Rice Magazine Fall 07

The Rice Brand • Campus Construction • The Houston Area Survey • Diplomat Michael Owen

RICE SALLYPORT • The magazine of rice universiTy • faLL 2007

D e p a r t m e n t s

2 foreword Thinking • 5 Through the sallyport • 20 students

40 arts • 48 scoreboard • 46 on the Bookshelf

InsIde

7 Excuse me, my ribs are rattling. I’d better take this call.

4 You might have more in common with zebra fish than you think.

5 It’s bigger. It’s bolder. It’s boron.

46 The women’s swim team pools its talents as it strokes toward the championship.

12 There’s predator and prey, and then there’s mutuality.

11 Plasmas are found in the middle of white dwarf stars. So, how do you get them into a lab? Freeze them, of course.

17 They may not be Burt Reynolds, but they’re in the same race.

41 He’s not defacing books — he’s re-facing them.

6 It’s good to be at the top of the trash heap when you’re in a recycling contest.

9 Call it alternative fuel’s alternative fuel.

9 Nanodevice, build thyself.

42 What the heck is that? Is it an instrument?

F e a t u r e s

18 Competition, Collaboration and the Rise of Global Higher Education

B y D a v i d W . L e e b r o n

20 Words of Wisdom When you want to be the best, you’ve got to stand up

and make yourself known.

22 Building on a Vision Rice’s Vision for the Second Century already exists on

paper, but Facilities, Engineering and Planning is turning the touchstone into the tangible.

28 What’s Your College? Introduced 50 years ago, Rice’s college system has

become a dominant feature of undergraduate student life.

B y C h r i s t o p h e r D o w

34 On a Mission Michael Owen has never let cultural differences

slow him down in a Foreign Service career that has taken him to Europe, Africa and India.

B y K e v i n M a r k e y

38 Enduring Reflection: The Houston Area Survey

Most of us have a hard time taking stock of our own lives. Stephen Klineberg keeps tabs on an entire city.

B y C h r i s t o p h e r D o w

38

2228

What do Saul Bellow, Vice Admiral James Stockdale, Allen Ginsberg, John Irving, Julian Bond and Tom Stoppard have in common?

Rice Sallyport

Fall 2007, Vol. 64, No. 1

Published by the Office of Public Affairs

Linda Thrane, vice presidentSuzanne Gschwind, director of

Communications Services

EditorChristopher Dow

Editorial DirectorTracey Rhoades

Creative DirectorJeff Cox

Art DirectorChuck Thurmon

Editorial StaffMerin Porter, staff writer

Jenny West Rozelle, assistant editor

Design StaffTommy LaVergne, photographerJeff Fitlow, assistant photographer

The Rice University Board of Trustees

James W. Crownover, chairman; J.D. Bucky Allshouse; D. Kent Anderson; Teveia Rose Barnes; Alfredo Brener; Vicki Whamond Bretthauer; Robert T. Brockman; Albert Y. Chao; Robert L. Clarke; Bruce W. Dunlevie; Lynn Laverty Elsenhans; Douglas Lee Foshee; Susanne Morris Glasscock; Carl E. Isgren; K. Terry Koonce; Robert R. Maxfield; Steven L. Miller; M. Kenneth Oshman; Jeffery O. Rose; Hector Ruiz; Marc Shapiro; L. E. Simmons; Robert B. Tudor III; James Turley

Administrative OfficersDavid W. Leebron, president; Eugene Levy, provost; Kathy Col l ins , vice p r e s i d e n t f o r F i n a n c e ; Darrow Zeidenstein, vice president for Resource Development; Kevin Kirby, vice president for Administration; Chris Muñoz, vice president for Enrollment; Linda Thrane, vice president for Public Affairs; Scott W. Wise, vice president for Investments and treasurer; Richard A. Zansitis, general counsel.

