GATEWAY STUDY OF
LEADERSHIP
TURNING
POINTS
SCHOOL OF
SOCIAL SCIENCES
Connecting Ideas
Featuring Engineering
Connecting Ideas
Turning Points Series Discover nuggets of unconventional wisdom through the excerpts of student interviews with Rice University faculty. Copyright 2014 Rice University. All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the School of Social Sciences at Rice University. Requests for permission should be directed to ipek@rice.edu. Online presence at http://turningpoints.rice.edu.
Books in the 2013-2014 Series III Engineering: Choosing Academia Connecting Ideas Envisioning Solutions Leading Innovation Empowering Others
Previous Turning Points series: 2012-2013 Series II Natural Sciences 2011-2012 Series I Social Sciences
Rice University School of Social Sciences
Gateway Study of Leadership TURNING POINTS
{series III | 2013 - 2014} Engineering
Connecting Ideas
Gateway School of Social Sciences Rice University 6100 Main Street Houston, Texas 77005-1827 U.S.A.
Turning Points Series DIRECTOR
Ipek Martinez PRODUCER & WEB MANAGER
Alex Wyatt 2013-2014 GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP DIRECTORS Nitin Agrawal Cynthia Bau Bo Kim 2013-2014 GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP FELLOWS Mariam Ahmed Nathan Andrus Jyra Bickham Mary Charlotte Carroll Sai Chilakapati Rucy Cui Nicholas Fleder Justin Fu Cathy Hu Richard Huang Wendy Liu Michelle Lo Xinnan Lu James McCreary Giray Ozseker Tanya Rajan Andrew Ta Guangya Wang
A NOTE FROM THE GATEWAY DIRECTOR
The 2013-2014 Turning Points series features excerpts from interviews with the Rice University George R. Brown School of Engineering faculty conducted by the Gateway Study of Leadership students. Each year, the School of Social Sciences Gateway Study of Leadership participants are engaged in interviewbased research on leadership themes and lessons offered by academics. During the interview process, students explore topics such as the influence of family expectations on career decisions, the role of mentors, the sources of inspiration for research projects, and faculty thoughts on leadership and the role of academia in our society. This year, the collection also includes thoughts shared by Rice engineering faculty on creativity, innovation, and interdisciplinary collaboration. We hope the stories and experiences featured in these books provide a window into the life of research scholars and demonstrate the different ways that ideas and careers are born and flourish.
Ipek Martinez
CONTENTS
1. 2.
Genevera Allen, Ph.D. Creativity is Making Connections
1
Genevera Allen, Ph.D. 3 Diversity in Engineering
3.
Maria Oden, Ph.D. Crossing Disciplines to Solve Problems
5
4.
Wade Adams, Ph.D. Pondering Nature
7
5.
Rob Griffin, Ph.D. Rocking the Boat
9
6.
Rob Griffin, Ph.D. Prioritizing Leads to Greater Success
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7.
Luay Nakleh, Ph.D. Freedom in Academia
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8.
Ashutosh Sabharwal, Ph.D. See Things Getting Better
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9. 10.
Xaq Pitkow, Ph.D. Bringing Ideas Together
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Jane Grande-Allen, Ph.D. The Creative Process
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11.
Oleg Igoshin, Ph.D. Practical & In-Depth
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12. David Johnson, Ph.D. 23 Power of Computers 13.
T.S. Eugene Ng, Ph.D. Solving Problems
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14.
Xaq Pitkow, Ph.D. Organizing Collaboration
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15.
Genevera Allen, Ph.D. Growing Public Influence
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16.
Amina Qutub, Ph.D. Collaboration & Creativity
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17.
Ashutosh Sabharwal, Ph.D. Building Bridges
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About the Contributors Acknowledgements
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TURNING POINTS ONE
Creativity is Making Connections Genevera Allen, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Statistics, Rice University
Creativity can take on a lot of different forms. Math is a very abstract world, and creativity gives you the ability to see what exists and see well beyond it to things that don’t exist and things that could exist. That’s a really important thing. Another part of creativity is making connections between completely disparate things. And sometimes those connections are the important things that lead to a completely new innovation and a novel concept. Because I’m in a lot of fields, I read literature from statistics, applied math, electrical engineering, machine learning, and also neuroscience and genomics. People call everything different names in all these different fields—it’s so confusing—but it’s important because sometimes there are really valuable things in there. If you can form connections between something in genomics and something in neuroscience, 1
that’s where breakthroughs happen – it’s in the connections. I really like being a part of lots of different worlds.
