Leading Innovation by Turning Points

GATEWAY STUDY OF

LEADERSHIP

TURNING

POINTS

SCHOOL OF

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Leading Innovation

Featuring Engineering

Leading Innovation

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

Leading Innovation

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.

Ashutosh Sabharwal, Ph.D. Independent Thought Leader

Genevera Allen, Ph.D. 3 Follow Your Own Path

E. Neely Atkinson, Ph.D. Freedom to Innovate

Keith Cooper, Ph.D. Decisions

Illya Hicks, Ph.D. Fear Prohibits Greatness

Amina Qutub, Ph.D. Try Again

F. Kurtis Kasper, Ph.D. Cultural Creativity

Xaq Pitkow, Ph.D. Problems & Solutions

9. 10.

Luay Nakhleh, Ph.D. Leadership Means Creativity

Daniel Mittleman, Ph.D. Winning a Legacy

11.

Jeffrey Jacot, Ph.D. Standing Apart

12. Amina Qutub, Ph.D. 25 Managing a Busy Life 13.

Joe Warren, Ph.D. Collaborative Undergraduate Experience 27

14.

Amina Qutub, Ph.D. Academic Labs

15.

Rob Griffin, Ph.D. Hunger & Thirst

16.

Daniel Cohan, Ph.D. Creative Spark

17.

Maria Oden, Ph.D. Tapping the Potential

18.

Benhaam Aazhang, Ph.D.

You Want to Win & You Want to Shine

About the Contributors Acknowledgements

37 41 47

TURNING POINTS ONE

Independent Thought Leader Ashutosh Sabharwal, Ph.D. Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rice University

I tell my students that if they don’t question me, then I’m not doing my job right. They’re required to question me and most of them do. The objective is to become an independent thought leader. That’s my main task – not to get them a degree, because they will get a degree – is to help so that they can actually start new research areas and new research groups, and lead the way wherever they want to go. To be an independent thought leader means not only have to go against everyone else, but they have to convince others to pursue their ideas. And that requires practice, and that requires an environment where they can voice their opinions – an environment which I was very fortunate to have over and over again where I was allowed to make my mistakes without the nagging from somebody like “no no, 1

I know it’s going to go wrong.” We actually learn when a failure happens. For example, if on a regular basis something doesn’t burn in the lab, then I’m generally worried because people are not trying enough things. The only thing I consider as problem would be when people promise they’ll do something, and then they don’t do it and they don’t tell you that they are not going to do it. I consider that to be irresponsible. If your team relies on you, you need to communicate well and do your part. That’s also something one has to learn. Again, our lab environment provides that opportunity. I would like students to solve problems, and not worry about methods to solve them. I would like them to be passionately driven to solve a practical engineering challenge. The solution for me has two aspects: You should be able to build and demonstrate it, and equally importantly you should be able to explain why it works in the way it works, to me and to other experimental scientists. That method, I actually recommend to every student. But how they get there is a unique path for each student.

TURNING POINTS TWO

Follow Your Own Path Genevera Allen, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Statistics, Rice University

In life and in career, there are enormous swings up and down, good and bad. I think the most important thing for me is just to stick with it—extreme perseverance—and just be absolutely, completely stubborn. And, sometimes, in a really bad spell, it’s important to tune everybody else out and listen to what you want and what you think and take your own route. There are times where a lot of people are trying to tell you what to do, and I realized that I’m just not going to do what everybody wants me to do. I’m going to do what I want to do. Politically that could not be a good move; it could be extremely perilous career-wise and personally, it could be a really bad move. But if you’re not true to yourself and doing what you want, you’re not going to be happy. And in the long run, it’s important to be who you are and to find a career and a job and a lifestyle that 3

fits you and not vice versa. You should never try to fit the job. I would say in the hard times, just to be absolutely, extremely stubborn and listen to yourself over anyone else around you. This is the kind of the approach that I take. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not always going to be the right approach, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just what I tend to do.

TURNING POINTS THREE

Freedom to Innovate E. Neely Atkinson, Ph.D. Professor, Statistics, Rice University

Innovation requires a certain amount of freedom. I worked many years at MD Anderson, with a chairman. He would outline areas that needed work. He would work to get institutional support for those, but his role was taking care of all the problem areas to leave his researchers free to do their research. His idea of leadership was to take as many obstacles as I can out of the way of my people, and let them do their work.

