13 minute read
Alumni
ENTREPRENEURSHIP A Room of Mom’s Own
MBA grad Abbey Donnell founded a business to support nursing mothers in the workplace.
BY RACHEL FAIRBANK
ALUMNI
I
IN THE YEARS leading up to her MBA at Rice, Abbey Donnell ’17, founder of the company Work & Mother, watched as many classmates, co-workers and clients struggled with returning to an office after having children. “I wasn’t a mom yet, but I knew I wanted to be, so I just sat back and listened and thought, ‘This sounds terrible,’” Donnell said. These observations led to the creation of a company that designs and operates lactation suites for commercial clients.
How did your MBA studies impact the founding of Work & Mother? I actively worked on the idea for Work & Mother during my classes. Every time I was learning more about starting companies and growing companies, I was thinking about it through this lens. In 2019, when I was 39 weeks pregnant and launching the first location, I pitched the concept at one of the Lilie Lab events — the H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge — and won in the alumni category. I remember they told me that if I was going to participate, to have someone on standby who could deliver the pitch on my behalf, if need be.
How did the concept develop? I used the idea for Work & Mother as a case study for one of my entrepreneurship classes. At the time, this sharedspace, outsourced, fully managed approach was reflective of what was happening in the real estate industry, with the rise of coworking spaces and shared amenities. The advantage of this model is that it serves an entire building.
Did COVID-19 impact your business plans? When the pandemic first hit, we had to close our doors, but with the return to the office, after the initial days of the pandemic, there was and is a heightened focus on health, wellness and sanitation in the workplace. With flex work schedules, if the mom is only coming in once or twice a week, it makes less sense to have a fully dedicated, robust offering in every single office, but legally they still have to provide something.
What do these lactation suites look like? We like to describe these rooms as spa-like, but professional. Every private room has everything a mom needs, including a hospital-grade pump, cleaning and sanitizing supplies, fridge, lockers and milk storage bags. This means that when moms leave for work in the morning, they can truly just leave for work. They don’t have to worry about packing these big bags with all the parts and making sure they have everything. They can just show up.
CLASSNOTES Photography, Indonesian Coffee and Music
Excerpts from Owlmanac
1950s
Judith Brown ’58 (BA) is still living in South Natick, Massachusetts, and has been an animal photographer since retirement. Some of her work at the Unity Farm Sanctuary may be seen [online]. She has written a book, “Weatherbury Farm,” which may be purchased via contribution to an animal rights group or sanctuary. — Contributed by class recorder Jim Greenwood ’58 (BA) “My major accomplishment this spring was finishing and publishing my second novel: ‘By the Light of Uranium Glass.’ It takes place during the Space Age of the 1950s and 1960s, the hard war and depression days of the 1930s and 1940s, and also focuses on the emergence of television.” — Contributed by William H. Boyd ’76 (Baker: BA)
2000s
Angelique Poteat ’08 (Wiess: BMus) is excited to share that she will be the artistin-residence for the Seattle Symphony Orchestra for their 2022–2023 season. “Residency duties include being an educator … in addition to composing a piece for the SSO to open their season.” — Contributed by class recorder Emily Reagan ’08 (Will Rice: BA) 1990s
“We now enter our seventh year of living in Indonesia where we run a coffee processing and export company. … Our lives play out in a landscape of rice paddies, volcanoes and the frequent sounds of the call to prayer. … We spent this winter visiting America so that we could catch up with our oldest kids and extended family, and so that our younger kids could learn things like what a mailbox is and how barbecue should taste.” — Contributed by Renda Razgaitis Kiper ’97 (Brown: BA)
1970s
Susan Ammerman ’71 (Brown) is raising a 20-year flock of critically endangered NavajoChurro sheep in New Mexico. Churros are a Southwest-adapted landrace raised for meat, drought resistance and wool, which is used in Navajo rugs, tapestries and utility items. — Contributed by class recorder Ann Patton Greene ’71 (Brown: BA) 2000s
“I started an environmentally focused funeral home in 2018. This year, we’ll be focused on bringing water-based cremation to Texas and legalizing the process in the next legislative session in 2023.” — Contributed by Eric Neuhaus ’08 (Baker: BS)
To submit a Classnote to Owlmanac, contact your class recorder or log on to the Rice Portal at riceconnect.rice.edu and click “Submit a Classnote.”
