Rice Magazine | Summer 2023 by Rice University

A RECORD YEAR FOR INQUIRY, COLLABORATION AND DISCOVERY

RESEARCH THE

SUMMER 2023

ISSUE

RICE MAGAZINE SUMMER 2023

Rice produced an impressive $192 million in sponsored projects in 2022, with 958 awards received across all disciplines.

The Huff OEDK Engineering Design Showcase featured cool projects that aim to improve lives.

Ecologist Rachel Carson is central to “Silent Spring Revolution,” Douglas Brinkley’s newest book.

The Year in Research

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Inventive Minds

Environmental Awakening

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS GASH

CONTENTS FEATURES

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PHOTO COURTESY OF LAUREN HOWE-KERR, PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW, PHOTO COURTESY OF KEVIN MCHUGH, PHOTO BY BILL PURCELL

SUMMER 2023 RICE MAGAZINE

DEPARTMENTS Sallyport

Threats to coral reefs, Jayaker Kolli’s connections, Rice meets Madagascar, 150 precision instruments and Community Bridges

Wisdom

Micro medicine, HISD’s takeover, Ramamoorthy Ramesh, fossil fishing, “Wild World” and Rice’s cleanest room

Alumni

How estrogen affects injury, home-based diagnostics, the future of fusion and three alumni books — “O Mg!”

Last Look

Hannah Rahmaan ’23 exudes peace and joy at undergraduate commencement May 6, 2023.

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BREEZY DAY AT THE BEACH

Torres del Paine, Chile Spring 2022 The School for Field Studies

Kyle Dickens ’22 spent his final spring semester studying abroad in Patagonia. “There aren’t many study abroad experiences where the commute to class involves walking through katabatic winds (downhill winds from a glacier),” he says. “Many of our lectures took place in the field — seeing glaciers, snowcapped mountains, wild rheas and guanacos (relatives to the llama) was commonplace.” 4

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PHOTO BY K YLE DICKENS

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CONTRIBUTORS

RICE MAGAZINE Summer 2023 PUBLISHER

Office of Public Affairs Jeff Falk, interim vice president EDITOR

Lynn Gosnell Hilary C. Ritz (“One Wild World”) joined Rice as an editor and writer in January after seven years as the editor-in-chief of a small press and even longer doing freelance editing work. In her spare time, she pens science fiction and fantasy novels; see hchritz.com.

Tracey Rhoades (“The Clean Room”) is a 30-year Rice veteran who has edited and written too many stories, magazine issues and university publications to count. However, visiting and learning about Rice’s clean room was a first for her. “The facility and its leader, Tim Gilheart, really wowed me,” she says.

Silvia Cernea Clark (“Inventive Minds”) helps keep the world at large informed about science and engineering research at Rice. She is a seasoned writer with experience in a variety of registers, from the technical to the literary. Cernea Clark holds a doctorate in comparative literature from Brown University.

ART DIRECTOR

Alese Pickering DIRECTOR OF MARKETING

Lisa Yelenick EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Tracey Rhoades ASSISTANT EDITOR

Hilary Ritz PHOTO/VIDEO

Jeff Fitlow Brandon Martin Gustavo Raskosky CONTRIBUTORS

Wesley Allsbrook, Andrew Bell, Jade Boyd, Sam Byrd, Silvia Cernea Clark, Rachel Fairbank, Chris Gash, David Junkin, Elena Lacey ’13, Jennifer Latson, Delphine Lee, Amy McCaig, Alex Eben Meyer, Paddy Mills, Dunja Opalko, Bill Purcell, Jenny West Rozelle ’00, Mike Williams, Sarah Peters Yu David Junkin (“The Strategist”) is an award-winning illustrator living in Montreal, Canada. His work has made the pages of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Golf Digest, to name just a few.

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Elena Lacey ’13 (“COVID-19, Compounded”) is currently an art director at The Washington Post, where she commissions art and illustrates. She also eats a lot of Cheez-Its.

SUMMER 2023

Wesley Allsbrook (“Environmental Awakening”) writes and draws for print, TV, film, games and immersive media. Her work has been recognized by The Society of Publication Designers, Communication Arts and Sundance Film Festival, among others. She’s autistic.

INTERNS

Emma Korsmo ’24 Mabel Tang ’23

Rice Magazine is published four times a year and is sent to university alumni, faculty, staff, parents of undergraduates and friends of the university. © July 2023, Rice University

FROM THE EDITOR THE RICE UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Robert T. Ladd, chair; Elle Anderson; Bart Broadman; D. Mark Durcan; Josh Earnest; Michol L. Ecklund; Terrence Gee; George Y. Gonzalez; James T. Hackett; Jennifer Kneale; Holli Ladhani; Lynn A. Lednicky; Elle Moody; Brandy Hays Morrison; Asuka Nakahara; Vinay Pai; Brian Patterson; Byron Pope; Gloria Meckel Tarpley; Jeremy Thigpen; Claudia Gee Vassar; James Whitehurst; Lori Rudge Whitten; Randa Duncan Williams; Michael Yuen. ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERS

Reginald DesRoches, president; Amy Dittmar, provost; Paul Cherukuri, vice president for Innovation; Jeff Falk, interim vice president for Public Affairs; Kelly Fox, vice president for Finance and Administration; Caroline Levander, vice president for Global and Digital Strategy; Paul Padley, vice president for Information Technology and chief information officer; Yvonne Romero Da Silva, vice president for Enrollment; Ronica Smucker, interim vice president for Development and Alumni Relations; Omar A. Syed, vice president and general counsel; Allison Kendrick Thacker, vice president for Investments and treasurer. 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

PROTOTYPE NO. 2 “WHAT IF … ?” Our themed issues generally begin with the kind of openended questions that inspire curiosity and creative experimentation. Last year, we asked our team, “What if we turned over an entire magazine issue to research news, stories and data?” Borrowing a page from Rice’s engineering design projects, we built a prototype — and published a snapshot of some of Rice’s most “dynamic, complex and ambitious scholarship” taking place across, and far beyond, campus. This summer, we’re back with a new iteration of the research issue — one that we think readers will find informative, engaging and visually delightful. This issue kicks off with a note from President DesRoches in which he quotes the great Harlem Renaissance writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston: “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” In these pages, we see Hurston’s wisdom reflected in the questions our undergraduate researchers are exploring — in plant genetics, tropical ecology, urban planning and purpose-driven engineering design projects. We see the fruits of formalized curiosity in critical and creative scholarship from graduate students and faculty at home and abroad. We marvel at the ongoing discoveries of alumni researchers working in biomedical engineering, religion, medicine, philosophy and fusion energy — and praise the brilliance of an alumnus who can turn the history of chemistry into a

Our four-page explainer, “The Year in Research,” breaks down the data categories describing Rice’s banner year in research, and it’s expanded online. dad-joke-strewn graphic novel (really!). We also hear this philosophy expressed in the voice of Vice President for Research Ramamoorthy Ramesh, who joined Rice last year from the University of California, Berkeley. A condensed matter physicist with a breadth of experience across academic and government spheres, Ramesh exudes an infectious belief about Rice’s future as an innovation powerhouse. One lesson we took away from last summer’s issue is that research “by the numbers” could be richer in meaning with additional context. So, we’re trying something new. Our four-page explainer, “The Year in Research,” breaks down the data categories describing Rice’s banner year in research, and it’s expanded online. Finally, “what if … ” we ended all these stories of purpose with a moment of pure joy from a perfect commencement day?

We’ll see you in the new (academic) year. In the meantime, send your comments about this issue to ricemagazine@rice.edu.

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PRESIDENT DESROCHES are involved in research and all our students pursue the creative and systematic practice of discovery. Rice made a commitment to doing impactful research early on. Just six years after opening its doors, Rice awarded its first doctoral degree. Today, graduate students make up almost half the university’s student population. Rice’s funded research has grown significantly over the years as well. Scholars at Rice conduct research in a range of critical areas that

HERE’S TO “FORMALIZED CURIOSITY” THE GREAT American author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” My colleagues and I know what Hurston is talking about. It was this unquenchable curiosity and desire to advance humanity that led me, after witnessing the damage wrought by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, to pursue a doctorate in structural engineering. I then devoted my research to improving earthquake resilience around the world. Teaching, research and scholarly endeavors across all disciplines are what we do at Rice. Over the course of our 111-year history, we have established ourselves as one of the leading academic institutions in the world. Research is essential to great universities. In addition to fueling the creation of knowledge, driving innovation, enriching education, attracting talent and building reputation, research enables universities to fulfill their roles as critical thinkers, generators of new ideas and contributors to the betterment of the world. Research also enhances undergraduate education, especially at Rice, where the majority of our undergraduates

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Focusing our efforts on solving the big problems of our lifetime — energy and climate, social and economic disparities, health and medicine, and information science — is how we can make the biggest impact. cross numerous disciplines in all our acclaimed schools and departments. Following are just a few examples. Rice professors Naomi Halas and Peter Nordlander led the development of a new type of commercially viable photocatalyst that only needs the power of light to make the hydrogen economy a reality. Their invention has been licensed by Syzygy Plasmonics, a Houston-based startup company, and is making its way to the marketplace. In the area of global health, professors Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Maria Oden apply their research through NEST360, an international partnership of engineers, doctors and public health experts who aim to end preventable newborn deaths in African hospitals. Finally, Rice anthropologists Mary Prendergast and Jeffrey Fleisher recently gained international attention

for their genetic research that revealed that medieval people who lived along the Indian Ocean coast of eastern Africa had both African and Persian ancestry, suggesting that maritime trade connections fostered relationships between Asian merchants and African traders and their families. As you can see, Rice’s research enterprise is thriving, and our faculty is embracing the challenge of taking our endeavors to the next level. Elevating our research profile and the impact of our research is one of my primary goals as president. Focusing our efforts on solving the big problems of our lifetime — energy and climate, social and economic disparities, health and medicine, and information science — is how we can make the biggest impact. Partnering with world-leading organizations and institutions in Houston, such as the Texas Medical Center and Johnson Space Center, and leveraging the living laboratory that is the city of Houston are key to our success. In the coming years, we will make additional investments to support our research mission. Vice President for Research Ramamoorthy Ramesh will soon announce several new institutes and centers that will serve as focal points for research activities that span disciplines, and Vice President for Innovation Paul Cherukuri has hit the ground running in our efforts to build programs that help our faculty and students successfully commercialize their technologies. Rice will reach new heights of excellence and impact through research and innovation. Our research and scholarship will help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems while working to ensure that all communities share the benefits equally. This is our responsibility as a member of a nowglobal and interconnected community of learners, educators and researchers.

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CAMPUS NEWS AND STUDENT LIFE

BIOSCIENCES

In Hot Water Viruses that threaten coral reefs thrive in increased global temperatures. BY JADE BOYD

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HE BREATHTAKING colors of reef-building corals come from photosynthetic algae that live inside the corals. A groundbreaking three-year study has found that viruses may increase their attacks on these symbiotic algae during marine heat waves, which are increasing in frequency due to global warming. The study’s lead author, Lauren Howe-Kerr ’17, says coral and marine disease researchers are paying closer attention to coral viruses in the wake of studies in 2021 and 2022 suggesting viral infections might be responsible for stony coral tissue loss disease,

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which has been decimating reefs in Florida and the Caribbean since it was first identified in 2014. Howe-Kerr’s study was the first to analyze the reefwide prevalence, persistence, triggers and health impacts of “dinoflagellate-infecting RNA viruses,” single-stranded RNA viruses that infect the symbiotic algae that live inside the corals. “It builds our understanding of coral viruses, and particularly RNA viruses that infect coral endosymbionts,” says Howe-Kerr, a Rice postdoctoral researcher who co-authored the study with more than a dozen colleagues from Rice and eight other universities and institutions.