It is the policy of Sallyport to run letters that respond to a particular article only within one year following the article’s publication. All submissions to Sallyport are subject to editing for length, clarity, accuracy, appropriateness and fairness to third parties.

Sallyport is published by the Office of Public Affairs of Rice University and is sent to university alumni, faculty, staff, graduate students, parents of undergraduates and friends of the university.

Editorial OfficesCommunications Services–MS 95

P.O. Box 1892Houston, TX 77251-1892

Fax: 713-348-6751 E-mail: [email protected]

PostmasterSend address changes to:

Rice UniversityDevelopment Services–MS 80

P.O. Box 1892Houston, TX 77251-1892

©DeCeMBer 2007 riCe University

Christopher Dow

Think of Rice as an excellent little university residing quietly behind its hedges?Think again — about the quiet part, at least. Inside the hedges, something is cooking. No matter where you look — from campus facilities to programs to international collaborations — there’s activity as the ingredients of President David Leebron’s Vision for the Second Century begin to simmer. One ingredient we’re adding more of this year is students. The V2C recipe calls for an increase in the size of the student body by approximately 30 percent during the next decade. This fall, Rice saw the beginnings of that with our 742-member freshman class. In addition to being Rice’s largest-ever group of first-year students, they were selected from the largest applicant pool in Rice’s history. You can read

about them in more detail in this issue, and a pretty impressive bunch they are. It’s encouraging to know that these exceptional young women and men will leave Rice with the tools to become the kind of influential leaders so necessary for the coming century. But rest reassured that, at 3,002, our undergraduate class is only seven larger than last year’s. The projected growth will occur gradually over the next decade. We’re also adding more cutting-edge facilities for learning and research to the mix. You’ll be hearing a lot more about them during the next couple of years, but a perfect example is the Collaborative Research

Center, introduced in our last issue. When completed, this state-of-the-art teaching and research facility will bring a new dimension to bioengineering and biomedical sciences by combining, for the first time in one place, researchers from Rice and multiple institutions from the Texas Medical Center. Ingredients aren’t all we’re adding. We’re kickin’ it up a notch, too. At a recent town hall meeting where President Leebron updated faculty and staff on the progress of the V2C, he related an incident in which a student approached him and commented on how much more vibrant the campus seemed than in the past. The president replied that’s because all the campus construction is limiting space and forcing people into closer contact. The audience laughed in appreciation of the joke — and because they knew it isn’t strictly true. Life on campus isn’t more vibrant because of confinement but because boundaries are falling and exciting possibilities are opening up. Research is part of those possibilities, but we have our exceptional students to thank for much of the excitement in the air. They’re per-forming better than ever in the classroom — which is saying a lot — and making groundbreaking discoveries even while undergraduates. Equally impressive, they’re taking their burgeoning expertise to an international level as they travel to learn and serve in countries the world over. And back at home, no student space is more vibrant — or nearer and dearer to the hearts of students and alumni alike — than the colleges. We’ll keep you abreast of the construction of Rice’s 10th and 11th colleges — McMurtry and Duncan, respectively — but in the meantime, we help celebrate how the colleges enhance student life at Rice with a retrospective on the college system’s 50th anniversary. As any good cook knows, a tasty dish is more than ingredients and seasoning. It deserves stunning presentation, and you’ll be seeing a lot more of that, too, as Rice steps more boldly into the world. Just as the CRC extends Rice’s footprint outside the hedges, our new marketing campaign is working to make people across the country and around the world aware of Rice and all the wonderful research and educational opportunities going on here. And along with Rice’s greater visibility is a makeover of the Rice “look,” complete with a new logo and a fresh design for our Web sites. So, the next time you think of Rice, don’t think aloof, behind the hedges and quietly smart. Think passionate, unconventional and, at nearly 100 years of age, all the wiser. That’s the Rice recipe for doing good and achieving greatness.

“So, the next

time you think of

Rice, don’t think

aloof, behind

the hedges and

quietly smart.

