EMPOWERING CAMPUS CULTURE anD PERSONALIZED EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES
RICE’S 10-YEAR PLAN TO BE THE WORLD’S PREMIER TEACHING AND RESEARCH uNIVERSITY A TeACHING AND RESEARCH MISSION
ADVANCING GLOBAL COLLABORATIONS USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESPONSIBLY
GENERATING SUSTAINABLE FUTURES
DEVELOPING FUTURE LEADERS
Our winter issue celebrates the launch of Rice’s new 10-year strategic plan, Momentous: Personalized Scale for Global Impact. Throughout the issue, readers can learn about Rice’s ambitious and thoughtful vision. What kinds of stories can readers expect about our plan, moving forward? For this issue, we’ve added special labels that connect to the plan’s key drivers or themes.
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BY
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Rice’s new 10-year strategic plan, Momentous, will guide the university in becoming the world’s premier teaching and research university.
Energy expert Andy Karsner ’89 opens up the conversation around climate change, technology and a sustainable energy future.
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Historian and architect Jobie Hill ’02 is finding and saving slave houses through field workshops and collective storytelling.
From growing up in Houston to a fashion atelier in Paris, Deanne Nguyen ’11 shares the story of finding her home in the world.
Phils’ new album, Lowrey Arboretum turns 25, trendy water bottles, Rice serveries’ journey to new dishes, TikTok’s viral music
Interview with Sherwin K. Bryant, AI’s mad loops, grad students’ sweet rewards, Cannady Hall opens and a unique course in public service
Catch up on classnotes, Baker 13 turns 50 (happy birthday suit!), and profiles of alumni who rock, provide shelter, write books and revive a local business
Last Look 80 Election Day reflections in the Academic Quadrangle
Peter Oumanski
(“The Moment Is Us”)
is a visual artist and illustrator who studied fine arts in his hometown of St. Petersburg, Russia, before attending the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His award-winning work appears in such publications as The New Yorker and Wired.
Sarah Rufca Nielsen ’05
(“A Life by Design”) majored in history at Rice and currently works as a freelance writer and editor. Nielsen’s work can be found in the Houston Chronicle, Houstonia and CultureMap.
Kim Catley
(“Tracing the Ancestors”) is a freelance writer and a contributor to several university publications. She grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains — just south of the story’s Pharsalia Farm — but now calls Richmond, Virginia, home.
Russell Gold
(“The Climate Diplomat”) is an award-winning investigative journalist at Texas Monthly. He is the author of two books and a two-time finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. He covered energy for The Wall Street Journal for 20 years.
Zach Phillips
(“Tracing the Ancestors”) is a photographer and videographer from Charlottesville, Virginia, who is passionate about helping tell the stories of individuals and organizations striving to make the world a better place.
Dan Bejar
(“AI’s Mad Loops”) is a conceptual illustrator living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Bejar has created artwork for clients such as Apple, The New York Times and TIME magazine, among others.
Winter 2025
PUBLISHER
Office of Public Affairs
Melinda Spaulding Chevalier, vice president
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Alese Pickering
EDITOR
Lynn Gosnell
ART DIRECTOR
Amy Kinkead
GRAPHIC DESIGNER
Jackie Limbaugh
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Tracey Rhoades
PHOTO/VIDEO
Jeff Fitlow
Brandon Martin
Gustavo Raskosky
ASSISTANT EDITOR
PROOFREADER
Jenny W. Rozelle ’00
INTERNS
Zeisha Bennett ’25
Noa Berz ’26
CONTRIBUTORS
Dan Bejar, Andrew Bell, Ty Burke, Kim Catley, Silvia Cernea Clark, Marcy de Luna, Amy C. Evans, Avery Franklin, Russell Gold, Autumn Horne ’22, Jennifer Latson, Chuck Luce, Amy McCaig, Sarah Rufca Nielsen ’05, Peter Oumanski, Nico Oved, Scott Pett ’22, Zach Phillips, David Silverberg, Brandi Smith, Sarah Peters Yu
Rice Magazine is published three times a year and is sent to Rice alumni, faculty, staff, parents of undergraduates and friends of the university.
©January 2025, Rice University
Robert T. Ladd, chair; Elle Anderson; Bart Broadman; D. Mark Durcan; Josh Earnest; Michol L. Ecklund; Terrence Gee; George Y. Gonzalez; Jennifer R. Kneale; Patti Lipoma Kraft; Holli Ladhani; Elle Moody; Brandy Hays Morrison; Asuka Nakahara; Vinay S. Pai; Brian Patterson; Byron Pope; Cathryn Rodd Selman; Gloria Meckel
Tarpley; Jeremy Thigpen; Claudia Gee Vassar; James Whitehurst; Lori Rudge Whitten; Randa Duncan Williams; Michael B. Yuen.
Reginald DesRoches, president; Amy Dittmar, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs; Stephen Bayer, vice president for Development and Alumni Relations; Paul Cherukuri, vice president for Innovation; Melinda Spaulding Chevalier, vice president for Public Affairs; Kelly Fox, executive vice president for Operations, Finance and Support; Kenneth Jett, vice president for Facilities and Capital Construction; John Lawrence, interim deputy chief investment officer; Caroline Levander, vice president for Global; Tommy McClelland, vice president and director of Athletics; Paul Padley, vice president for Information Technology and chief information officer; Ramamoorthy Ramesh, executive vice president for Research; Yvonne M. Romero, vice president for Enrollment; Omar A. Syed, vice president and general counsel.
POSTMASTER
Send address changes to: Rice University
Development Services–MS 80 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892
EDITORIAL OFFICES
Creative Services–MS 95 P.O. Box 1892 Houston, TX 77251-1892 Phone: 713-348-6768
ricemagazine@rice.edu
IT’S A WEEK BEFORE Rice’s holiday break, and over here at Rice Magazine HQ, a talented team of editors, writers and graphic designers is chasing a deadline as if this issue were its final exam, research paper and class presentation rolled into one. Forget grades* — we’re truly excited to share these stories with you, our readers. Here’s a preview.
A vibrant illustrated cover is followed by an iconic view of Lovett Hall, which introduces Rice’s new strategic plan, Momentous: Personalized Scale for Global Impact. This thoughtful plan has a breadth and depth unlike anything we’ve seen before. We break it down on Page 26.
Throughout the magazine, you’ll find a variety of timely news along with stories of discovery and research within our Sallyport and Wisdom departments. For example, did you know? Rice’s lauded engineering school is now the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing. And a historic gift establishes the Virani Undergraduate School of Business within Rice Business. Also in this issue, we mark a handful of milestone anniversaries across campus — and several are just golden . In our additional features, we introduce you to three accomplished,
inspiring Rice alumni who are differently and deeply engaged in the world. Andy Karsner’s peripatetic career centers on energy and technology — and diplomacy. Journalist Russell Gold joined Karsner on a walk around Lady Bird Lake in Austin for this interview.
Historian Jobie Hill earned two degrees at Rice before pursuing historic preservation. Her nonprofit, Saving Slave Houses, finds and documents the built environment and collected stories from homes of the enslaved. We sent a writer and photographer to Hill’s innovative field school last summer in Virginia.
As a student in the early 2000s, Houstonian Deanne Nguyen was already interested in fashion. Today, as head of atelier at a fashion house that incorporates AI pattern-making software into its design process, she’s on the cutting edge of fashion and technology. Read about Nguyen’s delightful reconnection with her alma mater at Rice’s Global Paris Center.
Owlmanac’s collected classnotes and profiles share news about the happenings of classmates and peers. These stories can take us by surprise — as was the case when a writer tipped us off to Austin-based musician Lisa Pankratz, a first-call drummer, whose profile kicks off this section. We can’t wait for you to read this and all our stories.
*However, awards and recognition are always welcome. Write to us at ricemagazine@rice.edu.
SINCE BECOMING PRESIDENT
two and a half years ago, I’ve witnessed Rice grow at an accelerated pace, faster than many of our peers. This ambitious, yet thoughtful, expansion is something we’re proud of, aligns with our commitment to accessibility and affordability, and sets Rice apart from many other private, top-tier universities.
This semester alone, we expanded our global efforts in India, launched several new collaborations with our partners in the Texas Medical Center, changed the name of Rice’s School of Engineering to the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing to recognize the transformative impact and historic momentum of computing, and named the university’s undergraduate business school the Virani Undergraduate School of Business to honor Farid and Asha Virani’s generous support of the program.
From Edgar Odell Lovett’s founding inspirational vision to the impactful leadership of David Leebron, each president has propelled Rice forward in different but important ways.
Guiding all of this growth is Rice’s new strategic plan — Momentous: Personalized Scale for Global Impact. Launched in October, the plan sets a path for the university to follow for the next decade. Work on the plan started two years ago under the leadership of Provost Amy Dittmar and a committee of Rice students, faculty and staff. The committee collected input from a wide range of stakeholders, including campus community members, alumni, and other friends and partners.
The plan reaffirms our commitment to becoming the world’s premier teaching and research institution — delivering personalized education while advancing discoveries that transform lives.
The tagline, “Personalized Scale for Global Impact,” reflects our mission to preserve what makes Rice special — our culture of care and close-knit community — while positioning us for global leadership and relevance. Our location in Houston, an international hub for industry and culture, offers unmatched opportunities for partnerships, exploration and innovation.
Rice will be internationally recognized for preparing leaders who address the world’s complexities and advancing groundbreaking research across disciplines. Whether through innovations in health, sustainable futures or urban solutions, we will harness our unique size and collaborative culture to make lasting impacts, all while mastering advances in responsible AI.
The power of this plan is in the “and” — our ability to excel at both teaching and research. The vital synergies between the two, and our skill in working across disciplines and ability to leverage both our agile size and our interdisciplinary nature to solve humanity’s most pressing issues in a way only Rice can.
From Edgar Odell Lovett’s founding inspirational vision to the impactful leadership of David Leebron, each president has propelled Rice forward in different but important ways. As we move into the future, we must build on this foundation while adapting to changes in higher education. Rice will focus on growing with purpose; propelling research and innovation; enhancing graduate programs and advancing student success; enhancing athletics; and expanding our global presence. Central to our success is investing in people — faculty, staff and students alike. We will support professional and leadership development, mental health and well-being, knowing these investments will foster a thriving campus community. This, in turn, will reinforce an empowered campus culture that supports everyone on campus and allows them to reach their highest potential.
As I explained at our strategic plan launch event, built into Momentous is a focus on us. Each one of us. Everyone has a role to play in this plan — including you. This is our moment for Rice. We invite you to join us for this next exciting chapter as we take Rice to new heights … together.
Rice’s oldest a cappella group releases its seventh studio album.
BY AMY C. EVANS
When it is hopeless, I start to notice That I still feel alive
THE TITLE OF the Rice Philharmonics’ latest album, “still phil.,” was inspired by the first track, “still feel.,” a peppy a cappella arrangement of the 2018 song by the American rock band Half Alive.
But don’t be fooled. The Phils are wholly alive.
“Being in the Phils is mandated fun!” says senior Rita Ajit, the group’s president. “We want to be taken seriously,” she continues, “but being taken seriously is different from being serious.” To wit: One of their recent warm-up exercises was harmonizing the word ‘cornbread.’
The 14 members of Rice’s oldest a cappella group, founded in 1994, offer a unique array of interests and talents. Sound engineer Khalil JeBailey, a senior who sings bass, is a materials science and nanoengineering major. Music director Josh Paik is a junior pre-med student and an avid beatboxer. Sophomore Josh Yang is a competitive whistler who will get to share his unique talent on stage when the Phils compete in the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella in Texas in early 2025.
“A good chunk of us in the Phils are actually pre-med,” says Phils publicity manager Dhilani Premaratne, a junior. “For all of us, the Phils is probably the most fun thing we do.”
Being in the Phils is more than a distraction, however. It offers skills that enhance members’ academic lives. “In the Phils, it’s so important that everyone is really good at listening to each other, collaborating and committing to the overall blending of voices,” Premaratne says. “And being in the Phils has helped me a lot with group dynamics in my academics.” For JeBailey, being in the group has boosted his confidence in public speaking and presenting work to his MSNE cohort. For everyone, it seems, the most important part of the Phils is the friends they make along the way. Their new record serves as a kind of Phils family album. “It’s great to have something tangible from our time at Rice and be able to share that love,” says Ajit. “It also feels cool to transcend the smallness of the group, reach a wider audience and have our memories preserved forever.”
“Still phil.” is available now on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music.
THE TICKER Catch up on Rice’s top campus stories from news.rice.edu.
PODCAST REC
“Beyond the Hedges” is back! Host David Mansouri ’07, Association of Rice Alumni president, explores ideas and innovations with Rice community members.
WOOT!
Rice Student Association
President Jae Kim ’25 has been awarded a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, one of just 32 American recipients chosen to study at the University of Oxford in England next fall.
RICE GLOBAL INDIA
Rice launched a new global partnership — Rice Global India — in Bengaluru, India. Partnerships with the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and the Indian Institute of Science are underway.
Rice’s School of Engineering is now the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing — a name change that reflects achievements past, present and future.
Houston business and community leaders Farid and Asha Virani have made a historic gift to establish the Virani Undergraduate School of Business within Rice Business.
With her sights set on a journalism career, Basma Bedawi explores every angle of learning.
WHEN BASMA BEDAWI ’25 arrived at Rice, her dream school, in fall 2021, she already had a plan. “I started as prelaw because I cared about the issues that are facing us as a society,” Bedawi says. “I don’t want to just have the information. I want to do something about it.”
And while the pre-law track checked a lot of boxes for her career path, there was a long-held dream she could not shake — to be a journalist. “I used to watch Diane Sawyer religiously, because I loved that way of communicating information,” Bedawi remembers.
“I thought, this is how you let people know what’s going on.”
The fact that Rice doesn’t offer a journalism major was not a deterrent. “I realized how much power there is in writing, so I decided that I’m going to do my best to chase this thing, journalism.” Bedawi began seeking courses that would help hone her writing skills. She took Professor Kiese Laymon’s creative nonfiction course, and that experience inspired her to add English with a concentration in creative writing to her two other majors — social
policy analysis and sociology.
“It’s a very specific intersection that I have invented for myself at Rice by using this combination of majors,” she says. “It’s a way for me to build the strongest skill set I can with the resources available to me while I’m here.”
One of those resources was the support Bedawi received as a Moody Research Fellow. Last summer, she used the Moody stipend to support a short stint in New York City, where she interned at Vulture, the entertainment news website affiliated with New York Magazine. “I really like looking at media and pop culture through the lens of sociology and social issues and kind of reframing it,” she says, “looking through the lens of how something fits into greater society and how it is a reflection of greater society.”
Even with a heavy academic load, Bedawi has managed to maintain a vibrant extracurricular life. “I’m a very work-hard-play-hard person, and I try my best to strike a good balance between the two,” she says with a smile. She serves as co-editor in chief of The Wild Grain, the English department’s online magazine, and writes for the Rice Thresher.
KTRU also serves as a creative anchor for Bedawi’s hectic schedule. Every Monday morning, she starts her busy week off the same way: deejaying an hourlong set. When asked if she has discovered a new song or band that she is into, Bedawi does not miss a beat. “I like ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ by the Beatles,” she says. “That’s one I’ve been listening to a lot.”
When Bedawi graduates in the spring, she will take all of the experiences she accumulated at Rice with her into the field of journalism. So, look for her byline to appear here, there and everywhere.
— AMY C. EVANS
Kiese Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of Creative Writing and English in the School of Humanities.
GENERATE SUSTAINABLE FUTURES
TREE CAMPUS
Rice is home to the Lynn R. Lowrey Arboretum, which spans the entire campus and serves as a hands-on teaching and research resource for the university. The arboretum honors Lynn R. Lowrey (1917–1997), a Houston horticulturist who was known for his passion for plant collecting and naturalistic approach to landscaping, a philosophy that was far ahead of its time. Established in 1999, the arboretum marked its 25th anniversary this November with an event celebrating this ecological resource and launching a project to restore one of Rice’s most untamed spaces — the Harris Gully Natural Area. — AUTUMN HORNE ’22
There are around 125 species and 4,600 individual trees in the arboretum, including oaks, elms and pines native to Texas and Mexico.
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Famous campus trees include the “moon tree,” a loblolly pine grown from seeds taken to space on the Apollo 14 mission, and the Harris County champion post oak, the largest of its kind in the county with a 158inch circumference.
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Bioscientist Cassidy Johnson ’11, interim director of the arboretum, sees the arboretum — or urban forest — as a source of creativity and learning: “How many great ideas have people come up with while sitting under a tree?”
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The native trees play a vital role in supporting local biodiversity, attracting over 700 different insect species, which in turn draw birds and other wildlife.
Cassidy Johnson is assistant teaching professor of biosciences. Cin-Ty Lee is the Harry Carothers Wiess Professor of Geology, Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences in the Wiess School of Natural Sciences.
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Rice arborists Dawn Roth-Ehlinger and Maria Lopez work with Johnson to keep a tree inventory and management plan.
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The arboretum’s many live oaks are powerful vehicles for carbon sequestration. They play a key role in supporting Rice’s goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2030.
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Geologist and bird expert Cin-Ty Lee has identified 275 species of birds on campus, about 90% of which are migratory birds using the arboretum as a “rest stop.”
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The arboretum plants a tree each year in celebration of Arbor Day. For Arbor Day 2024, the arboretum planted an anacua (or knockaway) tree.
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This spring, Rice undergraduates will update the arboretum’s campus tree map as part of a research project.
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The Lynn R. Lowrey Arboretum is open to anyone in the community to explore and enjoy. Learn more at arboretum.rice.edu .
MOST RICE UNDERGRADUATES
know the Shepherd School of Music to be a serious place — a bastion of hard work and discipline where talented players spend hours each day practicing scales and rehearsing quartets. It’s much the same for Ariel Lee ’25, a doctoral student in violin performance who spent six years at the Juilliard School before coming to Houston, and whose new MUSI course had a roster full of nonmajors in its first semester.
In MUSI 125: That Viral TikTok Sound, students approach popular music and social media trends in a serious way.
“Most of the stuff that we consume is from Reels and TikTok, shorts on YouTube, and I think they’re really centered around music,” Lee says. “I just thought that was interesting, to look at the reason behind how that happens, why certain songs go viral and certain songs don’t. So we try to figure that out with music theory.”
MUSI 125
That Viral TikTok Sound
DEPARTMENT
Music
DESCRIPTION
In this course for no n-m u sic majors, students take a closer look at TikTok viral sounds exploring how classical music, despite its traditional roots, continues to inspire new forms of artistic expression and influence popular media.
For the final project, students apply the theory they’ve learned to a composition of their own.
In spring 2024, Lee drafted the course’s curriculum for an assignment in her pedagogy class, bridging her extensive musical knowledge with an internet savvy garnered during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many classical musicians active online, she began sharing videos on TikTok and Instagram during quarantine, eventually amassing over 12 million likes and 200,000 followers across both platforms.
The course begins with an introduction to fundamental music theory, starting with how to read music and working up to rhythm and harmony, all the while relating key concepts back to hit songs. For the final project, students apply the theory they’ve learned to a composition of their own, which Lee eventually posts to her own TikTok account. Whoever’s video gets the most views gets a pass on an assignment of their choice.
For a seasoned performer like Lee, going back to the basics in this way is a refreshing change of pace, revealing the wisdom of a beginner and inspiring her to think outside the box.
“They make me think about things that I really haven’t thought about that deeply, about the reasons behind music theory,” Lee says. — NOA
BERZ
’26
Listen to a student’s TikTok composition at magazine.rice.edu/ tiktok.
Ariel Lee is a graduate student in the Shepherd School of Music.
A demand for new food options set Rice’s chefs on a mission to change the way they do business.
PIONEERING CHEF James Beard once said, “Food is our common ground, a universal experience.” No group better exemplifies this sentiment than Rice’s chefs and dining staff who seek to make every meal a satisfying and mouthwatering experience. Driven by a commitment to serve an increasingly diverse student body with evolving eating habits and using feedback from students, Rice’s cadre of chefs sought to redefine their menus, marking a new culinary direction for Rice Dining, which serves over 10,000 meals a day.
Inspired by food halls — a modular cafeteria-like configuration that gives patrons different food options in a communal environment — the chefs, including senior executive chefs Sing Yam and Joe Stayshich, used Houston’s award-winning global cuisine for inspiration to broaden their culinary horizons.
The city’s unique diversity and thousands of ethnic restaurants, many close to campus, provided the perfect recipe for the chefs to easily explore international flavors. Their journey began in Asiatown in southwest Houston, an area known for many Asian and especially Vietnamese restaurants, followed by a trip to POST Houston, where ChòpnBlọk, a West African eatery founded by Ope Amosu ’14, introduced the team to African-inspired dishes. These “food trips” — which also included outings to Pakistani restaurants and the Houston Farmers Market, stocked with fresh ingredients from all parts of the world — culminated in a culinary throwdown where the chefs showcased what they had learned.
Honing their expanded culinary skill set, chefs Yam, Stayshich and Ernesto Perez, and team captain and
We created branded international stations that offer students comforting tastes from home, while introducing new cuisines and broadening their culinary experiences.
Cohen House senior executive chef Susana Cabrera, then traveled in June to team competitions at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s annual Chef Culinary Conference. The team brought home a gold medal — proof that the culinary queries had paid off.
“This experience as well as the field trips were instrumental in providing the inspiration we needed to elevate our offerings and enhance the dining experience for our students,” says Yam. Several of the new recipes are now showcased in campus serveries, which feature a mix of cuisines at stations named Owl Masala, El Rincon Caliente, Wok on Rice, Mezze, Global Bowl and Chef’s Table. Chef’s Table, in particular, features many of the new, uniquely crafted meals.
“We created branded international stations that offer students comforting tastes from home, while introducing new cuisines and broadening their culinary experiences,” says Beth Leaver, senior executive director and chief hospitality officer in Rice’s Housing and Dining.
A food ambassador program, made up of students from various colleges and the graduate community, was established to foster open communication and offer dining options that align with student expectations. Led by Kyle Hardwick, director of culinary excellence, and Faith Richards, assistant director of communications and marketing for Housing and Dining, the program gives students an opportunity to be involved at all levels from pot to plate. “Many students work in our kitchens, offering valuable insights,”
Richards says. “By involving them in the cooking process and recipe testing, we can ensure that our offerings are accurately representative of their backgrounds and preferences.”
This transformation wouldn’t have been as successful without the student liaisons, who are always eager to provide feedback — good and bad — from their peers, Richards says. “The program has made a positive difference in just one semester,” says sophomore food ambassador Alyssa Khor. “Seeing students enjoy these small but significant changes reinforces the importance of this program and builds a connection between us and the H&D staff.”
Rice’s chefs continually research to stay current with constantly changing food trends, educating themselves and students. “Students are expressing what they like and what they don’t like
more openly,” Yam says. “This shift reflects a broader awareness of dietary choices, and regularly monitoring these changes will be important for all of the chefs.”
This year, the staff has noticed an increased demand for vegetarian and vegan options. To meet this need, a collaboration with the Rice Vegan Society enabled dining staff to expand plantbased options for World Vegan Month in November. “We introduced rotating plant-based stations at a different servery each week throughout the month,” Leaver says. “The response was very positive, and students appreciated the new offerings.” Moving forward, the staff plans to collaborate more closely with other student organizations like RASA (Rice African Student Association) and HACER (Hispanic Association for Cultural Enrichment at Rice) to represent their individual backgrounds and preferences.