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TURNING POINTS TWO
Diversity in Engineering Genevera Allen, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Statistics, Rice University
My advisor in graduate school is known for doing statistical learning, and statistical learning is on the border of statistics and machine learning, which is mainly in computer science. When I was on the job market, I applied for only statistics jobs, but when I started here, it was a joint appointment between Rice in statistics and Baylor College of Medicine in a neurological research institute. This was not at all what I was looking for. I was coming to take what I thought was going to be a practice interview, but it turned out that I was really impressed with the institute and the vision. Everybody told me, “don’t take a joint appointment, it’s a terrible idea,” but I decided to try it anyway, and that’s how I got involved with the neuroscience and genomics side. And then, as I realized there’s more and more connections between fields, things just kept getting 3
added on. My work right now is probably closer to what a lot of people do in Electrical and Computer Engineering or Applied Math at Rice than it is to other statistics faculty members. There’s a lot of overlaps between the fields, I publish in all different venues.
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TURNING POINTS THREE
Crossing Disciplines to Solve Problems Maria Oden, Ph.D. Professor in the Practice, Engineering Education, Rice University
It’s my belief that many of our world’s problems are technical in nature; require engineers to solve those problems. However, these challenges also require other kinds of thinking. I’m a big proponent of the interdisciplinary design work. In my global health technologies classes, many of the students are not engineers or scientists. They are learning how to build solutions to global health challenges. The reason they’re so valuable is that they bring a different kind of thinking to the problem. The reality is that even if we come up with new technology development, there are policy implications or uptake issues or sociologic issues in a community, particularly around putting in a new technology. One example is: we have a bubble continuous 5
positive airway pressure (CPAP) project that started out as a capstone design team a number of years ago, and now it’s scaled up and the CPAP systems are being distributed countrywide in Malawi. In Malawi, it turns out, to put a CPAP on, they put prongs in the baby’s nose, which turns out that there’s a huge fear of tubing into anything in the face in Malawi. So there’s a whole social side of whether or not someone would be willing allow their child to be treated with this system. As an engineer, I think “It will help your child breathe, why wouldn’t you try it?”, I need someone on my team to say, “There’s a social issue here. We need to work through and we need to understand what it is. We need to educate people. That’s not the right approach.” I feel like every discipline has something to add. We don’t serve ourselves very well by saying engineers over here, social scientists over here, and let’s not meet, because the issues cross over and we can help each other.
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TURNING POINTS FOUR
Pondering Nature Wade Adams, Ph.D. Senior Faculty Fellow, Materials Science & Nanoengineering, Rice University
The ivory tower of academia is an old idea. But it’s changed a lot. You don’t have time to think these days, between your iPhone and email and meetings and everything else you have to do. Even as a researcher, your time has become incredibly precious. I think we need to have think tanks, places where there are collections of people that are just pondering the nature of nature and looking for the tough problems that we don’t understand how to solve yet. We need that. It’s important for a country, it’s important for a society to have people that are willing to just be ivory tower academics. They need to both teach and learn and to push knowledge for the sake of knowledge. At the same time, limited resources, limited time, limited money especially, forces a lot more relevance into the picture, more now than it did before. This country is renowned 7
for its creativity. You don’t get that if you are really chained to a relevant objective and have to work on it to support yourself and your crew. The nature of academia has changed somewhat and it is being forced to change even more to be relevant. Your research, to be funded, has to be relevant to society in some way that you could write a paragraph about it and convince Congress that it’s important. I think there should be a balance between fundamental and applied research, and the trouble is that if we slip too far from our country’s strength in governmentsponsored fundamental research (which doesn’t have to have demonstrable output), then you run the risk of not being creative at all. If you give people money to do research to do something that is applied but you give them a little bit of flexibility in what they are doing, they will still have that creativity which makes them unique. I think you need a balance of both. In the USAF Materials Lab, we were encouraged to spend 15% of our time working on “pie-in-the-sky” ideas!