TURNING POINTS FOUR

Decisions Keith Cooper, Ph.D. Professor, Computer Science, Rice University

Taking on leadership roles changed me tremendously, and it changed the department in some significant ways. I learned a lot. I learned that I didn’t have to take action on something until it was a problem for 3 days. I told David Leebron, Rice University President, this, at dinner one night, and he said “Oh that’s so true! The most important thing I do is decide what I’m not going to decide today.” And most problems heal themselves, within 48 hours. So if it’s still a problem on the 3rd day, then I deal with it. If it’s a faculty member “Oh I can’t possibly teach this course in this time slot,” let it set for a few days. First lesson: your blood pressure will be lower; second most of those problems heal themselves. The faculty member comes back within 2 days and says “I figured out how to deal with this.” Also, you have to listen to people. Say you come to see me as department chair because you need 7

money to go to a conference; before you approach the department chair you probably spend time thinking what you are going to say. You lay out your arguments; you plan them; you get your case built. You walk in and within the first 2 sentences I know what you’re asking, but if I give you your answer without allowing you to present your case first, one of two things happens. If I gave you what you wanted, you’re now encouraged to come back more. “That was so easy; I’m going to come back.” If I didn’t give you what you wanted, you’re really frustrated because you know if I had given you the time to make your full case it could have swayed my decision to go the other way. So I learned that I needed to sit here and listen and look you in the eye, hear your whole story, and then I need to calmly explain what I’m going to do. I also learned to set my chair at a much lower height than everybody else’s. I learned this the first week when another faculty member came in and immediately raised the chair up to assume the dominant position. Be dominant; if I get to make the decision that doesn’t really matter.

TURNING POINTS FIVE

Fear Prohibits Greatness Illya Hicks, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Computational & Applied Mathematics, Rice University

Most times people don’t excel as much as they could because they’re actually fearful of success. It’s the fear of the unknown. Sometimes people get themselves in the way of their own success, just by being afraid. They’re afraid to say they don’t know anything or afraid to seek help. They shouldn’t be afraid – it isn’t a problem to seek help; everybody receives help and everybody gives help, or everyone should give help. But a lot of times people suffer in silence because they’re afraid to let people know that they don’t know as much as they do. But a lot of times, we as people are afraid to stretch the boundaries, or think outside the box, or venture somewhere we’ve never been before: in terms of research, in terms of physically going somewhere that we’ve never been before, or in terms of a position we’ve never had 9

before. A lot of times fear prohibits us from being as great as we could be. I think it’s something that everybody runs into at some point in time. I can see it in little kids, because I used to coach football, my son’s little pee-wee team, and they were really, really talented... but sometimes, they’ll face a team, and the team looks bigger, and they may perceive that the team looked better than them, and that fear prohibits them from really playing they should have. I think it’s something that, as humans, we deal with: how to overcome our own personal fears to excel.

TURNING POINTS SIX

Try Again Amina Qutub, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Bioengineering, Rice University

There have been times where my papers haven’t been accepted or my grant proposals haven’t been accepted. At those times I thought: well, it is not because the science is not there. The science is very strong. I am just not presenting it in a way where people understand it well. So I have to look at it from their perspective. I am passionate about this work; however, the person reading it is not necessarily passionate about the topic. How do I convince them that they really should be excited about my work? I step back, pretend I’m an outsider and critique my work from their vantage. Other times, I just have had to acknowledge that luck wasn’t on my side this time – and get up and try again.

TURNING POINTS SEVEN

Cultural Creativity F. Kurtis Kasper, Ph.D. Faculty Fellow, Bioengineering, Rice University

Creativity is super important. Especially when overcoming challenges. Usually one applies creativity in developing solutions to work around challenges that arise and creativity is this foundational component of innovation. Without creative thought, it’s difficult to push the envelope. I think that in the United States, we’ve traditionally been very successful in producing creative students because creativity is rewarded culturally in the US. It reflects back to the pioneering spirit that was so important in the development of our nation. I think that that’s a very strong aspect of graduate education in the United States and even undergraduate education, in that with our graduate students, for example, we don’t just give the students a set of experiments to accomplish, say do X, Y, and Z and you’ll get your Ph.D. That’s not the way we go. 13

What we do is we give them a problem, and we help them to find directions so they have to apply creativity in coming up with what should be done to tackle this issue that they have before them. And that will serve them well regardless of what they end up doing. Creativity coupled with critical thinking I think are very important.