Regardless of what’s being served — comfort food or a taste of something new — the dining crew has created a dynamic and varied dining experience for all palates. “We’ve definitely turned over a new leaf,” Stayshich says. “These new food offerings at Rice are just a layer in the fabric and reflective of our diverse culture.” And while there’s no consensus on which dishes are the best, Stayshich concedes, “Houston provides a wealth of food knowledge, but Rice has a good thing going on right here.”
— TRACEY RHOADES
CAMPUS TRENDS
Along with backpacks, laptops and lanyards, the reusable water bottle is a musthave accessory. By decorating the bottles with colorful, comical and meaningful stickers, Rice students turn the practical into artful with each sip.
1. Leslie Rojo Flores ’28 uses stickers to signify and summarize her time at Rice. The owl sticker she added before matriculation kicked off her bottle’s sticker collection. 2. Keeping with a pink aesthetic, Kendall Martin ’28 decorates with “only the super cute ones on the bottle, [while] the rest go on the computer.” 3. “I realized the hidden utility in a sticker-decorated bottle — identification,” says Joselyn Lwigale ’26. Faves? A “Be my swolemate” sticker from Rice’s Barbara and David Gibbs Recreation and Wellness Center and a holographic sticker from the Rice Women’s Resource Center. 4. “Rice and travel” are the two themes visible on Genesis Hahn’s ’25 water bottle, which is full of homages to the clubs, activities and places she has visited while a student. 5. Hong Lin Tsai ’26 is the creator of the popular Sammy the Owl stickers — many of which cover his water bottle. Tsai has produced more than 30 sticker designs and sells them on Instagram. The water bottle not only reflects his creative identity, but he says it is also “a great conversation starter.” 6. Using a calculated approach, Eric Chen ’27 “made sure there was a variety of colors, fonts and formats” to present the best bottle he could. His stickers document his adventures. — ZEISHA BENNETT ’25
ENGINEERING
RESPONSIBLE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Data scarcity for training generative AI models may eventually lead to ‘self-consuming’ feedback loops — and corrupted data.
BY SILVIA CERNEA CLARK
GENERATIVE artificial intelligence models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o or Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion are surprisingly capable of creating new text, code, images and videos. Training them, however, requires such vast amounts of data that developers are already running up against supply limitations and may soon exhaust training resources altogether.
Against this backdrop of data scarcity, using synthetic data to train future generations of the AI models may seem like an alluring option to Big Tech for a number of reasons: AI-synthesized data is cheaper than real-world data and virtually limitless in terms of supply; it poses fewer privacy risks (as in the case of medical data); and in some cases, synthetic data may even improve AI performance.
However, recent work by the Digital Signal Processing group at Rice has found that a diet of synthetic data can have significant negative impacts on generative AI models’ future iterations.
“The problems arise when this synthetic data training is, inevitably, repeated, forming a kind of a feedback loop — what we call an autophagous or ‘self-consuming’ loop,” said electrical and computer engineer Richard Baraniuk. “Our group has worked extensively on such feedback loops,
Problems arise when this synthetic data training is, inevitably, repeated, forming a kind of a feedback
loop — what we call an autophagous or ‘selfconsuming’ loop.
and the bad news is that after even a few generations of such training, the new models can become irreparably corrupted. This has been termed ‘model collapse’ by some — most recently by colleagues in the field in the context of large language models. We, however, find the term ‘Model Autophagy Disorder,’ or MAD, more apt, by analogy with mad cow disease.”
Mad cow disease is a fatal neurodegenerative illness that affects cows and has a human equivalent caused by consuming infected meat. A major outbreak in the 1980s and 1990s brought attention to the fact that mad cow disease proliferated as a result of the practice of feeding cows the processed leftovers of their slaughtered peers — hence the term “autophagy,” from the Greek auto-, which means “self,” and -phagy, which means “to eat.”
Their study, titled “Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MAD,” is the
first peer-reviewed work on AI autophagy and focuses on generative image models like the popular DALL·E 3, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.
“We chose to work on visual AI models to better highlight the drawbacks of autophagous training, but the same mad cow corruption issues occur with LLMs, as other groups have pointed out,” Baraniuk said.
The internet is usually the source of generative AI models’ training datasets, so as synthetic data proliferates online, self-consuming loops are likely to emerge with each new generation of a model.
In addition to Baraniuk, study authors include Rice Ph.D. students Sina Alemohammad, Josue Casco-Rodriguez ’22, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun ’22 and Hossein Babaei ’23; Rice Ph.D. alumnus Lorenzo Luzi ’20; Rice Ph.D. alumnus and current Stanford postdoctoral scholar Daniel LeJeune ’22; and Simons Postdoctoral Fellow Ali Siahkoohi.
Richard Baraniuk is Rice’s C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, professor of statistics and professor of computer science in the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing.
Read more at magazine.rice.edu/ madloops .
The incentive for cherry-picking – the tendency of users to favor data quality over diversity – is that data quality is preserved over a greater number of model iterations, but this comes at the expense of an even steeper decline in diversity.
Rice celebrates graduate students’ competitive fellowships with cake.
FOR ELENA MUJICA , the sweet taste of victory tastes a lot like strawberry pavlova and tres leches cake.
With a cake carefully balanced in each hand, she headed to the picnic tables outside Valhalla, Rice’s graduate student pub, to celebrate her GEM Fellowship and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program honorable mention with her friends and lab mates. She was one of about 100 graduate students to be recognized at Take the Cake, an annual event hosted in November by Seiichi Matsuda, the dean of graduate and postdoctoral studies.
The premise is simple: Each graduate student is awarded one cake of their choosing for every major external fellowship worth $5,000 or more. For Mujica, a first-year Ph.D. student in systems, synthetic and physical biology, that meant two cakes. “It feels good that my hands are so full,” Mujica says.
In the span of less than an hour, Matsuda and the graduate and postdoctoral studies office staff doled out 102 cakes from two local bakeries amounting to an estimated 2 or 3 million calories. The order was so large that one of the bakeries needed to rent a moving truck to deliver the goods.
The payoff is worth it. “It turns an individual win into a community win,”
says Matsuda.
Take the Cake is another way Rice cares for its graduate students, says Jose Hernandez, a first-year bioengineering Ph.D. student from Oswego, Illinois, who chose a berry Chantilly cake in recognition of his GEM Fellowship, which supports him as he researches the link between the metabolism and mechanics of cancer cells.
“This definitely goes beyond what a lot of schools do,” Hernandez adds. “It goes back to the recurring theme of intentional support.”
Matsuda’s office also launched a coaching program that pairs students with other students who have won or applied to other major fellowships.
Central to this community are advisers like psychologist Danielle King and bioscientist Caroline Ajo-Franklin,
In the span of less than an hour, Matsuda and ... office staff doled out 102 cakes from two local bakeries amounting to an estimated 2 or 3 million calories.
who came to cheer on their students. Ajo-Franklin is the thesis adviser to two students, Robyn Alba and Esther Jimenez, who received the NSF GRFP award and the NSF INTERN award, respectively. Jimenez’s award allowed her to expand her skill set while interning at a Houston company. Alba studies bacteria that make electrical currents in the hopes of engineering them to detect toxins. Her parents traveled from Dallas for the occasion.
“I have gone to Take the Cake the last two years to celebrate friends of mine,” Alba said. “Everyone loves cake, and it’s fun to set some time aside and celebrate and have good community.”
— SARAH PETERS YU
Danielle King is associate professor of psychological sciences in the School of Social Sciences. Caroline Ajo-Franklin is professor of biosciences in the Wiess School of Natural Sciences and director of the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute.
Watch a video at magazine.rice.edu/ cake
Stocking up the kitchen pantry can be a practical investment strategy.
AS ANYONE WHO HAS visited a Walmart Supercenter during a Black Friday sale can tell you, just about everyone loves a deal. Those carts stacked with discounted cleaning supplies and bulk toilet paper are more than just obstacles in a crowded parking lot. Stockpiling household goods is a strategy that shoppers can use to keep their overall spending low. However,
stockpiling requires “investment” in household working capital — the value of stockpiled goods and cash needed to finance shopping trips.
For households that stock up on goods at the right price, the gains can add up quickly, says Rice Business economist Stephanie Johnson. Johnson likens the savings achieved from strategic shopping behavior to the interest earned in a savings account — but at an average of 54% for the typical working capital investment, the returns far outpace any interest you could earn. The amount is also far higher than the average annual return of 8% achieved by the S&P 500, a stock market index that tracks 500 of the largest companies in the United States.
While stock market investments al-
ways carry inherent risks, the returns from buying discounted products are known at the time of purchase and are nearly guaranteed. However, unlike a savings account, the returns decline with the amount invested.
Traditionally, wealth is calculated by adding up the total value of assets such as real estate, savings and equities like stocks. But that calculation fails to capture what’s in a household’s cupboards. For those in the lowest quintile of annual household income, these goods are a significant form of wealth and likely the most effective way for them to generate returns with their money.
“A large number of American households have very limited financial assets, but all households have at least some consumer goods,” says Johnson. “You can stock up on things like dry grocery and frozen items, cleaning products, or canned food, and, to a lesser extent, yogurt, cheese or eggs. The items that you have in your fridge or in your pantry can be a significant form of wealth that is not captured in widely used measures. … What’s important to understand is these physical goods are also a form of wealth. Even if they cannot easily be resold, households can reduce spending in times of financial distress by drawing from their stockpile.”
Johnson, along with co-authors Scott Baker of Northwestern University and Lorenz Kueng of the Swiss Finance Institute, recently published these findings in the Journal of Financial Economics. — TY BURKE
Stephanie Johnson is an assistant professor of finance at the Jones Graduate School of Business. A version of this story originally appeared in Rice Business Wisdom.
OPENSTAX AT RICE, the world’s largest publisher of free, open education resources, was awarded $90 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation to build and lead SafeInsights — a groundbreaking research and development infrastructure for inclusive learning and education research.
SafeInsights will enable extensive, long-term research on the predictors of effective learning, all while protecting student privacy. This five-year project represents the NSF’s largest single investment in research and development infrastructure for education at a national scale.
It will serve as a central hub for a multidisciplinary team of 80 partners and collaborating institutions, including major digital learning platforms that currently serve tens of millions of U.S. learners. The inclusion of researchers, educators, developers and students from diverse, representative backgrounds will be a top priority.
Funded through NSF’s Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-2 program, which places it alongside other critical infrastructure for scientific discovery such as telescopes and supercomputers, SafeInsights is the largest federal award in the history of Rice.
“Learning is complex. Research can tackle this complexity and help get the right tools
into the hands of educators and students, but to do so, we need reliable information on how students learn,” says OpenStax founder and director Professor Richard G. Baraniuk, who will lead the SafeInsights project. “Just as progress in health care research sparked stunning advances in personalized medicine, we need similar precision in education to support all students, particularly those from underrepresented and low-income backgrounds.”
For example, a research study could reveal what strategies are most effective for middle school students struggling with reading comprehension in algebra to prepare them for success in high school and college. These studies can be replicated and expanded across different platforms, enabling a deeper understanding of the multitude of factors that influence learning outcomes, leading to the development of more effective, evidence-based teaching methods and tools. — AVERY FRANKLIN
Richard Baraniuk is Rice’s C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, professor of statistics and professor of computer science in the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing.
The new Cannady Hall extends Rice Architecture’s space for learning and creativity.
THE NEWLY COMPLETED William T. Cannady Hall is an eye-catching, two-story, 20,000-square-foot building designed for teaching, design, research and public engagement. Connected by an aerial walkway (that also serves as a “pinup” studio for students’ work) to Anderson Hall, the building’s modern, flexible construction is a model of sustainable design. Its terra cotta façade complements Rice’s historic brick architecture and preserves the expansive oak tree that shades the SI and Susie Morris Lounge.
Named for William T. Cannady, the lead donor and professor emeritus of architecture, the spacious addition features a large fabrication studio, a public gallery that spans two floors and a collaborative, open space for students and faculty to work on design projects. The fabrication lab enables students to create prototypes, models and new types of three-dimensional work. The gallery space, awash with natural light, provides a place for exhibitions.
“Cannady Hall is more than a building; it embodies our commitment to sustainability, learning and the future of architecture discourse,” explains Igor Marjanović, the William Ward Watkin Dean of the Rice School of Architecture. “It will be a place where ideas for the future are imagined and explored — a space that will empower generations of architects to leave their mark on society.”
The two-year project, designed by the Zurich-based Karamuk Kuo Architects, was formally dedicated Dec. 5, 2024.
— TRACEY RHOADES
Rice’s Biotech Launch Pad is leading the way for implantable devices to treat diabetes and obesity.
RICE IS PART of a multiuniversity research team awarded up to $34.9 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health to accelerate the development of a bioelectronic implant to improve obesity and Type 2 diabetes treatment. The technology promises to improve patients’ lives by simplifying treatment logistics and optimizing outcomes while reducing costs.
Rice Biotech Launch Pad will lead the commercialization effort for Rx On-site Generation Using Electronics — a selfcontained, durable implantable device that houses cells engineered to produce T2D and obesity therapies in response to patients’ physiological needs.
“ROGUE’s innovative design combines efficient biological manufacturing, long-term durability and patient-friendly features that have the
potential to transform the landscape of biologics delivery,” says bioengineer Omid Veiseh, faculty director of the Rice Biotech Launch Pad. “With the Rice Biotech Launch Pad leading the clinical translation and commercialization efforts, this funding will allow us to expedite the development and clinical trials of this groundbreaking technology, making it accessible to patients sooner.”
Paul Wotton, in-house entrepreneur and executive director of the Rice accelerator, will be involved in every step of the process to ensure the evolution of this technology from research to clinical translation to an independent company.
“With the Biotech Launch Pad, our goal is venture creation in parallel to the groundbreaking research at Rice and its collaborating institutions,” Wotton says.
Carnegie Mellon University leads the team of researchers driving the
accelerated development and testing of ROGUE. With a target cost of goods below $1,000 for at least one year of therapy, ROGUE aims to significantly lower the costs of biologics-based treatments.
This effort is funded under ARPAH’s REACT program and includes funding for a first-in-human clinical trial for patients facing obesity and T2D. The trial preparation is slated to begin in the fifth year of the six-year project.
Other Rice co-principal investigators include bioengineer Jacob Robinson, who leads integration efforts for the project in line with the focus on clinical translation and commercialization, and bioengineer Oleg Igoshin, who oversees pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics modeling.
The multiple institutions collaborating on ROGUE include Rice; Carnegie Mellon; Northwestern University; Boston University; Georgia Institute of Technology; University of California, Berkeley; the Mayo Clinic; and New York City-based Bruder Consulting and Venture Group. — SILVIA CERNEA CLARK
Omid Veiseh is professor of bioengineering at Rice and faculty director of the Rice Biotech Launch Pad. Jacob Robinson is professor of electrical and computer engineering and of bioengineering at Rice. Oleg Igoshin is professor of bioengineering and of chemistry and associate chair of the bioengineering department. Veiseh, Robinson and Igoshin are all affiliated with the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing.
With the Biotech Launch Pad, our goal is venture creation in parallel to the groundbreaking research at Rice and its collaborating institutions.
Historian Sherwin K. Bryant is building new and innovative connections to expand the impact of Rice’s Center for African and African American Studies.
IN 2019, Rice launched the Center for African and African American Studies, a collaboration between the School of Humanities and the School of Social Sciences, with the mission to be a home for critical conversation, innovative research, learning and community engagement. On Jan. 1, 2024, historian Sherwin K. Bryant — a distinguished scholar of slavery, race and the early modern African diaspora — took the helm. Under Bryant’s leadership, the center is advancing the understanding of African and African American history and culture while growing its capacity for research and teaching, curating dynamic programs, and increasing collaboration on campus and beyond.
What were your priorities when you arrived at Rice? One of the first things was to develop a Black History Month lecture series. It was important to me to hold that lecture series off campus, specifically to let the community know that we’re here, and we’re invested. Our BHM kickoff lecture was held at the African American History Research Center at the Gregory School in Freedmen’s Town. The Houston Museum of African American Culture was another lecture site. That’s the kind of outreach we’ve been able to nurture.
What are some highlights of CAAAS’ growth this year? The center
has hired nine faculty members who have tenure-line homes in departments within the schools of social sciences and humanities. That has spurred a great deal of innovation in undergraduate curricula and supports our minor. On the graduate level, we’re increasing courses to augment departmental offerings and support our Ph.D. certificate.
We’ve also welcomed Ayodeji Olugbuyiro, the inaugural Dr. Anthony B. Pinn Postdoctoral Associate, to the center. His research revolves around the formation of Black identities within the Luso-Afro-Brazilian Atlantic, a region encompassing countries like Brazil, Portugal, Angola and Mozambique. Two new staff members — associate director Erika Thompson and center administrator Canecia Smith — have enabled us to increase our activities at a dizzying pace.
How does having two academic homes — the School of Humanities and the School of Social Sciences — benefit CAAAS? It offers an opportunity to advance research that’s truly interdisciplinary — and allows
us to think about how we might engage with other Rice schools. So, if we’re thinking about the built environment and environmental justice, we can have conversations with architecture and engineering. If we’re thinking about the socioeconomic realities of Black life in global cities like Houston as well as the importance of studying practices of entrepreneurship, banking and finance in the broader African diaspora across the Americas, we can engage faculty in business and social sciences. The arts are another big part of what we want to think about as we’re thinking about history, research and practices.
How will Rice’s new strategic plan inform the center’s work? Part of the strategic plan is a globalizing ethos. CAAAS has many faculty members whose work addresses Latin America and the Caribbean — and is at the cutting edge in these areas. We will be formalizing more partnerships with universities and scholars in Latin America — in particular, in Colombia and Brazil.
As we think about what it means to advance a strategic mission toward thriving urban communities, CAAAS is committed to studying the history of Black Houston. And we want to be in dialogue with efforts to advance this research, support it and incubate it here. — INTERVIEW BY
LYNN GOSNELL
Sherwin K. Bryant is director of the Center for African and African American Studies and associate professor in the Department of History in the School of Humanities.
Read an expanded version of this interview at magazine.rice.edu/ bryant
MOODY GATEWAY PROGRAM
Former Houston Mayor Annise Parker ’78 and former Harris County Judge Ed Emmett ’71 joined forces this fall to teach students about the essential benefit of public service.
IN WHAT COULD be described as an “only at Rice” experience, a unique course in public service debuted at Rice by two veteran elected officials and lauded Rice alumni giving students unprecedented access to learning and participation.
“Judge Emmett and I have decades of experience in public office and nonprofit leadership, and we come from the ‘just get it done’ school of politics,” Parker says.
“In today’s world, it is important to understand the positive impact of public servants in both the governmental and private sectors,” Emmett adds.
Their course, SOSC 447: Public Service Practicum, delivered not only an insider’s view of the workings of local public and private sectors, but also an off-campus practicum experience in nonprofit or government offices. Each of the seminar’s seven students put in up to 10 hours weekly at city, state or congressional offices or at major private nonprofits. This complementary approach to learning allowed students to apply classroom lessons to their internships; in turn, students shared their real-world experiences with classmates each week.
“We were able to get experience and network in our internships, and then the seminar was more of the debrief,” says sophomore Daijah Wilson, a pre-law student who interned with BakerRipley. “We spoke candidly with Judge Emmett and Mayor Parker about our experiences, what surprised us and
The prominent guest professors hope that students leave the course with greater knowledge about what public service entails.
what we were tangibly doing.”
Senior Dean Toumajian — a political science and sociology major who wants to work in politics and interned in the Office of State Rep. Ann Johnson — credits his practicum for clarifying how classroom teachings manifest in the real world. “It reinforced that I am on the right track to pursue the career that I want,” Toumajian adds.
Emmett is a fellow in energy and transportation at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, and he served as Harris County judge from 2007 to 2019 and as a Texas state representative from 1979 to 1987. Parker is CEO and president of the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund and LGBTQ+ Victory Institute, and she served three terms as mayor of Houston from 2010–16. She also spent six years as a Houston City Council member and six years as city controller.
The prominent guest professors hope that students leave the course with greater knowledge about what public service entails. One of the useful takeaways for Wilson is that “government cannot function without the work of nonprofits.” Because of the course, Wilson can better see herself in the nonprofit world after law school.
— LYNN GOSNELL AND
AMY MCCAIG
The course is supported by the Frances Anne Moody-Dahlberg Gateway Program in the Social Sciences, which provides undergraduates an opportunity to apply what they learn in the classroom to real life. The Gateway Program supports students in professional practica, conference travel, undergraduate research and internships. Learn more at gateway.rice.edu.
As Rice launches a strategic plan to shape its future over the next decade, this year is marked by a series of historic anniversaries for some of our schools, institutes, organizations and public spaces. Here are some milestone moments from each one. To learn more about our anniversary celebrations, go to magazine.rice.edu.
Friends of Fondren Library
Celebrating 75 years
On May 18, 1950, “30 people interested in books and Fondren Library met and formed a group to be known as the Friends of Fondren Library.”
Kinder Institute for Urban Research
Celebrating 15 years
Houston philanthropists
Rich and Nancy Kinder provide major funding to expand research in Houston and in major cities around the world.
Rice Stadium
Celebrating 75 years
On Sept. 12, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech in Rice Stadium that set the nation on a consequential path. “We choose to go to the moon!”
George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing
Celebrating 50 years
Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen was dedicated in the former Central Kitchen.
OpenStax
Celebrating 25 years
OpenStax started publishing free, peer-reviewed textbooks.
1995
Shepherd School of Music
Celebrating 50 years
The Shepherd School’s first gala concert featured Italian opera star Cecilia Bartoli.
Wiess School of Natural Sciences
Celebrating 50 years
Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to Richard Smalley, Robert Curl and Harold Kroto for the discovery of buckminsterfullerene.
Doerr Institute for New Leaders Celebrating 10 years
Established by Ann ’75 and John Doerr ’73, the institute offers leadership and training techniques to all Rice students.
2018
Jones Graduate School of Business
Celebrating 50 years
Rice’s first online degree, MBA@Rice, is introduced.
Rice’s new strategic plan will guide the university’s growth for the next 10 years.
The vision of Momentous rests on the power of and as the connective tissue that will define Rice’s direction for the next decade. We see this clearly in the goal to become the world’s premier university known for teaching and research.
“It’s about teaching and research,” says President DesRoches. “It’s about arts and the sciences. It’s about undergraduate and graduate students. It’s about global impact — doing something really big — but also having a personalized approach with our students.”
REGINALD DESROCHES PRESIDENT
Momentous builds on Rice’s leading position in undergraduate education by creating new opportunities to integrate academic and co-curricular activities and attract students who are curious, diverse, academically excellent and deeply engaged in advancing the public good through their studies.
REBECCA SCHREIB ’14
As director of undergraduate studies and assistant teaching professor of computer science, Schreib received both the Nicolas Salgo Outstanding Teaching Award and the Sophia Meyer Farb Prize for Teaching.
An assistant professor of English, Marte-Wood received the Allison Sarofim Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities, which recognizes excellence in teaching and mentorship at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
“One of the things that just impresses me all the time about our students is they have such a wonderful attitude. They work hard, they care about other people and they value community. It is exactly what makes Rice, Rice.”
BRIDGET GORMAN DEA N OF UNDERGRADUATES
PHILIP KORTUM AND CHRISTINA DIAZ
LESA TRAN LU ‘07
Thrice recognized with the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching, Lu is associate teaching professor in the Office of Research and senior lecturer in the Department of Chemistry.
Kortum, a professor of psychology and associate department chair of psychological sciences, and Diaz, an associate professor of sociology, each earned the Sarah A. Burnett Teaching Prize in the Social Sciences.