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TURNING POINTS FIVE
Rocking the Boat Rob Griffin, Ph.D. Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Rice University
There are people that are technical leaders with a crazy ability to see nuances in problems that are trying to be solved. They have insight into ways to approach a problem from a different angle instead of going down a traditional pathway. Not letting the past dictate how you approach something is a real way of showing leadership and innovation in research. I think that is true across the board. Just because this is the way it was done last year does not mean this is how it should be done now. I think the ability to rock that boat without making too many waves is an example of how you can be an innovative leader. Research teams are becoming larger and more cross-disciplinary, and the people that can take the reins in such team situations are absolutely leaders. For example, it would not be very much of 9
a stretch for me for example to corral four or five different atmospheric chemists to work on a relevant problem. Real leadership would be the ability to corral a mathematician and an atmospheric chemist and a sociologist, or epidemiologist, or someone from the health center to tackle the same issue. Corralling breadth is difficult. I think that people that should be in leadership positions are those who fluidly move among those groups and keep people united towards their goals.
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TURNING POINTS SIX
Prioritizing Leads to Greater Success Rob Griffin, Ph.D. Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Rice University
The most important thing for me to do is manage my time wisely. It is very easy if you don’t have a deadline for something to let it slide. I tend to set aside blocks of time during specific days for working on a specific thing. I find myself actually getting things done even when they do not have a deadline. That approach has worked very well for me. Being a full-time faculty member with research and teaching and being a dad and a husband and a college master, there are demands coming from almost every angle. Being able to compartmentalize the tasks has been the most effective way for me to manage. In terms of bad habits, I check my email too much. It is a bad habit when you instantaneously drop something for something that probably could have waited. I check my email and respond to things 11
right away when it could have waited an hour or two for me to finish something else up. I also should take more downtime for relaxing or going for a run or whatever. I think that people don’t take time for themselves, resulting in a decrease in productivity. If you don’t take that time to revamp yourself, it takes longer to do everything else. That is a bad habit that I sometimes let myself fall into. I do find myself rewriting papers or re-reading things. If I had just taken the time to refresh my mind and have a little break, I would have had it done within the same amount of time.
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TURNING POINTS SEVEN
Freedom in Academia Luay Nakhleh, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Computer Science, Rice University
Academia has two major roles.
One of them
is education; you are training always the next generation of scientists and teachers and doctors and lawyers. The traditional role of academia was for teaching and education, but the other is research. Some people make fun of professors and faculty; doing research on some crazy things that have no relevance, especially people say that about mathematicians. They ask, “Why are they looking at this mathematical question that has no relevance?�, and I think actually this is where the truth lies. For companies, for example, like the Googles of the world and so on, they do everything for a profit and it has to be for an immediate profit, the same thing with pharmaceutical companies, they want the drug, like one of the things that I think about evolutionary biology, if I get a disease, of course I go to a doctor, 13
right? I don’t go to an evolutionary biologist to try to tell me about what happened five-hundredthousand years ago, right? However, evolutionary biology is about trying to come up with explanations. Doctor is about treating things, but the question is what caused this? Why is there so much obesity in the country, why do you see an increasing rate of diabetes around the world? Now if you think about the explanation for these things, you have to go back to evolutionary biology questions, so I think academia is playing this role, and if you think about something that we are used to today as something simple like the Internet, the idea actually came from academic research. It did not come from Microsoft or from Google; I mean Google didn’t exist even. So it is the academia that drives innovation and once innovation gets close to the point of being commercialized and so on, this is where you start seeing companies. Google, it was started by two graduate students and their advisor at Stanford, and then when they saw the potential for it, they stepped out and said okay, let’s start up this company.
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TURNING POINTS EIGHT
See Things Getting Better Ashutosh Sabharwal, Ph.D. Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rice University
I’m now working on two different researches that have nothing to do with each other. But I spent most of my career, and still work heavily, on wireless communications, things which make your cell phones connect faster, the icon on your Smartphone that says ‘4G’ or so on so forth. I work on the mathematical theories of wireless and the actual implementations – how do you actually achieve the fundamental limits. Secondly, more recently over last four years, because of our vicinity with Baylor, I became interested in inventing new ways of mobile healthcare. Wireless is actually a well-established industry. We actually see an impact in our lifetime. The wireless concept gets brought to actual parts in an eight to ten-year life cycle. Something invented today, if it is useful, will show 15
up in products somewhere around 8 or 10 years later. So we actually get to see that. The impact, collectively, is to see things getting better for all engineers. Engineers are always working to make them faster, smaller, and lighter. Those are the things that drive us. Somewhere in there are our contributions. It’s hard to identify what exactly I did, but I would say community contributes towards the larger goal of improving technology, and we’re part of that community which contributes toward next generation of systems.