TURNING POINTS EIGHT

Problems & Solutions Xaq Pitkow, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rice University

People are the problem, people are the solution. I would say the disparities that we face and how some people just donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have nearly what they need to be selfactualized. I think that we are also very able to adapt as people. That is one of the core properties of the brain. If there is a simple, unified principle of the brain that I know, it is that the brain looks for change, and it is change relative to whatever baseline is your current context, so if things are hard, but you have something which is a little easier or you get some pleasure then that pleasure is felt regardless of whether your average situation is really low or really high. And likewise, something that is a disappointment but would in fact be an incredible, wonderful thing for some other context in this context seems like a disappointment it feels like a disappointment. So it is not necessarily that 15

our happiness depends on the overall level, but I wish people could actualize themselves is the way I like to put it, and I have hopes that technology will help us get to the point where more people are able to actualize themselves and technology gets cheaper and more pervasive and can solve some of the more fundamental human needs problems so that we can all work on developing our higher selves.

TURNING POINTS NINE

Leadership Means Creativity Luay Nakhleh, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Computer Science, Rice University

I think about Steve Jobs and what he did and all the innovation and creativity that he thought about. I mean the way the world is connected today and the way the world looks at mobile applications and the internet and computers and so on, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all because of innovation and creativity of a person like Steve Jobs. Of course, he did not implement everything, but he had such creativity that he would drive an entire industry. I think creativity is important. I think about my own field and where I work in biology and medicine. You cannot solve major problems like cancer, you cannot cure cancer without creativity, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not just about someone spending 24 hours in the lab a day and just doing what everyone has been doing, to be able to cure cancer, people have to be very creative and very innovative, without leadership, 17

you’re not going to get the Googles of the world and the Microsofts of the world. Technical ability is one thing. There are lots of technically very capable people that you say “here’s the problem, solve it,” but the question is who’s going to give them these problems, who is seeing where the field is moving or who is deciding where the field should move, right? These are what the leaders do. There are very few leaders compared to the ones that are technically capable and doing the actual work. Those leaders are the ones that sometimes people question of why is he who gets that much money and stuff like that, but if you look at, how much revenue and how much they drive the economy. Put million 4.0 students to do work, they aren’t going to drive the economy like one person with the leadership and innovative and creative innovation and creativity to come up with an idea like an iPhone.

TURNING POINTS TEN

Winning a Legacy Daniel Mittleman, Ph.D. Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rice University

I want to do experiments that people care about. I think, three years from now, which project will have really turned out to be the most fruitful and interesting and impactful. That’s the kind of planning that I typically engage in. Now, very recently, I’ve started to do something a little different and that’s inspired by the fact that I’m right now working on a proposal to submit to the NSF for funding for a center. I don’t know if you’ve heard about CBEN, which was the NSF center that was here at Rice that just ended in 2011. The Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology. That was a 10 year program which really had a huge impact on what went on here at Rice. But, now it’s done, so now we’re applying to the same program at NSF for a center on terahertz. This has really forced 19

me to think very carefully, not just about “Will this research project have impact in 3 years?” but “Will these 15 or 20 research projects done by 40 professors over 10 years have an impact which is commensurate with that extra effort?” That’s a very different kind of question, because it’s not just me and my students and 3 years. It’s me and 39 of my colleagues and 10 years and a bunch of industry partners and all sorts of other people are involved. So it’s a much different kind of view of planning. I don’t know if we’ll win this center or not; I hope we do. We’re taking it very seriously, but these programs are sort of a long shot; you can’t count on it, but if we win then I can start to use the word legacy in a real way because it has occurred to me that if you win a center like this, if you actually write a proposal like this and win, then at the end of your career, it’s the thing people will remember you for.

TURNING POINTS ELEVEN

Standing Apart Jeffrey Jacot, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Bioengineering, Rice University

Innovation is the big key word now and people are studying innovation, and people are the “director of innovation.” I write in every grant proposal why what we are doing is innovative. That does not make that interesting, so you look at all those things people have done before, do a lot of experiments and get a lot of historical background. And when you do, the next step is to naturally going to be innovative. I am the type of person that never uses the word innovative, when I tell my group what I want them to be working on. But I will say to some people about their experiments, “How does this set apart from what has already been done? What answers will you get out? How do those answers look, in terms of a couple of very similar published papers? What talks to our strength, what can we do that no one else can do? Not just what no one has done before, but what 21

is really our strength?â&#x20AC;? There are certain things we really understand, a lot of them are biomaterials, and we can leverage those but not necessarily just work on other types of projects that are adding our own expertise. And I think if you do that, some of the projects you do are just going to be innovative because you know the science, you know the lab part.