A comprehensive plan aligned with a vision of Rice “to be the world’s premier teaching and research university, delivering unparalleled personalized education and propelling breakthrough discovery to transform lives and better humanity.”
The result of a two-year process that sought input from Rice students,
faculty, staff, alumni, board members and key stakeholders, Momentous leverages Rice’s unique strengths, history and achievements to pursue solutions to the most intractable problems facing our world. The result of this forward-thinking process is a vision that is uniquely Rice. This 10-year vision is organized
Momentous will leverage Rice’s interdisciplinary and collaborative graduate education culture to promote research, discovery and creative achievements of consequence. It starts with developing and mentoring a community of scholars.
ILLYA HICKS ‘00
Hicks received the Marjorie Corcoran Award for his contributions to the advancement of women or underrepresented minorities in STEM fields. He is trustee professor and chair of computational applied mathematics and operations research.
RICHARD LAVENDA ‘79
A professor of composition and theory and director of graduate studies in the Shepherd School of Music, Lavenda earned the 2024 Provost’s Award for Outstanding Doctoral Adviser.
around five key drivers (or themes) that will align our attention and resources:
>> Advance undergraduate education
>> Advance graduate education
>> Build thriving urban communities
>> Generate sustainable futures
>> Lead innovations in health
“We are focused on student success. Ph.D. education really is the heart and soul of knowledge generation around the world.”
SEIICHI MATSUDA DEAN OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES
LAURA SCHAEFER ‘95
Schaefer was honored for her commitment to both undergraduate and graduate students with the School of Engineering and Computing’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is the Burton J. and Ann M. McMurtry Chair in Engineering.
UTPAL DHOLAKIA
The George R. Brown Professor of Marketing at Rice Business, Dholakia was among faculty receiving the 2024 Faculty Research and Teaching Excellence Awards from MBA students and alumni.
In addition to these themes, two catalysts — responsible artificial intelligence and an empowered campus culture — will propel the plan to succeed, university leaders said. At the core of the plan is a focus on the people who will make it possible.
“The most important thing that we will do in the next 10 years is bring the most talented students, faculty and staff to Rice,” DesRoches said. “We have ambitions to grow the university more than we’ve ever grown before.”
Rice is bringing focus, urgency and immense scholarly talent to achieve an audacious research vision — to be world-renowned in producing advances in foundational, applied, creative and humanistic research that leads to lifechanging discoveries and innovations in health, sustainable futures and thriving urban communities.
“Our students — undergraduate and graduate as well as postdocs — are a big piece of the puzzle. We want to give them the tools and the strategic thinking processes for them to go and become leaders.”
RAMAMOORTHY RAMESH EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT FOR RESEARCH
Rice brings so much to the table when it comes to innovations in health — deep collaborations with Houston medical institutions, a legacy of talented alumni in the health care field and renowned scientific discoveries. Our ambition is to be the leading nonmedical institution in health research and innovation.
Led by Rice bioengineer GANG BAO and MD Anderson’s DR. JEFFREY MOLLDREM , the new CANCER BIOENGINEERING
COLLABORATIVE harnesses the strengths of Rice and the MD Anderson Cancer Center to develop new technologies for cancer detection and therapy.
To help accelerate a transition from lab to market for new health technologies, RICE’S OFFICE OF INNOVATION awards the One Small Step Grant. These grants provide crucial capital for projects to spin out of the university and successfully attract investment from angel investors and venture capital.
This fall, the RICE 360 INSTITUTE FOR GLOBAL HEALTH TECHNOLOGIES convened newborn and maternal health experts, innovators and community leaders from around the world to learn, be inspired, and take collective action to improve maternal and newborn health from day one in resource-limited settings.
“The wide spectrum we have of expertise at Rice, from engineering and science all the way to the humanities, where they look at issues like medical humanities, the social sciences and the Baker Institute where they look at policy issues — this is one of the great things about Rice.”
LUAY NAKHLEH
THE WILLIAM AND STEPHANIE SICK
DEAN OF THE GEORGE R. BROWN
SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND COMPUTING
Momentous strives to use Rice’s unique strengths and our coastal location in the energy capital of the world to collaborate on, create and employ sustainable solutions to create a more sustainable energy and environmental future — building on key efforts from our schools, our institutes and our centers.
Rice’s CENTER FOR COASTAL FUTURES AND ADAPTIVE RESILIENCE is advancing social scientific research that empowers coastal communities confronting the twin challenges of climate change and social inequality. This year, the center’s data experts mapped toxic releases and polluters in flood-prone communities ahead of hurricanes Helene and Milton.
“As a school of architecture, we are particularly excited about the topic of generating a sustainable future. I think we need scientific discovery. We need the political will. But maybe more than anything else, we need imagination.”
IGOR MARJANOVIĆ
THE WILLIAM WARD WATKIN DEAN OF RICE ARCHITECTURE
At the RICE WATER INSTITUTE , Rice faculty and graduate students are focused on public health protection, including destruction of PFAS (forever chemicals) in water, protection from pathogens and endocrine disruptors that break through our treatment plants, and wastewater-based epidemiology to warn us about pandemics.
Doctoral student XI CHEN is using microwave-assisted techniques to revolutionize how we recycle lithiumion batteries. “Recycling lithium-ion batteries in an environmentally and economically sustainable way is essential for global energy security,” says Chen, who recently received the Rice Chevron Energy Graduate Fellowship in concert with Rice’s Sustainability Institute.
“We need to develop students through professional master’s programs who can tackle new problems and lead at work and at organizations that are changing the future.”
PETER
RODRIGUEZ DEAN OF THE JESSE H. JONES GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
“We have the ability to bring energy companies, but also environmental interests, together with our outstanding faculty and students to really do the deep work to find the solutions to the challenging problems of providing the energy we need while also preserving our environment.”
TOM KILLIAN, DEAN OF THE WIESS SCHOOL OF NATURAL SCIENCES
How can Rice help urban communities thrive? From issues with infrastructure to housing disparities and economic opportunities, Rice is pursuing consequential research to address urban challenges. Our aim is to create a more inclusive prosperity that includes a culture of creativity in the arts.
At the KINDER INSTITUTE FOR URBAN RESEARCH , the Center for Housing and Neighborhoods studies the dynamics of housing and neighborhood development across the Houston region. They recently collaborated with the Houston Housing Authority to help the organization expand the number of affordable housing options for people who rely on housing choice vouchers and promote upward mobility.
Since 1967, the GLASSCOCK SCHOOL OF CONTINUING STUDIES has been helping Houston’s populations — from ages 3 to 103 — learn and thrive. Through its Early Childhood and Elementary Education program, more than 3,000 teachers a year are trained in early childhood literacy. Those teachers impact almost 25,000 students a year.
“Right now, 57% of the world lives in urban communities, but by 2050 it will be 70%, so that rapid urbanization brings lots of opportunities, but also challenges. Those challenges intersect with things like climate change and migration to mean that we have to call on all of our disciplines to try to tackle these problems.”
RACHEL KIMBRO ’01 DEAN OF THE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
“This component [thriving urban communities] is core to what we do at the Glasscock School. When you think about societal, educational, economic growth of a city, that is within our mission and vision.”
ROBERT BRUCE DEAN OF THE GLASSCOCK SCHOOL OF CONTINUING STUDIES
Our two catalysts — responsible artificial intelligence and empowered campus culture — are the foundational structures that support our strategic plan’s goals over the next decade. We aim to use the powerful tools of AI to promote discovery and generate new thinking, but we will do this with an ethical lens — pioneering a responsible approach to AI.
“The Rice experience is premier, excellent teaching and research, giving the same attention, the same dedication, the same devotion to each of those in every individual and in every experience.”
AMY DITTMAR
THE HOWARD R. HUGHES PROVOST AND EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT FOR ACADEMIC AFFAIRS
We believe that Rice can be a global leader in developing, applying and understanding AI as a responsible tool that can be used to advance research and learning. We’re poised to leverage our considerable strengths in these areas to research, teach and lead in ways that promote the ethical use of AI.
“Responsible AI is something we are very attuned to in the School of Humanities, especially as we have now empowered our philosophy department to develop a tech, ethics and philosophy track.”
KATHLEEN CANNING DEAN OF THE SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES
Rice students are learning about AI through courses such as THE ETHICS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE , which is taught by both philosophy and computer science faculty members, and DATA, ETHICS AND SOCIETY, which examines the societal impacts of choices made by data science professionals and identifies best practices to protect privacy and increase societal benefits.
Recently, an interdisciplinary team of Rice engineers and collaborators led by JAMIE PADGETT, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor in Engineering, has won $1.5 million from the National Science Foundation to leverage responsible artificial intelligence and data to provide insights to emergency response organizations and communities during tropical cyclones and coastal storm events.
A groundbreaking artistic collaboration between Rice, the University of Houston and Sam Houston State University was featured at the United Nations’ AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva last year. “Meeting of Minds” explores human connection through dance and neuroscience and is led by ANTHONY BRANDT, professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School of Music.
Rice is made up of a diverse community — students, faculty, staff, alumni and engaged community members. Working together, this community will fuel each and every goal of the strategic plan.
“Empowered campus culture is critical to our campus strategic plan. It is so important for everyone who comes through our doors to realize that they can lean into the opportunities that are before them, and by doing so, they will not only help Rice achieve its ambitions, but also improve the world.”
KELLY FOX EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT FOR OPERATIONS, FINANCE AND SUPPORT
IN HIS FINAL SEMESTER AT RICE, ANDY KARSNER ’89 TOOK A POLITICAL SCIENCE COURSE WHEREIN HE STUDIED THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF EAST GERMANY AND THE SOVIET UNION. A FEW WEEKS AFTER GRADUATING, HE WAS IN BERLIN TEARING DOWN THE WALL, WHICH PHYSICALLY SIGNIFIED THE DOWNFALL OF COMMUNISM.
That experience taught him a valuable lesson — that change can happen even when the status quo is set in stone. “It just really opened me up to the realization that things aren’t always as intractable as they may seem,” he says.
Karsner has spent his peripatetic career surfing wave after wave of change in the energy industry. He developed oil and gas-fired power plants in Pakistan and the Philippines, pioneered wind farms in Morocco, started companies, negotiated global climate accords, made far-sighted technology investments, and served as assistant secretary of energy in the George W. Bush administration. Today, he is senior strategist — dubbed “space cowboy” — for Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory, and if that wasn’t enough, Karsner also serves on Exxon Mobil’s board of directors.
On a recent morning walk around Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin, we talked about energy, climate, technology, world travel and how to construct a fulfilling career. Karsner suggested we talk while walking. It seemed apt; in the three decades since graduating, he hasn’t stopped moving. He joked that if he ever slows down enough to write a memoir, he plans to title it “Backpacker in the Boardroom.”
Russell Gold: You don’t have an MBA. You don’t have an engineering degree. How did you end up building power plants in your 20s?
Andy Karsner: What I did have was a mountain of school debt and the need to pay it off. In those days, Houston’s economy wasn’t really as diversified as it is now. So, if you weren’t heading off to be a rocket scientist at NASA, somebody on Wall Street or a consultant, then the probability was you’d be in the energy industry.
RG: If you hadn’t gone to school in Houston, do you think you would have ended up in energy?
AK: It’s hard to say. I think of energy as a conduit of impacting and evolving human systems. If I had gone somewhere else, would it have been about water? Clean air? I think I always had an itch to do something of consequence in the world. The opportunity bred the obligation. I’m a bit of a systems thinker, so I think that energy is such a
common touch point across how we live and where we work and how we play, and how we measure our significance, affluence or lifestyle — and now, how we measure our risk and the probability of sustaining ourselves.
RG: What do you mean by obligation?
AK: It’s really the thing that my father sought to impress most on us: that liberty comes with responsibility. They’re in equal measure. And that your opportunities breed an obligation. And that obligation is to serve others, serve community, serve your country, serve your fellow humanity.
RG: In 2021, you were part of an insurgent slate elected to the board of Exxon Mobil. Three years later, what do you think you have to show for this insurgency? Have you been able to effect change?
AK: Well, it’s larger than my efforts solely; pursuing change successfully is a collective exercise. The number one change you make is to help people understand that it wasn’t meant to be a binary outcome. There were lots of people who perpetuated the mythology that we were going there to blow up the company, to have a solar-panels-everywhere policy by one of the world’s largest oil and gas players. What we were trying to do was change the performance and outcomes of a company by altering its strategy and strengthening its capacity to be more accountable and to better account for the probable future we face.
And as it turns out, in business, the greater precision you have in a thoughtful strategy, the greater the probability you have of profitability and positive impact. And that has happened for Exxon. Making profits to a company is like health to each of us individually. We need it to survive; the more of it we have, the stronger we are; but it isn’t why we exist! And what’s actually happened in those years since [I joined the board] — and I credit the management team and employees and not just the slate of us that came aboard, but really the whole board — is ultimately hashing through and coalescing around a strategy that reorganized the company.
Exxon consolidated and co-located its executives and employees, relocating the headquarters from Dallas to Houston. That simplified its structure and amongst other efficiencies, elevated the role of one of the three new legs of the company called Low Carbon Solutions. Now Exxon is one of the largest investors — if not the largest — in low carbon solutions such as carbon capture and sequestration and low carbon alternative fuels.
And for a company that wasn’t perceived to be as engaged on the issue of low-carbon emissions management, to go from sort of worst to first by most measures of investing dollars for carbon molecules management, it’s been a key shift that has been welcomed by most parties.
RG: Alphabet’s innovation lab is called the Moonshot Factory. What’s the point of a moonshot factory? Is it to create a world-changing technology, or is it to generate enthusiasm and optimism?
AK: You cannot have one without the other. That’s why Kennedy’s speech [“We choose to go to the Moon,” delivered at Rice in 1962] is the greatest science and technology speech in the history of the American presidency. He challenged us to do something well beyond existing capability. He gave us a very specific timeframe, an urgency that we should do something that is beyond anyone’s imagination. And that’s completely analogous to where we are today managing
our climate challenges.
A moonshot is a bet. It’s placing a highrisk/high-reward wager on society’s table. It’s a willingness to take enormous risks that come at an enormous price. Our endeavor to bend what is possible and to realize something greater for our species, for our fellow men and women on this planet, is an important and relentless aspiration.
RG: Let me ask you to play a futurist or job counselor. Someone comes to you and they’re interested in energy. What technologies do you see out there that excite you?
AK: When I left government, I would have thought that fusion wouldn’t arrive in my lifetime. Now, I believe fusion, if I live long enough, will arrive in my lifetime.
RG: You seem to be very optimistic about technology.
AK: We are in a battle with ourselves every day to find our higher angels, both individually and collectively. A hammer is technology. A hammer is something you can hand to your neighbor and share and build a home together. Or it can be a murder weapon. Technologies aren’t moral or immoral, they’re amoral. And what we do with them is what defines us as a species, or as a nation, or as a community and even as a family.
So you’ve got two different things you’ve got to keep distinct. There’s our consummate need to move forward and develop the tools and technologies to disseminate goodness at a rate that exceeds our propensity to do bad things. And then you have the need to apply some morality on how these tools ought
to be used. Ethics haven’t caught up yet with CRISPR and AI.
We haven’t even caught up with big data and the power of our capacity to compute, in terms of our moral and metaphysical reckoning of how these things are going to integrate into our society. I still call upon my undergraduate religious studies at Rice to navigate this inevitable intersection.
RG: You’ve worked in government; you’ve worked as a CEO and as an investor. You serve on boards. How deliberate would you say your career has been? Did you seek out and say, okay, now is the time to go into government and figure out how government works? Or was it more just randomness of opportunities?
AK: I think it’s closer to the latter than the former. It’s the reason why I’m a terrible speaker at MBA classes. I always get asked to teach a course or lecture and inevitably it comes with the question: How do we follow your career? And I just view myself as the Forrest Gump of energy — lots of pachinko machine balls going down into the right column when they could have gone down the other column. I’m a lucky guy: Right place, right time. But it’s also what you make of the luck that you get.
So I think it’s more important to understand what true opportunities look like and blend them in with your own passions, drive and mission and meet at the corner of purpose and productivity. And then kind of everything else falls in place. The money follows, the positions follow, the titles follow. But if you get consumed with those things, you might subordinate your compass. That has to be your guide, more than credentials.
RG: There’s a Shakespeare quote you like from “Hamlet” where Polonius is talking to his son. It’s a famous quote: “To thine own self be true.” The second part of that quote is a little less known. “Thou canst not then be false to any man.” So, at the risk of sounding cynical, what’s so important about
honesty in business and life in general?
AK: It’s not cynical. That is really my top advice for my children. It’s not merely to be honest — it’s to be honest with yourself. It’s to be authentic to who you are. That’s what it means to me. To thine own self be true.
Have a curious mind and bring in different and informed peripheral inputs as far and wide as you can, but develop your core and know who you are. It is hard for people to be efficient in exercising their best self or finding their highest aspirations, let alone realizing them, the longer they dwell in the judgment of others rather than find their own inner compass and calibrate it for what their true north looks like.
RG: One of the themes in your professional life is valuing nature and figuring out how to put a price on it.
AK: You need to put a price on it. There are those who would walk through the woods and recite the old Mastercard commercial and say, “It’s priceless.” Because spiritually it is. It has its own intrinsic value. Of course it’s priceless. It’s sacred. But we live in a world where trading systems have organically sprung up from our societies.
The magnitude of the challenges we face environmentally mean that you can’t live under the mythology that nature is priceless, because people put a price on it every day. They put a price on it for lumber. They put a price on it for mining; they put a price on it for oil and gas. We do things that exploit and extract from our environment every day and put a price on it with incredible efficiency. So what I would really like to have is a system change where we internalize the value of nature, where we understand the cost and opportunity cost of depleting it, and we account
for it on the ledgers of our companies and our societies. The price, the cost and value of nature should always be worth more thriving and alive than unhealthy and dead.
If you believe you can never put a price on nature, that’s just abdicating the field to self-destructive systems, and that must be corrected for us to avoid worst outcomes.
RG: Let’s go back to the Moroccan wind farm. Your mother is from Casablanca. Was she Moroccan or was she part of a diaspora that was moving through Morocco?
AK: She would absolutely consider herself Moroccan. My mother always kept a picture of the king of Morocco in our house. As a kid, I found it embarrassing to explain. It was already enough my mother would speak in French in front of my elementary school friends … but my mother lived in Casablanca at the time that the Vichy French and the Nazi collaborators were occupying Morocco. That was the first eight years of her life. According to my mother, when the Nazis demanded Sultan Mohammed V turn over the Jews, he replied, “We don’t have any Jews; we only have Moroccans.”
I’m very proud of that Moroccan heritage. And I’m even more proud of that multicultural diaspora. Not just of Jews from Iberia who were pushed out with the Inquisition, as my ancestors were, but also of Arabs who arrived in the seventh century, who lived with a significant majority Berber indigenous population. I view the Earth — both humanity and nature — as our shared treasury: It’s our endowment, and it’s up to us not to recklessly deduct more of the principal, but to try to live off the interest as good, responsible stewards and grow the inheritance for future generations.
IF YOU BELIEVE YOU CAN NEVER PUT A PRICE ON NATURE, THAT’S JUST ABDICATING THE FIELD TO SELF-DESTRUCTIVE SYSTEMS, AND THAT MUST BE CORRECTED FOR US TO AVOID WORST OUTCOMES.
BY KIM CATLEY PHOTOS BY ZACH PHILLIPS
HISTORIAN, PRESERVATIONIST AND RICE ARCHITECTURE
GRAD JOBIE HILL ’02 DOCUMENTS AND PRESERVES SLAVE HOUSES — AND THE STORIES OF THOSE WHO LIVED THERE.
On a warm July morning, I met preservation architect Jobie Hill ’02, ’04 in a small brick kitchen set in the rolling hills of Nelson County, Virginia. At the front of the room was a wide fireplace and a table holding a sound bowl, incense, candles and herbs — offerings for an ancestral veneration ceremony that would foster a spiritual connection with the enslaved people who once lived and worked on this land.
“Let us begin by inviting the presence of our beloved ancestors in this space,” the ceremony leader says. “May the vibrations of the sound bowl connect us across time and space, bridging
the gap between past and present.
“Though their names may not be recorded — yet — or remembered in history books, their spirits live on in us and their descendants.”
The ancestral veneration marked the start of the first session of the Slave House Exploration and Evidence Tracing (SHEET) Field School, led by Hill. In the coming days, we would learn architectural, anthropological and archaeological techniques that would help uncover stories that have long been hidden — in the objects buried under the ground in front of us, and in the construction of the building in which we stood.
“People have a visceral reaction to a physical space,” Hill says. “To understand the landscape of slavery, you need structures. It’s impossible to understand the restraints, the confinements associated with slavery without physically experiencing it.”
Located about an hour south of Charlottesville and the University of Virginia, Massies Mill is a small community named for the nearby wheat mill operated by the Massie family in the 1800s. The family owned several plantations in the surrounding area, including Pharsalia, now an event space with sweeping views of the Tye River valley and the Priest mountain.
A winding gravel drive leads to the complex of 20 buildings at the center of the 1,400-acre parcel Major Thomas Massie presented to his
son, William, as a wedding present in 1814. At the time, Pharsalia was a working plantation that produced wheat, hops, tobacco, potatoes, apples, cranberries and ham, on the backs of enslaved people.
The Massies kept meticulous records about the farm’s production and crops, finances and enslaved people, totaling more than 100 years of daily memorandum books. Hill, whose research focuses on domestic slave buildings, says this level of detail about plantation life is rare. If records of enslaved people exist at all, they typically include little more than a list of first names.
“I’ve identified 1,336 names of enslaved people associated with Pharsalia,” Hill says. “These are real people that I can connect to real descendants today. They’re now more than just names; they are real people with real stories.”
Still, these records contribute to a history of slavery that is framed by the perspectives of the enslavers — not the people who appear on those lists. That bias is present today in everything from our history books to the limited study of slave houses. For more than a decade, Hill has been working to expand that narrative, marrying architecture, archaeology, anthropology and historic preservation to search for clues about enslaved buildings and the people who used them.
“Slave houses are often described as poorly built structures. But they’re hundreds of years old and they’re still standing,” she says. “We continue that pattern [of bias] if we don’t acknowledge the structures for what they really are.
“Enslavers could control the materials, the size, the location, but the one thing they couldn’t control was the quality of the work. These houses were built by the same skilled people who built the main house. The little things that show off their skill and resilience, their strength and perseverance, are hidden — but if you know how to look for them, you’ll see them.”
“To understand these structures,” Hill says, “you need a background in more than one thing.”
Luckily, Hill is a n eager student. She started at Rice, where she earned a B.A. in anthropology and architecture as well as a Bachelor of Architecture. She added graduate degrees in historic preservation with an architectural technical teaching certificate and art history with a focus on Egyptian art and archaeology from the University of Memphis and the University of Oregon. Now, she’s pursuing a Ph.D. in history at Duke University, with Pharsalia as the focus of her dissertation.
A MULTIFACETED APPROACH TO STUDYING SLAVE BUILDINGS AT THE FIELD SCHOOL.
HISTORY
A tour of Pharsalia and surrounding area, including Tyro Farm, Massies Mill, Oak Hill Cemetery and Level Green plantation.
STORYTELLING
Using film to understand historical trauma in communities of color, led by film producer Frederick Murphy.
During a field school week at Pharsalia, participants learned about and practiced archaeological excavation, studied slave house architectural details and unearthed valuable artifacts (like a wooden toothbrush, pictured on the following page).
Hill first surveyed a slave house when she was studying historic preservation, and that moment set the course for her career.