“Our work provides the first empirical evidence that exposure to high temperatures on the reef triggers [RNA] infections within coral colonies, and we showed those infections are intensified in unhealthy coral colonies,” Howe-Kerr says. The study was carried out at the Moorea Coral Reef Long-Term Ecological Research station in French Polynesia. Moorea, which is about 20 miles from Tahiti, is ringed by coral reefs. Samples from 54 coral colonies around the island were collected twice a year between August 2018 and October 2020, showing the warmest water temperatures in March 2019. Reefs across the island suffered heat-related stress during this period, including widespread bleaching. The sampling and analysis were carried out during Howe-Kerr’s doctoral studies in the Rice lab of marine biologist and study co-author Adrienne Correa. While all 54 colonies survived the three-year experiment, 50% suffered partial mortality. The hardest hit were ocean-facing “forereefs,” which were almost three times more likely to experience partial mortality than were corals in the fringing reefs, which may be more used to dealing with the high temperatures of the shallower waters close to shore, Correa says. She says a wider variety of RNA viruses were found in heat-stressed colonies during the hotter temperatures in 2019, which suggests viral production had increased. And the pattern proved strongest in colonies that suffered partial mortality, which points to specific host-virus interactions that could drive ecosystem impacts. “Viral productivity will likely increase as ocean temperatures continue to rise,” Correa says. “It’s important to learn as much as we can about hostvirus interactions, because they have the potential to alter the foundational symbiosis that underpins coral reef ecosystems.” Adrienne Correa is assistant professor of biosciences at Rice.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF LAUREN HOWE-KERR

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Across, Down and Forward

Jayaker Kolli finds ways to connect people, ideas and creative pursuits.

SCIENTIST, COLLEGE president, environmental advocate and crossword enthusiast. At Rice, Jayaker Kolli ’23 found a home that was big enough for all these interests and yet small enough for his interests to interconnect. Kolli’s academic story started when his high school chemistry teacher recommended him for a summer research program in the lab of chemical engineer Keith Keitz at the University of Texas at Austin. There, Kolli researched the electrogenic properties of the bacteria Shewanella oneidensis. The findings from these experiments were published in the journal Nature Chemistry when Kolli was only in his first year at Rice. “I really lucked into that one,” he says. In college, Kolli continued to study electrogenic bacteria by working in the Rice chapter of the International Genetically Engineered Machine Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to advance synthetic biology. Bringing in his passion for environmentalism, he led a team of students on a “very ambitious” remote project to create “biologic photovoltaics” using cyanobacteria — bacteria capable of photosynthesis — and an extracellular electron transfer pathway modeled on Shewanella, making “a biological solar panel.” Keeping his focus on the micro level, Kolli worked in the lab of molecular biologist Janet Braam on isolating plant-derived vesicles from Arabidopsis thaliana and their potential as carriers for therapeutics for diseases like cancer. That work inspired him to take a course in plant genetics with bioscientist Bonnie Bartel, and he brought the

PHOTO BY BR A NDON M A R T IN

Jayaker Kolli ’23 works on a crossword puzzle at Will Rice College.

Kolli’s affinity for finding connections is mirrored in a favorite creative pursuit — constructing crossword puzzles. scholarship from both of these experiences into his summer project with the nonprofit Cántaro Azul in Chiapas, Mexico, whose mission is to bring safe drinking water solutions to the community. With the support of the Center for Civic Leadership and a Loewenstern Fellowship, Kolli experimented with finding promising ways to filter water using plant-based methods. As it so happens, one of these methods used the seeds of the moringa tree, a tree that’s native to Southern India, where his parents are from. “I grew up eating the seeds, like for dinner. I was telling my parents that we are using them for [water] treatment. They’re like, ‘Really?’” Kolli’s affinity for finding connections is mirrored in a favorite creative pursuit — constructing crossword puzzles. He and roommate Nikhaz Omar ’23 used

to race each other to solve the Rice Thresher’s crossword every Wednesday night in the Will Rice Commons. When the Thresher advertised for new crossword writers, they got the job. And they made the crosswords their own, hiding “Easter eggs” in their puzzles and working in cultural references that resonated with students. “We were writing for the community that we were part of rather than just writing crosswords as they are typically written,” he says. Building community is a big reason that Kolli also relished his role as two-time Will Rice College president. “The best part about any leadership role is that you get to talk to people and be a confidant for them,” he says. “And especially during the last few years. Just connecting with people and being there for them.” — LYNN GOSNELL Jayaker Kolli started medical school at the University of Texas this summer. Janet Braam is professor of biosciences and associate dean for strategic initiatives. Bonnie Bartel is the Ralph and Dorothy Looney Professor of BioSciences. Watch a video at magazine.rice.edu/ crossword.

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Antananarivo, Madagascar, is home to the University of Antananarivo.

SYLLABUS

The New Environmentalists IN THIS SEMINAR, students explore the intersection of environmental issues and well-being under the guidance of lead teachers Carrie Masiello, a biogeochemist who studies Earth’s carbon cycle, and Amy Dunham, a bioscientist who researches the ecology of tropical rainforests. They are assisted by Eric Wuesthoff, a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology. “This class gives students the opportunity to synthesize what they have learned [in the major] and to explore topics in the environment that they’re really interested in,” Wuesthoff says. The goal is for students to generate ideas about what they want to do in their careers going forward. They even interview alumni to learn about different career possibilities in environmental

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sciences and the often-winding career paths that people take after college. Dunham adds, “We try to get people at different career stages so they can get a better understanding of what it may look like a couple of years after college versus others who are more established.” This semester, Rice students had the unique opportunity to discuss environmental issues via live video with students at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar. The island nation, whose official languages are Malagasy and French, provided an ideal international course component, as Dunham has engaged in ecological research there for more than two decades. “The Malagasy students were very excited to practice and engage in scientific

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discussions in English,” Dunham says. “The experience was enriching for everybody, and I am excited to keep up long-term learning engagements between our universities. Places like Madagascar are often excluded from conversations about global environment, but its scholars and students have a lot of knowledge and experience that we can learn from.” Sophomore M. Graham Waterstraat adds, “This class is exciting because you get to speak to people from a different continent about ongoing scientific and environmental issues, especially ones that uniquely affect them. I think one of the great things about interdisciplinary majors generally is the opportunity to hear from so many different perspectives.” — SAM BYRD

ESCI 495/ BIOS 495 Seminar: Topics in Environmental Science DEPARTMENTS Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences and BioSciences DESCRIPTION This capstone course integrates topics that span environmental sciences, allowing students to explore various areas that may be the seeds of future career paths. Topics include the interconnection between human health and the environment, environmental issues from international perspectives, and the students’ own interests in local and global environmental issues.

PHOTO VIA 123RF.COM

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BEHIND THE SCENES

High Maintenance Timothy Gilheart manages 150 highly sophisticated instruments across campus.

AS DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS for the Shared Equipment Authority, Timothy Gilheart ’08 keeps the lenses polished and gears greased — sort of. The Shared Equipment Authority, established in 2001, is literally a SEA of equipment maintained by dedicated research scientists and staff, many of whom have advanced degrees, are experts in their fields and possess 20-plus years of experience. At the apex of the organization is Gilheart, the keeper of 150 specialized, sophisticated instruments distributed in 12 locations across campus and the BioScience Research

Collaborative. Gilheart first came to Rice from Trinity as an undergraduate in 2001 for a summer of research, then returned as a graduate student in 2002, making him an early user of the resources he now manages. How did your early exposure to Rice influence your decision to come back? As [a student in the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program], I designed components for improving signal-to-noise in quantum-limited electron-detection experiments in the lab of Alexander Rimberg. That experience directly impacted my decision to attend Rice as part of the applied physics program and Alex’s team. When the Rimberg Lab moved to Dartmouth in 2004, I transferred and finished my Ph.D. there in 2008. I returned to Rice as an instructor in the physics and astronomy department, where I co-taught physics classes. In 2011, I became the Shared Equipment Authority’s clean room manager/research scientist and managed the old facility in

Timothy Gilheart outside the nanofabrication facility. See Page 24 for a look inside the “clean room.”

P HO T O B Y G U S TAVO R A SKO SK Y

Given how our core labs are geographically distributed across Rice, I am often on location with other staff members, being “eyes on” and “hands on,” providing technical leadership for timely issues. Abercrombie Lab, now demolished. As someone who has been an undergrad and grad student and held faculty and staff positions, I am very grateful for the many long-term collegial and mentoring relationships I have enjoyed throughout my time at Rice. Is there such a thing as a typical day for you? There is a lot of variation. In my basement office in the Space Sciences Building, I will triage the most urgent items before plugging in to the day’s planned tasks. Given how our core labs are geographically distributed across Rice, I am often on location with other staff members, being “eyes on” and “hands on,” providing technical leadership for timely issues. Do peer institutions have similar offices? Any university engaged in engineering and science research will have one or more core lab facilities, [which usually operate] independently. Our office’s distinctive quality is that we are an umbrella organization for most of Rice’s core labs. Being centrally positioned under the Office of Research, our organizational structure helps us more effectively leverage limited resources. Many larger institutions are surprised at how much Rice accomplishes in science and engineering research given its enrollment. We work relentlessly to help Rice punch above its weight class.

— INTERVIEW BY TRACEY RHOADES

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Sophomore Rachel Toole is a fellow for LISC Houston, a local office with the nation’s largest community development support organization.

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

Hands for Houston

The Kinder Institute’s Community Bridges program pairs Rice students with local nonprofits to benefit the greater good. RICE SOPHOMORE Sarah Davidson was interested in urban planning and public spaces before her fellowship with Community Bridges, an experiential learning program within the Kinder Institute for Urban Research. After working with Buffalo Bayou Partnership last

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semester, she gained an entirely new perspective on just how much public parks can mean to a city. “I’ve never thought this much about parks in my life,” she says, chuckling. “But you really start to understand what it means to be a resident of a city when you talk to people about their public parks. This has opened my eyes to what it actually is like to be a Houston resident.” Through a fellowship with Buffalo Bayou Partnership, a nonprofit focused on revitalizing the 10-square-mile stretch of bayou that flows from Shepherd Drive to the Port of Houston Turning Basin, Davidson has explored ways to redevelop Houston’s public spaces and parks. The goal of her research project was to examine how Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s 10-year,

$310 million expansion plan into its east sector can be improved to make these spaces more user friendly and accessible. The partnership’s plan envisions integrating new and redeveloped parks, trails and recreational destinations into surrounding neighborhoods from Highway 59 to the Turning Basin. At the heart of the east sector is Tony Marron Park, a 19-acre space that will double in size by the end of the expansion. Davidson visited public spaces along the bayou — Buffalo Bayou Park, Tony Marron Park and Eleanor Tinsley Park — to survey community members, finding out what they like about, and would like to see added to, existing parks. “One of the questions was to describe their ideal park in three words. This

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garnered great answers regarding what people liked and disliked most about the three different parks,” Davidson says. Through interviews, she learned that while some users of Tony Marron Park expressed dissatisfaction with a lack of maintenance and shade on playground areas, many were fond of the park’s peacefulness and tranquility. In addition, many favored the openness and diversity that Buffalo Bayou and Eleanor Tinsley parks provide. These types of findings will play a key factor in future development, says Karen Farber, vice president of external affairs at Buffalo Bayou Partnership. “It’s so important for us to be in direct dialogue with community members, whether it’s users of Buffalo Bayou Park or Tony Marron Park in Buffalo Bayou East. But it’s time-consuming, and we are a small nonprofit,” Farber says. “So when [a Community Bridges fellow] comes to us and says their mission is to do this kind of work — to talk to people, survey them, and collect and organize that data — we’re eager to have those kinds of partners.”

This empathy often lends itself to conversations with the students about the importance of these partners and how nonprofits in underserved communities are often heavily relied upon by residents. combining them with their personal talents,” Stokes says. “They actively help nonprofits who are occasionally under-resourced and who welcome any mission-complementary assistance.” Stokes contributes a unique perspective of the community outreach effort, as he’s seen it from both sides of the fence. Stokes was formerly the health equity program manager at

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Avenue CDC, one of the 16 external organizations partnering with Community Bridges. “As a past partner of Community Bridges, there are some parts of the program that I was already familiar with,” he says. “In my current role, I find myself occasionally thinking like a member of a nonprofit. This helps me empathize with the different obstacles that nonprofits face and overcome on a regular basis — namely staff turnover, potential issues with funding, staff capacity, etc. “This empathy often lends itself to conversations with the students about the importance of these partners and how nonprofits in underserved communities are often heavily relied upon by residents.”