TURNING POINTS TWELVE

Managing a Busy Life Amina Qutub, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Bioengineering, Rice University

You have to impose your own constraints and deadlines to stay organized. I have goals posted in a place where I can see them on a regular basis. Another trick a mentor shared is to periodically, say once a week, apply a triage system. Look at what you have on your plate and say if I need to get only two things done this week, what are those two things. These have to be things that you can see will make a difference not only this week but a month and a year down the road. What has been less helpful? So many emails! So much busy work to do. Paperwork. It would be great to design an algorithm to automatically answer each message, an algorithm that still made my responses sound like me.

TURNING POINTS THIRTEEN

Collaborative Undergraduate Experience Joe Warren, Ph.D. Professor, Computer Science, Rice University

I was lucky enough to go to Rice.

I had a

scholarship that paid for all of going to Rice. So I was a fortunate person. Now if I look at the number of people that can afford a Rice education, it’s hard. There’s financial aid for many of those students in there, but at the end of the day, there’s tremendous demand for good, high quality education. So for me, the role of academia in there is to think about how to help those people. I think to me, part of my job in academia is to make the world a better place. And that could be in the short-term or it could be in the long term. We talked about doing things that acquire pay off in ten or twenty years. And that happens with lots of faculty who are doing their research. I think for me the thing I talked about, kind of changing track into online education, now 27

I’m looking at things where maybe the payoff is in two, to three, to five years. But I think the key is the payoff can be very large. You know, if you can take some of the practices right now and improve them and build things where people can get a really good education online, maybe not as good as a residential Rice education, but maybe some significant fraction of it, I think that’s something that’s very valuable because, you know, to be a citizen of the planet and kind of share in the times, you’ve got to be able to contribute value. And to contribute value, you’ve got to have a skill that people will pay money for. I think computer science is one of those skills right now, it’s a very critical skill. So I view the class that we’re teaching here as something that can give lots of people a skill that can help them to be more valuable, be employable. Take what their existing knowledge is, and if they learn some computing, they can put that together and do something that’s more valuable. It might get them a better paying job, for example. My attitude on the role of academia in society is that ultimately I think that the goal for academia should be to help society, make the world a better place.

TURNING POINTS FOURTEEN

Academic Labs Amina Qutub, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Bioengineering, Rice University

Innovation is really an area where academia excels. In industry, from a general perspective, the bottom line is that businesses are there in part to make money – the sooner, the better. We don’t have that constraint necessarily. We can look at longer term goals. The “crystal ball” of science’s future can be found in academic labs. Google started out of a lab at Stanford, funded by the National Science Foundation. SixthSense grew out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. Each year I’ve been at Rice, either my lab or students I know from class have come up with new inventions. A lot of the big technologies have started out of “small-scale” research in either academia or in national institutes.

TURNING POINTS FIFTEEN

Hunger & Thirst Rob Griffin, Ph.D. Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Rice University

Globally, I think some of the biggest issues are access to food, water, and the fundamental things you need to exist. Everything else comes from that. If you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t actually feed and bathe yourself, you cannot have all of the other opportunities you need to address climate change, air quality, and access to health care. At a fundamental level and looking globally, hunger, water, resource availability - those fundamental needs are the biggest issues on a global scale.

TURNING POINTS SIXTEEN

Creative Spark Daniel Cohan, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Rice University

For every project, you have to figure out how your paper or your grant proposal may be something unique, something that has not been done before. The creativity is the vision of how you can look at the problem in a new way. There are so many thousands of scientists in the world having done so many great things already; so we have to think about how we can build from the findings of the past to contribute to society in the form of something new. Every project depends on creativity of both understanding and fully researching what has not been done before, and finding that creative spark so that we can go somewhere beyond that.

TURNING POINTS SEVENTEEN

Tapping the Potential Maria Oden, Ph.D. Professor in the Practice, Engineering Education, Rice University

Our students learn that they can solve real problems and that belief can build tremendous confidence. I don’t want our engineering students to leave engineering school thinking they’re really good at solving problems that have one answer at the back of the book. Engineers are supposed to design things in the face of constraints; they’re supposed to make decisions and make assumptions, and so the kind of education they get when they are solving a real problem, doing an engineering design project, allows them to experience, in a small way, the working world as an engineer. A lot of the work I do is in the area of global health and global health technologies. I feel like we can, by harnessing our students’ amazing creativity, solve 35

some real problems in the area of global health and save babiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; lives or make the experience of having a baby easier and safer for mothers. There are many things we can do with technology and I believe people around the world can benefit from that.

