy’s $70 million Land Bridge and Prairie project. One of the country’s biggest park projects, the nearly 100-acre Land Bridge and Prairie project will connect parkland over Memorial Drive and create 40 acres of coastal prairie land for stormwater mitigation. LOOKING FOR LAND The seed for a botanic garden in Houston was planted in 2002 when a group of garden advocates established the Houston Botanic Garden as a nonprofit. Five years later, longtime Houston planning commissioner Kay Crooker, a founding member of the nonprofit, recruited Jeff Ross ’75 to join the board. The two knew each other from roles on the city planning commission. As a municipal civil engineer, Ross was well versed on how to evaluate land. He knew the project wouldn’t gain momentum without a location. “The board decided it was a fish or cut bait situation,” he says. “We had to make a push to find a piece of land.” Over the years, Ross scrutinized two dozen properties, studying maps and spending hours visiting sites. A priority was land along a bayou. In 2011, he became the nonprofit’s CEO, a role that allowed him to focus on the project full time. It was around the same time that Ross ran into garden enthusiasts and longtime Rice supporters Mel Glasscock ’61 and his wife, Susie Glasscock ’62, during an event on the Rice campus. Ross mentioned the garden project to the Glasscocks, and Mel agreed to help. Ross also visited botanic gardens across the U.S. and attended four American Public Gardens Association conferences, from Philadelphia to Phoenix. In Philly, he met the president of the Atlanta Right: Bunching onion plants, found Botanical Garden, who became a key in the Culinary mentor, visiting potential sites with Ross Garden, will bloom and later reviewing the garden’s master all summer. plan before Ross and the board submitted it to the city. In 2012, Mel suggested the Gus Wortham Golf Course as a potential site. It was a municipal golf course in the East End, where he grew up. However, the golf course — known as the original Houston Country Club founded in 1908 — had been mired in controversy in 2006 when residents fought back against efforts to convert it into a soccer complex. “I knew it was a beehive waiting to be hit,” Ross says. Still, he went door to door in the surrounding neighborhood asking people to sign a petition saying they preferred a botanic garden over the golf course. Residents used to walking their dogs on the property were wary of change, and his efforts to convince naysayers were unsuccessful. “Then the city asked us if we’d consider the nearby Glenbrook Golf Course,” says Mel, who’s now on the garden’s board. Glenbrook was also an underutilized city golf course. When the city sided with residents on Wortham, Ross and the board pivoted, channeling all of their energy into Glenbrook. “It has some interesting topography,” says Gee Vassar, “these roly-poly hills that you really don’t see around Houston.” In January 2015, the Houston Botanic Garden signed 34 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 202 1
a contract with the city for Glenbrook — with conditions. To ease the land, the garden had to raise $5 million for the project by year end, and the city had to approve a master plan. “The board knew that Mayor Annise Parker ’78 was nearing the end of her term, and her enthusiastic support for the project had been key,” says Ross. “I said, ‘We have to get our master plan approved under Annise.’” MOORISH INFLUENCES With the deadline looming, Ross and the board moved quickly to hire a design firm to create the master plan, a road map of sorts for the garden over the next 30 years. Of all the contenders, Adriaan Geuze from the Netherlands and his team at West 8 stood out. The firm is perhaps best known for its redesign of Governors Island in New York City. Geuze, who lives part time in Spain, painted a picture of a garden that would include aspects of the palace and Left: Golden barrel cacti and bright red gardens of La Alhambra in southern Spain yuccas highlight — where the climate is similar to Houston’s the garden’s Prickly — with covered walkways, fountains and Patch. carefully framed vistas. Below: A view of the “There are a lot of Moorish influences Culinary Garden, featuring edible and in the design,” says Donna Bridgeman, medicinal plants, lead designer on the project at West 8. near the water walls “We wanted to create a space that isn’t like courtyard.