“I knew, this is what I’m going to spend my life doing,” she says. “Seeing the structure in person is so much different than reading about it or seeing a picture or a drawing of it. And as I kept learning, I realized that these buildings were incredibly misunderstood.”
In 2012, she founded Saving Slave Houses with the goal of preserving these structures. SSH maintains an international database of slave houses and aims to change the way people research and learn from them.
Two years later, she learned about an opening at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s primary
Presentation on the role of archaeology followed by excavation practice, led by Tim Roberts, owner of Black Star Cultural Resources.
ARCHAEOLOGY
How to study the architecture of slave houses and what buildings reveal about enslaved people, led by Jobie Hill.
Demonstration and practice with measured drawings, laser scanning and photography, led by architects and interns from the Historic American Buildings Survey.
plantation in Charlottesville. The museum was looking for an architect who specialized in slave houses to reconstruct Mulberry Row, a plantation street of 20 dwellings, workshops and storehouses used by the 400 men, women and children enslaved at the site.
“I thought, ‘What are the chances?’” Hill says. “I am setting out to be an architect that specializes in slave houses because that doesn’t really exist.”
She was hired for the position and is the architect of record for the reconstructed Hemmings Cabin. But the work required extensive research and surveys of other slave buildings. Her search for an example of a sliding sash window brought her to Pharsalia.
That’s how Hill met Foxie Morgan, a Massie descendant who owns Pharsalia with her husband, Richard. Morgan grew up 30 minutes away in Lynchburg, but she and her four siblings spent their summers at Pharsalia as their
parents worked to restore the property. She met her now-husband in high school, and, after she finished college, they married on the front lawn. They moved into one of the property’s houses, where they raised their three children.
When Morgan’s mother died in 2004, the couple bought Pharsalia and turned the property into a wedding venue to help cover the expenses of restoration. Morgan, who has a passion for flowers, also hosts wreath-making and floral arranging workshops.
Morgan says she was aware of the history of the buildings, but they were mostly part of the landscape where she lived and played. As Hill pointed out details in the construction of the windows, Morgan began to see the buildings in a new light.
In the decade since, Morgan and Hill have developed a trusting relationship. Hill has more flexibility to let her research unfold than she would at a publicly owned site. And she connects the Morgans with additional resources that help them preserve the property and share its story with the public.
“Bad or good,” Morgan says, “I think it’s important to know your past.”
Hill’s research also led her to the Descendants of Enslaved Communities at UVA, where she connected with Nina Polley and Star Reams, descendants of enslaved people of Pharsalia. In 2020, they began talking to Hill about their family connections and potentially partnering on her research.
“We grew up listening to our grandmother Yvonne Hill Thomas’ oral histories. She was born here in Massies Mill,” Reams says. “She is a vivid storyteller and loves telling stories about her family. We’ve been working to validate her truth.
“Our first time touring some of the historical buildings was meaningful for us. It was also, at times, heartbreaking. But it helps you fully understand the magnitude of what life was like. It was a first step of reconciliation for us to acknowledge the historical trauma and honor the legacy of our family.”
‘Where do these stories meet?’
A few hours after the ancestral veneration ceremony, we returned to the brick kitchen with trowels, brushes and rulers in hand. We chipped at the concrete floor and gently brushed the dust away, revealing broken bricks and eggshells, a toothbrush and an old key.
Suddenly, someone called out, “Is that a wall?”
Everyone froze. Hill and archaeologist Tim Roberts inspected the sliver of stacked bricks revealed in the dirt before excitedly confirming the potential discovery. The following week, the second group of SHEET participants discovered additional rows of bricks that suggested the presence of two more walls. Roberts had previously scanned the ground with ground penetrating radar, which suggested the foundation of another building lay below. Now several layers deep, the pattern of the bricklaying suggested that finding was correct. They were possibly looking at the foundation of an earlier kitchen, one that was replaced by the kitchenhospital quarter that stands there today.
“The archaeological act of going from top to bottom, it’s not like getting in a time machine and going back to 1865 or 1830 or 1814,” Roberts says. “There’s an awareness that we’re going to connect this all the way back. There’s a weaving [together] that happens in the process of investigation, and insights and inferences that come from having different people involved in the work.”
Basic excavation techniques are some of the many skills Hill has incorporated into the SHEET Field School — an idea she’s been honing for years. When she was on the board of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, the organization received funding from the Mellon Foundation to develop field schools focused on African American sites. Hill was given the choice of planning the application or stepping down from the board and applying herself. She stepped down.
SHEET was one of three field schools selected, and Hill held the first of two seasons this past
Hearth cooking demonstration and lunch featuring foods available to enslaved people, led by food historians Jerome Bias, owner of Southern Heritage Furniture, and Lyslee Duncan (session 1) and Leni Sorensen, owner of Indigo House, and Liz Beamon (session 2).
Steps to preserve the kitchenhospital quarter, led by engineers from Springpoint Structural.
Engaging with Pharsalia descendants, both from the enslaved communities and the Massie family, listening to and learning from their family stories.
summer. The concept is based on architectural field schools, which typically focus on measured drawings of buildings.
“But slave houses are usually just a square or rectangle,” Hill says. “That doesn’t tell you a lot.”
Instead, the weeklong intensive brought together archaeologists, architects and historians who offered demonstrations in excavation, photography and, yes, measured drawing. Among the participants, Hill gave preference to descendants of enslaved communities, but otherwise
they came from a range of backgrounds and no previous experience was required.
“I wanted to show people you can have a background in anything and be involved in the storytelling of history,” she says.
As they learned core skills, participants also contributed important work to the research at Pharsalia, which hasn’t received the same resources as sites like Monticello. The measured drawings produced during the field school will eventually land in the Library of Congress. And Hill expects next year’s field school to focus on hands-on preservation as participants address building repairs.
Hill hopes SHEET will lead more people to find a way to contribute to the study of slave houses. She also wants to create a template for field schools across the country, with participants becoming trained facilitators who can pull from a growing network of experts, descendants and property owners to support their own site-specific projects.
Pharsalia will continue to be Hill’s focus for now, but unexplored slave houses exist across Virginia and the U.S. She hopes to eventually connect with more property owners who are
On the second story of the kitchen-hospital quarter, sliding sash windows are installed horizontally and low to the ground. “It’s not random,” Hill says. “Enslaved women were often sitting down [to sew], and the window needed to be at the right level. The horizontal windows spread more light across the room. It tells the story of how people were working and using the space.”
The Massie family’s extensive records offer a rare look into the depths of plantation accounting and business practices. In addition to her own research, Hill has applied for grant funding to digitize the papers for wider access among researchers. To help make her case, Hill often turned to the book “Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management” (Harvard University Press, 2018) — and discovered an unexpected link. The author, Caitlin Rosenthal ’05, is a Rice alumna who earned her undergrad degree in political science in the School of Social Sciences. Rosenthal is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.
committed to understanding the full history of their land — and to making that story accessible to others.
“That knowledge doesn’t just belong to property owners,” Hill says. “It involves many other families. It belongs to hundreds of thousands of other people. If you’re going to do [this research], you need to share it with everyone that it involves.”
Morgan and Hill are already working toward that goal. Collections of Massie family papers and plantation journals that document in great detail the lives of the people they enslaved are available at several museums and universities, and Hill is helping to digitize their contents. Hill and Morgan are also joining the National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Network, which could provide resources for more robust tours at Pharsalia. And the involvement of descendants like Reams and Polley has added a deeper level of nuance and connection that spans generations.
“Descendants [of both enslaved people and the Massie family] are starting with themselves and researching backward to trace their families,” Hill says. “I’m starting historically and trying to move forward. And there’s the built environment.
“They’re each telling a story. It’s a little bit different, but it’s the same story. That’s the part I’m fascinated with: Where do these stories meet?”
ALUMNA DEANNE NGUYEN FINDS HER PATH TO A GLOBAL FASHION BRAND IN PARIS — AND AN UNEXPECTED RECONNECTION TO RICE.
BY SARAH RUFCA NIELSEN ’05
PHOTOS BY JEFF FITLOW
IN PARIS’ FAMED SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS NEIGHBORHOOD , where bustling streets hum with history and café terraces buzz with quiet charm, Deanne Nguyen ’11 is watching snow flurries brush against her windows and savoring a macaron from the Ladurée patisserie around the corner. Nguyen, the head of atelier at luxury fashion label Steven Passaro, represents a new generation of creatives who transcend traditional boundaries between art and science. Her journey from Rice to the City of Light, and to a career in fashion design, was a winding path marked by doubt, self-discovery and an unrelenting curiosity about what might be possible.
Raised in Houston as the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Nguyen felt the tug of fashion from a young age, yet did everything in her power to ignore it. Her mother had dreamed of being an architect but settled for a practical career in accounting. That choice loomed large in Nguyen’s mind. “It’s not that my parents ever discouraged me — it’s not the firstgeneration immigrant stereotype. I made up these narratives in my head,” she says. “I didn’t feel like I deserved an artistic life.”
Instead, she followed what she thought was the responsible path. At Rice, Nguyen initially studied chemistry, before realizing she couldn’t see herself working in a lab for the rest of her life. She switched her major to linguistics, embracing a love of language that had taken root at age 15 during her first trip to Vietnam.
Outside of class, her closet became her creative outlet. Her style was colorful and unapologetically maximalist, inspired by Tokyo’s over-the-top Harajuku street fashion subcultures. “I went to great lengths to not dress like a Rice person,” Nguyen laughs. If she couldn’t figure out her outfit, she’d skip class altogether.
After graduating in 2011, Nguyen moved to Korea to teach English. Eventually, she landed a corporate copywriting job in Seoul, the kind of role that brought in a decent paycheck but slowly made her miserable. She couldn’t shake the persistent, gnawing feeling that she wasn’t doing the work she was supposed to be doing. “My intuition just woke up one day, and I felt it pushing me back into this dream I had of working in fashion, this dream that had been buried under self-doubt,” she says. For the first time, she listened.
In spring 2017, Nguyen moved to Japan and enrolled at the Tokyo campus of ESMOD, one of France’s oldest fashion schools. When her professor suggested she spend her final year in Paris, Nguyen hesitated. Japan has long been her cultural touchstone, from her Harajuku era to her current obsession with the midcentury Showa aesthetic. Paris was never part of her plan. But she took a leap of faith — and found a surprising fit.
“I’m an anxious person in part because I’m a romantic and poetic soul,” Nguyen says. “And the French people, that resonates with them. As a designer, the less you have to explain yourself, the more you can just vibe and evolve. I fell in love with being in Paris.”
Although she’d originally hoped to work at one of the major fashion houses, her interest in 3D pattern-making soft-
ware, sustainable fashion and a shared design sensibility landed her an internship with Passaro. Launched in 2020, Steven Passaro’s eponymous collections blend traditionally gendered concepts of tailoring and dressmaking, infusing garments with poetry and architectural precision. Featured in British Vogue, GQ and Harper’s BAZAAR Man, the label has been worn by international style icons such as Paul Forman (“Emily in Paris”).
Rising to the role of head of atelier in 2024, Nguyen is in charge of making sure the collections are produced in line with Passaro’s vision as the creative director. Traditionally, fashion houses divide their workflow into a design studio, where the creative vision for a collection or garment is incubated, and a pattern-making division, which translates this artistic rendering into a blueprint for the fabrics and trims to be used and the specifications for construction. But at a small label like Steven Passaro, both processes coexist in the atelier.
Her interest in 3D pattern-making software, sustainable fashion and a shared design sensibility landed her an internship with Passaro.
It’s a role that combines her artistic instincts with her analytical mind. “I’m the link between the design side and the production side,” she explains. “As a cerebral person, I have to get into my body, and that’s why I like pattern-making.”
Passaro and his team have integrated cutting-edge technology from Style3D (a digital pattern-making software) into their design process, reducing cost, time and waste. Whether for the brand’s ready-towear collections or custom design commissions, all garments still begin with a hand-drawn sketch to capture the technical details and overall style of a look.
Any fabric the atelier works with can be digitized to assess not only its color and pattern, but also the weight, luminosity, thickness and stretchiness of the fabric. Once uploaded, the technology previews how the fabric would look and drape if turned into a T-shirt, a pleated skirt, a pair of trousers, etc.
“In the luxury industry you can have more than nine iterations as part of the research and development process — it’s such a huge waste,” says Nguyen. “Using this software, we go directly from pattern to prototype without cutting any fabric, so it cuts down on waste. And since most of our stuff is made to measure, the prototype is perfectly fine for a fashion show.”
The benefits are significant. What once took a week can now be completed in two
days, with unparalleled precision. Even complex tasks, like ensuring consistent print placement across sizing, can be resolved in seconds using Style3D. “It not only makes us competitive with prêt-à-porter, but also gives us the luxury of time,” Nguyen says. She’s tight-lipped about the fall/winter 2025 collection currently in production, which debuted during Paris Fashion Week in January. “It’s along the same vein as what Steven and I produce as romantic souls: delicate, bold, but confident,” she says. The label’s Instagram account offers an intriguing inspiration and cri de coeur:
In a realm of judgment, where selfexpression was forbidden, one found themselves cloaked in the pain and shame of difference, every layer a silent echo of their inner turmoil. But one day, amidst the whispers of doubt, one uncovered a shard of courage, gleaming in the darkness, urging them to weave their truth into a tapestry of self-acceptance. … The act of adorning oneself in these fabrics became a ritual, a daily affirmation of one’s worth … not just attire but armour, crafted from the very soul of resilience. Through fashion, one declared their firm right to exist, to be seen, and to celebrate the beauty of being uniquely oneself.
Reflecting on her educational journey, Nguyen still feels like Rice was the right choice. “I can see the difference in how I operate in the fashion world,” she says. “In fashion school, both in Tokyo and Paris, the students have a lot of creativity but less experience with critical thinking and analyzing the world around them. I have a more left-brained approach to fashion … things are more than just design.”
As Nguyen has reconnected with her alma mater in Paris (see sidebar, “In Fashion”), she hopes her story inspires other students to follow their intuition, even if it takes them on a winding path to self-discovery. “Finding your community and living life with honesty and integrity is a different type of success,” she says. “Don’t be told by society to ‘find yourself.’ Now is the time to get a little bit lost. To wander.”
IN SUMMER 2024 , an impromptu visit to the Rice Global Paris Center brought Deanne Nguyen full circle to her alma mater. She had no idea the center existed until a visiting college friend suggested stopping by the campus, a charming 16thcentury townhouse and courtyard in the heart of the Marais.
That’s where Nguyen ran into bioengineer Matthew Wettergreen ’08 and students from Rice’s International Summer Experience in Engineering Design program, which for two weeks transformed the center’s wine cellar into a pop-up makerspace exploring accessibility and innovation. As the city hosted the 2024 Paralympic Games, the students worked on a project for a motorized wheelchair user in Paris, investigating how to improve mobility in a city notorious for its challenging urban infrastructure.
As they spoke, Wettergreen asked Nguyen if she would be interested in presenting for the students, and she jumped at the opportunity. Nguyen arranged a visit to the Style3D/ Steven Passaro atelier, offering insights into how an industry as creative and tactile as high fashion is integrating technology into its business model. “This is something I would have loved as a student, seeing the integration of engineering and technology into real-world applications,” says Nguyen. “They were interested in the process. They were 19- and 20-year-olds thinking the way that professionals think.”
“The students had no idea how fashion works — I certainly didn’t,” Wettergreen admits. “In this program, even though it’s engineering, we can broaden the types of things that we include. Students were able to see firsthand how technical expertise can create meaningful change in unexpected fields.” Nguyen’s reconnection with Rice was more than happenstance. It reflected the deep ties that Rice alumni carry with them and the opportunities created by the university’s expanding global presence. — SARAH RUFCA NIELSEN ’05
Matthew Wettergreen is associate teaching professor in the Department of Bioengineering and at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and director of the Global Medical Innovation Program.
“Sometimes you just bash!”
Lisa Pankratz is one of the most soughtafter drummers in Texas today. From humble beginnings on a family farm to the big stage in NYC, here’s her story.
BY CHUCK LUCE
IN THE EXPANSIVE Texas music scene, if you need a drummer, you’d be fortunate indeed to convince Lisa Pankratz ’90 to play your gig. Country. Rock. Swing. Blues. Reggae. She can do it all. She is known as steady. Reliable. Dedicated to her craft. Tough, but nuanced. Not flashy, but she’s good — really good — which makes her exciting to watch.
That hardworking virtuosity was on full display at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle this summer when she performed with Dave Alvin, the poet laureate of American roots rock, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, the West Texas troubadour of sagebrush folk music. Alvin encourages improvisation and signals where he’s taking a song with telepathic hints. A glance. An almost imperceptible nod. A finger lift. But Pankratz was right there with him, keeping an eye on the neck of his Stratocaster and pounding emphatic punctuation to every musical phrase.
This knack for hearing, anticipating and executing began on her grandfather’s ranch in
Dripping Springs, Texas. Pankratz’s dad picked up the sticks as a young teen, playing blues and other gigs while living in South Austin. From an early age, she was not only watching family members perform, but also playing with her dad at places like Liberty Lunch and the Continental Club. At 16, she performed on “Austin City Limits” in her Uncle Pat’s band, Greezy Wheels. Later, she played with rockabilly sensation Ronnie Dawson, aka The Blond Bomber, at Carnegie Hall and on “Light Night with Conan O’Brien.”
Alvin recalls first meeting Pankratz when she was playing with The Derailers, an Austin country-rock group. “I was knocked out by not only her musi-
cal chops but her wisdom, humor and willingness to try new things. When I formed an all-female group called The Guilty Women in 2009,” Alvin says, “she was the first person I called.”
That project eventually evolved into Alvin’s current band, The Guilty Ones, one of whose members is Pankratz’s husband of 21 years, bassist Brad Fordham. Back in Dripping Springs, Pankratz was salutatorian of her high school class and enjoyed playing basketball and volleyball. She learned about Rice from a friend who was valedictorian and decided to head to Houston. Even though she was already a working musician by the time she matriculated, Pankratz chose English as her major. “I just knew that I liked music and I liked reading books,” she says. “I guess I should have concentrated more on music, but at the time, in my head, I considered school life and music life separate. I did, though, have my drums set up in the basement of Lovett College.”
At Rice, she also was a DJ at Rice’s KTRU radio station all four years. “At the station, I could explore all kinds of music,” Pankratz recalls. “In some cases, funnily enough, I wound up playing with some of those bands later, including X, the Knitters, the Blasters and others.” In the classroom, Pankratz recalls especially enjoying Dennis Huston’s Shakespeare course and classes she took with Terrence Doody. In retrospect, she has realized that studying literature and making music maybe wasn’t such an unlikely combination after all. “It’s an arc, a whole.”
In her current work with Alvin, she says, “there are themes both lyrical and musical that appear, reappear and crescendo. I feel that all the reading, writing and thinking that went into my English literature degree has been a bonus, in this outfit especially. Sometimes you think; sometimes you just bash!”
Submit news and updates to your class recorder listed below or owlmanac@rice.edu.
1950
The Class of 1950 needs a new class recorder. To learn more about this volunteer position, please email owlmanac@rice.edu.
1951
Class Recorders: Gene Langworthy ueee3ami@gmail.com
George Laigle 713-705-3282 glaigleman1@gmail.com
Happy 50th anniversary to Baker 13! Go to Page 74 to learn the naked truth about this campus tradition.
No classnotes for your year?
Become a class recorder and keep classmates informed. To volunteer, email owlmanac@rice.edu.
Class recorder Gene Langworthy (BA; BS, 1952) writes: When I see Rice included on a list of Ivy League universities, it normally generates a feeling of pride. Our alma mater is once more moving forward, gaining academic recognition. However, recently was different. I found Rice being listed with Harvard, Yale, Columbia and others as locations of anti-Israel campus demonstrations, together with Jewish students being singled out and cruelly harassed. I thought Rice, located in Houston, would be different.
A lifelong Protestant, I grew up in Houston and had lots of Jewish friends as classmates back in the 1940s. Many of them entered Rice with me in ’47. Later on, I had Jewish business partners as friends, leading to invitations to a bar mitzvah and a bat mitzvah, plus a Jewish wedding. Then we recently befriended the rabbi here where we live, and he and his wife invited us to their home for a Friday evening Shabbat. Several years ago, I struck up a friendly dialogue with then-President David Leebron. I disagreed with him on some
issues but admired how he continued to maintain close ties with Rice’s Jewish students. From his very first year, he and his wife would invite Jewish students to their residence for a Shabbat, a practice that continued until his recent retirement. I remembered having kept a photograph of David and his wife surrounded by Jewish students. I’ve found it and will add it to my presentation here. It begins:
“Rice University President David Leebron and his wife, Y. Ping Sun, recently hosted their 16th annual Shabbat for Rice’s Jewish students. As in years past, students, alumni and guests looked forward to this year’s event with excitement and anticipation. What began as just an idea, when President Leebron arrived at Rice University, has become one of the most popular annual events among Jewish students on the Rice campus.
“On Friday evening, Sept. 20, students gathered at the home of Leebron. Rice senior Rebecca Topper ’19 (McMurtry: BA) led Kabbalat Shabbat services for the diverse congregation. Senior Emma Siegel ’21 (Martel: BA) shared a d’var Torah that drew on the connections that parashat Ki Tavo makes between Jewish memory and contemporary action. Siegel challenged the
community to engage in memory and action because, together, they lead toward social equality.”
[See the article at https://bit.ly/ rice-shabbat.]
I trust that David Leebron will not wander too far away from Rice and that his legacy will not be tarnished by current attacks on our campus.
Emma, now a graduate, has been a writer for the Thresher. I hope she keeps up that activity, bringing her perspective to happenings on our campus.
For further commentary I suggest you look for articles in the Thresher written by faculty member Moshe Vardi [University Professor and the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering].
The Class of 1952 needs a new class recorder. To learn more about this volunteer position, please email owlmanac@rice.edu.
Class Recorder: Peter Shannon 972-239-3227 newpeterb@gmail.com
Class recorder Pete Shannon (BA) writes:
Have you lived across the street from another Rice graduate for 42 years? One who every week or so rings your doorbell to regale you with little tales of Rice dormitory life and late-night architecture labs in Anderson Hall in the 1950s, interspersed with updates of kids, grandkids and great-grandkids? Well, classmates, I do — and together we’ve been enjoying many elaborate little reminiscences (otherwise called mini-prevarications) about the comic mischief and injustices we endured out on South Main in the middle of the last century.
Bill Cross ’56 (BA) first lugged his cardboard suitcase through the Sallyport in fall 1952, fresh off the bus from Kingsport, TN. Four years later he repacked it, with a degree under his belt, to join the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where, beginning in Galveston, he made a 38-year tour, including various Pacific posts and supervising the design and construction of NASA’s Space Center at Clear Lake, TX. Bill retired from the Corps in Fort Worth in 1995. He once joined me (when we were both a lot younger) to play in a neighborhood soccer league, and more recently we have been making periodic tours of Dallas to observe and gleefully critique some of our city’s notable architecture.
Our latest jaunt included the two marvelous Santiago Calatrava-designed bridges over the Trinity River and then tracking down “Golden Boy,” the famous gilt statue created in 1916 by the wife of the headmaster of my old prep school. For 64 years, it was perched on the top of the AT&T headquarters building in Manhattan and was moved to Dallas in 2009 after AT&T relocated here.
Bill says that since there’s no 1956 Owlmanac class reporter these days, he’d like to be adopted by us, and he appeals to any of
his former buddies to contact him through me. I’ve accepted that as another indication of how to tell you’re getting really, really old — i.e., you have to join another class in order to get your name and pic in the alumni mag.