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TURNING POINTS NINE
Bringing Ideas Together Xaq Pitkow, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rice University
I think that creativity, in some aspect of the word, is necessary to innovation, because I think the meanings are the same. If you are going to innovate it is because you recognize an absence somewhere, and you want to fill that absence, you are capable of filling that absence. And sometimes innovation is maybe an application of existing technology, and so maybe some people would not describe that as creativity in the way that somebody who is developing some new, unforeseen or never before manifested technology or development, but I take a broader view of it. I think someone can be creative in application and creative in identifying problems. So, there is this famous mathematician called Paul Erdos, and he was a crazy guy. He would just go around, he was homeless, but he had a suitcase and 17
he would travel around to mathematician friends and just drop in on them, and he would knock on their door and say “My brain is open, let’s do some math!� And he would stay with them until they kicked him out, and he was extremely well-loved but also very difficult. He was the most prolific mathematician of all time, he collaborated with a thousand people, just an absurd number. I would say that beyond being an exceptionally creative mathematician, he was also creative at identifying problems that were well matched to the people he was with. And so he had those two kinds of creativity, but if he just had the creativity of identifying problems, and other people were able to solve them, then you would be a real innovator, because you are bringing these ideas together. Every bit of creativity is bringing ideas together; it is never creating something from the vacuum. There is always some kind of thread or experience that you bring that out of.
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TURNING POINTS TEN
The Creative Process Jane Grande-Allen, Ph.D. Professor, Bioengineering, Rice University
I encourage a lot of creativity. If people can come up with an alternative solution to a laboratory problem, that’s awesome. I’ve had students who definitely had to do a lot of design, creative approaches, creative use of materials, being able to say “that didn’t work.” The ability for them to recognize they either need to figure something out or take the project into different directions is very valuable. So I try to praise that whenever I see it, and just encourage them. Feasibility is also very important. That has to be balanced. But in general I would like to have their ideas and their interests guide their projects combined with my wisdom on what is feasible and what is also cutting-edge.
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TURNING POINTS ELEVEN
Practical & In-Depth Oleg Igoshin, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Bioengineering, Rice University
Think of biology versus medicine; in medicine many treatments work even with incomplete understanding of how the body works. We can nevertheless do some very successful things as we need to go to applications right away. On the other hand, if you think of the fundamental biology and you really focus on understanding, and then at some point you discover some depths of it maybe even without a particular indicated application. However, a few years down the road this understanding can become very useful, for a new treatment or a new drug. The bioengineering field spans between fundamental biology and medicine. What’s happening, in my opinion, is that the approaches that go to practical applications right away, without in-depth understanding, have fundamental limitations, just like when you pick all the low-hanging 21
fruits and you don’t have a ladder to reach the higher ones. I see my group is really trying to build that ladder and try to get there. In the whole field of bioengineering there is a big revolution going on. A decade ago, most bioengineering was basically trying to use classical engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and apply these disciplines to biology. Now, what’s happening is that we are trying to engineer with biology; researchers taking the biological parts and putting them together and making those biological parts into the intraconnected system. With that, you really need to look for fundamental biological knowledge, and that’s basically what we have been doing.
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TURNING POINTS TWELVE
Power of Computers David Johnson, Ph.D. Professor, Computer Science, Rice University
When you think about how fast does biology or chemistry or physics or something advance, those are purely physical, tied inherently to their real-world fields, and you can study the real world, you can try to understand the real world, but it only moves at the rate where you can understand the real world. Computers, if you ignore for the moment that they run on hardware, in software, you can make software do anything you can imagine. You’re not limited to anything that exists today in the real world, you’re not limited to how the real world works, you can make a computer, through software, do anything, so software, I guess can move at a faster rate than more physical-based fields of science or engineering, but we’re also being helped a whole lot by the physical advances in hardware. Computers run so much faster than they used to, have so much more memory. 23
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TURNING POINTS THIRTEEN
Solving Problems T.S. Eugene Ng, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Computer Science, Rice University
I’m biased; I believe that engineers are all very smart people, and I think it is really important to develop more engineers to be in leadership roles. Traditionally, because engineering is such a problem-solving-oriented discipline, leadership training is not always the top priority. Engineers are trained to solve problems as opposed to inspiring other people to act or to connect different groups of people to make things happen -- skills that are necessary for effective leadership. I think society in general can benefit from having more leaders with an engineering background because they’re highly trained to solve hard problems.