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anywhere else in Houston.” When plants mature, she adds, visitors will get an immersive experience as the greenery creates tunnels they can lose themselves in. Once hired, the design team flew to Houston, where they spent time at Rice drawing inspiration from its live oaks. Team members spoke with local plant vendors and residents with private plant collections. They distributed self-addressed postcards to the public asking for ideas and input. “Ultimately, we landed on the idea of focusing on Houston’s diversity,” says Gee Vassar. With portions of the site in a flood plain, West 8 kept flooding in mind throughout the planning process. The garden’s Global Collection Garden, for example, is elevated, and the coastal prairie area is planted with vegetation to help mitigate flooding. The West 8 team pitched the idea of a Culinary Garden with medicinal plants and a Global Collection Garden as a place where people could see plants that remind them of their own culture and traditions. “The design and garden tap into the need for human connection with nature in our everyday lives,” Bridgeman says. “The new norm is that there’s this connecting with nature and realization that it’s necessary to be one with your environment, to learn from plants. I think people are really paying attention to that.” BREAKING GROUND The year before the nonprofit secured Glenbrook, Parker took it upon herself to visit the golf course on Christmas Eve with the city’s chief development officer, Andy Icken. “I looked at Andy, and I said, this is going to be the botanic garden,” says Parker, who’s now on the nonprofit’s board. During the mayor’s last week in office, Ross and the board hit the $5 million fundraising target, and the city accepted the master plan. “I’m glad I was in the right place and I had the energy and the interest,” says Parker. “It took a lot of politicking.” The city then tasked the garden with raising an additional $15 million to prove interest in the project. Ultimately, with help from locals like the Glasscocks, the garden was able to raise a total of nearly $39 million. Susie handwrote letters to potential donors and spent countless hours on the phone. “Frankly, it was just exciting,” she says. “The garden is worldclass.” The Glasscocks also contributed money to the garden. Ground broke in 2019, and work forged ahead on phase one, which created eight garden themes and collections. Most of the golf course’s paths were kept intact, even as the soil was restructured to give it the right balance. Sand traps were harvested to use in the garden for years to come, and plant signs in Spanish and English were created. Bridgeman and her team kicked into high gear, designing the garden’s signature alcove shade structures and benches, which have a spacecraft feel. “It’s a blend of Spanish design with that intergalactic history of Houston,” she says. Plans for a Family Discovery Garden with play structures and a boardwalk maze around a lagoon got underway. During the process, Ross and Gee Vassar got guidance from botanic gardens across the world. A task force of botanic garden leaders advised them on the master plan. Garden
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leaders participated in a design charrette to determine the key garden themes and collections that would situate the Houston Botanic Garden in the global ecosystem of botanic gardens. They shared their experiences on everything from business models to marketing materials to member benefits, Gee Vassar recalls. Among botanic gardens, “there’s this collaborative sharing of plants and information,” she says. Top: Unlike many Gee Vassar also worked with succulents, blue Emily Emmett ’05, a partner at chalksticks are winter growers. Bain, who helped the garden, pro bono, with a five-year strategic Bottom: Handlettered signs help plan. “We became pretty deep explain the latest experts of botanic gardens,” developments in the says Emmett, who, with her fivegarden. Recently placed signs point person team, helped the nonprofit to the resilience of settle on membership tiers, the garden followadmission prices and its funding the February 2021 storm. raising trajectory.
NEW VIEW OF NATURE When COVID-19 arrived in March, Gee Vassar was faced with a major decision — to keep construction on track or to delay the garden’s opening. “Some of our peers said, ‘Don’t open, it’s such a hard time right now. Why don’t you wait?’” she says. “But our mission is for this to be a place for the community. We felt people were exhausted by the pandemic, and they wanted a safe outdoor space.” So Gee Vassar and her team forged ahead with the lofty goal of reaching 500,000 annual visitors in five years, and ultimately 1 million. The garden opened Sept. 18, 2020. It met and exceeded its first-quarter operating goals for both admissions and memberships, with earned revenue of over $480,000 through the end of 2020. As of January, it had more than 2,000 members, half of whom joined after visiting. “Some of the naysayers from the past even brought their whole families and were really excited,” Gee Vassar says. “Our goal is for the demographics of our visitorship to closely match the demographics of the city in race, religion and social
status. It’s really becoming a place where people are making memories with their families.” For 2021, the focus is on safely offering the educational programming at the core of the garden’s mission and deepening engagement with visitors. Gee Vassar’s role with the botanic garden has altered how she sees nature. Now, she notices the wide diversity of trees around town and knows more intimately when different plants will bloom. “The garden has helped me connect with nature, which has so many healing benefits.” It’s her hope that visitors will find a similar connection, and that Houstonians, especially, will venture out even more into their greening city, inspired to support and protect the environment in their own ways. “Our goal is for people to grow in their affinity for the garden, but also for the natural environment,” she says. “We all play a role in caring for our natural resources, and we all can have Below: Three an impact.” ◆ large water Visit magazine.rice.edu for an extended version of this story, including a sidebar on how February’s record-breaking freeze affected the Houston Botanic Garden’s plant collections.
walls feature 3,591 handpainted jade ceramic tiles. The courtyard is designed to host educational, culinary and social events.
Today’s Lesson Whether in a Rice classroom or via his work as a public scholar, U.S. presidential historian Douglas Brinkley draws from America’s past to illuminate the crises of the moment. INTERVIEW BY LYNN GOSNELL PHOTO BY TOMMY LAVERGNE
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While we are accustomed to seeing you around campus, many people are more familiar with your role as a public scholar. How did you become comfortable on these different stages?