1954
The Class of 1954 needs a new class recorder. To learn more about this volunteer position, please email owlmanac@rice.edu.
1955
The Class of 1955 needs a new class recorder. To learn more about this volunteer position, please email owlmanac@rice.edu.
Don Brunson submits the following: “ Bob C. Hopkins (BA; BS, 1956) passed away Aug. 17, 2024, at the age of 90, from a recurrence of colon cancer. Bob was preceded in death in 1986 by his beloved wife, Barbara J. Stockbridge Hopkins ’56 (BA), and in 2020 by his truly wonderful daughter, Sheryl L. Hopkins Brunson ’82 (Baker: BS; MME, 1986).
“Bob lived an interesting life with many achievements. After graduating from Rice and marriage to Barbara, Bob interspersed
CONTINUED ON PAGE 59
AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED?
A humanitarian nonprofit is working with displaced communities to put decisions about shelter in the hands of refugees.
WHEN RICE MAGAZINE first featured Scott Key ’15 and Sam Brisendine ’14 in the Winter 2014 issue, they were graduate architecture students with a big idea: Emergency Core, an innovative flooring product for refugee shelters. A decade later, that idea has grown into Every Shelter, a nonprofit that designs housing solutions for displaced communities and is transforming the landscape of refugee aid.
The duo’s journey began in Rice School of Architecture’s legendary Rice Building Workshop (now known as Construct) when they discovered that refugee tents often lacked flooring. To make a warmer, dryer and more comfortable space, Key and Brisendine designed a lightweight modular flooring tile that creates a thermal and moisture break between occupants and the ground. Despite a successful pilot of their product in Lebanon, ultimately Emergency Core struggled for support from decision-makers in the humanitarian system. But that early failure yielded valuable insights. “We initially thought we were tackling a key aspect of the refugee experience,” Key explains. “But what we learned is that refugees know their needs better than we do. To make a more lasting impact, we needed
to listen to them and prioritize their self-determination.”
This insight reshaped Key and Brisendine’s entire approach. With the aim of transforming the humanitarian sector, they launched Every Shelter in 2018.
Every Shelter takes a market-based approach by establishing “Shelter Depots,” where refugees can access essential materials and tools to improve their living conditions. Because there’s no financial markup or transportation, products are affordable. Through a work-for-credit program, some refugees can plant trees, create bricks or do maintenance work to procure
items they need. “Refugees already have an entrepreneurial spirit,” Key says. “Our job is to build solutions that work with their energy and create sustainable outcomes.”
Every Shelter has faced a number of roadblocks. Have Key and Brisendine ever been tempted to quit? “Absolutely,” Key admits. “But there’s always been an open door that keeps us going.” For example, Every Shelter’s connection to Rice continues to grow, with recent events like an art auction at the new Cannady Hall and a panel hosted by architecture alumnus Rob Rogers ’81 in New York on World Refugee Day. The nonprofit also runs an annual internship program that has recruited 15 students from Rice Business and Rice Architecture since 2019.
Today, Key leads Every Shelter as the CEO, while Brisendine remains active on the board. “Our time at Rice, especially in the architecture program, gave us the foundation to think critically and creatively about complex problems,” Key reflects. “It has also instilled in us the importance of perseverance and innovation.”
—
SCOTT PETT ’22
See magazine.rice.edu/shelter for an extended version of this interview.
SMALL BUSINESS
When a neighborhood laundry spun out, two women stepped up to bring a vital service back to the community.
VALERIE TULLOCH CRAMER ’96, a former javelin-throwing phenomenon at Rice, majored in sports medicine and became one of the most decorated track and field athletes in the university’s history.
“Being a student athlete at Rice is one of the hardest things to do in the world,” Cramer explains. “But it taught me discipline and continuing to do things when they’re hard, so bumps in the road don’t bother me.”
A single mother of three children, Cramer knows something about bumps
in the road. One such bump recently launched her on a new path.
In March 2024, Cramer’s children’s uniforms needed to be ready for school on a Monday. Cramer, who works in medical sales, dropped them off at Graustark Laundry, a small laundromat in Montrose. When she returned on Sunday, the business was closed. “I found myself overwhelmed, and I was buried in laundry. I really needed help,” she recalls. It was closed again the next day, too. When she finally found it open, Cramer asked the attendant about the unpredictable hours. Pretty soon, Cramer had the idea to purchase the business. She asked her friend Jacqueline Hawkins, a retired pharmacist, for advice. “We can go in it together,” Hawkins recalls telling Cramer. “Why don’t we do this, build it up and then go from there?”
By September, Cramer and Hawkins were the new owners of Graustark
“We want people to think of us as a ‘third place’ for the neighborhood,” Cramer says. The term refers to places that are neither home nor work — social spaces that function as anchors of community life.
Laundry. The 30-year-old business had seen better days. The duo’s first order of business was to replace broken machines, update the air-conditioning system and add new ceiling tiles. But there were some things they kept the same: the store’s dedicated attendants and their regular customers.
Many customers kept tabs on the changes as renovations were taking place. Julia Bynum, a regular washand-fold customer, has been coming to Graustark Laundry for at least 20 years. She appreciates the improvements and neighborly attitude the new owners are bringing to the premises. “It’s a great atmosphere,” Bynum says.
“We want people to think of us as a ‘third place’ for the neighborhood,” Cramer says. The term refers to places that are neither home nor work — social spaces that function as anchors of community life. “That’s exactly what this is,” she adds. “Some people come in, and they just want to talk. And it doesn’t hurt that there’s a coffee shop [Black Hole Coffee House] next door.” Or that they’re now open on Sundays.
— AMY C. EVANS
Check out our story, “Owls in Harmony,” with accompanying photographs taken at Graustark Laundry in December on Page 7 and at magazine.rice.edu/phils
working as a propulsion engineer in Fort Worth for Consolidated Vultee/General Dynamics on the B-58 Hustler supersonic bomber project, with serving out his Army ROTC officer’s commission in the Army Corp of Engineers (even being called back in the early 1960s for the Cuban Missile Crisis). Bob then switched to Rocketdyne outside Waco, TX, to work as a design/optimization engineer on various solid rocket missiles. In the mid-1960s, Bob joined the burgeoning Apollo space program to work as a weights engineer on the lunar module for TRW in Houston. He even had the honor of being present in NASA Mission Control when Neil Armstrong took his first step on the moon!
“With the scaling back of the space program in the 1970s, Bob switched to the oil and gas industry in the Houston area and finally retired in 1996 from FMC Corp.’s Wellhead Equipment Division, where he designed a number of world record-setting subsea wellheads, and headed up the new business proposal department, winning hundreds of millions of dollars in new contracts.
“But of all his achievements, he always brought up graduating from Rice Institute with his mechanical engineering degree (‘I made it, many didn’t!’), plus the fact that both Barbara and Sheryl were also Rice graduates. In fact, Bob claimed that at the time Sheryl graduated in 1986, he and she were the only father/daughter graduates from Rice’s mechanical engineering program. Interestingly, after her graduation, Sheryl also went to work in thermodynamics with General Dynamics in Fort Worth, working with a number of the same engineers from Bob’s days there!
“Sheryl Lynn was Bob and Barbara’s biggest accomplishment. She was ‘scary smart,’ a truly special person, and the pride and joy of her entire family. Sadly,
Barbara passed away in 1986 after a lengthy illness; her loss was devastating to both Bob and Sheryl. After retirement, Bob continued to live in his beloved Nassau Bay, TX, and traveled frequently with Sheryl and her husband, Don. In 2015, Bob moved to Fort Worth so Sheryl and Don could care for him until her untimely passing in 2020. Bob and Don soldiered on until Bob’s passing, with quickly declining health after he reached the milestone of 90 years of age.”
The Class of 1956 needs a new class recorder. To learn more about this volunteer position, please email owlmanac@rice.edu.
Catherine Good submits the following obituary for her father: “ Bobby Everett Smith (BA) of Cincinnati, OH, passed away at his home May 10, 2024, at the age of 89. He is survived by his wife of 68 years, Harriet Green Smith (BA), and their three children, Clay Smith ’79 (Baker: BA), MD (Maura Gasparetto, MD), Catherine (Rick) Good and Cliff Smith (Jane Wakefield). He is also survived by his grandchildren, Ben Smith (Honor Hsin, MD), Maj. Caleb Cook (Seungha Lee), Hannah (Peter) Foley, Connor Smith and Alex Smith. He also leaves behind four great-grandchildren.
“Born and raised in Wichita Falls, TX, Bobby earned a degree in economics from Rice and an MBA from the University of Washington. He served as an active duty and reserve aviator in the U.S. Navy for 16 years, including tours in East and Southeast Asia. After leaving the Navy, Bobby spent several decades in the private sector in the computer and real estate industries, retiring from a consulting position at IBM Corporation in 2006.
“Bobby was a true ‘Renaissance man,’ with many diverse interests
and hobbies. He authored several e-books, planted multiple vegetable gardens, learned to scuba dive, dabbled in photography, earned a GIA Graduate Gemologist diploma and so much more. He was an entertaining storyteller, frequently regaling family and friends with his adventures in the Navy. Grandson Connor Smith described Bobby best: ‘He was a funny and smart man with a big personality.’ Never moderation. Always full throttle. A life well-lived.”
Class Recorders: Anne Westerfield Brown brownaw57@gmail.com LaNelle Ueckert Elston elstonl@att.net
Shirley Dittert Grunert sdgrunert@sbcglobal.net
Class recorders Anne Westerfield Brown (BA), LaNelle Ueckert Elston (BA) and Shirley Dittert Grunert (BA) write: James Hofmann “Jim” Foerster (BS) passed away March 3, 2024, after a few years of declining health. Jim received a football and baseball scholarship from Rice. He decided that baseball was the most important sport in the universe.
From his obit: “At an early age, his love of anything sports was his main focus. He was a friend to all, and his outgoing and friendly nature served him well all of his life. He excelled in football and baseball in high school along with being the senior class president and was voted ‘most popular.’”
After college, he entered the U.S. Army and served with the Counter Intelligence Corps. He was offered an appointment to West Point, but declined since he didn’t want to pursue a military career. Instead, he joined his father’s insurance agency in Corpus Christi. Jim’s memorial service was April 20, 2024, at the
First Baptist Church, Fredericksburg, TX.
We are sad to report the loss of Mary Wheeler Zelle May 28, 2024. At Rice she was active in PALS and the Rice Follies. She left during our junior year to marry John Zelle ’56 . They moved to Tennessee with their four daughters after John completed his degree at U of H. Mary worked as a medical transcriptionist until the girls were grown. After moving to Chattanooga, Mary completed a BFA at the U. of Alabama. She was talented both in watercolor and acrylics, and freely gifted her work to those she loved. She loved to paint, knit and play bridge, and to go annually to the beach at Fort Morgan, AL, with family and friends. Mary is survived by her four daughters, six grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and many friends.
Homer Borgstedte (BA) passed away July 10, 2024, with his wife of 67 years, Joan, by his side. He excelled academically and in football and track in high school. Homer was a member of the Brenham High School Football Hall of Fame. He attended Rice on football and track scholarships. He dedicated his professional life to the insurance industry as an independent insurance agent in a company known as GBS Insurance Agency, Inc., in Bellaire, TX. His leadership and commitment to his profession and community were exemplary as a member of the Bellaire Chamber of Commerce, Bellaire Rotary Club, many insurance organizations as well as the Rice R Club. He also served with honor in the Army Reserves as a medic. Homer and Joan have one son who has three sons. His funeral was held at Friedens Church in Washington, TX.
We are very proud of our classmate Martha Lou Musgrave Broussard (BA), who has been selected to receive the inaugural Distinguished Alumni Award of the Wiess School of Natural Sciences!
This award is the highest honor bestowed by the Wiess School of Natural Sciences. Recipients of this prestigious award are selected based on a lifetime of professional achievements, leadership and contributions made professionally and to society at large. The award will be presented during homecoming weekend at Rice. Congratulations and our very best wishes!
1958
Class Recorder:
Jim Greenwood 713-898-2293 jmgrnwd@aol.com
1959
Class Recorder: Marilynn Revis Wait mwrice1959@gmail.com
Johanna Gordy Brown submits the following: “My father, Marvin Keith Gordy (BA; BS, 1960), passed away Nov. 13, 2022. After completing his BA and BS in architecture, Marvin was awarded the M.N. Davidson traveling fellowship upon graduation. His adventurous trip to Europe with architecture classmate Hugh Rucker (BS, 1960) was an experience he talked about for many years.
“MKG enjoyed a fulfilling career as an architect in Beaumont, TX. Susan, his beautiful wife of 56 years, preceded him in death in 2018. He was very proud of his three daughters and arguably more proud of his seven grandchildren, one of whom is a Rice graduate ( Harrison T. Brown ’19 [Lovett: BS]).
“Marvin nurtured a decadeslong friendship with his professor and mentor of architecture, the inestimable Professor Anderson Todd. They remained friends until Professor Todd’s death in 2018. Professor Todd’s influence and
support was such a gift to MKG.
“A colorful raconteur, Marvin loved to regale his Rice days. Many of his stories featured his roommate Robert ‘Roberto’ Dopson (BA), Phyllis Phair Walton ’58 (BA), Tommie Lu Storm Schewe (BA) and Hugh Rucker. Tommie Lu’s father, Mark Storm, a wellknown Western artist, taught MKG how to create paintings for his architecture projects. Mr. Storm’s portrait of MKG remains a family treasure.
“MKG and Roberto had planned a Marfa visit shortly before Marvin’s unexpected death in fall 2022. Roberto in Marfa said about MKG, ‘Soulful and full of spirit, enriching the lives of all he came in contact with. We were blessed to have him in our lives.’”
Class Recorders: Barbie Scott McKittrick bmck4827@comcast.net
Trudy Abel Hester TrudyHester@alumni.rice.edu
Class recorder Barbie Scott McKittrick (Jones: BA) writes:
I write this column toward the end of another long Houston summer in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl. Many of us have found ways to escape the heat for at least a while. I left two days before Beryl hit to spend 10 wonderful days in Seattle and Victoria, British Columbia, with my daughter, Kimberly, technically also a Rice alum, though she transferred and graduated from Brown.
Linda and Jerry Paine (Hanszen: BA) are frequent travelers. When a trip to Iceland was canceled, they pivoted to a cruise down the St. Lawrence with daughter Jennifer and her husband, returning to Boston just in time to be stranded by the computer programming glitch that shut down air travel. Two extra days in Boston did not constitute
hardship duty. A few weeks later, they left to visit their son and his family in Seattle. When they aren’t traveling, Linda and Jerry drive weekly for Meals on Wheels, delivering meals and encouraging words to elderly residents.
Harry Reasoner (Baker: BA) finally retired from Vinson Elkins and now wonders why he waited so long. His next task is learning to say no to other demands on his time.
I had a wonderful visit with Polly Philbrook Lewis (Jones: BA), who has NOT retired. She says practicing estate and probate law with her son, Andrew Lewis ’90 (Jones: BA), and grandson Drew in Houston is great fun. Polly and her husband, Mike Pierson, live in a high-rise near the Rice campus. Polly also has a daughter living in Seattle and planned to spend Labor Day there.
Polly’s sister, Bonnie Philbrook Stivers (Jones: BA), has recently moved to a senior living condominium. Her new address is 1800 Clairmont Lake, #721, Decatur, GA 30033.
R. Annette Wicker Duggan (Jones: BA) died June 25. Annette transferred to Rice from Baylor for her junior and senior years and married F. Lee Duggan ’52 (BA) shortly before her graduation. The following is from her obituary: “She often recalled to family and friends her first date with Lee. During outings with past suitors, Annette often felt she had to do most of the talking, and was tuckered out by the end of the evening. However, when she went out with Lee, a lively extrovert, she sat back and enjoyed listening to his engaging conversation. Annette was smitten. And so was Lee. They married on April 16, 1960, a month before her graduation.”
John “Jack” Larner (Wiess: BA) died June 10. He came to Rice from Pittsburgh, PA. After graduating from Rice in 1960, he received a master’s degree at Pittsburgh University in 1961. He
completed his doctoral work in history at West Virginia University in 1972. He served as supervisor of Indian Treaty Rights for Canada’s National Indian Brotherhood from 1971 to 1972 and worked for that organization as a freelance writer and researcher in the early 1970s. He left his papers related to this work to an archive at Washington State University. After teaching at St. John’s College Newfoundland and Penn State Altoona, he taught at Indiana University of Pennsylvania until his retirement. According to Galloway Hudson (Wiess: BA; BS, 1961), he had a really wicked wit and sense of humor.
Trudy Abel Hester (Jones: BA) and I would really like to share your exploits and adventures now while you are active rather than as excerpts from an obituary. But we need news now!
Class Recorder: Nancy Thornall Burch 713-781-3634 nburch2@juno.com
Class recorder Nancy Thornall Burch (Jones: BA) writes: As the years creep up on us, more and more of our classmates are moving to senior facilities. Earl Vanzant (Will Rice: BA; BS, 1962) now lives at the Buckingham in assisted living. Earl continues to be active in the Houston community and at Rice events. Uber is his personal chauffeur, and he keeps them busy. Wendy Rainbow Germani (Jones: BA) originally moved to the Village of Southampton from her longtime Houston home. Sadly, she contracted COVID-19 during an outbreak there and was hospitalized for an extended period. Her son, Ken Germani ’89 (Baker: BA), contacted me to let me know that she now is in memory care at Silverado Hermann Park.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 63
ALUMNI BOOKS
POET AND ESSAYIST Elisa Gabbert has always loved reading and writing critically on authors she admires, so much so that pas sion for her bookworm life comes through vividly in “Any Person Is the Only Self,” her third collection of essays. One essay will reveal her outlook on “The Catcher in the Rye” decades after reading it for the first time (“Salinger was writing more for me then than me now”), while another essay will see Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” as a premonition. We spoke to Gabbert to learn more about her intentions behind sharing these memorable moments with literary classics.
What drew you to write about reading the books you enjoyed ages ago, and the books you discovered for the first time?
My last collection of essays was all about climate change, natural disasters and some bleak stuff, and it took a bit of a psychological toll on me. I wanted to read a bunch of novels and poetry, which I was able to do when the pandemic happened and I was stuck in the house. Some people write about their traveling and vacations, their experiences outside their home, and for me reading books is my traveling. That’s when I feel alive.
In the course of rereading some of your favorite authors, did you find you had a renewed appreciation for them and their works?
I feel like I’m a very slow reader, as I tend to pause a lot, stare up into space, and then I come back to the page. So it can take me a very long time to get through a book.
I used to think that there are so many books I haven’t read yet that I can’t justify rereading books, but for this collection I gave myself that assignment — to see if my feelings had changed at all. It was an experiment.
In the last essay, I wrote about rereading John Updike’s “Rabbit, Run,” which I loved as a teenager. It’s a book about lost youth. Back when I read it, I hadn’t lost my youth, so it’s amazing it appealed to me so much back then. Now it’s actually much more poignant of
a book to me, and the level of empathy I have for the characters is much richer. This experiment made me realize that books are only going to get better for me the longer I’m alive, because I’ll have more personal experiences to bring to the books that I’m reading.
How do you approach writing an essay differently than writing a poem? For poems to arrive to me, it feels almost like a magical visitation. I can’t sit down and make myself write a poem, but instead it shows up to me as a gift.
I like to write essays when I’m not writing poetry because I feel like I’m using my writerly mind, and I get just as much pleasure out of trying to convert those thoughts into language I can play around with.
How did your time at Rice inform your writing career and your trajectory as an author?
Elisa Gabbert ’02 FSG Originals, 2024
I met Susan Wood, who used to teach at Rice, and she was very encouraging of my writing. Without her mentorship, I wouldn’t have gone on to get my MFA to study poetry more intensely. I still am interested in my majors — linguistics and cognitive sciences — and I sometimes wonder if it weren’t for Susan, and the found family I enjoyed meeting at Rice, would I have taken a different path in life? Would I be working in a tech job in Silicon Valley right now? — INTERVIEW BY
DAVID SILVERBERG
Susan Wood is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor Emerita of English in the School of Humanities.
Suzanne Rindell ’10 Dutton, 2024
Forbidden romance blossoms during a steamy New York summer in Suzanne Rindell’s fifth novel, “Summer Fridays.” In the era of AOL Instant Messenger, Sawyer, a 20-something publishing assistant, is engaged to her college boyfriend, but she worries that he’s getting too cozy with one of his colleagues. The colleague’s boyfriend, Nick, shares her suspicions, and they meet up to compare notes. But as they get to know each other better, Sawyer begins to wonder whether her fiancé is the right man for her. She and Nick spend their Fridays exploring Manhattan together, and these rambles take on increasing meaning for both of them. But their paths in life seem predestined, leaving no room for a shared future.
Rindell, who has a Ph.D. from Rice, worked for several years at a New York literary agency, where she wrote her first novel, “The Other Typist.” In this lighthearted romance, the city is a backdrop for the witty banter and intense longing of new love at a crossroads in a young woman’s life. — JENNIFER LATSON
Elizabeth Crook ’82
Little, Brown and Company, 2023
Fans of Elizabeth Crook’s “The Which Way Tree” will be delighted to find its narrator, Benjamin Shreve, at the heart of her new novel, “The Madstone.” Set in the Texas Hill Country in 1868, the novel follows 19-year-old Benjamin on a series of misadventures after he agrees to provide transport to a treasure hunter eager to offload some unusual jewelry, as well as a pregnant woman named Nell, with a 4-year-old son and a backstory that makes her getaway a matter of some urgency.
Early in their journey, when they encounter a stranger on the road, Nell shoots the man in the face but won’t explain why. In his endearing, guileless way, Benjamin slowly puts the pieces together. “Who ever shoots a man they just laid eyes on but half a second before, I asked myself,” he narrates. “There was something about how that scene had played that did not appear like a accident.” The truth sets Benjamin on a hero’s quest to deliver Nell to safety against perilous odds. — JL
James Fowler ’79
Through the valley gap range upon blue-gray range. An occluded winter sun firing the western sky precisely silhouettes the trees along a nearby ridge. The scene is set for sleights of light and glass. There: pendant Craftsman lamps process like Chinese lanterns in the solemn gloaming.
Fixtures on this side, celestials on that.
— From “Postcards from Home: Poems,” James Fowler, Kelsay Books, 2024. Published by permission of the author.
On a lighter note, Jean Bryan Philips (Jones: BA) has lived in the New Braunfels area ever since retiring from her longtime career as a teacher and then counselor. She lives on the Guadalupe River, just below the Canyon Lake Dam. Jean keeps busy with local activities and regularly visits son Bryan and family in South Carolina.
Earlier this year, we lost our classmate Myron Edgar “Ed” Bailey (Will Rice: BA). A Houston native, Ed was a National Merit Scholar at Lamar High School prior to entering Rice. Following his graduation, he worked for TRW on the NASA Apollo program. He then formed a company developing projects for Grumman Aerospace and NASA, in addition to many state and commercial projects.
A longtime member of Lakewood Yacht Club, Ed was an avid sailor who raced extensively during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1987, he was a co-founder of the Harvest Moon Regatta, an overnight race from Galveston to Port Aransas under the light of a harvest moon, which still is an iconic race for all levels of sailors. He also holds the record for the Regatta de Amigos race from Galveston to Veracruz, Mexico; his daughter Kitty Bailey was a member of the crew. The race is not held anymore, so his record will forever stand.