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TURNING POINTS FOURTEEN
Organizing Collaboration Xaq Pitkow, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rice University
If you look at the meetings that scientists go to, there are usually these meetings where people exchange ideas. One interesting goal of leadership in academia is in organizing that kind of stuff. If I look at other leaders in the field, some of them are thought leaders, so they just do their thinking and they give important talks and they inspire people. I myself have been inspired by a couple people, and then there are some other leaders who are really good at getting people together, and saying, oh, I think you guys would like to interact, in establishing a venue where that could happen, and establishing a common subject matter so that the interactions can happen.
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TURNING POINTS FIFTEEN
Growing Public Influence Genevera Allen, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Statistics, Rice University
The standard role of academia, of course, is to define and broaden the knowledge base, and that’s the research side. This pushes the boundaries, and that is hugely important. This cannot be overstated. It’s the innovation that started in academia that makes Silicon Valley possible and Wall Street possible and pharmaceutical companies and biomedical research possible; all that has foundation in academia and academic research. Academic research is vitally important, for our economy. At least in science and math side, it has enormous impact. The role of academia as far as teaching-wise, has been changing because of the online courses. I think there are a lot of new venues to teach besides a traditional lecture hall. For example: blogs, Twitter, etc. A lot of professors are now starting to have more public personas and public profiles, and that’s 29
something that I’ve sort of semi-embraced and I probably should embrace more fully. There’s a role for professors, I think, that’s a lot broader than just teaching in a traditional classroom setting.
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TURNING POINTS SIXTEEN
Collaboration & Creativity Amina Qutub, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Bioengineering, Rice University
In our lab, it is exciting that we come from very different backgrounds. Some people are from computer science, some people are from mechanical engineering or bioengineering. There is a worldclass athlete in our group. There are artists, musicians. People with family from Brazil, China, Japan, Pakistan, India, Korea, Sweden, Germany. Pulling from all those angles helps us see creative ways of approaching problem solving. I think creativity is also fostered by allowing people to be independent yet work together and get feedback from each other. That is something I really encourage: sharing algorithms and assays across projects, collaborating within the lab, and also giving everyone space to think on their own.
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TURNING POINTS SEVENTEEN
Building Bridges Ashutosh Sabharwal, Ph.D. Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rice University
Traditionally the role of academia is, if you look at the oldest universities, scholars and professors, they served as kind of an independent thought body, which is unafraid of challenging the norm. I think that’s why academic institutions should be left alone. They should not be under any kind of public control or government control or private control. They should completely run independently. I think they should be left alone because there should be one part of society that had complete freedom, and challenges every part of how we do things. They should have complete freedom to study all alternative ways of doing things, every aspect of our lives, and every aspect of our existence. For the large part academia has served that purpose but I think it has not always been sincere to that goal. Whenever we stray, we 33
as a society suffer, i.e. when the scholars become biased on their viewpoints. I think engineering is very easy to justify. I will confess that I’m an engineer so my thinking is biased and hence limited in its scope of thought. There are people who’re more knowledgeable in other aspects, e.g., social sciences and natural sciences. They would know more and can contribute more to this discussion. But for engineering, we are inspired to translate innovations into practice. So we are largely connected to what happens and have a direct impact. Secondly, a lot of our problems encountered in engineering are inspired by what actually is an existing problem. There’s a bridge to be built, but we don’t know how to build it today. That becomes an engineering challenge and the academics will be involved in figuring out how to build that bridge.
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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Dr. Wade Adams is a Senior Faculty Fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. He was educated at the U.S. Air Force Academy (B.S. Physics 1968), Vanderbilt University (M.S. Health Physics 1970), and the University of Massachusetts (Ph.D. Polymer Science and Engineering 1984). He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Dr. Adams also retired from the Air Force Reserve with the rank of Colonel in 1998. Dr. Adams joined Rice University in January 2002, as the Director of the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, later named the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University, the first organized nanotech center in the world, founded in 1993 by its namesake. In January 2012 he became Associate Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering. Dr. Genevera Allen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at Rice University. Her research interests include developing mathematical tools to help scientists understand massive amounts of data sets that are produced by technological advances in medicine, engineering, the Internet, and finance. Her applied research interests include neuroimaging, high-throughput genomics, imaging, and metabolomics. Dr. Allen received her B.A. from Rice University in 2006 and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2010. Dr. Jane Grande-Allen is a Professor of Bioengineering and Associate Chair of External Partnerships at Rice University. Her primary research applies engineering
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analysis to understand and fight heart valve disease. After receiving a B.A. with top honors in Mathematics and Biology from Transylvania University, she received a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from University of Washington. Dr. Rob Griffin is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University. Dr. Griffin’s research involves aerosol thermodynamics and chemistry, air pollution transport, atmospheric chemistry, regional air quality modeling, and urban air quality. Dr. Griffin’s research interests lie in performing field, laboratory, and computational experiments designed to understand the effects and behavior of organic species in the troposphere. Dr. Griffin received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Tufts University in 1993 and his M.S./Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Caltech in 1997/2000. Dr. Oleg Igoshin is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University. His primary research involves the design principles and characterization of biochemical networks, pattern formation in bacterial biofilms, and genetic networks in bacterial and stem cell development. First pursuing a B.Sc. of Physics from Novosibirsk State University in Russia, Dr. Igoshin graduated summa cum laude. After receiving a M.Sc. in Chemical Physics from Feinberg Graduate School Wiezmann Institute of Science in Israel, he received a Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley. Dr. David B. Johnson is a Professor in the departments of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rice University. His research interests include network protocols, distributed systems, operating systems, and the interactions between these areas. Dr.