Douglas Brinkley, the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Professor in Humanities, is that rare academic who is equally comfortable in the classroom and the national newsroom — a popular professor, public intellectual, prolific author and pundit. During the pandemic, which coincided with one of the most consequential elections in decades, he kept up a demanding schedule of media commentary; for example, Brinkley appeared regularly on CNN news broadcasts in his role as CNN’s presidential historian. We caught up with Brinkley at his home in Austin, where he’s putting the finishing touches on a new book about environmentalism, fielding questions from the media and anticipating a return this fall to the classroom. 40 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 202 1
My mother was a high school English teacher and armchair Shakespeare drama scholar. My sister and I were taught very early how to do public speaking. My sister, Leslie, is the reporter for KGO-ABC News in San Francisco. We are both very involved with current events, but we aren’t afraid to go in front of the group and talk. And that’s why I enjoy teaching at Rice so much. I’ve missed terribly the [classroom] interaction with students. I’m not a big Zoom kind of professor. I like pacing around, drinking a cup of coffee and trying to get a conversation going among students about our tenuous times. But last fall, we were able to intertwine the Biden-Trump showdown in an online course while we were studying other presidential elections. It becomes really fun, the students get engaged and it makes history seem relevant. You can’t teach somebody American history in a course, but you could get them excited to learn more about it in their lives. How did you intertwine those recent and past presidential elections? If I’m lecturing on Richard Nixon and Watergate, for example, there are characters like Roger Stone, who was part of the Watergate scandal, and John Dean, who was also part of Watergate — and they were all over the airwaves [during the Trump administration]. Roy Cohn is Donald Trump’s hero, and he was also [Sen.] Joe McCarthy’s lawyer. You start finding connections to the past. It’s hard to have perspective on the pandemic in all its tragedy while we’re living through it. Is it too early to ask how history will view this event? History will treat the pandemic of 2020 and 2021 as a seismic moment in U.S. history. I mean, when you have a death toll that exceeds America’s wars of the 20th century all wrapped up into one, it’s pretty mind-boggling. Are we going to be having more coronaviruses to come, or was this just an unusual one-off event? That’s frightening because it takes so much preparation on our part to not be caught blindsided again by another killer virus. In 1960, Time magazine picked scientists, collectively, as the Person of the Year. That’s why John F. Kennedy came to Rice on Sept. 12, 1962, and talked
about public science and the need to invest in STEM — and computers, aviation and medicine. Any president has to listen to the scientific community, particularly when it comes to issues like climate change and pandemics. On Jan. 4, 2021, you and Princeton’s Sean Wilentz led a group of historians and constitutional scholars to publish a statement deploring efforts to disrupt the congressional certification of the 2020 election. What came two days later must have been quite a shock. I think that Jan. 6, 2021, is a dark day in U.S. history. It was horrifying to watch fellow Americans ransack the Capitol and kill police officers. And it’s a date to never forget — an attempted coup d’etat. The thought that such a brazen attempt to overthrow a free and fair election even occurred is staggering to me. We’ve been able to vote through all of American history and not have a direct attack on our nation’s capital in such a fashion since the War of 1812. It’s a warning sign that our country has a lot of illness — from mass shootings and violent riots to the fact that some of our basic birthrights, like the Fourth Amendment, a right for privacy, are being trampled on. Add climate change and systemic racism into the mix, and we have a recipe for disaster if we don’t get our act together. How will history view the Donald Trump presidency? He looks like an asterisk president, a strange oneoffer. But he could come back, and we may be living in the age of Trump. How will he be ranked right now as an American president? He’s probably the worst president our country has ever had. And people in my field say this is good news for James Buchanan, who used to be on the bottom. President Joe Biden often used the phrase “lower the temperature” in terms of calming some of the divisiveness in the country. How’s he doing? I love the Bob Dylan song, “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and it’s odd that the change agent happens to be Biden, our oldest president ever. He has suffered a lot of blows in his family life. And he has a working faith, meaning a religious faith and calm demeanor. So he might be the right president for our time. Already, one could feel that Biden is calming waters and, at least, getting the insanity of tweet-bullying out of our public discourse.
