EARLY CAREER AWARDS Awards in the Humanities

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.

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 projects funded in 2022, go to magazine.rice.edu/year.

Kiese Laymon, acclaimed 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.”