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Johnson received a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematical Sciences in 1982, an M.S. in Computer Science in 1985, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1990, all from Rice University. Dr. Luay Nakhleh is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. His research is in the bioinformatics field and develops methodologies, through implementing software tools and conducting analyses, that are aimed at answering and empowering research into biological questions, specifically evolutionary questions, his main topic of interest. Dr. Nakhleh was born and educated in Israel. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from the Technion in Israel, his M.S. in Computer Science in Texas A&M and a Ph.D. degree at UT Austin. He is the recipient of numerous teaching and fellowship awards such Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, John P. Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and more. Dr. T.S. Eugene Ng is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rice University. His research is focused on developing new network models, network architectures, and holistic networked systems that enable a robust and manageable global networked infrastructure for the future. He also holds four U.S. patents. Dr. Eugene Ng grew up in Hong Kong and got his B.S. in Computer Engineering with Distinction and Magna Cum Laude from the University of Washington. He received his M.S. and subsequently a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Maria Oden is a Professor in the Practice of Engineering Education at Rice University, and Director
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of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. Dr. Oden received her B.S.E. in 1989, M.S. in 1991, and Ph.D. in 1994; all from Tulane University. She has more than 15 years of combined academic, research, clinical experience in biomedical engineering with an emphasis in orthopaedic bioemechanics and computational modeling. This work is also supported by three years of experience in computational modeling working with engineering consultants at SageCrisp Engineering in Houston, TX. Dr. Xaq Pitkow is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University with a joint appointment at the Baylor College of Medicine in Computational Science. His primary research focus is on developing theories of the computational functions of neural networks, especially how they compute properties of the world using ambiguous sensory evidence. Dr. Pitkow received his A.B. in Physics from Princeton University in 1997, and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard University in 2006. He held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Columbia University from 20072010, followed by a postdoctoral research scientist position at the University of Rochester. Dr. Amina Qutub is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University. Her research at Rice University integrates biological systems theory and design to characterize hypoxic response signaling and neurovascular dynamics. After receiving her B.S in Chemical Engineering from Rice University in 1999, Dr. Qutub went on to receive a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from University of California, Berkeley in 2004, as well as graduating from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2009.
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Dr. Ashutosh Sabharwal is a Professor of Eletrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. His research includes “distributed� network information theory, full-duplex wireless communications, directional communication on mobile devices and scalable health. Professor Sabharwal received his B.Tech. in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi in 1993 and his MS and PhD in electrical engineering from the Ohio State University in 1999.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering faculty who graciously spent time sharing their career experiences and educational life stories with the Gateway students through one-on-one interviews. Much appreciation goes to School of Social Sciences Dean Lyn Ragsdale for her ongoing support of the Gateway Study of Leadership program. We would also like to give special recognition to Dr. David Nino, Dr. Phillip Kortum, Dr. David Johnson, Dr. Sergio Chavez and Dr. Royce Carroll, as well as Rice alumni Neeraj Salhotra (’13), Amol Utrankar (’14), Danny Cohen (’14) for their contributions to the training of the 2013-2014 GSL fellows, and to Ms. Jennifer Gucwa for her assistance with editing the publications. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the Gateway Associates and the supporters of the Gateway program for making projects like this possible. Many thanks also go to the current and past Turning Points team and the GSL fellows for the tremendous amount of time and effort they commit to bringing the faculty stories to life.
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