Expanding nonprofit capacity Since Community Bridges’ inception in 2011, more than 230 students have partnered with local nonprofit organizations like Buffalo Bayou Partnership to explore ways to evaluate and improve their efforts in serving Houston residents — whether it be through community development, public health or education programs. The aim of the student projects is to build the capacity of Community Bridges’ partner organizations to make evidence-based decisions in pursuit of their missions, says Imarogbe “Rogbe” Stokes, who oversees the program. “Rice has the advantage of having access to the newest technology, data and personnel. The students of the Community Bridges program serve as a conduit of those resources,

Junior Vanessa Chuang is a fellow at Rice’s School Literacy and Culture program.

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By providing student fellowship opportunities, Kinder is planting seeds of interest and passion in essential community outreach functions among Rice’s talented student population.

Kinder Institute Assistant Director of Community Engagement Imarogbe “Rogbe” Stokes oversees the Community Bridges program.

Theory meets practice During the 2023 spring semester, there was no shortage of student projects that displayed the intersection of curiosity, engagement, ingenuity and empathy. For example, sophomore Rachel Toole is a fellow for partner organization LISC Houston, which is a local office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, the nation’s largest community development support organization. With programs addressing real estate, leadership capacity, and economic, community and neighborhood development, the organization’s goal is to provide funds as loans or grants to partner nonprofits. “The project really deals with trying to identify service delivery gaps in the Houston market and looking for ways for them to collaborate more or leverage the resources that are being deployed in the community to maximize their effect,” Toole says. Toole’s fresh perspective, open-mindedness and creativity while meeting and interviewing with partner companies has resulted in improved candidness and problem-solving, LISC Houston

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program officer Ellary Makuch says. “It’s been so valuable to have an outside perspective,” Makuch says. “A lot of times when you’re an employee of a company, you’re concentrated on if you have any deadlines coming up. ‘Who do I have to nag today? What do they owe me?’ And having somebody coming in with not only that fresh perspective to ask questions to elicit information but also a neutral party who’s not connected to the day-to-day operations, it really helps illuminate some of the challenges companies might not otherwise willingly share.” Community Bridges fellows have also aided in the outreach efforts of Rice’s own School Literacy and Culture program. Through her project, junior Vanessa Chuang mapped the areas of Houston currently being served so the organization can develop strategies to reach communities that could benefit from having high-quality early childhood education centers. “Vanessa’s data analysis will serve as a blueprint that our organization will be able to use as we continue to expand our support of children, teachers and families across the Greater Houston

community,” says Karen Capo, the director of the School Literacy and Culture program. “The value of Community Bridges is that it combines the theoretical side of urban sociology with a way to apply it in a very practical and meaningful way,” says Chuang. “I’ve learned a lot about educational inequality in the classroom, which has helped shape my understanding of the educational landscape. It has been an even more profound experience to be partnered with a nonprofit that is actively working to improve early childhood education in the Houston community.” Changing the future, today The Community Bridges program is one of many efforts the Kinder Institute deploys to address urban inequality and poverty issues in Houston. By providing student fellowship opportunities, Kinder is planting seeds of interest and passion in essential community outreach functions among Rice’s talented student population. “We have some of the brightest minds who are going to go forward and do amazing things in their field of choice,” says Julia Szabo ’20, ’24, Community Bridges course instructor. “For [these students] to be able to gain a broader context of some of the inequalities that exist in our society will make them more thoughtful and better at whatever path they choose in their work and in their daily lives, understanding that their decisions have consequences for whether these inequalities increase or decrease across time.” — ANDREW BELL

WISDOM

INNOVATION IN THE LAB, THE FIELD AND THE CLASSROOM

BIOENGINEERING

Mighty Small Medicine

Tiny cylinders deliver time-released drugs in a single shot. BY JADE BOYD

PHOTO BY BR A NDON M A R T IN

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ISSING crucial doses of medicines and vaccines could become a thing of the past thanks to Rice bioengineers’ next-level technology for sustained drug delivery. “This is a huge problem in the treatment of chronic disease,” says Kevin McHugh, who recently authored a study of the technology in Advanced Materials. “It’s estimated that 50% of people don’t take their medications correctly. With this, you’d give them one shot, and they’d be all set for the next couple of months.” Encapsulating medicine in microparticles that dissolve and release drugs over time isn’t a new idea. But McHugh and graduate student Tyler Graf ’24 have used 21st-century methods to develop encapsulation technology that is far

The idea is to make chemotherapy more effective and reduce its side effects by delivering a prolonged, concentrated dose of the drugs exactly where they’re needed. more versatile than its forerunners. Dubbed PULSED, which is short for Particles Uniformly Liquified and Sealed to Encapsulate Drugs, the technology employs high-resolution 3D printing and soft lithography to produce arrays of more than 300 nontoxic, biodegradable cylinders that

are small enough to be injected with standard hypodermic needles. The cylinders are made of a polymer called poly lactic-co-glycolic acid that’s widely used in clinical medical treatment. McHugh and Graf demonstrated four methods of loading the microcylinders with drugs and showed they could tweak the polymer recipe to vary how quickly the particles dissolved and released the drugs — from as little as 10 days to almost five weeks. They also developed an easy method for sealing the cylinders, a critical step to demonstrate that the technology is both scalable and capable of addressing a major hurdle in time-release drug delivery. “The thing we’re trying to overcome is ‘first-order release,’” McHugh says, referring to the uneven dosing that’s characteristic with current methods of drug encapsulation. “The common pattern is for a lot of the drug to be released early, on Day 1. And then on Day 10, you might get 10 times less than you got on Day 1,” a situation which is usually therapeutically problematic. For some patients, it would be ideal to have the same amount of a drug in their systems throughout treatment. McHugh says PULSED can be tailored for that kind of release profile, and it could also be used in other ways — such as treating cancerous tumors with chemotherapies. “For toxic cancer chemotherapies, you’d love to have the poison concentrated in the tumor and not in the rest of the body,” he says. “People have done that experimentally, injecting soluble drugs into tumors. But then the question is, how long is it going to take for that to diffuse out? “Our microparticles will stay where you put them,” McHugh says. “The idea is to make chemotherapy more effective and reduce its side effects by delivering a prolonged, concentrated dose of the drugs exactly where they’re needed.” — JADE BOYD

Kevin McHugh is an assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice.

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PHOTO COURTESY OF KEVIN MCHUGH

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WISDOM PUBLIC EDUCATION

The Explainer What is the impact of the state of Texas’ takeover of the Houston Independent School District?

WHEN TEXAS LEADERS announced the plan to take over Houston ISD in March, we asked Ruth N. López Turley and Erin Baumgartner to share their expertise with us. Turley is the director of Rice’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, and Baumgartner is the director of the Houston Education Research Consortium — a partnership between the Kinder Institute and 11 Houston-area school districts that was created to guide policy and improve educational equity. Together, Baumgartner and Turley have supported Houston ISD through research to help guide decisionmaking for more than a decade. They talked to us about what the takeover means to students, faculty and parents and the best way to improve academic performance in public schools. In brief, what events triggered the takeover of HISD in March 2023? While the takeover was announced in March 2023, it was really sparked by Texas Education Agency efforts to take over the district, which began in November 2019 and have been in legal battles since. The primary reasons stated for the takeover were having a campus rated as “unacceptable” in accountability ratings for five consecutive years and having a conservator/ monitor appointed to the district for more than two consecutive years. What does research tell us about the likely impacts on student performance? In the years immediately following a takeover, what researchers have seen in districts across the country is that

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student test scores often decline, taking about five years for students to recover to pre-takeover levels. So what comes next for the district? The takeover will last for a minimum of five years. After two years, if the district meets certain requirements, there is the possibility of starting to phase a third of the elected board members back on to the board each year. The appointed superintendent and an appointed board of managers will serve as the primary leadership. What alternatives to a takeover can address school performance? Alternatives typically focus on the specific schools that are underperforming and include actions such as closing schools, merging schools or partnering with a charter school. All of these actions, including a takeover, assume that the problems stem from governance issues. Governance definitely matters,

but research shows that the strongest predictor of performance gaps — like those seen in HISD and throughout the country — is the concentration of poverty in schools. This means that one effective way to reduce and even eliminate performance gaps is by integrating schools and school districts. Although Texas has increased school funding over the past few years, it is still well below the national average, coupled with a high proportion of students in poverty with many needs. How is the consortium staying involved with the district? Our aim is to continue providing support to HISD through our partnership, identifying areas in which research could help guide decision-making and efforts to provide equitable educational experiences for students in the district. — INTERVIEW BY LYNN GOSNELL Read more at magazine.rice.edu/ takeover.

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WISDOM

Fossil Fishing

A recent field trip to Niger turned up rivers of fish fossils for evolutionary biologist Robert Laroche to study.

ROBERT LAROCHE went fishing in the Sahara. The catch was greater than he dared hope. The fourth-year Rice graduate student mentored by evolutionary biologist Scott Egan spent three months in the desert in late 2022 with an expedition to discover fossils of all kinds. The now-barren stretches of Niger once teemed with life, and the

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Laroche mainly hoped to find “articulated” fossils of Actinopterygii, ray-finned fish that are ancestors of almost all fish today, and perhaps part of an even-more-distantly related lobe-finned fish, Sarcopterygii, whose relatives evolved into dinosaurs — and us. While most of the trip focused on the bounty of dinosaur bones, Laroche found what he was looking for on rocky outcroppings hidden deep in the desert. There, he found partial skulls of specimens that he believes may belong to the family Polypteridae, freshwater fish that evolved divergently from the rest of Actinopterygii “with a head that was potentially close to a meter long.” According to Laroche, “Everything you think of as a fish today, with the exception of maybe one or two species, falls into this one group called ray-finned fish. Polypterids are interesting because they separated from all other ray-finned fish nearly 400 million years ago. There are living species of them today.” Tons of sediment, including blocks of sandstone from a “microsite” loaded with fish fossils in Gadoufaoua, which the team visited twice, were arduously bound in plaster, excavated and put on trucks in up to 130-degree heat. Presently still in Niger, they will be shipped to the United States for study before being put on display in museums planned for Agadez and the Nigerien capital of Niamey. “They’ll take years to study,” says Laroche. Since returning from the trip funded by Rice’s Expanding Horizons Fellowship Program and a Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship, Laroche has focused on his thesis with the encouragement of his mentors. But he would like to return to the desert one day. “Part of the excitement is knowing that showcasing the diversity of fossils will lead to future expeditions and research.” — MIKE WILLIAMS Scott Egan is an associate professor of biosciences at Rice.

Blocks of sandstone from a “microsite” loaded with fish fossils.

evidence is plentiful if you know where — and when — to look. “Some [researchers] had been to Niger before,” Laroche says. “The sand dunes move constantly, sometimes at incredible rates, so when they would revisit a site, it would be completely covered, but right next to it, there would be a whole new area with fossils, like litter, all over.” Guides led the team of several dozen paleontologists, geologists and evolutionary biologists to three regions that required sometimes arduous journeys across the desert in a caravan of vehicles kitted out for extreme conditions. The payoff at the first site was immediate. “At multiple sites we found a huge number of fish fossils preserved in incredible condition,” he says. “When you have multiple specimens of what looks like the same organism, it deepens our understanding of its biology.”

Learn more about Laroche’s field research at robertaslaroche.com/blog.