One of the jobs of the modern American presidency is to be a grief counselor in chief. With a 24/7 media cycle, we kind of demand that our presidents heal the nation in times of disaster — school shootings, mass murders, hurricanes. I think of Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War, losing his son. He would go to Rock Creek Cemetery and have a rocking chair and just sit there and mourn his son’s death while in the middle of the Civil War. In Biden’s case, it’s the loss of his first wife and child in an automobile accident, then losing his son, Beau, more recently to cancer, and having his other son, Hunter, deal with alcohol and drug abuse issues. He’s gone through a lot of pain, yet he still is able to present himself as a happy warrior. One of the jobs of the modern American presidency is to be a grief counselor in chief. With a 24/7 media cycle, we kind of demand that our presidents heal the nation in times of disaster — school shootings, mass murders, hurricanes. I think of Ronald Reagan when the Challenger blew up, Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing and Barack Obama after Charleston all giving incredible speeches that healed the country. Trump didn’t know how to give that kind of speech; he operated by dividing the country and didn’t know how to show public empathy. Biden is very openhearted; he feels other people’s pain and understands the hardships other people go through. In addition to your scholarship around presidential history, you’re a scholar of the environmental and conservation movements in the U.S. When did you first discover a love of the natural environment? My mother and father were teachers, and they got their summers off for vacation. We had a 24-foot Coachmen trailer and a station wagon, and we would do family trips to the national parks. By the time I entered college, I had been to the 48 lower states and had gone to the Everglades, the Great Smokies,
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the Grand Canyon, Sequoia — on and on. We were a national park family, and it turns out that those are my greatest memories of my childhood. When I first started teaching, I had a road class where students would earn college credits, living on the road and studying American history by going to presidential libraries, cemeteries or battlefields. So I’ve always liked that idea of learning American history on the road. In my career as a public historian, I’m very actively outspoken on saving national parks and wild and scenic rivers. I’m a big environmentalist — I want to make sure that we protect our natural resources in America. If I have a foe, it’s somebody who takes our natural resources for granted or poisons or pollutes in an indiscriminate and illegal way. The one common ground we all have right now is air and water, and we want to make sure we keep both clean. I tell students to pick [a cause] that they endorse and get involved with. It could be volunteering one day a week or for just a few hours; you don’t have to write a check. It’s just about giving your time. Right now, I’ve been reading about how the Tennessee River is really being destroyed around Decatur, Alabama. I’m doing research on the side for a small nonprofit, just to write an op-ed piece about the Tennessee River to help understand what’s going on at that one place. I can’t spend my life fighting for the Tennessee River, but I can put my shoulder to the wheel a little bit. Tell us about your next book. It’s called “Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, and the Great Environmental Awakening of 1945 to 1964,” and it’s coming out in May 2022. It deals with [the period] after World War II and issues like nuclear fallout and a whole host of pesticides and chemicals that had a negative effect on wildlife and humans. Rachel Carson was the great marine biologist who started studying the consequences of DDT spray. She led a great crusade to ban certain pesticides, and it really launched the environmental movement. John F. Kennedy embraced her research, and we started having regulatory panels. The interior department building is named after Kennedy’s secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall. He did everything to save parks and wilderness and seashores during the 1960s. Kennedy was responsible for creating Padre Island, Cape Cod and Point Reyes as national seashores. And so it was a group — Rachel Carson, Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Washington University biologist Barry Commoner — that were worried that we were contaminating the Earth with too many
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The main point of history is to remind us that our own times aren’t uniquely oppressive. America’s going to get on track eventually. chemicals and pesticides. I wrote about Theodore Roosevelt’s generation of conservationists and then I published a book on FDR, and now I’m looking at the Cold War era. President Biden likes to quote the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, especially lines about hope from “The Cure at Troy.” Can we “hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge”? The main point of history is to remind us that our own times aren’t uniquely oppressive. America’s going to get on track eventually. We do have some serious ruptures in our public faith in institutions. There seems to be a disdain for the U.S. federal government in many quarters. It used to be that people would be called for public service, whether you worked in the military or the Peace Corps or you planted trees with the Civilian Conservation Corps. We have to think of a way to get young people believing in the government and believing that our country can still do great things. I’m hopeful because I keep seeing our country go through difficult times and seem to persevere in the end. One could look