Think passionate,

unconventional

and, at nearly

100 years of age,

all the wiser.”

2 rice sallyport

[ T h R O U g h T h E S A L L Y P O R T ]

fall ’07 3

Called “Rice 360°: Technology Solutions for World Health,” the plan was announced during the annual meeting of the Clin-ton Global Initiative in New York. It will focus on establish-ing an institute to create, test and disseminate new technolo-gies and educational programs that help achieve the United Nation’s health-related Mil-lennium Development Goals. These include halting the spread of HIV, slashing the mortality rate of children under 5 by two-thirds and reducing the num-ber of women who die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth.

“Studies estimate that nearly 10 million children under age 5 die each year in develop-ing countries because they do not have access to appropriate health technologies — tech-nologies that we often take for granted here,” said Rebecca Richards-Kortum, who is step-ping down as bioengineering department chairwoman at the end of the academic year to spearhead the Rice 360° initia-tive. “Rice’s strong commit-ment to its undergraduates is one of our unique strengths. Rice 360° will capitalize on this commitment by blending engi-neering, education and service in a way that ignites students’ imaginations to change their

lives and the lives of the world’s most needy patients.”

Rice 360° is designed to tap students’ and faculty members’ creativity and their desire to make a difference, serve oth-ers and save lives. It builds on Rice’s successful Beyond Traditional Borders program, in which students learn about global health issues and design technologies in response to problems doctors face in the developing world. BTB is sup-ported by a grant to Rice from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Undergraduate Sci-ence Education Program.

Last summer, seven under-graduates took their technolo-gies and educational programs to Africa for real-world testing and implementation in clinics run by the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative.

Kim Bennett, a senior who interned this summer in Malawi, was on a team that designed a pump to dispense liquid medi-cation accurately according to a child’s individual needs. Called the ABC pump, the device aims to eliminate human error associ-ated with current syringe and medicine cup techniques.

“I brought the ABC Pump to Malawi to show it to the doc-tors in the clinic where I was working,” Bennett said. “It met with rave reviews. One doctor

wanted to know when it would be available there.”

A Rice student team en-rolled in this fall’s class already is working on developing a battery-powered IV drip moni-tor that can warn nurses and doctors in time to prevent pedi-atric deaths. Hospitals currently are reluctant to use lifesaving fluids because they are unable to control the volumes given to patients.

Sophie Kim and Christina Lagos, two Rice undergradu-ates who interned this summer in Lesotho, taught a health and HIV-awareness class of their own design in an orphanage. They also worked with social workers and doctors at a clinic to revamp the counseling pro-gram that teaches HIV patients and their caregivers how to take antiretroviral medications.

“Our goal was to make ad-herence counseling much more educational by teaching the concepts of drug resistance, how antiretroviral therapy works and the importance of strict drug adherence,” Kim said.

Kim and Lagos trained about 40 volunteer counselors to en-sure that the program would continue long after they left.

“Seeing what I saw — the kids that were dying and their families — you cannot be com-placent after that,” Kim said. “I

always knew I wanted to go to medical school and work toward ending health disparities, but it really put a fire in me, particu-larly in the arena of health pol-icy. I’m very determined to get involved in public policy and health policy now.”

This sort of grassroots dedi-cation is one of the reasons Rice President David Leebron believes the Rice 360° initiative will be successful. “Rice has all the elements to make a differ-ence in solving urgent global health problems,” he said. “Our brilliant and gifted students are an enormous asset to Rice 360°. The university’s bioengineering and nanotechnology programs are among the world’s best. We have strong and growing ties with the world’s largest medi-cal center, and Rice’s Baker In-stitute is home to world-class experts in public policy and global science policy. Another advantage is provided by Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, which has a wealth of expertise in entrepre-neurship and microfinance.”