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PHOTO BY ROBERT LAROCHE

BIOLOGY

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UNCONVENTIONAL WISDOM

The Strategist Ramamoorthy Ramesh in his own words. INTERVIEW BY MIKE WILLIAMS

AMAMOORTHY RAMESH is a bottom-up thinker, but his job demands a top-down sensibility. As Rice’s vice president for research, his days incorporate a lot of both. A materials scientist and physicist, Ramesh’s inclination is to build things from atoms on up to gain the ultimate level of control over structures and their properties. His new gig requires a different kind of thinking. “Top-down thinking gives you a clear perspective on how to solve

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big problems, but many top-down people do not see the bottom-up,” he said. “You somehow have to make those two pieces meet each other. You have to open your mind and trust people and their strengths.” Ramesh joined Rice in 2022 amid a storied career at the University of California, Berkeley, with stops along the way at the Department of Energy, at the Lawrence Berkeley and Oak Ridge national laboratories, and as the founding director of the Obama administration’s SunShot solar energy initiative. He’s a fellow of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and The Royal Society of London. Ramesh will build upon that work at a shared lab at the Ralph S. O’Connor Science and Engineering Building, home to the new Rice Advanced Materials Institute. At the same time, he’s responsible for making the Rice research community a global player. And he has a plan.

Rice on the radar My introduction to Rice was as part of a committee to evaluate materials science in 2018, when I got to know Reggie [DesRoches]. I was very impressed by his demeanor and positivity. Fast forward to August 2021, when Reggie told me he was a candidate for president and asked if we could brainstorm about what research at Rice should look like. I made some slides to show him what I thought made sense: five areas set up like Olympic rings as a prompt that I knew could also be a focal point. When he offered me the VP position, I was

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WISDOM sold; there was no protracted negotiation. I think it took all of 20 minutes. Five rings to rule it all The first ring is for energy, environment and climate change. This has relevance to a broad spectrum of research — social sciences, humanities, public policy, natural sciences, business, architecture and engineering. The second is health care sciences — we are literally a hundred meters from the biggest, most comprehensive and sophisticated health care complex in the world. At Rice, we have the fundamental science and engineering to attack problems in cancer, neuroscience and mental health. Third is information sciences, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. We’re already strong in these areas, but we need to extend them all the way down to quantum computing and computer engineering, the hardware part. Fourth is policy, and the Baker Institute is a jewel of a think tank that does a lot of techno-economic analysis. And fifth is helping turn our spectacular research into transformational technologies. Great expectations and big achievements We need to have an environment of scholarly work and great expectations. We need to expect to win the Nobel Prize; that means we consistently compete for global recognition by solving the biggest problems of our lifetime: climate, energy, health care and information

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evolving into new institutes. Rice is the founding home of NASA astronauts — 16 so far — and we are keen to build up our space research as the nation gears up for the trip to Mars and the Artemis program.

We need to expect to win the Nobel Prize; that means we consistently compete for global recognition by solving the biggest problems of our lifetime: climate, energy, health care and information science, which is also intimately tied to food security. science, which is also intimately tied to food security. Managing the big picture When I took on SunShot in 2011, I had not done any solar work. I’m a condensed matter physics person. I asked [then Secretary of Energy] Steve Chu why he brought me in. He said, “You’re in the National Academy; we hope you’re a smart fellow. We expect you to do smart things.” I learned you don’t have to be an expert in every field, but you do have to know who the experts are and give them the license to innovate. You create a platform and put a huge value on cuttingedge science, creative work and technology. The power of institutes One thing I’ve learned is that if the operations part

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is good, everything else becomes easier. The Office of Research has fantastic people, and we’re bringing on new [leadership] for tech transfer, research compliance and research security. And the institutes at Rice are an important part of this game plan, because they are the research engines within which people can come together and carry out cutting-edge interdisciplinary research. For example, we’re already very strong in artificial intelligence and machine learning through the Ken Kennedy Institute, nanotechnology through the Smalley-Curl Institute, and global health through the Rice360 Institute, which we’d like to strengthen. Climate, advanced materials and synthetic biology are all

Creating shared advanced labs In the fall, we will have a lab in the O’Connor Building for advanced, atomicscale synthesis of materials to probe their properties and measure their physical phenomena. We’ll have laser-based deposition systems where you can deposit materials atom by atom and have very high-precision, high-resolution magnetic measurement capability. Most importantly, it will be a shared lab. I want it to be an open lab where all faculty — especially young faculty — can come in and take advantage of its capabilities and carry out research in a safe, collaborative manner. Houston as a hub for innovation Typically, the drivers for energy, climate, health care and information science are academic institutions, and the East and West coasts have prominent academic ecosystems. We have something very similar, except maybe it’s not as well publicized. Our undergraduate program is clearly one of the best in the country — and around the world — which we will emulate in our graduate research. There will be an aspiration for persistent excellence, and my impression is that Rice embodies all the necessary qualities for it.

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disease-carrying and an economic burden. Additionally, limited access to health care affected their ability to seek treatment during the pandemic, which they believe resulted in more illness and death in their community. These stressors also frequently come with trauma and the fear of detention, deportation and family separation, says Garcini, and these concerns affect every aspect of their lives. To minimize the risk of exposure, families often avoid seeking health services, remain

It’s essential that mental health, medical and other allied health professionals are aware of the hardships and oppression faced by these immigrant families. PSYCHOLOGY

COVID-19, Compounded

For undocumented Latino families in the U.S., especially during the pandemic, chronic daily stressors compromise health and well-being. THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC caused a disproportionate amount of illness and death among Latino families lacking permanent legal status or with mixed documentation status compared with the general U.S. population — and factors such as poverty, dangerous living conditions and lack of access to health care are to blame, according to a study published recently in the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology.

The study’s lead author, Luz Garcini, a clinical psychologist with a master’s in public health, focuses her research on the health care of historically marginalized communities, seeking to identify, understand and address their needs from a behavioral and sociological perspective. For this study, she led a team of researchers who are all immigrants; three of them are Latinos who speak Spanish as their first language. The team assessed families residing in South Texas near the U.S.-Mexico border, conducting a series of interviews with the participants and producing a narrative summary about what respondents believed impacted their health and well-being during the pandemic. The answers included economic changes and financial losses, such as being forced to change jobs to those with less pay, longer hours, denial of time off and high-risk exposure to COVID-19. Another issue was social disadvantage and discrimination fostered by an amplified narrative depicting immigrants as dangerous,

silent about crimes and abuses against them, and forgo employment and investment opportunities that could have supplied them with greater stability. “It’s essential that mental health, medical and other allied health professionals are aware of the hardships and oppression faced by these immigrant families,” Garcini says. “And it’s vital to expand culturally sensitive services and policies that would increase equal access to health and other support services.” The study recommended that services strive to build upon the natural resilience of this population, broaden support networks through organizations such as faith-based institutions and community advocacy agencies, increase access to mental health care through options such as telehealth and self-guided care, and improve the cultural awareness and competency of health providers. — AMY MCCAIG Luz Garcini is an assistant professor of psychological sciences and faculty scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy.

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SPACES

The Clean Room ISO perfection.

PHOTO BY GUSTAVO RASKOSKY

WHILE RICE HAS many unique rooms and spaces across campus, its nanofabrication facility is the most pristine. Housed in the basement of the Space Science and Technology Building, the facility consists of more than 2,800 square feet of process bays and work spaces with one essential purpose — contamination control. Opened in 2019, the room supports over 200 unique users from nearly a dozen engineering and science departments and other institutions, including the Texas Medical Center. Specific clean room challenges vary by industry, but the major concern for Rice’s facility is particulates landing on surfaces where devices are precisely engineered down to the nanometer — a billionth of a meter. “One speck of dust can ruin a device, and too many failures like that across too many devices reduces yield,” says Timothy Gilheart ’08, director of operations for the Shared Equipment Authority. A typical home or office has hundreds to thousands to millions of tiny airborne particulates at the scale of 0.5 microns, the benchmark value for certifying clean room particle counts, Gilheart explains. This is truly tiny when 1 micron equals 1 millionth of a meter; a human hair is approximately 100 microns in diameter. In Rice’s facility, highly specialized air handling and filtration systems drive particle counts down to 100 or fewer 0.5-micron particles per square foot per minute, resulting in its ranking as a Class 100 (or, in newer terms, an ISO 5) clean room and providing an optimal space for such diverse applications as materials science, microelectronics, microfluids, nanotechnology, neuroengineering and photonics. — TRACEY RHOADES

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BIOSCIENCES

One Wild World

Scott Solomon’s new podcast gives us all a chance to learn from specialists out in the field.

BIOLOGIST SCOTT SOLOMON is, at heart, a science communicator. He says, “I am very passionate about sharing my knowledge and enthusiasm for science with as many people as possible.” In recent years, he has produced documentaries, created online courses, and written a notable book and numerous articles for major magazines, but his podcast, “Wild World with Scott Solomon,” is giving him a completely new way to reach an ever-growing audience. Each episode focuses on an expert doing fieldwork in a remote location. The first season includes episodes about a biologist working with macaws in Belize, an underwater cave diver studying lemur skeletons in Madagascar and an entomologist digging deep in the Brazilian Cerrado to study ants. “There’s just all these different perspectives on science,” Solomon says, “and

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each [researcher is] doing something out in the field that is fascinating.” Solomon is no stranger to fieldwork. A big part of his research background has involved travel to remote places, and one of his favorite classes is his summer course on tropical field biology. “We go for two weeks down to Belize and spend a week at a field station in the rain forest and another week on an island off the coast doing coral reef ecology,” he says. “An integral part of the experience is seeing and touching and doing and experiencing nature.” While Solomon knows from experience that this kind of hands-on research can be life-changing for students, he laments, “It’s only a small number that gets to do that.” His podcast is inspired in part by a desire to give more people a sense of fieldwork, even when they lack the opportunity to go in person. Season 1 of “Wild World with Scott Solomon” was released in early 2023, and Season 2 will become available in 2024. Episodes can be found anywhere podcasts are available. — HILARY C. RITZ Scott Solomon is an associate teaching professor in biosciences, focusing on ecology and evolutionary biology. Read more about “Wild World” at magazine.rice.edu/wild.

Materials scientist and engineer Lane Martin has joined Rice as the director of the Advanced Materials Institute and the Welch Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering in the George R. Brown School of Engineering. The institute, which will be housed in the new Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering Science, will integrate chemistry, materials science, machine learning and artificial intelligence to revolutionize energy systems, sustainable water systems, space systems and more. Martin comes to Rice from the University of California, Berkeley, where he held several appointments, including the Chancellor’s Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. “He is a gifted scientist with the boldness and vision to build this new institute into a research powerhouse,” said Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Rice’s vice president for research.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ALESE PICKERING

MARTIN TO LEAD NEW INSTITUTE

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Kevin Janson

BIOENGINEERING

Bite This!

MOSQUITO PHOTO BY 123RF.COM; JANSON PHOTO BY BRANDON MARTIN

Engineers use fake skin and real blood to study mosquito feeding.

WHEN MOSQUITOES EAT, they spread disease. Using 21st-century materials and tools — including fake skin that’s 3D-printed with blood vessels — Rice bioengineers have made it faster and easier for tropical disease experts to study the insects’ blood feasts. The engineers teamed up with tropical medicine experts from Tulane University to take some of the pain out of studying mosquitoes’ blood-sucking behavior. Their bites can spread diseases like malaria, dengue and yellow fever, but setting up experiments to examine their behavior can be

expensive and time-consuming. “Many mosquito experiments still rely on human volunteers and animal subjects,” says Kevin Janson ’23, a bioengineering graduate student and lead co-author of a recently published study about the experiment. Janson and his co-authors found a way to automate the collection and processing of mosquito feeding data using inexpensive cameras and machinelearning software. To eliminate the need for live volunteers, their system uses synthetic skin made with a 3D printer. Each patch of gelatin-like hydrogel comes complete with tiny passageways that can be filled with flowing blood. In feeding tests, Janson and his adviser and co-author, Omid Veiseh, place as many as six of the hydrogel skin patches inside a transparent plastic box about the size of a volleyball surrounded by cameras. When mosquitoes enter the chamber, the cameras record

how often they land at each location, how long they stay, whether or not they bite, how long they feed and the like. The system was tested at the laboratory of Tulane mosquito expert Dawn Wesson. In the proof-of-concept experiments featured in the study, Wesson, Janson and co-authors used the system to examine the effectiveness of existing mosquito repellents made with either DEET or a repellent derived from the oil of lemon eucalyptus plants. Tests showed mosquitoes readily fed on hydrogels without any repellent and stayed away from hydrogel patches coated with either product. While DEET was slightly more effective, both repellents deterred mosquitoes. Veiseh says the results suggest the behavioral test system can be scaled up to test or discover new repellents and to study mosquito behavior more broadly. The system could also open the door for testing in labs that couldn’t previously afford it. “It provides a consistent and controlled method of observation,” he adds. “The hope is researchers will be able to use that to identify ways to prevent the spread of disease in the future.” — JADE BOYD Omid Veiseh is assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice. Dawn Wesson is associate professor of tropical medicine at Tulane’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.