at the fact that the election did hold — Biden is president; that hundreds of people were arrested for mob violence on the Capitol; that our judicial system worked when Trump was trying to say that he would be the winner of the election. There’s still a coherency to our country. I have three kids, and they all tease me that I use the word “onward” as my motto in life. You know, we’re going to be hit with adversity all the time, but we have to move forward and go onward. I’m excited to get back in the classroom, hopefully, this fall at Rice and have students back on campus — to pick up the pieces where we all left off. I always like the line novelist Jack Kerouac once said about young people, “They’re all angels of pure future.” They’ve got everything in front of them. I think it’s important to be engaged in American politics. I never care whether somebody is on the right or on the left if they’re a student. I just want to make sure that they feel that this country’s worth fighting for. ◆
PROFILES, HISTORY AND CLASSNOTES
ALUMNI ARTS & LETTERS
Rooting for You For Maria Failla, the plant show must go on. BY KYNDALL KRIST
PHOTOS BY MICH A EL N AGIN
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N THE PLANT LOVER community, Maria Failla ’11 is best known for her successful podcast, “Bloom and Grow Radio.” However, her beginnings at Rice might surprise you. “Broadway was always my dream,” Failla said. “I knew that I wanted to be a singing musical theater performer — dance was never my area of expertise. So I thought, I’ll go get my degree in opera and train my instrument to the highest level, and then transition with the finest-tuned instrument into musical theater to help give me a competitive edge.” This led the Westchester, New York, native to the Shepherd School of Music to earn her Bachelor of Music degree in opera studies. After graduation, the soprano landed
“I’m using my voice in a different way to help educate people to use plants to distract them, to help them see their lives a little bit differently, to help bring joy to their space.” touring roles in beloved musicals such as “The Sound of Music,” “Evita” and “West Side Story.” In 2019, she did a brief stint on Broadway performing in “Cats,” then toured nationally with the show throughout that year. Her career came to a halt in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the U.S., but fortunately she had a passion project to fall back on. In 2017, the self-proclaimed “serial plant killer” tried to hone her skills
after moving into an apartment in New York City with her now fiancé, Billy Morrissey. This time, she educated herself on plant care through Google searches, reading articles and books, and asking her green-thumb mom for advice. After successfully growing an herb garden on her small balcony, she gained enough confidence to venture back into houseplants. “We went, literally and figuratively, from zero to 60 plants in three months,” Failla laughed. Being a fan of podcasts, she discovered a lack of houseplant-specific programming, so in November 2017 she created “Bloom and Grow Radio” to continue learning by interviewing experts on a wide variety of topics — from understanding watering, pruning and natural light to lessons on specific types of plants such as hoyas, fiddle leaf figs and monsteras. Over the years, the podcast’s audience grew beyond her expectations, now with more than 1 million downloads and reaching listeners in 80-plus countries. While podcasting and musical theater performance might seem unrelated, Failla recognizes the commonalities between the two. “[The podcast] is a platform just like the stage is,” she explained. “As a performer, you want that connection with the audience through telling a story. … Through ‘Bloom and Grow,’ I’m using my voice in a different way to help educate people to use plants to distract them, to help them see their lives a little bit differently, to help bring joy to their space.” Despite grieving the loss of live onstage performance, Failla said the pandemic has given her the opportunity to explore new life experiences. The couple went from a 500-square-foot apartment to living on 5 acres of land in the Catskills of upstate New York. “The beauty of the pandemic is that it’s made some space for me to consider what [‘Bloom and Grow’] could look like as a job if it just had more of my time,” she said. “I’m fortunate that I have something else that I’m so passionate about.”
ALUMNI
The family established the nonprofit Lemond Foundation with the mentality that “you have to help people however you can.”
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Serving Up Success
Kindness is always on the menu at Lemond Kitchen.
MERINDA WATKINS-MARTIN ’91 and her husband, Reggie Martin, run Lemond Kitchen, a gourmet Southern cuisine catering and event business in Houston. Watkins-Martin learned her business acumen at the feet of her father, a man with a third-grade education who built a successful business from the ground up and emphasized the importance of education for his family. She began working for her father when she
PHOTO BY JEF F F I T LOW
was 4 years old and was helping with his accounting before she was a teenager. Martin is a third-generation chef and developed his skills while working for his grandmother, Emelda Lemond, who began her catering business in 1959. Watkins-Martin and Martin have instilled a similar work ethic in their own children: 13-year-old Chris and Elizabeth, who is a sophomore at Brown College. “Our kids understand that this is their business as well, so they helped from a very early age,” said Watkins-Martin. “Chris at 3 years old was emptying trash cans, and Elizabeth demonstrated products at catering events around age 5.” The family established the nonprofit Lemond Foundation with the mentality that “you have to help people however you can.” They deliver food weekly to senior citizens and donate school