Rice has committed to secur-ing $100 million from a vari-ety of sources over the coming decade to fund the institute’s programs. Rice 360° already has received $2 million in funding, including a gift to seed research in cost-effective health technol-ogies from Rice Board of Trust-ees Chairman Jim Crownover and his wife, Molly.

rice 360° is designed to tap students’ and faculty members’ creativity and their desire to make a difference, serve others and save lives.

Rice University unveiled plans on Sept. 28 for a $100 million initiative to combat pressing health problems in the developing world.

Zebra fish cost about a dol-lar each at the pet store, adults can lay up to 500 eggs at once and the fish grow from eggs to hunting their own food in just three days. “Even so, humans and zebra fish aren’t that dis-similar,” said assistant profes-sor of biochemistry and cell biology Mary Ellen Lane, who is Rice’s resident zebra fish ex-pert. “For every zebra fish gene we isolate, there is a related gene in humans.”

Zebra fish — like rats and fruit flies before them — are

becoming regular contribu-tors on research ranging from cancer to cocaine addiction. For example, zebra fish were used in a landmark 2005 study that led scientists to the human gene that regulates skin color. It helps that zebra fish embryos grow from just a single cell to having a forebrain, hindbrain, spinal column and eyes in a scant 24 hours. It also helps that the embryos are transpar-ent and develop outside their

mothers’ bodies — and thus can be observed under a micro-scope during every step of their development.

“It’s a beautiful organism for experiment,” Lane said. “It de-velops in a very regular way, so any abnormality is easy to spot, even for undergraduates with only a few days of training.”

Lane’s zebra fish studies ex-plore one of the major unex-plained areas in developmental biology: how the brain and central nervous system develop. In her latest work, Lane, as-

sisted by graduate students Catherine McCollum and Shi-vas Amin and undergraduate Phillip Pauerstein, zeroed in on a gene called LMO4 that’s known to play roles in both cell reproduction and breast cancer. Using the tools of biotechnol-ogy, the team studied zebra fish that couldn’t transcribe the LMO4 gene and observed marked enlargement in both the forebrain and optical por-tions of the embryos. When the

fish overexpressed the LMO4 gene, making more protein than normal, those same areas shrank. The findings appeared in the journal Developmental Biology.

“The study suggests that LMO4 independently regulates two other genes that promote growth in those areas of the embryo,” said Lane. “It fills in another piece of the bigger pic-ture of what’s going on during neurological development.”

Lane established Rice’s zebra fish program six years ago. She

said the program got a major boost in 2003, when fellow ze-bra fish researcher Dan Wagner joined the faculty. Their facility houses 18,000 zebra fish and employs a full-time fish caretak-er. They recently won funding from Rice’s Faculty Initiatives Fund to hire a research scien-tist to oversee collaborative research with partners in the Texas Medical Center.

—Jade Boyd

Size is RelativeIf someone told you Rice is a large research university, you might wonder how they de-fine the word “large.”

But Academic Analytics, which named Rice the most productive large research university in Texas, recogniz-es that Rice strides across the academic landscape in seven-league boots.

A collaboration between Stony Brook University faculty and researchers at Educational Directories Unlimited to rate univer-sity programs, Academic Analytics compared doc-toral programs at research universities by measuring the scholarly productivity of faculty based on their book and journal publica-tions, citations of journal articles, federal grants and awards and honors. To be considered a large research university for Academic Analytics’ Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, an insti-tution must have at least 15 Ph.D. programs across multiple disciplines. Rice’s ranking was based on 27 Ph.D. programs. In addition, Rice was the only Texas in-stitution to make the top 25 list nationally, where it ranks No. 22.

—B. J. Almond

Not Your Average Lab RatWhen you look in the mirror, you wouldn’t expect to see a zebra fish star-ing back, but you have more in com-mon with them than you may realize.