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WISDOM touch with these altered states. Trauma, illness, danger and death also sometimes constitute major openings to the superhuman dimensions of who and what we already are. What would it mean to reimagine the humanities as the superhumanities? The humanities are already the superhumanities. That is, so many of our revered authors, artists and activists were drawing quite explicitly on these altered states and their gifts. What it would take to transform the present humanities into the superhumanities is a new way of remembering and focusing on those states and then cultivating them in the present and future. Why did the humanities come to exclude the study of “impossible” experiences? I think the humanities came to exclude these things for many reasons, some of them good. The 20th century, for example, saw a fairly dramatic turn to social, political and moral concerns, all of which are perfectly just and important. One underlying assumption has been that the vertical or “super” dimensions of human experience must be excluded or ignored to focus on these immediate concerns. I just think that is wrong.

FACULTY BOOKS

Now Reading The Superhumanities Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities Jeffrey J. Kripal University of Chicago Press, 2022

JEFFREY J. KRIPAL is convinced we’ve all had surreal, otherworldly experiences in our lives, but many of us are too embarrassed to talk about them. Academics, in particular, go out of their way to ignore the uncanny. Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice who has written extensively about such subjects, understands why. He knows firsthand that the social stigma is real. But he believes that humanities scholars are doing themselves — and all of us — a disservice by neglecting this immense part of what it means to be human. In his latest book, “The Superhumanities,” Kripal makes a case for bringing the fantastic back to academia. We spoke to him about what that would entail.

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You argue that “there is something cosmic or superhuman smoldering in the human.” What do you mean by that? By the “superhuman,” I mean that human beings, and especially wildly creative intellectuals and writers, often experience altered states of consciousness and embodiment, which then result in new ideas and intellectual movements. These altered states are literally “super” in the sense that they transcend or go beyond our ordinary day-to-day thinking and functioning and are not arrived at only through logic or reason: They suddenly appear, and they appear as given. People who are more porous or “on the margins” are generally more in

The New York Times called you “a renegade advocate for including the paranormal in religious studies,” and you acknowledge in the book that you are an outlier. Fair assessment? Yeah, I feel like an outlier often, but I doubt I really am. I always get the question, “How do you deal with the pushback?”, to which I always reply, “What pushback?” I think intellectuals and scientists are often in the closet on this one. That is, they know perfectly well that these extraordinary things happen. They just do not want to sound like the tabloids. And young people, especially young intellectuals, are very interested in exactly this material. The human has always been, and will always be, the superhuman. That’s my deeper point. — JENNIFER LATSON

PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW

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Futures of the Architectural Exhibition

Reto Geiser and Michael Kubo, editors Park Books, 2022

The Architecture of Birdsall P. Briscoe Photography by Paul Hester Stephen Fox ’72 Texas A&M University Press, 2022

IF YOU’VE EVER DRIVEN through Houston’s tony River Oaks neighborhood, you’ve seen some of Birdsall P. Briscoe’s architecture. A self-styled “gentleman architect,” Briscoe specialized in palatial country houses, the grandeur of which set his homes apart from the Colonial Revival, Craftsman and Foursquare houses that characterized much of Houston at the time. They also contributed to the elite ideal of Houston as a suburbanized garden city and helped brand the families who occupied Briscoe’s homes as progressive community leaders intent on “modernizing Houston with beauty,” as architectural historian Stephen Fox writes in “The Architecture of Birdsall P. Briscoe.” “An examination of Briscoe’s architecture reveals the ways in which his houses materialized a collective identity for his clients by representing them as a patrician class, worthy of respect, trust and civic leadership,” writes Fox, a lecturer at the Rice School of Architecture. “This patrician identity constituted the ‘social architecture’ of the 20th-century American country house, setting it apart from the commercial, institutional and industrial architecture where the wealthproducing activities of the occupants occurred or from which they were managed.” — J.L.

ARCHITECTURAL exhibitions are a relatively recent cultural phenomenon. Exhibition venues and museum collections dedicated to architecture have only become widespread in Europe and North America since the late 1970s, write Reto Geiser and Michael Kubo in the introduction to “Futures of the Architectural Exhibition.” But such exhibitions have evolved enormously in that time, and new approaches are transforming them in both content and context. Geiser and Kubo, professors of architecture at the Rice School of Architecture and the University of Houston, respectively, argue that these changes reflect a “profound reckoning with architecture’s ongoing complicity in structural forms of racism and exclusion.” “In this context, recent exhibitions speak to the charged questions of race, class, gender, labor and identity that have accompanied architecture’s stocktaking with regard to equity and social justice,” Geiser and Kubo write. Taking the form of a series of conversations between architecture students and seven contemporary curators who visited Houston between 2018 and 2021, the book investigates the ways international exhibition curators have addressed these thorny issues. As the editors write, “Reflecting shifts in contemporary curatorial thinking in response to a changing present, these dialogues suggest pathways toward multiple possible futures for the architectural exhibition.” — J.L.

Seven Virginians

The Men Who Shaped Our Republic John Boles ’65 University of Virginia Press, 2023

SEVEN MEN, ALL BORN in the northeast corner of the colony of Virginia between 1725 and 1758, played an outsize role in laying the political and legal foundations of our nation. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison tend to get most of the limelight, but historian and Professor Emeritus John Boles gives equal credit to James Monroe, George Mason, Patrick Henry and John Marshall. All seven, Boles argues, played an essential role in shaping the United States, from fighting a revolution to writing a constitution, organizing the first political parties and clarifying the role of the president. “Seven Virginians” is not just a narrative of the nation’s founding; it’s also a clear-eyed examination of the cultural and environmental conditions that set these historical figures on a path to leadership. That includes the enormous privilege they enjoyed at the expense of others, including enslaved African Americans, whose lives and labor they exploited for the wealth and leisure that enabled them to pursue their own aspirations. “I recognize that a book about seven white slaveholders will appear inappropriate or even repugnant to some readers in 2023,” writes Boles, “but I believe it is important to see these men in all their complexities — good and bad — if we are to face our history honestly and with completeness.” — J.L.

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BY THE NUMBERS

958

awards received

$192 MILLION

THE YEAR IN RESEARCH Considering its enrollment of only 7,500 undergraduate and graduate students, Rice produced an impressive $192 million in sponsored projects across all disciplines in 2022. See the highlights here and go to magazine.rice.edu/year for more about Rice’s banner year in research. Illustrations by Delphine Lee 30

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in funding What is sponsored research? This label means that the research activity is funded — or sponsored — by an external organization, such as a federal, state or private organization or agency. These funds support faculty scholarship, help maintain research facilities and equipment, and support the research activities and training of students and postdocs.

Sources of Research Funding

51%

The U.S. government is at the top of Federal the list for research and development funding at Rice. See the next page for a breakdown of federal funding sources and examples.

Another way that Rice receives funding University research is by collaboratSubawards ing with other institutions of higher education with complementary research strengths.

For-profit companies in energy, health, Industry biotech and information technology are significant partners in the higher education landscape.

27%

Nonprofit organizations — Nonprofit such as the MacArthur Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Welch Foundation, to name just a few — contribute substantially to new and ongoing projects.

8 STARTUPS

Who pays for research? The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education classifies Rice in its highest category, a “Research 1” or “R1” doctoral university, meaning that it has a highly active roster of sponsored research projects in all academic fields. Funding for this robust activity comes from these sources.

State and local organizations are funding State/ powerhouses for Local/ Rice. One imporOther tant example is the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, which has supported faculty recruitment, clinical studies, prevention services, research laboratories and more at Rice since 2010.

In 2022, eight new startups were incorporated to pursue commercialization of innovations created by Rice researchers. One of these companies is Motif Neurotech, which specializes in developing wireless technology intended for treatment-resistant depression and other diseases via minimally invasive electronic therapies. Rice faculty member Jacob Robinson is the co-founder and CEO of Motif Neurotech, and Rice is providing incubator space at the Ion for this startup.

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Federal Funders What are the top five sources of federal funding at Rice? The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and NASA. Here’s a breakdown of this funding.

44%

National Science Foundation This foundation supports science and engineering research and education. At Rice, the National Science Foundation accounts for the majority of our federal funding profile.

19%

Department of Defense The Department of Defense funds basic research, such as the creation of novel materials, which can be turned into practical applications across multiple disciplines.

Department of Energy This federal department funds research to address scientific problems in clean energy, AI and machine learning, climate change, and more.

4% NASA

Rice and NASA have a storied partnership going back to the earliest days of human spaceflight programs. In 2022, NASA and Rice signed an agreement to expand joint research opportunities, STEM engagement and educational activities.

22%

National Institutes of Health Part of the Department of Health and Human Services, this agency is the primary source of funding for biomedical research at Rice and, indeed, around the world.

Sources: Rice University’s Office of Sponsored Projects and Research Compliance fiscal year ’22 report, Cayuse database (2022), the Office of the Provost (2022), and Clarivate’s “Highly Cited Researchers” list (2022) 32

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SUMMER 202 3

ACADEMY MEMBERSHIPS In 2022, a total of 20 Rice faculty held 34 memberships across the national academies, including the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the United Kingdom’s Royal Society.

Awards in the Humanities

Richard Baraniuk,

the C. Sidney Burrus Professor and a professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science at Rice, was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2022. The election recognized his “development and broad dissemination of open educational resources and ... foundational contributions to compressive sensing.”

EARLY CAREER AWARDS

Jo Nelson, mathematician,

won a five-year grant for $435,000 to support her research into mathematical structures that describe the movements of physical systems such as springs, planets and waves. “My field has applications, for example, to low-energy space travel — finding trajectories for satellites that may not be time-efficient but are energy-efficient,” Nelson says.

Kiese Laymon, acclaimed

Why is the Early Career Award important? The National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program offers the foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of the two. The awards include grants to support their work.

ON THE WEB To read about the full breadth of research

writer and creative writing professor, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the honor popularly known as the “genius grant.” He is the author of the novel “Long Division,” the essay collection “How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America,” and the bestselling “Heavy: An American Memoir.”

Tomás Q. Morin,

poet and assistant professor of creative writing at Rice, won a Guggenheim Fellowship, an honor bestowed annually by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation upon a slate of the world’s top scholars, artists, writers and scientists. He is the author of several poetry collections, including “Machete,” and the memoir “Let Me Count the Ways.”

projects funded in 2022, go to magazine.rice.edu/year. MAGA ZINE.RICE.EDU

Inventive Minds

Five innovative undergraduate engineering projects that aim to improve lives

By Silvia Cernea Clark Illustrations by Chris Gash

These inventions are a select few of the 69 projects that were shown in April’s annual engineering design showcase and competition coordinated by Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK). According to OEDK director Maria Oden, the facility this year supported the work of 900-plus students from more than 25 courses taught in departments all across Rice, including all nine departments of the Brown School of Engineering. The event, which was held April 13 at the Ion innovation hub in Houston’s Midtown, has been newly renamed from the George R. Brown Engineering Design Showcase to the Huff OEDK Engineering Design Showcase in honor of Harrell and Carolyn Huff, who have supported dozens of teams in the competition over the years. Industry and medical professionals, many of whom are Rice alumni, judged the projects and awarded a total of over $19,000 in cash prizes. See magazine.rice.edu/winners for the full list.