supplies, books and computers to students. “We put 10% of Lemond Kitchen’s retail sales into the foundation,” Watkins-Martin said. Recently, Lemond Kitchen led a group of 18 local restaurants and catering companies and 43 faith-based, nonprofit and educational partners through the Houston Eats Restaurant Support (H.E.R.S.) program. The $2.2 million program, funded by the city of Houston as part of the federal CARES Act, went into action in early November 2020. The restaurants were paid to supply meals, and volunteers from the churches and nonprofits distributed the food to high-risk, homebound, low-income or unemployed individuals and families in 31 Houston ZIP codes that were hardest hit by COVID-19. The program, which aimed to give people relief over the holidays, also provided small business support to these restaurants. “Being paid to provide 50 meals a day made a difference in staying open for some restaurants,” said Watkins-Martin. The H.E.R.S. program served 218,059 meals in 7 1/2 weeks. Watkins-Martin spent much of her time training the other restaurants to do invoices, develop their menus and refine other business skills she honed at Rice while earning her B.A. in managerial studies. Having a good work-life balance is vital to Watkins-Martin, who also serves on the School of Social Sciences Dean’s Advisory Board at Rice. “Success doesn’t necessarily mean making huge sums of money at a Fortune 500 company. It’s about defining your own success.” — JENNY WEST ROZELLE ’00
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CLASSNOTES
Books, Big Bend, Van Life and a Wedding
Excerpts from Owlmanac
1960s
1950s
“Ginger Purington Bernhard ’59 (BA; PhD, 1971) and her colleague, Roswitha Wagner, wife of Harrison Wagner ’58 (BA), are awaiting publication of ‘The Ima Hogg Diaries: Love and the Great War, 1907–1918,’ by Texas A&M Press. Ginger is also at work on a novel about Cotton Mather’s witchcraft wife. I have three new books now available on Amazon: A memoir of my days as general manager of Houston’s Society for the Performing Arts titled, ‘Somebody Peenched My Het!’; ‘Tiny Troupers’ about child stars; and a new, light-hearted translation (shades of Lester Mansfield!) of Molière’s ‘Le Misanthrope.’ I can’t seem to shake my habit of constructing crossword puzzles, which appear regularly in the Phi Kappa Phi Forum and highly irregularly elsewhere. I also concoct a weekly theater quiz for a national online theater publication called GraceNotes.” — Contributed by Jim Bernhard ’59 (BA)
My family managed to plan a trip to Big Bend to celebrate my 80th birthday. Everyone drove, including my younger son and his wife from California. We stayed at Cibolo Creek Ranch, which really is in the middle of nowhere. They were only booking on a limited basis so there was plenty of social distancing, and we all had carefully quarantined two weeks beforehand. It was a safe and enjoyable experience. Thanks to our guide in the park, I even managed to spot an owl in a tree when we stopped for our picnic lunch. My only other outing, other than to the hospital for cataract surgery, was the final Owl football game of the season. The Rice staff did a great job organizing a safe opportunity for us to mask up and enjoy a beautiful afternoon at the stadium. — Contributed by class recorder Nancy Thornall Burch ’61 (Jones: BA)
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2000s
“Husband Andrew Foster and I decided 2020 wasn’t quite interesting enough, so we decided to add Samuel Joseph Foster (Lovett 2043) to make a Foster Party of Five. Leo Atticus Foster (Lovett 2037) and Maxwell Oliver Foster (Lovett 2039) are pleased with the addition, noting that more boys means more chaos. … The Foster family enjoys loading up the 12-passenger Mercedes Benz Sprinter van with Tracy Dittert Janda ’79 (Jones: BA), Ken Janda ’77 (Lovett: BA), and other family and friends to visit national parks or to go on other ‘van adventures.’ The next time you are in DFW, come play with the Foster fray!” — Contributed by Allie Janda Foster ’09 (Lovett: BA)
2010s
Gabby Parker ’17 (Sid Rich: BA) married Blake Alfson ’15 (Sid Rich: BSME) Nov. 28, 2020, at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in San Antonio. The newlyweds first met at Rice and quickly became best friends, bonding over pizza and movies on Friday nights and trips to Ren Fest, bluebonnet fields and the Idaho wilderness. They continued to remain close after graduation and started dating after some time. When Gabby is not working in the Rice University Archives or freelancing for Roll 20, you can find her and Blake playing elaborate tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons, baking wonderful confections or spending time with friends watching “Lord of the Rings.” They look forward to traveling to New Zealand to experience the Shire once traveling is safe. — Contributed by class recorder Margaret Lie ’17 (Wiess: BS and MA)
IL LU S T R AT IO N S B Y DEL P HINE L EE
ALUMNI ALUMNI BOOKS
Q&A
BY JENNIFER LATSON
founder of Houston’s Bayou City Press, is one; she writes about her experience in her book, “Savoring the Camino de Santiago.” We spoke with her about what put her on the path and what she took away. Q. You spent 40 years thinking about making the trek. What took you so long? A. When I first heard about the Camino, I was in my early 20s and teaching English in Portugal. I barely made enough money to feed myself, so taking a long trip was just not a possibility. I kept thinking about it, though, and always thought that I would travel the Camino after retirement. I originally planned to drive the French route, but between 1970 and 2014 when I retired, walking the Camino exploded in popularity, and gradually I was persuaded that walking the Camino was the way to experience it.