TURNING POINTS EIGHTEEN

You Want to Win & You Want to Shine Benhaam Aazhang, Ph.D. Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rice University

We are all competitive. I’m not openly competitive, but in my career I want to leave a mark. I want to do something that has impact. There are no scores, but there are a lot of somewhat competitive situations that you create for yourself. You want to win and you want to shine – you want to do well. It hasn’t been hard to get motivated, and I have this competitive spirit. It’s true that there isn’t one person that I have been competing with for the last ten years. It’s just that there are a lot of little competitions that I create in my own head and use as motivation to move forward. And sometimes, when you have a project and you focus on this particular idea and you are competitive, you want your idea to work. You really push hard for the idea to work, and try things for the idea to be 37

proven right, which again comes from a competitive nature. I think having a somewhat competitive nature is good.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Dr. Behnam Aazhang is the J. S. Abercrombie Professor and Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. His research interests are in the areas of communication theory, information theory, signal processing, and their applications to wireless communication, wireless networks, and neuroengineering, with emphasis on closed-loop neuromodulation and real-time brain stimulation. Dr. Aazhang received his B.S. (with highest honors, 1981), M.S., 1983, and Ph.D., 1986, in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 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. E. Neely Atkinson is a Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and a Senior Lecturer in the department of Statistics at Rice University. His research interests are exploratory analysis of survival data and hyperbolic matrix decompositions.

Dr. Daniel Cohan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University. His research specializes in the development of photochemical models and their application to air quality management, uncertainty analysis, energy policy, and health impact studies. Before joining Rice, Dr. Cohan worked for the Air Protection Branch of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division. He received a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Chemistry from Georgia Tech, and served as a Fulbright Scholar to Australia at the Cooperative Research Centre for Southern Hemisphere Meteorology. Dr. Cohan is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER young investigator award and a member of the NASA Air Quality Applied Sciences Team. Dr. Keith Cooper is the Associate Dean for Research at the George. R. Brown School of Engineering and the L. John and Ann H. Doerr Professor of Computational Engineering at Rice University. His research involves the use of adaptive techniques in code optimization, improved algorithms for code optimization, instruction scheduling, and register allocation, and the application of optimization techniques to reduce the energy consumed by microprocessors. From Rice University, Dr. Cooper received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1978, his M.S. in Mathematical Sciences in 1982, and his Ph.D. in Mathematical Sciences in 1983. Dr. Rob Griffin is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University. Dr. Griffinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s research involves aerosol thermodynamics and chemistry, air pollution transport, atmospheric chemistry, regional air

quality modeling, and urban air quality. Dr. Griffinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;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. Illya Hicks is an Associate Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University. His research interests are in combinatorial optimization, integer programming, graph theory and matroid theory. Some applications of interest are social networks, cancer treatment and network design. His current research is focused on using graph decomposition techniques to solve NP-complete problems. After receiving his B.S. in Mathematics at Texas State Univerity in 1995, Dr. Hicks received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice in 2000. Dr. Jeffrey Jacot is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University. His research specializes in the study of congenital heart disease and heart defects, and in the translation of novel regenerative cardiac therapies for young patients of various stages in their growth and development. After receiving his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Colorado, Dr. Jacot obtained his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University (2005) and completed his Postdoctoral Fellowship in Cardiac Myocyte Mechanics at University of California, San Diego (2005-2008). Dr. F. Kurtis Kasper is a Faculty Fellow in the department of Bioengineering. Dr. Kasperâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s research focuses on the development and evaluation of novel biomaterial-based approaches for tissue regeneration, cell encapsulation, and

the controlled delivery of thepeutics. He received his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 1999, and his Ph.D. from Rice University in 2006. Dr. Daniel Mittleman is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice. He received his B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988, and his M.S. in 1990 and Ph.D. in 1994, both in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, under the direction of Dr. Charles Shank. His thesis work involved the spectroscopy of semiconductor nanocrystals using laser pulses with durations of less than 20 femtoseconds, at wavelengths from 480 nm to 670 nm. He then joined AT&T Bell Laboratories as a post-doctoral member of the technical staff, working first for Dr. Richard Freeman on a terawatt laser system, and then for Dr. Martin Nuss on terahertz spectroscopy and imaging. His research interests involve various aspects of spectroscopy, sensing, and imaging using terahertz radiation. Dr. Mittleman is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, and the IEEE. 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. Maria Oden is a Professor in the Practice of Engineering Education at Rice University, and Director 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. Dr. Ashutosh Sabharwal is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. His research includes â&#x20AC;&#x153;distributedâ&#x20AC;? 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. Dr. Joe Warren is a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. His research interests focus on the application of computers to geometric problems and are centered around the general problem of representing geometric shapes. More specifically, he works with computer graphics, computer gaming, geometric modeling, and visualization. Dr. Warren received his B.A. from Rice University in 1983 and went on to complete his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1986.

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.