Pectus Reparatum! A high-tech, lightweight brace may provide a remedy for rib flaring.

ody image can have a significant impact on a person’s life, especially in their youth. For those suffering from rib flaring associated with congenital deformations of the chest wall, a team of Rice engineering students calling themselves “Pectus Reparatum” has come up with a potential solution. Pectus carinatum and pectus excavatum are conditions in which a person is born with their breastbone protruding outward or sunken inward, respectively. For many patients — who are mostly teenagers — they also cause rib flaring, a condition in which the lower ribs at the front of the rib cage protrude outward. “Because these conditions occur mainly in patients with ages between 12–20, this affects their body image, social life, etc., at a crucial time in their development,” says Jaden Roberts, a member of the team along with fellow seniors Jose Castillo, Shelby DesRoches and Brandon Zimmer. For some patients with pectus carinatum, wearing a brace helps reshape the breastbone over time, but the standard design as it is currently used doesn’t treat rib flaring. The Rice team learned that pediatric surgeon Dr. Mark Mazziotti at Texas Children’s Hospital had hoped to expand the use of the standard brace for this purpose. However, the device is bulky and adds to the discomfort and insecurity associated with the condition, discouraging many patients from wearing it. “This helped us set a goal,”

DesRoches says. “We were thinking about this bracing mechanism they were already using, and we drew inspiration from that brace design to create one that patients would be more compliant using that would effectively treat rib flaring.” As its capstone design project, the team designed a low-profile, costconscious brace called the “Cartilage Corrector.” “The main feature we wanted to improve upon with our design is providing self-adjustability for the user,” Roberts says. “With the current brace, you can’t adjust the pressure being applied yourself. Instead, you have to go in to your doctor’s office and have them adjust it for you, and

As its capstone design project, the team designed a low-profile, cost-conscious brace called the “Cartilage Corrector.”

then you’re stuck with that fit until the next visit, which can be months or even one or two years later.” The team also wants to make it possible for doctors to track the pressure being applied over time in order to assess treatment effectiveness and optimize plans based on individual needs. “The electronic system for our device will provide accurate data, such as time tracking in conjunction with pressure measurements,” Castillo says. “Measurement values will be saved to an SD card and can then be transferred to a computer and read on a graph.”

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A Cargo-Carrying Catamaran An autonomous sailboat could resupply Marines in conflict zones.

team of engineering seniors designed, built and tested a low-cost, energyefficient vessel that can carry more than 60 pounds of cargo and serve as a lifesustaining link for Marines on shore during dangerous missions. The project won one of the two Excellence in Capstone Engineering awards at the Huff OEDK Showcase this year. Says team member Oli MacGregor, “This is the first autonomous catamaran sail design that we know of that’s intended to bear load.” The vessel was inspired by the team’s sponsor, Marine Corps Lt. Col. Thomas Kline. “The central idea is to make an adversary choose whether or not to use expensive weapons on cheap targets,” Kline says. “If they do not, Marines get resupplied. If they do, but some sailboats get through, Marines get resupplied. Win-win.”

Robocontrolled Sail

Navigates straight ahead in favorable conditions but zigzags when sailing against the wind.

Solar Panels

Produce plenty of electricity and store the excess in on-board batteries for cloudy weather or nighttime sailing.

Low-cost Materials

Wood and other budget components deliver a high cost-toefficiency ratio.

Iridium Satellite Module

Provides a data link from anywhere on Earth.

Wind Direction Sensor

Dual Hulls

Provide 3.5 cubic feet of watertight storage and enough buoyancy for 60-plus pounds of cargo.

Determines optimal course of navigation.

GPS Antenna

Receives and amplifies GPS satellite array signals to allow the boat to navigate.

At a Touch An award-winning automated system sheds better light in operating rooms.

eam OR Lights took this year ’s top spot — the Woods-Lea zar Innovation Award for Excellence in Engineering and its accompanying $5,000 cash prize — with its automated touch-screen-operated lighting system. The team was inspired by Dr. Munish Gupta, an orthopedic spine surgeon at Washington University in St. Louis. He noted that up to 25% of operating time was spent physically adjusting lighting equipment on overhead booms, and he tasked Rice engineering students — sophomore Hemish Thakkar and seniors Ellice Gao, Bryn Gerwin, Justin Guilak, Rosemary Lach and Renly Liu — with building a solution. “With current lighting, they have to

adjust it manually,” Guilak says, “and often it’s hard to light up an exact spot at the right intensity and without shadows.” Headlamps were thought to help, but they require surgeons to keep their heads perfectly still as they work, which can cause neck strain. And headlamps can get in the way when multiple surgeons are working together in close proximity. “Our system has four separate light clusters mounted on an overhead frame,” Guilak says. Each light cluster is mounted onto a 3D-printed circular base that can adjust its position and the angle of the lightbulbs. “This allows us to aim our spotlight anywhere on a 2D plane and adjust the size of the spotlight we’re creating,” Gerwin says. In addition to the lights, a lightweight camera is mounted on the frame to supply a live video feed of the operating table. “The surgeon can [tap on a touch screen] and drag a circle on top of the video feed, and that’s the spot the lights focus on,” says Gerwin. The app allows surgeons to adjust the position, size and intensity of the spotlight with minimal effort. “There already are touch screens being used in the operating room, so

The app allows surgeons to adjust the position, size and intensity of the spotlight with minimal effort.

covers, etc., for sterilization already exist,” adds Gao. Operating room lighting requirements are very specific. Brightness, color, power source, sterilization protocols and even the noise levels emitted by lighting devices are all geared to maximize focus and reduce distraction. The team weighed all these factors carefully in its design. “The most memorable thing was the moment when we first turned on the lights,” says Guilak. “We had this vision of it working all semester and then when the lights actually turned on and lined up where we told them to, it almost didn’t feel real.” real.”

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A Remedy for Fall Risk A new movementmonitoring system offers safer movement for older adults.

alls are the leading cause of injury — and death caused by injury — for adults 65 and older, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The population of older adults is expected to pass 85 million by 2050, and a quarter of them fall each year, with 1 in 5 incidents resulting in serious injury. The OEDK team calling itself “Three Seasons” (because “with us, there is no fall”) designed an assessment system that enables doctors to create personalized risk-management strategies for patients based on their movement patterns at home. This could help older adults reduce health care bills and live in their homes longer.

A Wearable Device

The system includes a device worn as a fanny pack, a homemapping and movementmonitoring component, and an artificial intelligence-mediated data-processing element. “Our wearable device tracks location, movement and time,” says team member Vanessa Garlepp ’23. “Everything is written to a micro SD card, and the data is postprocessed.”

Lidar Technology

The system includes a lidar scanner mounted on a tripod that maps a room’s layout, including the furniture, at different heights.

Collecting Data

“Our device not only detects falls in the home but also what patients were doing before the fall, where they were when they fell, etc.,” teammate Ahalya Lettenberger ’23 says.

A Map of Safe Paths

“Combined with the ultrawideband location sensing, [the lidar system] provides physicians with a map of how a patient moves in their home and helps them find the riskiest locations,” says team member Chris Heuser ’23. According to the group, patients often don’t recall where or why they fell, and this device will supply physicians with needed context. Teammate Fadeel Khan ’23 adds, “Most patients experience some form of activity or a dizzy spell within a certain time period [before a fall].”

Two Steps Ahead

A wearable device mitigates foot pain and balance issues for diabetic patients.

eed a little spring — or buzz — in your step? A wearable electrical-stimulation and vibration-therapy system designed by Rice engineering students might be just what the doctor ordered for people experiencing foot pain and balance loss due to diabetic complications. Team NeuroSole — composed of seniors Abby Dowse, Yannie Guo, Andrei Mitrofan, Sarah Park and Kelly Xu — designed a sock with a smart insole that can deliver transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) to block pain signals to the brain and vibration therapy that provides haptic feedback to help with balance issues. Mentored by Sabia Abidi, bioengineering assistant teaching professor, the project won one of the two Excellence in Capstone Engineering awards in this year’s showcase, along with a $1,000 cash prize. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2022 estimates, over 37 million people in the U.S. suffer from diabetes. About half of them will develop some form of diabetic neuropathy, a type of nerve damage that occurs most often in the legs and feet. The NeuroSole team sought to combine the best aspects of existing therapies into a single, user-centered design. “Existing products or devices used to treat the symptoms of diabetic neuropathy are either pharmaceuticals or large at-home vibration devices users stand on,” Dowse says. “But none of them can both treat pain and improve balance,

which our device aims to do by combining the TENS and the vibrational therapy in one wearable, portable, usercontrollable and easy-to-use device.” “The intent is for the patient to be able to wear the device for the whole day,” Guo adds. “Even when everything’s off and they don’t want the electrostimulation or haptics effect, they can still wear their device. You don’t want it to look like you’re wearing an ankle monitor.” Patients use a smartphone app to control the type, intensity and duration of the desired therapeutic stimulus. The system also allows users to target a specific area of the foot. “We have three regions: one in the front of the insole, one in the middle and one at the back,” Park says. “Our aim is to allow patients to be able to control both the amplitude of the vibration and the location where it’s delivered. Some patients might only want vibration at the front of their feet and some only at the back.” Mitrofan says the team anticipates that the device’s final form will have sufficient battery life to provide the recommended maximum of four 30-minute sessions of TENS therapy per day and operate on standby the rest of the day.

Addendum:

Rice University’s students consulted with Dr. Ngozi Mbue, assistant professor of nursing at Texas Woman’s University early on in the project written about in the Summer 2023 Rice Magazine article titled “Two Steps Ahead.” Dr. Mbue is named as an inventor on a patent application relating to a sock that wirelessly delivers electrical signals to the foot. We appreciate Dr. Mbue speaking with Rice’s students about the invention disclosed in her published patent application and the technology in general.

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Rachel Carson, who was among the first conservation ecologists to capture the public’s attention in the late 1930s, is the animating presence of Douglas Brinkley’s new 600-page book documenting the rise of environmentalism. Here’s how her story begins.