ENTREPRENEURSHIP Engineering a Dream
Continuing a legacy, Rice alums open Bellaire brewpub.
IN 2005, DENNIS RHEE ’07 AND Jaime Robles ’06 were just a couple of Rice Owls coordinating Brown College’s O-Week and working toward engineering degrees. It might surprise some to learn the two former engineers are now the proprietors of a buzzy new brewpub in Bellaire, Texas. But to hear it from them, their experiences at Rice were the perfect prep for opening CounterCommon Beerworks & Kitchen. Coordinating O-Week “was definitely one of those things that puts you in a leadership role,” Robles said. “You’re running an entire operation, and you’re responsible for the 70 to 100 new students coming in. You’re setting the tone and the culture.”
CounterCommon’s doors opened to the public in summer 2022, but the idea had been percolating in the back of the two friends’ minds for over a decade, inspired by their desire to create a comfy neighborhood hangout modeled after the brewpubs they’d grown to love on visits to cities like Portland, Oregon; Denver; San Diego; and Munich. “This has always been a dream of ours,” Rhee said. “We joked about this in college — ‘Maybe we’ll open a brewery one day ...’” Inspired to become homebrewers by fellow Brown denizen Dan Erchick ’07 — namesake of CounterCommon’s “Thanks A Lot, Erchick” pale ale — Rhee and Robles started making craft brews together with him and other friends after graduation. At the time, both Robles and Rhee were working oil and gas jobs in Houston. Robles moved up the corporate ranks for 15 years, homebrewing in his spare time. Rhee had grown disillusioned with his industry job, so when he met Saint Arnold Brewing Company owner
and founder Brock Wagner ’87 on a pub crawl, he asked Wagner if the brewery was hiring any engineers. (They weren’t.) Undeterred, Rhee decided to hone his brewing bona fides at the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago and later in Munich at the Doemens Academy. In 2010, Rhee did land a job brewing at Saint Arnold, before leaving to focus on making CounterCommon a reality. Robles helped out on a part-time basis until 2020. Their other partners include Minh Nguyen from famed Cafe TH and Tanushri Tarafder Nguyen ’17.
The brews at CounterCommon harken back to the German-style lagers Rhee grew to love during his time at brewing school in Germany, with a couple of well-balanced IPAs on offer as well. Their recipes were designed to create sessionable beers, aka relatively low-alcohol beverages that leave you eager for a refill or two — “the beers we like to drink ourselves,” Rhee said. The food menu is a Houston-friendly mix of Asian and Latin American-inspired fare, taking notes from both Rhee’s Korean heritage and Robles’ Mexican roots. For example, a take on Tex-Mex queso, called “K-So,” is a Korean twist with gochujang glaze; “Common fries” are loaded with chopped kimchi and a lime-tinged Sriracha mayo.
Robles and Rhee are proud that their brewpub is the latest outgrowth from the Saint Arnold family tree, a behemoth from whose branches have sprung beloved Houston area watering holes Eureka Heights Brewing Company, Southern Star Brewing Company, Brash Brewing and more.
“We stuck with our passion,” Robles said. “Sometimes those far-fetched dreams and college quips are the ones that keep you motivated and wanting
more.” — SCHAEFER EDWARDS ’13
BOOKS Q&A
Living Lies
A Novel of the Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program James Lawler ’73
BookBaby, 2021
IN JAMES LAWLER’S DEBUT NOVEL, a CIA officer struggles to convince the agency that a double agent is undermining a nuclear weapons agreement between the U.S. and Iran. In the gritty, dangerous world of covert nuclear intelligence, millions of lives are on the line — and it’s a world Lawler knows well as a retired senior CIA operations officer. We asked Lawler how his intelligence career informs his novels, “Living Lies” and “In the Twinkling of an Eye” (BookBaby, 2022), as well as his forthcoming book, “The Traitor’s Tale.” How has your experience as an intelligence officer shaped your writing? They say to write what you know, and espionage is what I know about. I spent the last two-thirds of my 25 years in the CIA battling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction — not just nuclear weapons, but also biological and, to a lesser extent, chemical weapons. That’s a big focus for my first two novels — that and the sacred commitment that the CIA makes to its human assets. When we recruit somebody, we promise to protect them from harm. When I recruited spies, I was basically asking them to commit treason — to betray their country. In both of my first two novels, the CIA officer who recruits someone goes to hell and back to get them out of trouble. We owe them that. They’re putting their lives on the line for us.