Ed and Barbara later moved to New Smyrna Beach, FL, where they lived for 20 years and made many wonderful memories and lifelong friends. During this time, they sailed extensively and spent their time renovating older properties before moving back to San Antonio to develop federal medical clinics. After fully retiring, Ed and Barbara made their way back to Houston in 2021 to spend more time with family and friends.
The final years of Ed’s life were spent with Barbara, back in his old stomping grounds
around Houston, hanging out at Lakewood Yacht Club with friends and attending his grandchildren’s school and sporting events. He is survived by Barbara and his five daughters and their families.
As for me, I’m still in the same home where I’ve lived for almost 56 years, occasionally going through the piles of things I’ve accumulated. These include quite a few items intended for the Woodson Research Center at Rice. I always tell them to keep what they want and toss the rest. I still travel quite a bit and just bought a new car. Now, let me hear from more of you, please.
Class Recorder: Eleanor Powers Beebe 713-526-5424 ebeebe@yahoo.com
Class recorder Eleanor Powers Beebe (Jones: BA) writes:
An article was published in the online Rice News in April 2023 about Dr. H. Gordon Green (Wiess: BA). Gordon made a very generous donation of his collection of vintage comics from the early 1940s through the 1960s to Rice. The report, which can be seen at https:// bit.ly/comics-donation, includes a video of Gordon speaking about his collection as the boxes are welcomed by faculty and students. The collection will be housed in Rice’s Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts.
While at Rice, Gordon was on the Dean’s List, was a Wiess Cabinet member and fellow, and earned a BA in biology. After he fulfilled his military obligation to the U.S. Navy, he received his medical degree from UT Southwestern in 1968, completed his residency in pediatrics at the University of Washington in 1971, and also earned a Master of Public Health from the University
of California, Berkeley, in 1972. The Gordon Green, MD, Endowed Scholarship Fund has been established at the UT Southwestern School of Health Professions in Dallas. If you are interested in making a gift, you may contact UT Southwestern and specify the Gordon Green Fund for your donation.
I am very sad to report the deaths of two Rice Class of 1962 friends, Linda Angela Day (Jones: BA; MA, 1965) on June 6, 2024, and Gayle Dupont Evans (Jones: BA) on Aug. 15, 2024. Please search for their names online for their full obituaries and photos.
Linda, a chemistry major at Rice, married Jim Colthart ’65 (PhD) after graduation. After their divorce in 1978, Linda earned a BFA in visual arts from U of H. She supported herself as a freelance writer, carpenter and builder, and pursued many hobbies: opera, kayaking, gardening, piano, violin, sculpture and painting. Her enthusiasm and vitality were amazing! She is survived by her son, Chris Colthart, and beloved granddaughter, Wren.
My friendship with Gayle Evans dates back to Lamar High School, where she excelled in debate and writing skills. At Rice, she majored in history but still found time to participate in productions of the Rice Players and Senior Follies. She was a dedicated teacher for many years in Memphis, TN.
After Rice, Gayle worked at the Library of Congress. While she was there, she met and married James M. Evans ’60 (Wiess: BA), an architect, and they raised three sons, Moseby, Ben and Bo. Gayle was a devoted member of Grace St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Memphis, and after retirement from teaching, she remained active in several ministries, including helping to run the church food pantry.
Gayle will be remembered fondly by her sons and their families, as well as her brother, Todd Dupont ’63 (Wiess: BA; PhD, 1968), and goddaughter, Torlisa Jeffrey. She was preceded in death by her daughter, Virginia, in 1979 and her husband, Jimmy, in 2005.
1963
Class Recorder: Kathleen Much much.bookdr@gmail.com
1964
Class Recorder: Lucy Meinhardt 510-220-3459 lmeinhar@pacbell.net
Class recorder Lucy Meinhardt (Jones: BA) writes:
This summer I was very saddened to learn of the loss of two old friends, Doug Alvord ’63 (Will Rice: BA) and Linda Day ’62 (Jones: BA; MA, 1965).
I had known Doug since elementary school. He was in the same Boy Scout troop with my brothers. He was my friend in high school and at Rice. I was working at Washington University Medical School while Doug was a student there. We had communicated by email in recent years. He died April 17, 2024.
Doug spent most of his years as an internist in Bozeman, MT, where he was highly regarded. From his obituary (a simple
Google search will find it online), “he touched countless lives. His passion for medicine extended beyond his practice, as he served as an instructor at the WWAMI medical school, inspiring others with his knowledge and dedication. … Beyond his professional pursuits, Doug found solace in the arts, music and the tranquility of fly-fishing. … He is survived by his devoted spouse, Ellen; and his brother, Dean (Esther) Alvord.”
Linda Day stayed active until her very last day. She was working in her beautiful Houston garden when she collapsed June 6, 2024, while preparing for a dinner party. Linda generously welcomed my spouse and me into her home the last two times we were in Houston, for my 50th and 55th reunions. We connected on Facebook as well. Her son, Chris Colthart, wrote a beautiful obituary on her Facebook page. It, too, can be found by Googling her name online. She is survived by Chris and his daughter, Wren, both of whom Linda loved dearly, along with her miniature poodles, Felix and Pip. (A previous poodle, Chipper, frequently went kayaking with her.) Linda was very active with improving her home and contributing to her community. Truly a Renaissance woman, Chris described her as a “writer, artist, musician, kayaker, scientist, environmentalist, dog friend, mother and grandmother.”
I shall never forget our caper my freshman year when Linda, a wise upperclasswoman, took me under her wing. She taught me how to play the guitar, back when folk music was a very cool thing. We got into a practical joke duel with two upperclasswomen who lived on the top floor. Chem-major Linda constructed a hydrogen sulfide generator so we could pipe rotten egg smell into their room. We won the duel but earned letters home from the dean about being on the forbidden part of Jones’ roof and for exposing students to a toxic gas. We lost a few weekend
privileges.
On Facebook I connected with classmate Ginger Hindman Rogers (Jones: BA), after responding to her brother’s comment remembering our graduation in 1964 and how heavy rain caused it to be moved into the sweltering gym. I asked her to write about herself for Owlmanac. “Wish I could report to you gallant travels and exciting adventures and technological inventions, but I must leave that to the younger crowd. As for me, ye ole joints have pretty much given out, and I am practically chair-bound. Still, I am connected to my missionary agency, whereby I used to travel, but now I am an intercessor and keep up with world affairs through those who are on the go. I moved in with my youngest daughter and her family in the eensy-teensy town of Joshua, TX. I’m waiting for the deluge of cooling rains to stop and the pool to warm so I can get some exercise. And hopefully soon I will meet some nearby neighbors who will want to join me in a home Bible study.”
The Facebook exchange was noticed by Sharon Breard Reese ’91 (Wiess: BA), the daughter of our classmate L. Gayle Goodner Breard (Jones). She wrote about her mother, “She married my dad, Mike Breard ’63 (Will Rice: BA), after her junior year and was always disappointed that she ended up getting her diploma from Stanford instead of Rice. She went on to teach advanced high school math and was head of the math department at her school. Unfortunately, she passed away in 2005. My dad remarried and is doing well, though.”
(Will Rice: BA) sends the following:
Tim O’Connell (Baker: BA; BS, 1966) writes: “The letter from Brandon Jones (Baker: BA; BS, 1966) published in the spring edition of Owlmanac includes Mac McWhorter (Archer McWhorter Jr.) among our group of five Rice friends. At some point in the text, he is misidentified as Bill McWhorter (Baker: BA). The confusion arises because Brandon neglected to mention Mac’s first name. Bill and Mac (no relation) both entered Rice in 1961, both were in Baker College, and Bill graduated but Mac did not. The five of us friends understand what happened, but imagine how mystified anyone knowing Bill must be.
“It’s true that Mac did not graduate from Rice. He had to be satisfied with a PhD from Michigan, a tenured professorship at U of H and the founding of a successful actuarial firm. A statistical analysis (Mac’s specialty) of the relative success of graduates vs. nongraduates might not come out as well for us graduates as we might think.
his research. You got a 1 if you made no mistakes. I got a 3. My reaction after the first meeting of such courses was something like this: ‘This course is required. I can’t drop it. Yet I know I’m seldom going to this class (I didn’t), and seldom doing the homework (I didn’t). How can I do just enough not to fail?’ It worked. I never failed a course and graduated with the class, but I have a transcript full of 3s and 4s.
“When I see Rice rated highly, I feel proud but have misgivings about it being actually deserved. My experience is limited to Rice and the University of Chicago, where I went to grad school. In those years, at least, there was no comparison. Chicago was in a different league in almost every respect. Perhaps Rice has closed the gap since then.”
Class Recorder: Jim Bearden jbearden@ieee.org
Class Recorder: Cordell Haymon cordell.haymon@pscgroup.com
Class recorder Cordell Haymon
“Which brings me to a complaint about Rice. I was an EE major, but I chose Rice partly because the five-year program allowed room for more humanities courses. I did not expect, however, to have to take so many required engineering courses that I thought irrelevant to EEs. Just three examples: Strength of Materials, in which I was supposed to learn the properties of Portland cement and carbon steel; Fluid Mechanics, in which I was supposed to learn how to describe, in mathematical terms, the shape of the leading edge of a liquid in a pipeline (I am not making this up); Statistical Thermodynamics, in which I had no idea what I was supposed to learn. Sensing our befuddlement, the professor gave up. For our final exam, we each had to punch a different section of computer cards dealing with
Class recorder Jim Bearden (Will Rice: BA) sends the following: Raymond Smith (Will Rice: BA; BS, 1967) writes: “After a fifth year at Rice for my BSChE, I spent summer 1967 in Manhattan, where I worked for Conoco Petrochemical’s project development group in Rockefeller Plaza and lived adjacent to Calvary Church on Gramercy Park. What a fun summer for a single guy!
“[After school,] I worked as an engineer for a while, but it soon became obvious that engineering was not my calling. One night while singing in choir, I said a silent prayer: ‘Lord, I have no idea what direction I should go in, but I know You do, and I’m ready to quit kicking and screaming, and shut up and start listening.’ The answer was a little inner voice that said: ‘Why don’t you go to medical school?’
“I earned my MD at University
of Texas Southwestern at Dallas in 1975 and completed a family medicine residency at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth in 1978. I was blessed to find a clinic in Fredericksburg, TX, that was ready for a new family doc, moved here in summer 1978, and am thankful to have been here ever since. As a rural family physician, I could do it all, from delivering babies to hospice care. Diane and I raised all four of our sons out here in the country.
“Several years ago, I limited my practice to aviation medicine, doing FAA pilot exams and consultations, which I still do. Along the way, we have had a cruising sailboat and flown coast to coast in our three different airplanes. We still ride CanAm Spyders.
“In 2018, we wound up with a second home in Henderson, NV, near our oldest son and youngest grandchild, and have made a whole new group of dear friends and neighbors there.
“We have been blessed beyond anything we deserve.”
Jim Hargrove (Hanszen: BA) submits the following: “Our new solarpowered ADU (Auxiliary Dwelling Unit) is finished, at least enough to use, in Philo, CA. Beautiful place, worth the two-year wait, with a lovely view of the ‘meadow’ (aka septic field), great dock, good birding, fabulous kitchen. Though not ‘off the grid,’ we generate at least as much power using solar panels as we draw from the grid, so this is net zero carbon. Visitors can use the guest bedroom next door. See photos online at https:// bit.ly/owls-roost.”
1967
Class Recorder:
Michele Stojan Roberts
P.O. Box 271611
Houston, TX 77277-1611 owlmanac@rice.edu
Class recorder Michele Stojan Roberts (Brown: BA) sends the following:
Stuart Long (Wiess: BA; MEE, 1968) shares a press release, excerpted below, concerning an award he was fortunate to receive in Florence this past summer.
“Stuart Long [the Moores Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and associate dean of Undergraduate Research and the Honors College at the University of Houston] was recently awarded the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Achievement Award for the introduction and development of the dielectric resonator antenna and the early development of the microstrip patch antenna.
“This award honors outstanding career technical achievements in the fields of antennas and propagation and is the highest recognition given by the society. The development of the two classes of antennas that distinguished Long for this award — the microstrip patch antenna and the dielectric resonator antenna — span decades.
“The former was developed with a grant from the U.S. Army in the 1970s in response to the need for a rugged, conformal antenna that could be used on artillery shells; now, nearly any portable device intended to facilitate wireless communications — such as laptops and cell phones — has at least one such antenna.
“The latter is a response to the need for an antenna capable of high-efficiency transmission at high frequencies. As most antennas are made of metal, and metal is an imperfect conductor, increasing losses are incurred at high frequencies. The dielectric resonator antenna contains no such conductors, making it much more efficient at higher frequencies which are required, for example, for some military applications and for the newest communications
systems like 5G or 6G.
“In addition to his work with IEEE AP-S, Long has also led programs with the university to engage young women in exploring potential STEM careers, involve public high school teachers in research initiatives, and pair PhD students with science and math classes across the Greater Houston area to further promote K–12 STEM education and engagement. Long just completed his 50th year on the faculty, coming to U of H in 1974 after receiving his PhD from Harvard.
“This is the fourth award Long has received from the IEEE AP-S. Previous awards include the IEEE AP-S Outstanding Service Award for his service on the administrative committee, as vice president and president of the society in 2007; the IEEE AP-S John Kraus Antenna Award for the introduction and development of the dielectric resonator antenna in 2014; and the IEEE AP-S Chen-To Tai Distinguished Educator Award for his commitment to electromagnetics education through teaching, research and the development of programs to attract students to the field in 2018.”
Stuart Long
Guy Rollins (Will Rice: BA, 1970) writes: “I recently attended a 60-year high school reunion where I saw that Grant Fehr ’69 (Wiess) passed away in 2023. Grant was a classmate in architecture school. He played guitar for a band (can’t recall the name — John Casbarian ’69 [Baker: BA; BArch, 1972] will probably remember) at many Rice parties.”
1969
Class Recorder: Linda Wald Gibson lindawgibson@gmail.com
1970
Class Recorders: Ann Olsen ann.olsen@alumni.rice.edu Mike Ross 408-221-3359 mikeross2@prodigy.net
1971
Class Recorder: Ann Patton Greene 713-899-7433 annpgreene@gmail.com
1968
Class Recorder: Bruce Morris 210-909-1022 blmorris46@gmail.com
Class recorder Ann Patton Greene (Brown: BA) writes: Michelle Littell Halsall Colville (Jones: BA; MA, 1978) died Nov. 6, 2023, in Pittsburgh, PA. I’ve had to edit a heartfelt obituary, so please ask for a copy. Michelle was born in Jackson, MS, but moved to Beaumont and then Houston to connect with a larger art community. At Rice she graduated with a BA in anthropology and art history and then an MA in psychology. She became a licensed professional counselor and later a licensed supervisor for LPCs. She graduated from the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest and was ordained as an Episcopal priest in the
Diocese of Montana. She qualified as a Diplomate Jungian Analyst and practiced as an analyst while serving in the church ministry. She was also a lifelong multimedia artist, creating works in drawing, watercolors, oil, printmaking and textiles. Michelle married William Colville, author and filmmaker, in 1995 and lived in Red Rock, TX, until his passing in 2020, practicing psychotherapy and serving her church ministry until her death. In a weaving class, she met Caley Palmieri, who became her caregiver and supporter. She was cherished by friends, many of whom also attended Rice, as well as by colleagues, fellow Episcopalians and clients in her Jungian practice. A fellow priest described Michelle as full of life and light, integrating various careers/activities in her joy-filled path: hippie, artist, analyst, priest, traveler, connoisseur of music. Many from Rice days knew her as sisterfriend. Carl Jung wrote, “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” Michelle epitomized the realization of that privilege.
In the photo, from left, back row: Marvin Hecker ’72 (Baker: BA), Jim DePitts ’69 (Will Rice: BA), Michael Bludworth, Terry Gaschen ’73 (Will Rice: BA), Andy Allen ’70 (Baker: BA), Hank Rhodes ’75 (Hanszen: BA) and J. Whatley Langham (Lovett); third row: Wally Washington ’70
(Lovett: BA), Bonnie Brown ’69 (Jones: BA), Suni Stewart and Lucy Ferguson Galbraith (Jones: BA); second row: Elaine Frank (Jones: BA) and Chick Bianchi ’70 (Jones: BA); front row: Professor Chandler Davidson, Katie Ewing DePitts (Brown: BA), Michelle Colville and Hillary Loring (Jones: BA). Photo courtesy of Paul Hester (Wiess: BA).
Roger Collins (Lovett: BA) died July 1, 2024. Roger played football at Permian High in Odessa, TX, and was on the school’s first state championship team in 1965. He then played football at Rice, where he earned a BA, followed by an MBA at the University of Texas. In 1978 he married Marilyn Merten, an associate professor of nursing at Baylor (Dallas), and raised daughters Lauren and Lindsey. When Marilyn died after 32 years of marriage, they remained the highlight of his life. Roger worked for Arthur Anderson from 1973–77 and a Dallas printing company as VP of finance until 1986 when he became VP of finance for Harps Food Stores. He became executive VP and then CEO/chairman and led the company to become employee-owned in 2001. He retired as CEO in 2016 and chairman in 2018. Under his leadership, Harps became one of the largest and most recognized independent grocery chains in the U.S. The National Grocers Association
honored him with the annual industry Entrepreneurial Excellence Award in 2015. He served on the NGA Board and as chairman of the NGA Foundation Board. Roger placed his faith in Christ at age 11 and lived his life consistent with that calling, serving on many philanthropic boards and earning awards for that service. He is survived by his daughters, brother Jay Collins ’68 (Baker: BA and MChE, 1969) (Maxann), and sisters JoRene (Chet) Mills and Rita (Paul) Hall. Throughout his life, Roger put time, love and energy into his friends — resulting in friendships that spanned over 60 years.
Class Recorder: Tim Thurston 614-486-4846 timthurston@hotmail.com
Class recorder Tim Thurston (Lovett: BA) sends the following: Karen Shannon McDonell ’77 (Jones: BA) submits an obituary for Linda Cherrington Hershey (Jones: BA), the sister of her close friend, Janet Cherrington Eakes ’77 (Jones: BA).
“Linda Kay Cherrington Hershey, a much-loved wife, sister and aunt, and lifelong resident of Texas, died with her family at her side in Spicewood July 22, 2024, after a courageous battle with a neurological disorder.
“Born Jan. 17, 1950, Linda grew up in Harlingen, where she developed her strong work ethic from the examples set by her parents, who farmed, raised cattle and ran an insurance agency. Linda graduated first in her class from Harlingen High School in 1968. She proudly earned her bachelor’s degree in political science from Rice in 1972, a master’s degree in public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs in 1974, and her
MBA from UT Austin in 1996.
“Linda was devoted to her family. She and her husband, John Paul Hershey ’73 (Lovett: BA, 1974), shared 26 years in a happy marriage based on Galveston Island. She was the much-admired older sister and mentor to Janet Cherrington Eakes and Anne Cherrington Culver, and she was an involved and supportive ‘Aunt Linda Kay’ to her dearly loved nieces and nephews.
“Linda’s sense of service led her to a career in public affairs, focused on the development and refinement of public mass transit systems. She was gratified to work in a field that supported community development and equitable access to transportation. Linda held senior positions with the City of San Antonio, the City of Houston, the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Houston (METRO), LKC Consulting, Inc., and the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. Linda was proud to be named the recipient of the inaugural Distinguished Service Award presented by the Texas Transportation Association in 2023, considering it the capstone of her career.”
Class Recorder: Mike Alsup malsup2020@outlook.com
Class recorder Mike Alsup (Wiess: BA) sends the following: Bob Cook (Baker: BA; MArch, 1976) writes: “Four of us who lived off campus together junior and senior year got together, along with our wives, for a dinner during our 50th Rice reunion. None of us had seen any of the others for more than 40 years. Amazing how after all these years our personalities were still the same and meshed so well. Pictured are, from left, Bob Cook and wife Jenny (Nanjing Agricultural University
’64) of Santa Clara, CA; Jim Black (Baker: BA) and wife Gwen (SMU ’72) of Denver, CO; Ed Dickinson (Baker: BA) and wife Glenda (TWU ’75) of Houston; and Jeffrey Ochsner (Baker: BA; MArch, 1976) and wife Sandra Perkins ’76 (Jones: BA) of Seattle, WA.”
Scott Litin (Wiess: BA) writes: “Spending most of our time in Phoenix area save for summer months in Minnesota. Retired from patient care at Mayo Clinic after 40 years in general internal medicine. Still employed teaching presentation skills to clinicians at Mayo Clinic and nationally. In between, lots of tennis and pickleball. Our lives were dramatically changed in January when my wife, Jolene, was diagnosed with primary brain lymphoma. Thankfully, she is responding very well to chemotherapy, and we are hoping for a remission and later maintenance therapy. Two kids and four granddogs keep our spirits up.”
Lisa Sandlin (Jones: BA) writes: “My new book, ‘Sweet Vidalia,’ came out Dec. 3, 2024, from Little, Brown. And I became a grandmother in September. So, it was a big year.”
Mary Weeks Rosenthal (Jones: BA) writes: “I’ve been working for seven years part time at William Chris Vineyards in Hye, TX. Every couple of years, Marc and I take
a long trip. We enjoyed a rest day in Cassis after a two-week drive through southern France, and then three more weeks in France and the UK by train. We stayed with Dominique Majani Dumaine-Martin (Jones: BA) and her husband for a weekend. When complimented on my French, I send silent thank yous to professors Rapaport and Urrutibeheity 50 years ago at Rice and my French Club in Canyon Lake, TX!”
Goldie Domingue (Jones: BA) writes: “After working from home, less and less, for the past four years, I finally retired at the end of 2023 from practicing immigration law for the past 37 years. It was a great profession — very rewarding; it was hard to let go. I moved back to my hometown, Baton Rouge, with my husband, Philip, at the end of 1998 after 13 years in Chi -
cago (where I started practicing law), preceded by 17 years in Texas (Houston plus a couple of tours at UT for MLS and JD degrees). I enjoyed our Class of 1973 reunion last fall and seeing old (as in ‘former’ and ‘aging but vibrant’) classmates. Life is good.”
Jay Temple (Wiess: BA) writes: “I have been working for the last 25 years for the Colorado Geological Survey primarily as a field geologist tasked with mapping projects throughout the Front Range. I currently live on a ‘ranchette’ of 35 acres in Westcliffe, CO. I’m on my last field project this summer and look forward to ‘retiring’ and spending more time with my two daughters, 20 and 22 years of age. Yep, had ’em late, but better late than never.”
1974
Class Recorder: Cathy Cashion cathy.cashion@gmail.com
Class recorder Cathy Cashion (Brown: BA) sends the following:
Mike Mannes (Baker: BA) writes: “Memories of a few Rice places pop into my consciousness on a regular basis: 1. The Baker College Quad — I was a Baker resident, and all my dorm rooms looked out on the quad. I have memories of Lovett water balloon attacks, touch football games and movies shown outdoors (‘Woodstock,’ ‘Elvira Madigan’ and ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’). But what routinely brings the quad to mind is music. To this day, I have only to hear a few notes of Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’ or the Allman Brothers’ ‘Eat a Peach,’ and I am instantly transported back to those clear blue days when someone turned their speakers toward the windows and the sounds of those keening guitars went soaring across the quad.
“2. The construction crane on the top of Sid Rich — When we
arrived on campus in fall 1970, Sewall Hall and Sid Richardson were under construction. Security was minimal, and, if you were a person who enjoyed exploring such places after dark, their rooftops afforded wonderful views of the campus and the surrounding Houston area. The best of these was Sid Rich, where we discovered the construction elevator to be operational. You could ride it to the top, climb the construction crane and perch on its boom with the lights of Rice and Houston carpeted below. Those nights on the nascent structure high above the campus and the city were magical.