Environmental Awakening BY DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

ust twenty-five miles west of Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys and thousands of other families enjoyed the sail-dotted water along the coast, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was home to those fascinated with the world beneath the ocean surface. Established in 1930, Woods Hole operated beside the previously existing Marine Biological Laboratory and the Woods Hole Laboratory of the US Commission of Fish and Fisheries. Rachel Carson, who worked as an ocean science researcher at all three over the years, considered the coastal village of Woods Hole the most “delightful place” to “biologize.” During the summer of 1929, the trim and proper twenty-twoyear-old Carson was on a research fellowship at the MBL and living in a cottage run by the lab. Down a path from her quarters was the marvelous Nobska Point Light Station. On a clear day, she would sit there and gaze toward the vacation island of Martha’s Vineyard, watching sea ducks bob and collecting spine-studded urchins at the low-tide line. Migrating eels and bottom-dwelling mollusks became her primary interests that summer and later. Though Carson had never seen the ocean until that summer, she had read about the diverse animal societies to be found on shorelines. Chatting with conchologists or ichthyologists at the MBL was a thrill for the budding zoologist. Carson enthused that it “would be very easy to acquire the habit of coming back every summer” at Woods Hole, conducting marine experiments in the huge redbrick Crane Laboratory building and diving into books at the extensive oceanographic library. But those weren’t the only attractions. “To understand the shore, it is not enough to catalogue its life,” she wrote. “Understanding comes only when standing on a

beach, we can sense the long rhythms of earth and sea that sculptured its landforms and produced the rock and sand of which it is composed; when we can sense with the eye and ear of the mind the surge of life beating always at its shores—blindly, inexorably pressing for a foothold.” That summer Carson began a study of the cranial nerve in reptiles. If serious research at the MBL set her course professionally, long walks on the sand and swims in the waves gave her a life-affirming love of the sea. The two strains of Carson’s Woods Hole stint combined with her own inborn view of the world. To her, all of God’s creatures had a will to live and were worthy of compassion. Though not outwardly philosophical, she did believe that every person had to respectfully repay an eternal debt to nature. At a young age, she understood ecology as a basic notion: We live in the house of life, and all the rooms connect. A line by the English poet Francis Thompson nicely summed up her view: “Thou canst not stir a flower / Without troubling of a star.” ... As a “beginning investigator” of the Atlantic Ocean, [Carson] entered graduate school in zoology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on a one-year scholarship. Whenever possible, she worked to improve the flow and rhythm of her prose. After earning her master’s degree in 1932, she wrote articles about the Chesapeake Bay for the Baltimore Sun, focusing on mid-Atlantic fish and wildlife under headlines such as “It’ll Be Shad Time Soon” and “Chesapeake Eels Seek the Sargasso Sea.” Her Sun articles showcased her broad interest in progressive conservation writ large. However, freelancing for the newspaper, though satisfying, didn’t earn her much money to live on. After Carson’s father, Robert, died in 1935, she taught part-time at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins summer school. With him gone, there was little income with which to support her mother and herself. When Professor Skinker learned that Rachel was in a financial bind, she recommended applying to the Bureau of Fisheries in Washington, DC, which had recently undertaken a series of radio broadcasts entitled Romance Under the Sun. It needed a part-time biologist-type who could write. Carson recalled later, “I happened in one morning, when the chief of the biology division [Elmer Higgins] was feeling rather desperate—I think at that point he was having to write the scripts himself. He talked to me a few minutes and then said: ‘I’ve never seen a written word of yours, but I’m going to take a sporting chance.’ That little job, which eventually led to a permanent appointment as a biologist, was in its way, a turning point.” She was hired as a junior aquatic biologist in the Division of Scientific Inquiry, writing radio scripts about fish.

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For the rest of Carson’s life, her main fascination was discovering the exotic creatures who lived in saltwater ecosystems, especially crustaceans, seaweeds, invertebrates, and small fish— what one of her biographers, William Souder, called “an embassy of living things.” At about the same time, Carson had a turning point in her freelance writing career, as well, when Atlantic Monthly published her “Undersea” essay in its September 1937 issue. In it, she brilliantly explored tidal pools, surface waters, and the seafloor, treating humans as aliens and predators, at a remove from the ocean ecosystem. Only by thinking like a sea creature, she felt, could a scientist fully grasp the marine environment. “Who has known the ocean?” she wrote. “Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere.” ... In 1938, bolstered by positive feedback from the Atlantic essay, Carson spent another summer at Woods Hole gathering material for her first book. She also went on a working vacation at a Bureau of Fisheries station in Beaufort, North Carolina. The sandpits and tidal marshes along the mid-Atlantic Coast, protected by the Outer Banks of barrier islands, provided her with rich material for her project, which would become Under the Sea-Wind. Her adoption of sea creatures such as Scomber, the primary character in Under the Sea-Wind, resembled Henry Williamson’s treatment of otters in his book, Tarka the Otter (1927), while the musicality of her prose was reminiscent

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SUMMER 2023

of Beston’s The Outermost House. For the rest of Carson’s life, her main fascination was discovering the exotic creatures who lived in saltwater ecosystems, especially crustaceans, seaweeds, invertebrates, and small fish—what one of her biographers, William Souder, called “an embassy of living things.” Under the Sea-Wind, her first and favorite book, was published in November 1941 by Simon & Schuster. Its artwork was by Howard Frech, an illustrator Carson had worked with in Baltimore. Under the Sea-Wind was a masterly dissertation on the life cycles of three ocean creatures, told from the perspective of the animals themselves. The first section, “Edge of the Sea,” was about the migratory journey of the sanderling pair Silverbar and Blackfoot from the Outer Banks of North Carolina to the Arctic Circle and back to Patagonia. “The Gull’s Way,” the second part, centered on Scomber the mackerel, swimming through a gauntlet of near-death experiences from the shores of New England to the Continental Shelf. Finally, “River and Sea” depicted migration as experienced by Anguilla the eel, who journeyed to the Sargasso Sea, south of Bermuda, a spawning ground for American and European eels. All three migration stories were based on the latest research on the life cycles of sea creatures. Carson had anthropomorphized the sanderling, mackerel, and eel to help the reading public see the world through their underwater eyes and so absorb their dramatic survival stories in a more sincere way. In the preface, Carson, praising Beston’s The Outermost House, admitted to being awestruck by that Cape Cod memoir’s great simplicity, beauty, and reflection of oceanic rhythms. With Beston pointing the way, she vowed “to make the sea and its life as vivid a reality for those who may read the book as it has become for me during the past decade.” About a dozen years later, in the mid-1950s, John F. Kennedy received a copy of Under the Sea-Wind as a gift from his mother. Although Under the Sea-Wind sold in low numbers, perhaps because Pearl Harbor occurred right after it debuted, it became celebrated by marine biologists and other lovers of the animal kingdom. Seldom had a scientifically accurate delineation of ocean species been written with such gorgeous literary flair. At the time it was published, glowing reviews poured in; the New York Times called it a “beautiful and unusual” book for a naturalist. William Beebe, who had ventured three thousand feet deep in a record-breaking descent in the Bathysphere off the coast of Bermuda, authoritatively declared in the Saturday Review of Literature that he couldn’t detect a single error in Under the Sea-Wind. In a 1945 anthology that Beebe edited, The Book of Naturalists: An Anthology of the Best Natural History, an essay by Carson appeared alongside work by such immortals as John James Audubon and Henry David Thoreau. Pleased to be recognized as a defender of the world’s oceans and sea life, Carson professed that her ambition was to leave the natural world “a better place to live in.” Adapted from “Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening” (Harper Collins, 2022). See more at magazine.rice.edu/silent.

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PROFILES, HISTORY AND CLASSNOTES

SPORTS MEDICINE

Estrogen and Injury

Biomedical engineer Jenny Robinson studies the role hormones play in injury prevention and rehabilitation. BY RACHEL FAIRBANK

PHOTOS BY BILL PURCELL

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HEN JENNY Robinson ’09 was 12, she hurt her knee playing soccer. Over the next couple of years, as many of her teammates, including her sister and her cousin, sustained similar knee injuries, she developed a curiosity about the mechanism of sports injuries in female athletes, including the process of tissue regeneration and rehabilitation. The complications stemming from the treatments of her injuries, which included hamstring issues and the development of post-traumatic osteoarthritis at the age of 16, made a big impact on her academic pursuits. “We all deserve treatment that doesn’t cause additional injury,” says Robinson. As Robinson continued her studies, she realized that what had happened to her and other teammates was part of a larger pattern, one that included a lack of knowledge about the role hormones

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SUMMER 2023

We know that at a macro scale, male and female tissues are structurally different. What we are interested in answering is how that might impact how a cell and tissue respond to certain cues. such as estrogen play in tissue remodeling and regeneration. “We know that hormones affect the cell cycle and the proliferation of cells,” Robinson says. “We also know that hormones impact collagen production and play a role in the action of degradative enzymes, which are responsible for breaking down tissues.” Historically, gender differences in Rick Wilson medicine have been under-studied due

to a number of factors, which included a policy of excluding women from clinical trials due to safety concerns and the exclusive use of male mice in lab experiments to avoid complications caused by fluctuating hormone levels in female mice. This has led to a large gap in knowledge about the effects that hormone levels may play in a number of medical issues, including injury prevention and repair. “There is epidemiological evidence to suggest that during the follicular phase, when you have high estrogen, that’s when predominantly more ACL tears happen,” Robinson says. “We have some evidence to suggest that estrogen levels might impact cross-linking of the collagen, which impacts the stiffness of ligaments, but mechanistically, it’s still not a clear story.” Robinson’s research uses engineered materials to answer some of these questions. “We’re interested in how the structure and the mechanics of a tissue might tell a cell to do things and can use our engineered materials to test these questions,” Robinson says. “We know that at a macro scale, male and female tissues are structurally different. What we are interested in answering is how that might impact how a cell and tissue respond to certain cues.” From a clinical perspective, Robinson is hoping that this research can lead to a better understanding of how injuries heal and what impact hormones might have on the healing process. And as a former soccer player and the mother of a young daughter, she also brings a personal perspective to her work. “I would hope that my daughter is able to compete in high-performance sports and that coaches, staff and trainers will have a full awareness of the relationship of hormones to biomechanics in ways that could reduce injuries.”

Jenny Robinson was recently named an assistant professor and Endowed Chair in Women’s Sports Medicine and Lifetime Fitness at the University of Washington.

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To help detect diseases early, Tom Carroll is creating home-based diagnostic tests.

Since early detection is lifesaving and there’s a lot at stake, they plan to expand to screen for diseases such as cervical, prostate and bladder cancers.

“THERE’S ALL THIS COOL innovation happening in the academic setting, but it’s taking years to get to patients,” Tom Carroll ’16 says in frustration. This lag between innovation and patient care affects treatment — and lives — and it’s a concern that has motivated Carroll to co-found a company for home-based diagnostic testing. Carroll, who double majored in biochemistry and classical studies and was the recipient of a Rhodes scholarship, has seen health concerns hit close to home. “A number of people in my family have had cancer. We’re all BRCA carriers,” he says, referring to two genes known to correspond to a higher risk of certain cancers. Also, for most of his life, he lived with a bicuspid aortic valve — a heart condition that was repaired

during an operation in 2019. “At the cardiology clinic, I felt lucky because I was always doing relatively well. Other patients were very sick. I felt this drive to help people whose conditions were worse than mine.” Spurred by this determination, Carroll spent five years at the University of Oxford’s branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, where he worked on a clinical trial for esophageal cancer. “We identified a set of biomarkers that could predict which esophageal cancer patients would do well on a new treatment called immunotherapy and which patients might not benefit from it,” says Carroll. At Oxford, he met Luca Springer, another Rhodes scholar who shared his frustration that many such research

BIOMEDICINE

Better Diagnostics

PHOTO BY DUNJA OPALKO

findings take too long to filter into public use. “I came out of my clinical trial experience motivated to do more, so I decided to pivot into early detection and diagnostics,” says Carroll. In 2021, he and Springer started their own company, Cleancard, to create diagnostic tests that could be used by patients at home with a simple urine sample. For the first application of their technology, Cleancard is focusing on sexually transmitted diseases — specifically chlamydia and gonorrhea. “Only 20% of people in my age bracket are testing like they should,” Carroll explains. He believes that a home-based diagnostic method “could bring testing rates up significantly.” Carroll’s days are often filled with lab work in Cleancard’s London laboratory space, where they make synthetic versions of disease targets and use their technology to develop accurate tests, even with a low concentration of disease in samples. Since early detection is lifesaving and there’s a lot at stake, they plan to expand to screen for diseases such as cervical, prostate and bladder cancers. “Because blood-based tests and biopsies are the norm for cancer testing, there’s been no big push to see what you can get from urine. We want to work on that,” Carroll says. Making medical discoveries inspires Carroll. “What gets me excited about research is being the first one to see something. In my past work, that was seeing new biomarkers that could impact patient treatments. I also get that with Cleancard — we’ve developed a method that previously has not existed. That gets my mind whirring about the possibilities.” — JENNY WEST ROZELLE ’00

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ENGINEERING

Fusion Futures

Robert Plummer works for a future where clean energy powers the world.