Savoring the Camino de Santiago
It’s the Pilgrimage, Not the Hike Julie Gianelloni Connor ’73 Bayou City Press, 2020
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EEKERS OF SPIRITUAL enlightenment have walked Spain’s Camino de Santiago for centuries, starting with the millions of medieval Catholics who undertook the pilgrimage as penance for their sins, ensuring that they’d spend less time in purgatory. The roughly 500-mile journey is a sort of purgatory in itself, but that doesn’t stop hundreds of thousands of modern-day pilgrims from following in their footsteps every year. Julie Gianelloni Connor, a retired foreign service officer and the
Q. How did you prepare for the trip? A. I read a lot of books by others who had traveled the Camino. That’s my usual way to prep for a trip. I researched the gear I would need, but I didn’t actually train, which I should have. Going up and down all those hills and mountains in northern Spain is a challenge for a flatlander like me. Q. What did you take away from the experience? A. At the end of my trip I thought that I must be a very shallow, superficial person because I didn’t experi-
ence any of the life-altering moments other pilgrims wrote about. Once back at home, however, I had time to reflect. The war-torn Middle East was spawning migration disasters all through the Mediterranean, and here at home our immigration policies seemed to me to be headed in the wrong direction. When I thought about the everyday help I, as a foreigner, received from Spaniards all along the Camino, I began to believe that being on the receiving end of unexpected kindness was an important experience. A handful of almonds given to me by a total stranger told me something about the value of offering a helping hand to others. I try to keep this lesson in mind all the time. Q. What advice do you have for others who are contemplating the pilgrimage? A. I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that there is no “right” way to experience the Camino. The important thing is just to go do it. You can do a long walk here in the U.S. via the Pacific Crest or Appalachian trails, but you won’t have an experience at all like you do on the Camino. My heart would swell when I stood on sections of the Roman Road or on the bridge at Puente La Reina and reflected that my footsteps followed those of millions of others, dating back to the ninth century when pilgrims first set out for Santiago de Compostela.
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ALUMNI
ALUMNI BOOKS
Now Reading BY JENNIFER LATSON
Bones
Inside and Out Roy A. Meals ’67 W.W. Norton, 2020
BONE DOESN’T GET NEARLY enough respect, Roy Meals believes. As a building material, it’s far superior to any other material nature or man has ever made. “Not only is bone the world’s best structural support, it is also the world’s largest import-export bank, a repository of vital elements — especially calcium — on which our lives depend,” writes Meals, an orthopedic surgery professor at UCLA. Even after bone has served its skeletal purpose, it can last for millions of years more, living a second life in a variety of forms, from tools to weapons to ornaments to musical instruments. The study of bones, both inside and outside of bodies, has a lot to teach us about the history of Earth and of mankind, Meals argues. In this comprehensive but lighthearted account, he sets out to explore the lively and often surprising history of bone — and convince us to give it the deference it deserves.
Keith Haring’s Line
Race and the Performance of Desire Ricardo Montez ’97 Duke University Press, 2020
THE WORK OF POP ARTIST KEITH HARING, who began his career drawing chalk figures on New York City subway walls, is instantly recognizable for its bold, clear lines. But as Ricardo Montez documents in “Keith Haring’s Line,” his legacy blurs the lines between collaboration and complicity, appreciation and appropriation. The book, which blends performance studies, critical race studies and queer theory, focuses on Haring’s treatment of cross-racial desire in his art and his life. “The artist wrote in his journals that he did not feel white on the inside, and he often expressed a fetishistic desire for people of color,” writes Montez, a performance studies professor at The New School. “In these bodies, he found a soul more akin to his than that of white people.” Haring, who was 31 when he died in 1990 from AIDS-related causes, enjoyed immense commercial success in his short life. And while his collaboration with queer artists of color helped raise awareness of their own work, it was inherently exploitative. “Collaboration cannot ultimately remake the social world of privilege that values Haring over those with whom he worked,” Montez writes.
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ALUMNI
Buildings of Texas
East, North Central, Panhandle and South Plains, and West Gerald Moorhead ’69 University of Virginia Press, 2019
TEXAS’ ICONIC 19TH-CENTURY courthouses get a lot of love in the historic register — and, starting in the 1990s, they got a lot of federal funding as well, through the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program. But there are plenty of other Texas structures worthy of our consideration, argues Gerald Moorhead: from forts to houses to churches to the Harvey House restaurants credited with being America’s first restaurant chain. “Buildings of Texas: East, North Central, Panhandle and South Plains, and West” is the second of two towering tomes in a series aiming to “convey the myth and the reality, the diversity, beauty and magic” of these gems of Texas architecture. This volume alone covers more than 1,000 buildings, with 352 illustrations and 45 maps. But it’s not meant to serve only as an armchair anthology. Moorhead, an award-winning architect based in Houston, chose the locations based on whether the reader might actually want to go visit them, using the book as a travel guide. “We have chosen towns with several sights worth the journey and hope the visitor will discover other sights once there,” he writes.