“3. A small room in the Mechanical Laboratory — Early in my Rice experience, I thought I wanted to be a chemical engineer. Tray separation equations changed my mind: They were impossible to achieve with a slide rule and painful to do by hand. But in a small room in the Mechanical Laboratory, there was a lone Wang electronic desktop calculator. It was oversubscribed by day, but, if you woke in the middle of the night and walked across campus, you could find yourself alone with it for the time required to calculate the needed answers. A year later the world changed when a classmate returned to school with a new handheld HewlettPackard calculator. Back then the retail price of the HP calculator was $450, and it was a wondrous thing. Over the years, as waves of new technology have emerged, I have often found myself thinking of that solitary Wang calculator in the heart of the Mech Lab.”
1975
Class Recorders:
Sharon Readhimer Kimball 703-965-3360 sharonrkimball@gmail.com
Tom Gehring
619-206-8282
tom@tsgehring.net
Class recorder Sharon Readhimer Kimball (Jones: BA) sends the following:
Terry Kilpatrick (Brown: BA) writes: “I graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1982 with an MSS in clinical social work. For a number of years, I worked with children, both in group homes and then as a pediatric social worker at a hospital in Trenton, NJ. In 2001, I became the member services director for TAUP, the union for faculty members at Temple University in Philadelphia. I retired from there in 2016, then unretired for a couple of years by working at a mental health agency after the COVID-19 lockdown made me stircrazy. I am again retired and have been spending long stretches of time in suburban Washington, D.C., with my dear friend Anne Murdoch Shipps ’77 (Baker: BA), who underwent surgery for a glioblastoma in July 2023.
“I am getting to know D.C. and the surrounding area. My Rice roommate, Nancy Knowlton McMahon (Hanszen: BA), currently lives in northern Virginia, and we are able to get together regularly to visit the local sites of interest. In mid-September, the third member of our Brown friend group, Katrinka Moore ’76 (Brown: BA), came down from her summer home in the Catskills to join us for a cruise down the Potomac to Mt. Vernon. It was a beautiful fall day, and we had great fun. We finished the day at Politics and Prose, truly a gem of a bookstore.
“My daughter, Emma Weaver ’06 (Baker: BS), and my two sons, Lucas and Atticus, still live in the Philadelphia suburbs. I get back to see them every few weeks. I am hoping that one of Emma’s children might decide to be the fourth generation of our family at Rice in the Class of 2038 or 2040.”
Betty Wray Venson (Brown:
BA) writes: “I cannot believe it will be 50 years since I graduated. After marrying Mike Venson ’73 (Will Rice: BA), we settled in San Antonio and have resided there ever since. Mike is an insurance broker, and I enjoyed a fulfilling career as an English teacher and later became the human resources director for Jefferson Bank. My time at Rice was four years of hard work and having fun. I will never forget all the English papers I wrote, English teachers such as professors Huston and Grob, lots of mixers my freshman year, dates with weird and interesting boys, and having a wonderful roommate, Sarah ‘Sally’ Barnum Allen (Brown: BA; BArch, 1977), who married Mike’s suitemate, Chuck Allen ’73 (Will Rice: BA). All in all, the four years blew by, and sometimes it seems like it was only yesterday. The Rice tradition in my family continued, with two of my children, my son-in-law and my niece all graduating from Rice too. I hope to see many of my Rice friends next fall at the reunion.”
Tom Marshall (Baker: BS; MS, 1977) writes: “First and best thing I did following graduation was marrying Jan Weidenbach, another ’75 grad, but from Concordia College in Moorhead, MN. After Rice, grad school for an MS in mechanical engineering, and being blessed with two daughters, a nine-year career in naval nuclear propulsion engineering in Washington, D.C., and a 29-year career in aerospace in Littleton, CO, I (we) retired to
Minnetonka, MN, near one of our daughters, a son-in-law and three grandchildren, and Jan’s elderly parents. This transplanted Coloradan (me) is enjoying freedom from an alarm clock, developing new roots in Minnesota, traveling to Colorado for family time, other leisure travel and various volunteering gigs around town. Memories of Rice days are all good.”
Class Recorder: Michael Hindman 615-370-3252 (office) 615-373-1450 (fax) mhindman@hmharchitects.com www.facebook.com/ groups/349670321737395
Class recorder Michael Hindman (Lovett: BA) sends the following: Paul Reinhardt (Sid Rich: BS) writes: “Last year, it was two weddings. This year, two grandbabies. Ehren from son Ben and daughter-in-law Clare, living in New York City. Sienna from daughter Shelby Reinhardt ’12 (Sid Rich: BS) and son-in-law Drew, living in San Francisco. I guess Susan and I are a close as we can get, being right in the middle in Houston. Any tips
for new diaper change techniques will be appreciated.”
David Bozak (Lovett: BA) writes: “I retired Jan 1, 2024, after 42.5 years at SUNY Oswego. By the end of the month, I hit some ice, went down and tore two tendons; so my first summer of retirement was spent in physical therapy — which for shoulder/ rotator cuff tendon repair is way more painful and difficult than a knee replacement (two years ago — back in the classroom in under three weeks). So, I made a small dent in all those books I bought while still teaching that I just stacked up on the floor and hadn’t read. But far enough along in recovery to be back judging dog agility competitions.”
Carol Garner (Brown: BA) writes: “Finishing up a round of visits from three kiddos and five grandkiddos to celebrate my retirement Sept. 27, 2024. I’ve worked in the legal aid/poverty law field since graduating from Rice and am ready for a rest from that work. Celebrated with spouse of 49.5 years with a trip to Bhutan in early October! Then taking up crafting again (crocheting, spinning); catching up on political reading; developing a cadre of delicious one-pot meals that I didn’t
have the energy to cook while working full time; learning more about my current roots in New Mexico, its history and environs and my birth roots in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada (the closest land to where the Titanic went down); training the beastiedogs to be better behaved — just generally joining the lifestyle of the not-so-gainfully employed. It’s been a grand experience, and I am proud of what I have been able to contribute to seeking justice, equality and equity for the disenfranchised and excluded members of our communities.”
Tricia Crosby Stefanowicz (Jones: BA; BArch, 1978) writes: “I left Houston in 1988, having married a Brit, who had already decamped to Paris. We spent about 18 months in Paris, then back to London, where we have lived in the same two floors of an 1850s in Little Venice ever since.
“There are two children: adult one, an executive for AI-related medical transformation aimed at Africa (Senegal, etc.) based in west London, with his wife, Eleanor, and a son (Bartholmew, age 14 months); adult two, a management consultant for Accenture based in NYC, not yet married.
“Not retired, I have a ‘portfolio career,’ undertaking project management and other sundry activities for the National Health Service and other health care agencies and, in my alternative life, as a Master of Wine, judging internationally and writing journal and research articles. Still playing lawn tennis, real tennis and squash, but gave up football (American soccer) and ladies hockey a couple of decades ago.”
Melinda Mingus (Jones: BA) writes: “I have just completed the ‘Long Trail’ in Vermont!”
Michael Hindman writes: Despite our best efforts to promote Rice, our grandson Jake chose another university and commenced studying aeronautical engineering at Virginia Tech this August.
Our daughter, Michele Emrath, has recently been named senior executive producer at Spectrum News in New York City. Reminder to the Class of 1976 — be sure and join our Facebook group “Rice University Class of 1976.”
Class Recorder: Connie Dressner Tuthill connie.tuthill@gmail.com
Class Recorder: Chris Lahart clahart@earthlink.net
R. Thomas submits the following: “My practice partner, Dr. C.R. Anderegg (Sid Rich: BA), was recently named 2023 co-citizen of the year by the Washington State Dental Association.”
1979
The Class of 1979 needs a new class recorder. To learn more about this volunteer position, please email owlmanac@rice.edu.
David Honeycutt (Wiess: BA) submits the following: “I regret to report the passing of Cliff
Shapiro (Wiess: BA) Sept. 20, 2024. Cliff had been battling cancer for about a year and was on his fourth round of chemo at the time of his death. I met Cliff early in our freshman year. My first impression was that he was a quiet, very reserved guy. After a while, though, you realized that Cliff was someone with an opinion on everything (usually very well reasoned) and a great sense of humor. As an example on the latter point, he was, in our senior year, one of the organizers of the Great Hanszen Chair Removal. For those not acquainted with this enterprise, early one Sunday morning all of the chairs from Hanszen’s commons were removed and placed in a line running from that deservedly much persecuted college out to the long-since demolished track stadium. The sight of that line of chairs running off into a foggy Houston dawn was inspirational. After graduation, Cliff went off to Columbia Law School, where he met the love of his life, Doreen ‘Dorie’ Ludemann. Cliff then undertook a 40-year legal career, starting with Baker Botts here in Houston, and then going on to work as in-house counsel for several major banks on the West Coast. Cliff and Dorie, contradicting the idea that lawyers don’t have time for anything but law, also raised two wonderful children, Amy and Robert. For the
last several of those years, he was also a primary caregiver for Dorie, who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Cliff’s last year was not an easy one, as he had to deal with the effects of both cancer and chemotherapy. He never, though, lost the strong spirit he had always possessed. As exhausted as he must have been, he spent the day preceding the commencement of Passover preparing what sounded like a true feast for his family’s Seder. That was the kind of person he was. Cliff was one of the world’s quality people. He will be much missed.”
1980
Class Recorder:
Kathy Behrens 909-307-1228
310-871-3791 kathybehrens@verizon.net
1981
Class Recorder: Gloria Meckel Tarpley 214-763-0008 gloriameckeltarpley @ricealumni.net
Paula Desel (Jones: BA) submits the following: “ Stuart ’80 (Wiess: BA) and Kit Stebbins Sutherland (Jones: BA, 1982), Henry Ayon and
I met up in Copenhagen, Denmark, in August. This rendezvous was all thanks to the eagle eye of my sister, Anne Desel ’85 (Jones: BA), who noticed Kit’s Facebook post asking for Copenhagen travel advice. We overlapped in Copenhagen by one day and spent a lengthy lunch catching up, comparing notes and marveling at how great we all look! The photo is in the lobby of the SAS Royal Hotel designed by Arne Jacobsen.”
Class Recorder: Susan Stone Woodard 270-303-1173 suz.woodard514@gmail.com
Julia Fonseca (Baker: BA) submits the following: “Like many others, my husband, Dale Turner (Hanszen: BA), and I recently traveled to Texas for the solar eclipse. Now that I have retired, I am enjoying spending more time with Dale and my sister and mom, all of whom now reside in Tucson. Dale and I are both working on papers, his about lizards and mine about the life and work of G.E.P. Smith, an early hydrologist in Arizona. Rice’s Fondren Library provides online access to many of the journals I am reading for my research — a nice perk! Dale and I occasionally consult on land, water or species issues as Madrean Resources.”
Class Recorder: Jennifer S. Sickler
713-665-7469 j.sickler@hotmail.com
Class recorder Jennifer Sickler (Will Rice: BA) writes: I was recently honored to be admitted to the Honorable Nancy F. Atlas IP American Inn of Court. As an attorney, this will be an
excellent way to build collegiality and contribute back to the legal community.
Class Recorder:
Gretchen Martinez Penny gretchen.penny@gmail.com
Class Recorder: David Phillips 202-374-4787 (cell) 929-432-4453 (office) bigolpoofter@alumni.rice.edu david@agilelama.com
1986
Class Recorder: Greg Marshall 713-666-RICE (home) 713-348-6782 (office) gm@rice.edu
The Class of 1987 needs a new class recorder. To learn more about this volunteer position, please email owlmanac@rice.edu.
Class Recorder: Sonu Thukral Keneally 713-432-7668
sonuk@alumni.rice.edu
Class Recorder: Sten L. Gustafson 281-701-4234 stengustafson@icloud.com
Class recorder Sten Gustafson (Lovett: BA) sends the following: Clark Sitton (Brown: BA) writes: “ Brian Joseph Holmes (Brown: BA), 56, of Dallas, died May 10, 2024, in hospice care of natural causes after a brief, unexpected hospitalization. Brian was born Aug 25, 1967, in Yuma, AZ, the third child and only son of Lyell and Diane Holmes. Because his father was an active-duty Marine officer at the time, Brian’s first 10 years were spent in several states until the family settled in Orange County, CA, in 1977.
“In the beautiful Southern California weather, Brian was able to enjoy a wide range of sports both as a participant and spectator, with baseball and golf becoming favorites.
Brian attended University High School in Irvine, excelling in academics and golf. He attended Rice as an undergraduate and UT Houston for medical school on an Air Force scholarship. Following his four-year Air Force payback in Little Rock, AR, he began his radiology residency at UT Southwestern in Dallas.
“Brian’s career as a radiologist was spent mostly in private practice, and eventually came full circle when he joined his alma mater, UT Southwestern, as an assistant professor and attending physician of radiology in 2017. Brian loved teaching and his students. Of all his achievements
and awards over the years, Brian seemed most honored and proud to receive the Golden Apple Award from the Southwestern students in 2021.
“However, proud as he might be of any personal achievements, it couldn’t compare to the pride he had for his kids (and nephews) and their accomplishments. Brian had a deep, genuine love of learning that he has passed on to his son and daughters. He was a loving, protective and generous husband and father.
“In late October 2023, Brian made a lasting memory for his immediate family when he spontaneously bought tickets to the second game of the World Series. Together, they cheered on the Texas Rangers in what would be their first World Series Championship. Witty and quirky, Brian could make people laugh. He was a man of many T-shirts, each reflecting his interests or unique sense of humor. Along with sports, he enjoyed a wide variety of music, piloting his airplane, ‘The X Files,’ Coke, and Daisy, the family dog.
“Brian was a beloved father, husband, son, brother and uncle; a loyal friend; and a respected radiologist. He will be greatly missed in so many ways, and by so many friends, family and colleagues.
“Brian was preceded in death by his sister, Jackie Hoffner. He is survived by his wife, Laila (Wang),
of nearly 19 years; his son, Trevor, and daughters, Sarah and Lauren; his parents, Lyell and Diane of Des Moines, IA; sister, Julie Sparks of Prairie City, IA; brother-in-law, Barry Hoffner of Sausalito, CA; and six nephews.
“The family would like to thank the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital ICU and Faith Presbyterian Hospice for the care and love shown Brian in his final days. Brian’s family asks that any memorial contributions be made to Genesis Women’s Shelter at www.genesisshelter.org/donate.”
Alyson Gabbard Wilson (Brown: BA) of Raleigh, NC, was promoted to interim vice chancellor for research and innovation at North Carolina State. Wilson joined NC State in 2013. More information about her is available at https://bit.ly/alyson-wilson.
Class Recorder: Gilbert Saldivar 832-341-0694 saldivar@alumni.rice.edu facebook.com/ groups/294713521722
Class recorder Gil Saldivar (Sid Rich: BA) writes:
The Class of 1990 is deeply saddened that Jan Marie Casto Stavinoha ’91 (Jones: BA and BS) passed into memory after a courageous battle with cancer. After graduating with dual degrees in materials science and Spanish, Jan’s brilliance and steadfast devotion to family, friends and colleagues enabled nearly a decade of service as an environmental consultant and engineer. This initial success formed the foundation for a distinguished career of more than 20 years, ensuring environmental compliance at heavily regulated Calpine Corporation, America’s largest electricity generator from natural gas and geothermal resources.
Commanding environmental compliance across Calpine’s Texas operations throughout a period that witnessed an unexpected 50% surge in gas production, Jan earned responsibility as director of environmental, health and safety compliance across Calpine’s enterprise in what became her final years.
Please join her many fiercely devoted friends in honoring her memory. For more details, you can access her online obituary via legacy.com.
In happier news, Rice President Reginald DesRoches recognized the deeply loved Angela Berry-Roberson (Hanszen: BA), Esq. (Georgetown, JD) with the Distinguished Alumni Award at the March gala for Rice’s Black Student Association. In attendance were Deron Neblett (Will Rice: BA, 1991); Barry Donovan (Will Rice: BA); Elisa Macia Donovan ’92 (Will Rice: BS), Esq. (Harvard, JD); Edward “Teddy” Adams ’91 (Will Rice: BA), Esq. (Stanford, JD); and Katy Feibleman Miner ’89 (Sid Rich: BA) (UH, MFA). Angie currently serves as senior adviser to the Office of Civil Rights in “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg’s U.S. Department of Transportation.
Mike Banashek (Will Rice: BS; MCE, 1992) writes: “I continue to
live in St. Louis with wife Cheryl and sons Brandon (sophomore at Vanderbilt) and Max (senior at Parkway North High School). After over 30 years as a structural bridge engineer and manager, I was promoted to director of technical operations at Horner & Shifrin, Inc. last year. In my new position, I oversee all disciplines in our 180-person, employeeowned consulting firm. Hobbies include bowling, watching sports, cooking and Zillow.
“In June, I met up with Rice roommates in Nashville for a way overdue reunion. Clay Stallworth ’91 (Will Rice: BA) lives in
Augusta, GA, where he has been a pediatrician for 24 years. He is the trophy spouse of Leila Eanes Stallworth ’91 (Will Rice: BA), who is professor of pediatrics and assistant dean for career advising at the Medical College of Georgia. They have two adult daughters (Helen Wisniewski, 27 years old and married to Glenn, both graduates of Georgia Tech, and Lucy, 22 years old and recent graduate of UGA). Clay’s spare time is devoted to crossword puzzles, birding, piano and discovering new ways to waste time.
“ Charles ‘Ellis’ Ragan (Will Rice: BS; MS, 1995) lives in Port-
land, OR, where he masquerades as an EE for NVIDIA. In his spare time, he likes to ski, mountain bike and travel overseas with his son.
“ Ronnie Po ’91 (Will Rice: BA and BS) is an independent software developer in Pasadena, CA. He is married to Ellen Tsai Po, and they have three children — Jason (21 years old), a fourth-year student at UC San Diego; Brandon (20), a third-year student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo; and Daniel (16), a junior at St. Francis High School in La Cañada Flintridge. As his family moves forward in the empty nest transition, Ronnie is attempting to relive his glory days by playing in an oldies band and posting cover song videos.
“ Will Pecoul (two years at Rice, Tulane ’90) is married to wife Alison with grown daughter Sydney and recent high school graduate son John. He lives in North Carolina and works for Truist Bank.
“Despite a valiant effort, we were unable to solve all of the world’s problems during the weekend discussions but will try again at a future time and place.”
Class Recorder: Phil Miller 612-385-5891 phil_miller_98@yahoo.com
Class Recorder: Alison Cohen
909-213-7789 (cell) ERISAgirl44@yahoo.com
Class recorder Alison Cohen (Brown: BA) sends the following: Sharon Discorfano (Wiess: BA) writes: “A second time we’ve been delighted to discover a Rice connection during a small group excursion with Natural Habitat Adventures! A few years ago, it was an alumna on our boat of 16 in
the Galapagos. This summer, our group of 12 to bear camp in Alaska included the parents of fellow Owl Ross Wyman ’07 (Brown: BS). In other news, after 15 years of animal law and advocacy, I decided to take a sabbatical this past year and returned to my performing arts roots. In addition to having some fun with musical theater songs at one of New York’s prominent cabaret venues, Chelsea Stage + Table, I’ve now performed several times at the legendary Birdland Jazz Club with a group of truly extraordinary musicians, including the pianist who served as Liza Minelli’s musical director for decades. I’m humbled and grateful for these moments. Meanwhile, my yoga teaching has evolved from leading retreats to weeklong stints as guest instructor at various resorts around the world — a wonderful way of combining my love of yoga, teaching and travel. This past year, it was Punta Cana and Costa Rica; next up, Jamaica, Panama and Cancun.”
Madhav Chinnappa (Brown: BA) got a surprise visit from Amber Hutchison Reese (Brown: BA) in London. Their kids got to meet each other, and a wonderful time was had by all.
Becky Roberts Czarnik (Brown: BA) and Alison Cohen had a fabulous time exploring
Colorado Springs for their annual reunion.
Alison Cohen and Becky Roberts Czarnik
Class Recorder: Jamie Nelson 646-505-9990 jnelson0612@hotmail.com
Class Recorder: Tom Harris 205-721-3713 wthmd@yahoo.com
Class recorder Tom Harris (Brown: BS) sends the following: Tim Petersen (Wiess: BA)
writes: “In addition to my primary appointment in anesthesiology and critical care medicine, I recently got a joint appointment in obstetrics and gynecology here at the UNM School of Medicine.”
Class Recorder: Francisco Morales texasliberal@hotmail.com
Class Recorder: Brooke Johnson Borden 919-455-1057 borden.brooke@gmail.com
Class recorder Brooke Johnson Borden (Wiess: BA; BArch, 1998) sends the following: Vivian Mo (Will Rice: BA, 1997) writes: “Got together with some Rice friends in June in Los Angeles. Top row: Jim Arteaga ’95 (Will Rice: BA), Brian Langa ’95 (Will Rice: BS), Tom Lloyd ’95 (Will Rice: BA) and Neelesh Kenia (Baker: BA); bottom row: Jahong Kim ’97 (Will Rice: BA), Vivan Mo and Shalini Jain ’98 (Brown: BA, 1999; MBA, 2004).”
Jen Olson Graves (Sid Rich: BA) writes: “1996 class 50th year celebration: Ashley Lile Milam (Sid
Rich: BA), Stacey Vial (Sid Rich: BA) and I got together this year in Nashville in honor of being 50.”
1997
Class Recorder: Sara Chiu drsarachiu@gmail.com https://www.facebook.com/ RiceUniversity1997
1998
Class Recorders: Ria Papageorgiou Stella Hines ricegrad98@gmail.com
1999
Class Recorder: Stephanie L. Taylor 415-350-0467 Whereisstephanietaylor @gmail.com
2000
Class Recorder: Felisa Vergara Reynolds felisavr@gmail.com
Class Recorder: Kristin Johnson Aldred kris.layne@gmail.com
Class Recorder: Scott Berger csberger@gmail.com
Class Recorder: Julie Yau-Yee Tam 713-828-4062 julietam@alumni.rice.edu https://bit.ly/rice-class-2003
Class Recorder: Kate Hallaway katehallaway@gmail.com www.facebook.com/ groups/1425217191026994
2005
Class Recorder: Alex Sigeda alex.sigeda@gmail.com
Class Recorder: Hugham Chan hugham@gmail.com
Class Recorders: Clint Corcoran clintc@alumni.rice.edu Becky Thilo Tuttle 713-412-4030 becky@alumni.rice.edu
The Class of 2008 needs a new class recorder. To learn more about this volunteer position, please email owlmanac@rice.edu.
In July, Emery Gullickson Richards (Lovett: BA) became Of Counsel to Cabello Hall Zinda, an intellectual property law firm in Houston. A board-certified labor and employment lawyer with nearly a decade of Big Law experience, Emery represents executives, professionals and employers in employment law and executive compensation matters, in addition to litigating commercial cases. She is thrilled to join the team of talented attorneys and Rice alums at CHZ.
Class Recorder: Gina Cao Yu 713-870-9218 ginacaoyu@gmail.com
Class Recorder: Emily Zhu Haynie emilyahaynie@gmail.com
Class recorder Emily Zhu Haynie (Wiess: BA) released her first book, “Behind Clinic Doors.” This daring memoir is full of hilarious, heartbreaking and shocking stories from her training and career as a physician assistant. Emily also writes candidly about her experiences as an Asian American clinician in Texas during the COVID-19 pandemic. Available in paperback and eBook on Amazon and Lulu.