Robert Plummer

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IF YOU’VE SEEN THE MOVIE “Star Trek Into Darkness,” then you may have seen a huge futuristic facility full of intricate systems: the workplace of Robert Plummer ’08. The real-life Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility is where Plummer has spent much of the past 13 years of his professional career. “You should never watch that movie with someone at [our facility],” says Plummer. “We’ll pause it to say, ‘I built that!’ or ‘I know what that is!’” Plummer’s workplace may have been the setting for a science fiction movie, but the work they do there aims to turn fantasy into reality. On Dec. 5, 2022, scientists achieved fusion ignition in a laboratory — producing 50% more energy from fusion than was delivered to the target. “For the first time, humankind has demonstrated net energy gain from nuclear fusion in a controlled

laboratory environment, so it’s huge,” says Plummer. Both fusion and fission yield vast amounts of energy; however, fission produces highly radioactive byproducts when uranium and plutonium are split into smaller atoms, whereas fusion — which powers our sun and other stars — delivers a much cleaner version of energy that is also several times more powerful. The National Ignition Facility’s successful fusion ignition was accomplished in a building the size of three football fields with the world’s largest and most energetic laser system. To create fusion at their facility, a low-energy pulse is amplified on the order of a quadrillion times, creating 192 laser beams that travel to the target chamber, a journey of about 1,500 meters, in about five microseconds. The lasers are then focused on a gold cylinder

PHOTOS COURTESY OF LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY’S NATIONAL IGNITION FACILITY

To create fusion ignition, the National Ignition Facility’s laser energy is converted into X-rays inside the chamber, which then compress a fuel capsule until it implodes, creating a hightemperature, high-pressure plasma.

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The target chamber of the National Ignition Facility

about the size of a pencil eraser with a peppercorn-sized pellet of hydrogen fuel inside. The lasers hit the inner wall of the gold cylinder and generate X-rays that compress the hydrogen, releasing huge amounts of energy. Although using fusion commercially to power homes is still many years in the future, it would provide sustainable energy with none of the greenhouse gases created by traditional fossil fuels. “I’m confident we’ll repeat ignition with increasing frequency over the coming years,” Plummer continues. “[We] just had our Kitty Hawk moment. This is that level of impact.” Kim Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore Lab, adds, “The pursuit of fusion ignition in the laboratory is one of the most significant scientific challenges ever tackled by humanity, and achieving it is a triumph of science, engineering and, most of all, people.” While one of the facility’s missions is to support inertial fusion energy for a sustainable clean energy future, the facility’s primary mission is to help maintain the reliability and safety of the U.S. nuclear weapons deterrence program without nuclear testing. Plummer, who describes himself as a pacifist at heart, says, “I never liked the idea of nuclear weapons, but I’ve come to understand that nuclear weapons are the greatest deterrent we have. It’s much better to be at the forefront of understanding how

On Dec. 5, 2022, scientists achieved fusion ignition in a laboratory — producing 50% more energy from fusion than was delivered to the target. they work and focusing on things like nonproliferation and counterterrorism, so I have a great respect for why what we’re doing matters.” Plummer began working at the National Ignition Facility in 2010 as a mechanical engineer, designing and providing engineering support for the positioning and delivery systems inside and around the chamber, before being promoted to head of engineering and maintenance for the facility’s optics organization. As the engineering manager, he oversaw a team of 30 people and was in charge of all the equipment that is used to process the optics. In 2021, Plummer accepted the job of chief engineer of Advanced Photon Technologies. The laser currently fires only a little more than one time per day on average; a lot of electrical energy is required to excite it, and the recharging process takes time. Reaching the commercial prototype phase will require a large

amount of time and research. “We have to have advances in the laser technology, which is what I’m working on,” Plummer says, “so that we can fire many times a second at these really high energies and powers. We need to make it robust, reliable and resilient.” The research and development work being done at Advanced Photon Technologies will help make a prototype inertial fusion power plant possible. Plummer, who was born in Norway and moved to Houston when he was 7 years old, says that he has always been an engineer at heart. “Building with Legos as a kid — that’s just who I am.” The high school Texas All-State clarinetist also has a passion for music and decided to apply early decision at Rice because of the university’s strong engineering and music programs. He majored in civil and environmental engineering while finding time to take private composition lessons at the Shepherd School of Music. Plummer, who was also president of Brown College his senior year, next attended Stanford University to earn his master’s degree in structural engineering and geomechanics. He’s very happy with where he’s settled. “I really love where I work,” Plummer says. “The [Lawrence Livermore] Lab is one of the best employers anyone could wish for. It’s because of the people. They’re super smart — it’s a lot like Rice in that sense.” He is also enthusiastic about what the future holds. “I’m very excited about helping make a prototype commercial fusion power plant a reality,” he says. “That’s hugely inspiring. To be a part of the leadership team that could maybe demonstrate it within our lifetime — what more could you ask for?”

— JENNY WEST ROZELLE ’00

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ALUMNI

BOOKS

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O Mg!

A LIVELY, colorful graphic novel for How Chemistry teens and laypeople, Came to Be “O Mg! How ChemStephen M. istry Came to Be” is a Cohen ’89, ’92 fascinating, enthusiWorld Scientific Press, 2022 astic and humorous presentation of the history of chemistry from Greek times well into the 2000s. The book keeps readers engaged by including historical context from art, language, literature, politics, music and more — plus a few “Easter eggs” and plenty of dad jokes. Author Stephen M. Cohen might be uniquely qualified for this project, as he holds a doctorate in chemistry from Rice and has also been drawing cartoons since boyhood, including a comic strip in the Daily Pennsylvanian

RICE MAGA ZINE

SUMMER 2023

while an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. He also hosts a weekly podcast called The History of Chemistry. How difficult was it to draw a history of chemistry? Very, [especially] in regards to making it look historically accurate. For example, the photographs tended to be black and white in those days: 19th century. So, I had to research, if somebody was wearing a cravat and a jacket, what color might that be? If women were doing research — and pictures of women in the labs are more difficult to find — what would they have worn? If they spoke, I wanted to include one or two words of their native language, and I happen to like languages, but I don’t know every

language. There was also the apparatus to draw, so I’d have to go back into the literature and look for what that apparatus actually looked like. And then of course there’s the topic itself. How do I draw a particular experiment? How do I draw a chemical topic? How do I draw molecules moving around? All the research that you did makes the book tremendous fun to look at, because there are so many interesting details to notice on every page. Yes, that was deliberate. In some

ALUMNI

cases, I put in Easter eggs, as some people call them. I put in a few dad jokes; I’m a dad, so I get to do that. Humor is a Stephen M. Cohen way to relax people and get people more interested in the topic of chemistry and science. People think about chemistry classes and they freeze up: “Oh my god, it’s gonna talk about moles and balancing equations.” I really don’t do that in the book. I don’t think I even mentioned the word mole, deliberately. On a serious note, you’ve said that Isaac Asimov didn’t talk about chemical warfare in his history of chemistry published in the 1960s, and you decided to do the opposite. Tell me about that decision. When Asimov wrote his book, chemistry was sort of — if you can imagine a 1950s newsreel narrator — the world of progress! So, he was really doing it from that perspective, that nothing will stop science — it’s upward and onward forever. But I wanted my book to say chemistry has found all kinds of wonderful things, but put it in the wrong hands, then bad things happen. Even good people with good intentions can unintentionally do bad things. I had to talk about Fritz Haber [and chlorine gas]. I had to talk about Louis Fieser and napalm. You have to talk about these things. You can’t ignore them. In this world of censoring in schools of topics that you don’t like, we have to talk about all of chemistry and all of history and then be the judge after that. — INTERVIEW BY HILARY C. RITZ Read an expanded version of this interview at magazine.rice.edu/omg.

Black Life Matter Blackness, Religion, and the Subject Biko Mandela Gray ’17 Duke University Press, 2022

IN HIS INTRODUCTION, Biko Mandela Gray describes his approach in “Black Life Matter” as a “sitting with” the deaths of four Black Americans who suffered violence at the hands of police officers. “The dead still speak,” he says, “and we can hear them if we only listen.” One comes away from the book convinced he has done just that. His study of the deaths of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling and Sandra Bland is profound, visceral and meaningful — unrelentingly attentive, but never exploitive. An assistant professor of religion at Syracuse University, Gray was trained as a philosopher of religion, and “Black Life Matter” examines how theodicy, ontotheology and interpellation play out in anti-Black police violence. “My goal in this text,” he said in a recent interview with the Black Agenda Report, “was to show how the phrase ‘all cops aren’t bad’ is a form of religious apologetics. ... The goal ... is to push toward other ethical frames that might afford different possibilities.” What shines through the philosophy is Gray’s commitment to “take care” with the lives he writes about. That care is always present on the page. “Do not mistake my claims or my intentions,” he cautions in the conclusion. “Love and care do not erase or escape the violence. But they are ways that we live in the midst of such violence.” — H.R .

Life Above the Clouds Philosophy in the Films of Terrence Malick Edited by Steven DeLay ’13 State University of New York Press, 2023

AMERICAN DIRECTOR TERRENCE Malick studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford and taught philosophy at MIT, as well as published a translation of Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. But in 1969 he set aside his academic career to express his views through film instead. And what films: His works are described in this anthology in such effusive terms as “invitations to receive the gift of this world” (Page 253), “stunningly beautiful” (Page 25) and “they make God perceptible” (Page 12). Editor Steven DeLay, research fellow at the Global Center for Advanced Studies, describes himself as “at the moment probably the most prolific phenomenological philosopher working in the world in English.” This, his sixth book-length project, was lauded by editor of Place Images in Media Leo Zonn as an “exceptionally rich, creative and intriguing study of Malick and his imprint on the world of filmmaking.” Fans of Malick’s work will return to their beloved films with fresh insights; those unfamiliar will feel inspired to discover this remarkable filmmaker for the first time. — H.R.

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May 6, 2023 // Rice Stadium // Hannah Rahmaan ’23 exudes peace and joy at undergraduate commencement.

LAST LOOK

RICE MAGA ZINE

SUMMER 202 3

PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW

Envisioning New Paths to Progress

Terrence Gee ’86, a member of the Humanities Advisory Board and the Rice Board of Trustees, and his wife, Terri Gee, are long-standing and enthusiastic champions of the humanities at Rice. Most recently, the Gees established the Dr. Anthony B. Pinn Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Center for African and African American Studies — a collaborative initiative that enables scholars from the humanities and social sciences to engage in important discussions involving race. “Terri and I believe that understanding the complexity of our histories and identities is one of the important issues of our time, and the world needs the kind of thoughtful, interdisciplinary scholarship that Rice excels at. We are pleased to support this vision and to honor the fine work of Dr. Pinn, who helped turn the center into a reality. Our hope is that this endowment will attract the rising academic stars that will launch the center into international prominence and pave the way for even more support.” To learn more about the Center for African and African American Studies and how you can make an impact, visit caaas.rice.edu/giving.

Rice University, Creative Services–MS 95 P.O. Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251-1892

Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Permit #7549 Houston, Texas

JooYoung Choi: Love and Wondervision Moody Center for the Arts Through Aug. 26, 2023 “The creativity inside of us can bring us all on an incredible voyage, led by love. The love of others who care for us and help us grow, and the love we give to others on this journey I call Wondervision.” — JooYoung Choi

VISITORS TO “LOVE AND WONDERVISION,” this summer’s exhibition at the Moody Center for the Arts, will find themselves immersed in the dazzling imagination of Houstonbased multimedia artist JooYoung Choi, originally from Seoul, South Korea. Through playful and colorful sculpture, painting, video, puppetry and installation art, “Love and Wondervision” invites visitors to experience Choi’s highly original and complex storytelling. Drawing from a universe of characters and narratives inspired by Choi’s personal experiences, her work explores themes of identity, belonging, trauma and resilience to convey kindness and healing. Dive deeper into JooYoung Choi’s imagination through our exclusive video at magazine.rice.edu/wondervision.

Rice Magazine | Summer 2023

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Across, Down and Forward

BIOSCIENCES In Hot Water

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PROTOTYPE NO. 2

Envisioning New Paths to Progress

Now Reading

Fusion Futures

Better Diagnostics

Environmental Awakening

Two Steps Ahead

A Remedy for Fall Risk

At a Touch

A Cargo-Carrying Catamaran

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EARLY CAREER AWARDS Awards in the Humanities

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Sources of Research Funding 8

THE YEAR IN RESEARCH

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