Mississippi Poets
A Literary Guide Catharine Savage Brosman ’55 University Press of Mississippi, 2020
MISSISSIPPI HAS AN OUTSIZED presence in American literature, although many of us are more familiar with the state’s rich prose heritage than its poetry. In “Mississippi Poets: A Literary Guide,” Catharine Savage Brosman, a professor emerita of French at Tulane University, aims to help us appreciate the latter by introducing 47 Mississippi poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. Several of the poets Brosman includes are better known for their fiction, such as William Faulkner and Richard Wright. In fact, they’re all highly versatile, she notes: “Some are fiction writers also, some performing musicians, some painters, one a woodworker, and many, of course, teachers at various levels and, for the women, ‘domestic engineers.’” Some have scientific backgrounds; one is a professor of medicine. Not purely an assessment of their poetic prowess, the guide offers an introduction to the poets themselves: their lives, their backgrounds and their place in the culture of Mississippi. Not all are natives of the state, and some well-known writers who were born in Mississippi don’t get a mention, including Tennessee Williams, who is more closely connected with the New Orleans literary scene. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Eudora Welty, meanwhile, is omitted despite having written poems because, as Brosman writes, “the genre was a marginal one for her.”
POEM
The Pain Trader James Fowler ’79
Works in horn, wood, bone. Itinerant, he appears in the yard, asking for water; tells of pigeons on the wing, nations of bison. Shortly his talk gives way to quiet, hands abstractly busy as folk hear themselves unpack their sorry load of troubles: Failed crop, marriage, business, all so singular and hard, like a child named and buried, raw cicatrix of loss. They’d rather not hold it against the world, try to strike the right accepting tone, but it’s hard. The hurt burrows. All this while a shape emerges, carved, etched: creaturely perhaps; blossoming; stark like crystals. A thing of power rough hewn. They see and know it theirs at some remove, not so particular as first felt, a more broadly veined and grained likeness. So they barter, setting shrewdness aside, surprised what value something neither finery nor tool can have by their reckoning. — From “The Pain Trader and Other Poems,” James Fowler, Golden Antelope Press, 2020. Published by permission of the author.
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03.29.2021 // Ginnie Okafor ’23 // Hanszen College
LAST LOOK 50 RICE M AG A ZINE SPRING 202 1
PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW
Nelly Murstein holding a photo of herself as a doctoral student at Rice.
After retiring from a long and fruitful career as a French professor, Nelly Murstein ’54 (M.A.; Ph.D., 1960) is still curious. In fact, she recently completed two genetics courses through an educational retirement community affiliated with Lasell University. “I feel I am very alive intellectually right now,” she says. “And Rice gave me that hunger for learning.” That spirit of learning was very much a family affair: Nelly’s mother, Rebecca Cassel ’57 (M.A.; Ph.D., 1959), and brother, Edwin Kashy ’56 (B.A.; M.A., 1957; Ph.D., 1959), earned their doctorates from Rice within a year of Nelly. Looking back, Nelly credits Rice for providing a foundation for her and her brother’s careers. She is most grateful, however, for the life-changing impact it had on her mother, who, after raising five children, fulfilled her lifelong dream of earning a degree in French literature. Rebecca Cassel and Edwin Kashy, Rice graduation 1959.
To honor her mother, Nelly established the Rebecca Elnekave Cassel Endowed Scholarship, with an additional gift commitment planned in her estate. By supporting study abroad opportunities for undergraduates to immerse themselves in a foreign language and culture, Nelly spreads her family’s love for learning to future generations of Owls.
To learn more about establishing your own legacy at Rice, contact the Office of Gift Planning at 713-348-4624 or giftplan@rice.edu. PHOTO CREDIT T K
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Rothko, Remembered
Founded by John and Dominique de Menil and opened in 1971, the Rothko Chapel houses 14 of artist Mark Rothko’s famously color-saturated pieces and is one of Houston’s most iconic landmarks. In celebration of the chapel’s half-century anniversary, the Moody Center for the Arts organized a unique exhibition, “Artists and the Rothko Chapel: 50 Years of Inspiration,” which ran through May 15.
THE PROBLEM WAS COMPLEX: How could Rice hold in-person commencement ceremonies while still maintaining campus pandemic protocols? The elegant, if unconventional, solution: Rice Stadium, of course. In April, the Rice community received an exciting update about the 108th Commencement — all ceremonies were to be held at historic Rice Stadium. The announcement from President David Leebron, Provost Reginald DesRoches, Dean of Undergraduates Bridget Gorman and Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Seiichi Matsuda noted that all schedules would remain as planned for the weekend of May 14–15, 2021, and that students would be able to walk the stage with their classmates and invite guests to attend. A special commencement ceremony for the Class of 2020 was also planned. See our coverage in the Summer 2021 issue.
VIDEO
“Hello, Hamlet!”
Wiess Tabletop Theater’s parody of a Shakespeare classic has been reprised roughly every four years since 1967, but it’s safe to say this year’s online show was particularly novel. “It was a lot of innovating as we went along,” said Adrian Almy, the show’s director and a sophomore at Wiess College. Read the story, “To Thine Online Self Be True,” and watch the video online.