Class Recorder: Alex Wyatt 281-623-8438 awyattlovett@gmail.com
2012
Class Recorder: Daphne Wert Strasert 832-986-3210 daphnestrasert@gmail.com
Katherine Jenson (Lovett: BA) submits the following: “Happy to announce that I’m a secondyear general surgery resident at TTUHSC Permian Basin. I was commissioned into the Air Force Oct. 19.”
Class Recorder: Matt Mariani 908-328-6632 mmariani16@gmail.com
Class Recorder: Molly Richardson Krueger Mollykrueger03@gmail.com
Class recorder Molly Richardson Krueger (McMurtry: BS) writes: In 2023, Asia McCleary-Gaddy Bright (McMurtry: BA) published her first book, “Cultural Issues in Healthcare: Emerging Challenges and Opportunities.” It is available at Springer and Amazon.
Asia Bright with her new book
Class Recorder: Qizhong Wang qizhong.wang2011@gmail.com
Class Recorder: Michaela Dimoff 414-629-5270 michaeladimoff@ricealumni.net
Class Recorder: Margaret Lie margaret.lie@ricealumni.net
Class Recorders: Meg Brigman 713-569-7015 megbrigman@alumni.rice.edu
Haley Kurisky 713-817-6344 haley.e.kurisky@gmail.com www.facebook.com/groups/ rice2018
The Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers has named Rice graduate Nathan Tat (Martel: BA; MS, 2019) as a recipient of the prestigious SASE Achievement Award. The award recognizes the achievements of top talents in STEM. Nathan was honored at the annual SASE National Convention in Boston, MA.
Earning both his undergraduate and graduate degrees within five years, Nathan is a Rice-twice alumnus. Now involved in interdisciplinary fields, Nathan’s curiosity and interests have been foundational to his journey.
He has received multiple accolades, including recognition at the Rice University-Texas Medical Center Sigma Xi Chapter Poster Session, designation as a 20 Under 35 Honoree in the space industry and the Excellence in Interprofessional Education Award from The University of Texas Medical Branch.
Founded in 2007, SASE is dedicated to “advancement of Asian heritage scientists and engineers in education and employment so that they can achieve their full potential.” Members study and work across the United States, including at Rice.
Class Recorder: Isaac “Ike” Arjmand 412-736-1596 isaac.arjmand@gmail.com
Class Recorder: Adria Martinez 713-459-4483 adria@texascres.com
Class Recorder: Kevin Guo guokevin1@gmail.com
2022
Class Recorder: Ben Li Zaltsman zaltsmanben@gmail.com
2023
Class Recorder: Jonathan Lloyd 914-217-5568
jonathan.sc.lloyd@gmail.com
2024
The Class of 2024 needs a class recorder. To learn more about this volunteer position, please email owlmanac@rice.edu.
… is wearing their birthday suits? We’ll never tell!
In late fall 1973, a popular craze — streaking — erupted on college campuses. Not unlike their peers, a group of all-male Rice students shed their bell-bottoms, tie-dyed T-shirts and platform shoes and ran across campus on several occasions during that semester and into the next. In March 1974, six Baker students — two women and four men who knew about the previous runs — decided to organize a coed, daytime streak. A run by the administration building, the quad, around Willy’s Statue, then back to Baker, went off without incident. And while the birthday-suited runners had no aspirations of creating an ongoing tradition, a serendipitous sale on shaving cream sparked an idea with another group, BAADS (Benevolent Aid and Drinking Society), the following semester.
On Friday, Sept. 13, 1974, five Bakerites in the buff donned sneakers and strategically placed shaving cream and then ran from Baker to Jones and past the former president’s house. An abundance of leftover shaving cream following the inaugural run resulted in an official name, Club 13, and subsequent runs on the 13th of every month, a ritual that now celebrates 50 years.
— Tracey Rhoades
Submit news and updates to grad notes coordinator Jose A. Narbona at janv@rice.edu or owlmanac@rice.edu.
Broadstone Books recently released “We the People: Confessions of a Caucasian Southerner,” a collection of poems from Harry Moore ’70 (MA). Retired after teaching writing and literature in community college for four decades, Harry lives with his wife, Cassandra, in Decatur, AL. For earlier works, see his website at harryvmoore.com.
Kyle G. Sweeney ’14 (MA; PhD, 2017) was promoted to associate professor of art history at Winthrop University and recently launched a new research project titled “Capturing the Camino: Simulation and Immersion Through Virtual Reality.” In summer 2024, Sweeney hiked the 500-mile Camino pilgrimage trail, capturing data required for the creation of immersive digital
models of the region’s medieval art and architecture. Preliminary models are viewable on the project’s Instagram page (@capturing.the.camino).
Wanda Pan ’77 (Jones: BA; MLS, 2009) writes: “My father, Poh-Hsi Pan ’69 (PhD), passed away Aug. 17, 2019, after battling Parkinson’slike symptoms for several years. This year would have been his 55th reunion for his PhD in geophysics.
“Known to his friends and colleagues as Percy, he was born in Hanzhou, China, in 1922 and came to the U.S. in 1960, by way of Taiwan, to study for a master’s degree in geophysics at Colorado School of Mines. After graduating in 1962 at the age of 40, he brought his family to the U.S. and worked for Mobil Oil Corp. for three years be -
fore he decided to return to school for his PhD at Rice. His thesis work with Professor Jean-Claude De Bremaecker on direct detection of hydrocarbons, or “bright spots,” launched an innovative method for discovering subsurface oil and gas in the petroleum industry. Upon graduating in 1969, he returned to Mobil, where his talents eventually led him to a promotion as manager of the international exploration division. His proudest, and full circle, moments came when he represented Mobil in discussions with China’s petroleum industry leaders as they looked to major U.S. oil companies to develop oil and gas fields there.
“After retiring in 1992, he and my mother, the love of his life Yi-Yin — also known as Evelyn — finally had time to enjoy leisurely activities. They learned ballroom dancing, sang karaoke, joined a monthly dinner party with friends, took cruises, and traveled to see iconic destinations like the Colosseum, Eiffel Tower, the pyramids of Egypt, Victoria Falls and many more that they only dreamed of when they were struggling during WWII, moving to Taiwan and in the early years after immigrating to the U.S. He also played ping-pong regularly, participated in several amateur tournaments around the country and often won trophies in the senior division for top place finishes.
“Despite adversity and then with eventual prosperity, he remained true to himself: ethical, honorable and disciplined. Totally devoted to Yi-Yin — and setting high expectations for me and my brother, Golden ’78 (Sid Rich: BS), who earned his MD in 1982 at Washington U. School of Medicine in St. Louis — he was satisfied with living frugally because he had achieved all that he had hoped for. Nevertheless, he always tried to repay generosity whenever he had the chance. Consequently, in gratitude for the fellowship he received to study for his PhD, he established the Pan Family Endowed Fellowship for Postdoc recipients in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at the Wiess School of Natural Sciences at Rice. As an industrious and successful immigrant, he embodied the American Dream, and his family is proud of his legacy. They are Yi-Yin; Wanda and husband David Tocco, three granddaughters and their spouses, and four great-grandchildren (so far); Golden, two granddaughters (including Jennifer Pan ’10 [Martel: BA]) and a grandson.
“If any of his former classmates or students, when he taught at Rice as an adjunct professor from 1975–76, would like to send me their thoughts about my father, please contact me at datocco@ swbell.net.”
We love baby Owls! Send your birth announcement and baby photo to your class recorder or owlmanac@rice.edu.
Kristin Necessary Brookhart ’01 (Jones: BA) writes: “My husband, Daniel, and I are delighted to announce the arrival of our second child, Evangeline Morgan Brookhart, on June 6. Big sister Remington is an amazing helper and loved her from the very first moment.”
Marianne and William McKee ’05 (Lovett: BA) welcomed Emilianne Endress McKee on Jan. 2, 2024. She has been welcomed with hugs and kisses by big brother Jackson (7) and big sisters Mary Margaret (4) and Eliza (3).
Quinn Anthony Strasert was born June 19, 2024, to Brian ’14 (Lovett: BS; MS, 2017) and Daphne Wert Strasert ’12 (Lovett: BA and BS).
Rev. Frank L. Barcus , Feb. 4, 2019
Robert D. Brace , Dec. 26, 2008
Lily Callihan Matthews
Robert Riesenberg , May 7, 1992
Salvadore J. Madero
Beatrice Flam
Diana Gonzalez
Joe F. Blewett
Joseph Z. Garza Jr.
Bennie Morrison Harris , March 15, 1954
Nancy Baker Howard 1932
Joe Lube , July 6, 1993
Elizabeth V. Raney
Lawrence O. Seerden , Oct. 5, 1970 1933
Huber D. Blair, March 6, 1949
Carlos Gonzales
Josephine Mary Lou Herbelin MacFerrin , July 28, 1982
Monroe J. Mason
Charles R. Nelson
Lewis R. Taylor, Aug. 9, 1972 1934
Benjamin C. Briseno
Charles H. Daniel
Olivia Gonzalez 1935
Yolanda Gonzalez Ortega
Joseph W. Rose
Frances E. Stremmel
1939
Joseph V. Collins
1940
Erlene Weeden Chrysler, Oct. 11, 2017
Edwin R. Ivy, Dec. 17, 2011
Edwin A. McLelland
Leroy O. Sweval , June 17, 1979
Annie M. Joekel Walthall , Oct. 8, 2015
1941
James D. Bankier (PhD)
George L. Cassell , March 19, 2009
Ivan A. Freeman , Nov. 10, 1984
Barbara Scrimgeour Hamilton , Feb. 26, 2005
Charles J. Roberts , Jan. 7, 1944
Johanna Mansfeld Roth , Aug. 28, 1975
Hagen Taylor, Oct. 27, 2000
Dorothy Holmes Winslett , June 9, 2016
1942
Joy Walton Terry, July 18, 2018
1943
William G. Baker, Dec. 8, 2014
Stanley G. Blum , Jan. 13, 2019
George W. Garrett
Betty Zo Whitaker Hardy, March 31, 2014
Elizabeth Atkinson Brien , Feb. 17, 2022
Granville O. Dutton , Jan. 3, 2016
Leon W. Ellsworth , Feb. 8, 2006
Hicklin A. Harrel , Dec. 24, 2018
Martha McCollum Henck , June 16, 2020
Marcus A. Kyle , Jan. 18, 2010
Bruce G. Rogers , May 3, 2007
Perry B. Alers (PhD), Nov. 2, 2021
Robert L. Alexander, May 22, 2015
Garland E. Allison , Jan. 6, 2013
George K. Dupuy, Dec. 27, 2002
George M. Graham , June 24, 2005
Myra M. Kahle Horsey, Sept. 8, 2012
Lonnie M. Nolan , Nov. 4, 2017
Ralph H. Soape , Oct. 23, 2018
Brad L. Bradshaw, Feb. 17, 1992
Ernest B. Brown , Aug. 10, 2004
Patricia Semaan Gantt , Nov. 22, 2017
Peggy Lockwood Jarmon , Jan. 4, 2019
Robert O. Jaynes , Nov. 14, 2015
Ruben W. Knowles , Nov. 28, 2020
Alice Ray Stallings Overton , May 6, 2017
Richard F. Stillahn , March 28, 2002
William J. Taft , March 21, 2005
William E. Wallis , March 4, 2019
Robert C. Wheatley (PhD), April 27, 2012
Mildred E. Brown Ashcraft , May 19, 1999
James H. Brown , July 26, 2009
Edgar J. Davis , March 31, 2015
Doris Ione Scholl Marshall , July 13, 2024
Emily Moore Nichols , Nov. 16, 2014
Frances M. Potts Rogers , April 27, 2004
Jerry P. Conner (PhD), July 1, 2022
Robert L. Coon , April 10, 2003
Barney D. Garrison , Sept. 21, 2024
Dr. Clifford J. Hoffmann , March 16, 2020
Donald C. McLeaish , April 24, 2014
Nathan B. Miron (PhD), Feb. 22, 2014
Mary Ann Castello Patterson , May 6, 2013
Betty J. Underwood Schleier, Aug. 26, 2024
Ross Milton Carter, July 11, 2011
Peggy Albritton Conner, March 20, 2019
Dr. George W. Ford , Oct. 6, 2024
Walter G. Hall , April 24, 2024
Lola M. Daniell Kelley, Sept. 25, 2013
Dorothea E. Gajewsky McLure , March 22, 2023
Peggy Adair Staton , March 22, 2017
Jarvis S. Watson , June 23, 2019
James M. Blue , June 4, 2018
Nick G. Dokos , May 10, 2022
Bill L. Horn , Aug. 12, 2024
Robert P. Newton (PhD), Aug. 28, 2020
John E. Plapp (PhD), Feb. 18, 2024
William C. Raymer, July 16, 2023
Robert D. Sellers , Aug. 16, 2017
Arthur E. Smith , Oct. 20, 2023
Robert O. Wilford , May 29, 2021
Woodrow L. Wilson , Jan. 21, 2015
Jay W. Zink (PhD), June 18, 2022
George T. Butler, Feb. 6, 2020
Dorothy Bartlett Clark , Aug. 27, 2024
Patrick A. Flynn , March 9, 2015
Colleen Alessandra Jennings , Oct. 29, 2024
Frederick W. Johnson , May 22, 2021
Clara Mohr Kotch , Aug. 9, 2024
Howard C. Marchand (PhD), Dec. 8, 2019
George W. Oprea , Aug. 12, 2021
Arthur R. Prell , April 28, 2021
James E. Rogers , Oct. 13, 2008
Gwen Garnett Thomas , June 27, 2024
Philip H. Wright , Aug. 13, 2021
Charlean F. Gajewsky
Alexander, Sept. 26, 2024
Marvin B. Edwards , June 22, 2024
Ben W. Gilmore , March 30, 2023
Doris J. Beasley Martin , May 22, 2023
Alvin E. Soniat , Aug. 20, 2024
James I. Vette (PhD), Oct. 26, 2015
1953
Robert A. McMurtray, Oct. 28, 2024
1954
Walter O. Irish , April 1, 2021
Doris E. Cassil Schulse , Oct. 8, 2024
Emmitt E. Taylor, March 29, 2023
1955
Bob C. Hopkins , Aug. 17, 2024
Connie Jean Dear Lee , July 13, 2024
Dr. Daniel Clarke Redmond II , Feb. 23, 2023
Louis Scharff, July 12, 2024
1956
Mary Maurine Bell Bybee , Aug. 14, 2024
Barbara G. Watson Hoza , Sept. 28, 2024
Robert E. Smith , May 10, 2024
Robert J. Smouse , April 25, 2024
Betty Young Sutton , June 19, 2022
1957
Homer Borgstedte , July 10, 2024
Dr. Allen J. Dennis , Aug. 1, 2024
Perry J. Lyons , June 4, 2024
Hugh E. Miller, Sept. 29, 2024
James E. Peters , Oct. 1, 2024
Mary Wheeler Zelle , May 28, 2024
1958
Richard R. Arnold , Aug. 21, 2024
Andrew J. Davis , Nov. 6, 2024
James P. Mitchell (MS), July 8, 2024
Ann Sheppard Schrader, June 26, 2024
Roy G. Shaw, Aug. 13, 2024
Ed P. Garrett , Oct. 7, 2024
Roy F. House (MA), July 21, 2024
Lee M. Smith , Sept. 3, 2024
Dr. Robert Ralph Weihing , Feb. 15, 2024
Neil D. Anderson (Baker), Oct. 12, 2024
Ruth A. Wicker Duggan (Jones), June 25, 2024
Jack W. Larner (PhD) (Wiess), June 10, 2024
Tommy J. Lawley (PhD) (Will Rice), Sept. 13, 2024
Barton A. Parks (PhD) (Hanszen), Oct. 12, 2024
David L. Tate (Wiess), Sept. 21, 2024
Charles E. Walpole (Will Rice), Aug. 30, 2024
1961
John Q. Lawson (Will Rice), Aug. 6, 2024
David E. Rosenberg (Hanszen), Sept. 22, 2024
Jan M. Smith (Hanszen), June 21, 2024
Dr. David J. Werner (Will Rice), Sept. 27, 2024
1962
Gretchen L. Armstrong (Jones)
Johnny B. Burrell (Wiess), Sept. 28, 2024
Gregg S. Edwards (PhD) (Will Rice), Sept. 12, 2024
Gayle Dupont Evans (Jones), Aug. 15, 2024
1963
Robert R. Maxfield (MS; PhD) (Hanszen), Aug. 13, 2024
Marshall P. Williams (PhD) (Hanszen), July 26, 2024
1964
Dr. Walter J. Meyer (Baker), Nov. 8, 2024
Barbara Beasley Andrews (Jones), April 11, 2024
Richard A. Best (Hanszen), Aug. 4, 2024
Billy E. Bonner (MA; PhD), Aug. 8, 2024
Burke Burkart (PhD), July 29, 2024
William T. Carlisle (Baker), April 10, 2024
Harlan N. Head (PhD), Oct. 1, 2024
Klaus K. Neuendorf (MA; PhD), June 10, 2024
1966
David M. Griffin (MArch), Aug. 13, 2024
1967
Terry W. Feagin (PhD) (Wiess), Oct. 29, 2024
Harvey J. Gannon (Baker), Aug. 8, 2024
Charles M. Young (PhD) (Baker), Aug. 30, 2024
1968
John C. Lochner Jr. (Wiess), Sept. 15, 2024
Robert A. May (PhD), July 1, 2024
1969
Robert E. Henry (Will Rice), July 20, 2024
1970
Larry W. Davis (Hanszen), Sept. 21, 2024
Marie-Louise Hoerhold Weber (PhD), Sept. 9, 2016
1971
Troxel Ballou (Baker), Sept. 6, 2024
1972
Larry J. Friesen (MS; PhD), July 28, 2024
Linda K. Cherrington Hershey (Jones), July 22, 2024
James A. Waldroop (PhD) (Sid Rich), Oct. 5, 2024
1973
Bryan F. Helm (Hanszen), Oct. 23, 2024
1974
Dan P. Calvin (Wiess), Sept. 30, 2024
Robert S. Phillips (Will Rice), Aug. 8, 2024
Rob L. Sides (Hanszen), Oct. 1, 2023
1975
Priscilla M. Jennings (Brown), April 13, 2024
Bruce S. Woods (Will Rice), May 6, 2024
1977
Archibald Henderson III (PhD) (Will Rice), Nov. 2, 2024
1978
Thomas J. Brzustowicz (MS; PhD)
Cindy Stanard Dankberg (Jones), Oct. 13, 2024
Dr. Gary A. Nussey (Lovett), July 19, 2024
1979
Clifford J. Shapiro (Wiess), Sept. 20, 2024
1980
Richard E. Giusti (Will Rice), Aug. 20, 2024
Neill Massello (Hanszen), Oct. 20, 2023
1981
Jay D. Abramovitz (Baker), Aug. 28, 2024
Dina Sale Ringnald (Brown), Aug. 21, 2024
1983
Ernesto L. Maldonado (MArch), Aug. 13, 2024
J. T. Thornton Jr. (MA; PhD), June 28, 2024
Robert W. Warfield (Wiess), July 28, 2024
1985
Texas A. Burroughs Anderson (PhD), Oct. 3, 2024
1988
Howard L. Jones (MA), June 25, 2024
1989
Michael Dobson (Lovett), July 19, 2024
Dr. Brian J. Holmes (Brown), May 10, 2024
1993
Elizabeth S. Lam (MMus), Aug. 16, 2024
1997
Dr. Darrell L. Moulton (Sid Rich), June 23, 2024
2000
Eric Baca (MBA), Nov. 4, 2023
James G. Dallal (Lovett), Sept. 12, 2024
Alexandra A. Porter Wahlig (Wiess), July 21, 2024
Colin R. Ocker (MBA), July 13, 2024
Scott A. Gale (MBA), Sept. 24, 2024
Andrea J. Rodriguez Avila (Jones), Aug. 26, 2024
Kathryn E. Petree (McMurtry), Oct. 12, 2024
Robert R. Maxfield ’63 (MS; PhD) (Hanszen), Aug. 13, 2024
FACULTY
Anna B. Caflisch (PhD), senior lecturer of French studies, Aug. 24, 2024
Edward L. Cox (PhD), associate professor emeritus of history
YingHua He (PhD), associate professor of economics, July 2, 2024
Stephen Subtelny (PhD), professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology, Dec. 30, 2023
Charlotte E. Beaudet , Fondren Library, Dec. 24, 2005
Jean L. Edwards , Dec. 3, 2017
Wayne L. Graham , Athletics, Sept. 3, 2024
Eileen Grant , Controller’s Office, June 17, 2024
Kathleen P. Ivey, Human Resources, Jan. 2, 2016
Sylvia Y. Louie , School of Humanities, July 16, 2024
Carl M. MacDowell , Provost’s Office and Office of the President, Aug. 29, 2024
Carolyn “Mickey” M. Mata , Alumni Office, Sept. 1, 2024
Duc V. Pham , Fondren Library, June 15, 2024
Richard W. Pickar, Shepherd School of Music, Oct. 3, 2024
Kelly A. Quin , Development and Alumni Relations, Nov. 30, 2024
Elizabeth G. Reynolds , Aug. 21, 2024
David Schwartz , July 26, 2014
Gregoria Vasquez , Human Resources, Feb. 15, 2019
To learn more about how you can support Rice athletes on and off the field, contact Ryan Hall, senior associate athletic director of development, at 713-348-6970 or rh71@rice.edu.
The philanthropic spirit driving innovation in Rice baseball.
It all began with a phone call between two old friends: Jeremy Thigpen ’97 and José Cruz Jr. ’96.
Jeremy recalls, “José, who had just become the head baseball coach at Rice, called me up in the middle of his recruiting efforts and said, ‘Man, there’s a pitcher we want, but it’s between us and Vanderbilt. He said he’d come to Rice if we had a pitching lab.”’
Jeremy saw an opportunity to support his friend and the program they both love. “I told him to call back and tell him we had one,” he said. “When he asked how we’d do that, I just said, ‘We’ll figure it out.’”
Support from Thigpen and other generous donors funded the creation of “The Pigpen,” a state-of-the-art pitching lab. Rice is one of the few college programs in the country with the ability to capture biomechanical data, measure pitch force, track ball flight and provide high-speed, detailed analysis — all aimed at improving performance and mitigating injuries.
Read more about this incredible gift and the Rice Pitching Lab at giving.rice.edu/pitch-perfect.
Rice University, Creative Services–MS 95 P.O. Box 1892 , Houston, TX 77251-1892
Organization U.S. Postage PAID Permit #7549
Houston, Texas
An unexpected, colorful installation by artist Eva LeWitt hangs in the Shepherd School’s Alice Pratt Brown Hall. In her work, LeWitt alters commonly found manufactured materials, manipulating their color, texture and scale to create individual shapes. Here, LeWitt introduces a vibrant visual rhythm into the architectural grandeur of the hall with a large-scale assembly of concentric mesh strips hung vertically at varying lengths, creating dynamic forms of rising and falling color that evoke the movements of a symphony. “Her installation brings color, shape and movement into the space, beautifully amplifying the experience of this hall,” says Frauke Josenhans, curator at the Moody. The piece is the newest addition to the Moody’s Platform series, which invites artists to respond to artworks, architectural structures and research at Rice. Platform: Eva LeWitt is a reminder of the Moody’s commitment to making art accessible in unexpected spaces. The installation will be in place through Dec. 26, 2025.
Watch a video about the installation at magazine.rice.edu/lewitt
LeWitt, ‘Untitled’ Temporary public art on view through Dec. 26, 2025. Commissioned by the Moody Center for the Arts.