How does being a novelist compare to being a CIA officer? It’s a lot less pressure, but I work better under pressure. If there’s no pressure, you can keep putting it off. Deadlines in the CIA mean: You’ll be dead if you don’t meet this.
Tell us about your forthcoming novel, “The Traitor’s Tale.” It’s loosely based on something that really happened about 20 years ago. A CIA officer was accused of espionage — of being a mole for the Russians. It turned out the real mole was an FBI agent who knew a lot of the same people. The CIA officer was ultimately exonerated, but it ruined this guy’s life, and a few years later he had a heart attack and died. For the novel, I came up with a character who is accused of being a traitor and almost everyone treats him like a leper. Eventually he’s exonerated, but he’s so bitter that he vows, “Well, now I am going to do it.” Now they’ve created a monster. — JENNIFER LATSON
Read an extended version of this interview at magazine.rice.edu.
BOOKS Now Reading
Constructing Risk
Disaster, Development, and the Built Environment Stephen O. Bender ’74
Berghahn Books, 2021
IN 1992, HURRICANE ANDREW devastated much of Florida, wiping out homes, businesses and infrastructure. The destruction was compounded by the absence of a uniform, statewide building code and lax enforcement of the existing building standards. But the conflicting agendas of stakeholders — including landowners, builders, real estate agents and local government officials — thwarted efforts to create a statewide code for an entire decade before the Florida Building Code was finally adopted in 2002. It can be hard to determine who should take ownership of efforts to mitigate risk from natural disasters, architect Stephen O. Bender writes in “Constructing Risk.” But as climate change increases the likelihood of calamities such as Andrew, the stakes are rising for communities everywhere. Given the urgent need for risk reduction and preparedness, as opposed to reactive disaster relief, public and private institutions are increasingly being called upon to collaborate on measures that could prevent the worst outcomes for a given population. As Bender illustrates, those measures can include better building codes as well as land use management, development strategies and social policies that combat poverty and corruption. — J.L.
Thinking With Maps
Understanding the World Through Spatialization Bertram C. Bruce ’68
Rowman & Littlefield, 2021
MAPS PROVIDE much more than the answer to the question, “Where do I turn?” In “Thinking With Maps,” Bertram C. Bruce, professor emeritus in library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, argues that maps provide context that can help us understand our lived experience, expanding our capacity to think about and participate in the world. But many people have limited map literacy, including the growing number of us who rely on our phones to tell us where to turn without bothering to look at the map itself. By treating maps as an afterthought, we’re missing out on a wealth of information and the ability to make connections across space and time. Bruce recommends that we not only start paying attention to maps but also try making them ourselves. Maps, he reminds us, can be visual representations of many things besides geographic areas, and they can be a powerful aid to memory and information processing. “A map also tells a story, which the listener can enter into,” Bruce writes. “This can be the seed for all sorts of learning.” — J.L.
MUSIC
Now Listening
MoonStrike
Apollo Chamber Players
Azica Records, 2022
APOLLO CHAMBER PLAYERS, founded by violinist Matthew Detrick ’03, recently released its sixth studio album, “MoonStrike.” It features the works of Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning Jennifer Higdon, Chickasaw classical composer and pianist Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, and composer and professor Pierre Jalbert of the Shepherd School of Music. In addition to Detrick, Apollo performers on this album include Anabel Ramirez Detrick (violin), Whitney Bullock ’07 (viola) and Matthew Dudzik ’04 (cello).
“The three works on ‘MoonStrike’ wove together nicely because of their storytelling aspects. The title track is most obvious with the narrator, astronaut John Herrington, relaying American Indian moon legends as set by the composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. The musical DNA of Jennifer Higdon’s ‘In the Shadow of the Mountain’ is based on her ‘Cold Mountain’ opera as well as her childhood in the Appalachian Mountains. Jalbert’s ‘L’esprit du nord’ is inspired by the composer’s French Canadian heritage, relating the stories and folk music of his ancestors,” Detrick said.
The story of Apollo Chamber Players began in Detrick’s home state of Pennsylvania when, in elementary school, he became fascinated with space and wanted to attend space camp. As an adult, he chose Rice to earn both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Shepherd School, fittingly located in the heart of Space City. — SAM BYRD
Read an extended version of this story at magazine.rice.edu.
