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