“it’s a beautiful organism for experiment. it develops in a very regular way, so any abnormality is easy to spot, even for

undergraduates with only a few days of training.”—mary ellen Lane

4 rice sallyport


A new study by Boris Yakobson, pro-fessor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of chemistry, and his associates Nevill Gonzalez Szwacki and Arta Sadrzadeh, predicts the existence and stability of another buckyball molecule consisting entirely of boron atoms. The paper was an edi-tor’s selection in the April 20 issue of Physical Review Letters.

The boron buckyball is structurally similar to the original buckyball, a cage-shaped molecule of 60 carbon atoms, but it has an additional atom in the center of each hexagon, which significantly increases stability. “This is the first prediction of its possible existence,” Yakobson said of the boron

A new study by Boris Yakobson (right), professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of chemistry, graduate student Arta Sadrzadeh (left) and colleagues predicts the existence and stability of another “buckyball” consisting entirely of boron atoms.

buckyball, or B80. “This has not been observed or even conceived of before. We hope it may lead to a significant breakthrough.”

In the earliest stages of its work, the team attempted to build a buckyball using silicon atoms but determined that it would collapse on itself. The search for another possible atom led the researchers on a short trip across the periodic table.

“One reason we tried boron was because it is one atomic unit from carbon,” Yakobson said. “Boron also has the ability to stick together better than other atoms, which made it even more appealing.”

Initial work with 60 boron atoms

failed to create a hollow ball that would hold its form, so another boron atom was placed in the center of each hexagon for added stability.

Yakobson said it is too early to speculate whether the boron buckyball will prove to be as useful as its Nobel Prize-winning sibling. “All we know,” he said, “is that it’s a very logical, very stable structure and likely to exist. It opens up a whole new continent to explore. There should be a strong effort to find it experimentally. That may not be an easy path, but we gave them a good road map.”

Following the paper’s acceptance, there was some debate with the journal’s editors about whether the

structure could be termed a buckyball. Yakobson mentioned this to Robert Curl, co-discoverer of the original buckyball along with Harold Kroto and the late Richard Smalley.

“Bob said with a chuckle that it was more of a buckyball than his buckyball,” Yakobson said, adding that C60 was named for famed architect Buckminster Fuller because the molecule looked like conjoined geodesic domes, a structure Fuller invented. “When Fuller made his domes, he made them from triangles because hexagons would collapse,” Yakobson explained. “C60 is made up of hexagons, but in B80, we fill the hexagon with one more atom, making triangles.”

—Mark Passwaters

fall ’07 5


Top of the HeapIt’s good to be at the top of the trash heap when you’re in a recycling contest.

The contest was Recycle-Mania, which drew more than 200 colleges and universities nationwide, including eight in Texas. Rice contended in six different categories, finishing first among Texas universities in per capita paper recycling and 14th out of a national field of 111. In the Per Capita Clas-sic category, which measured the total amount of recyclables collected per person, Rice placed 54th out of 175.

“This was our second year to compete in RecycleMania,” said Rice sustainability planner Richard Johnson. “We showed real improvement and partici-pated in more categories this year. We again demonstrated that we could compete with the best, including schools that are well-known for their environmental programs.”

Rice was the only Texas participant in RecycleMa-nia in 2006. Johnson said the increased participation statewide indicates greater visibility of environmental issues in Texas. This year’s participating Texas universi-ties included Baylor, Southern Methodist, Texas Christian, UT Austin, UT Dallas, UT San Antonio and UT Medical Branch at Galveston.

Ending Biodiesel’s Glycerin Glut

Call it an alternative fuel’s alternative fuel.

U.S. biodiesel production is at an all-time high, and a record number of new biodiesel plants are under construction, but the industry is facing an impending crisis over waste glycerin, the

major byproduct of biodiesel production.

“The biodiesel business has tight margins, and until re-cently, glycerin was a valuable commodity — one that produc-ers counted on selling to en-sure profitability,” said Ramon Gonzalez, the William W. Akers Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

But that dynamic has changed. “One pound of glyc-erin is produced for every 10

pounds of biodiesel,” he said, “and that has caused a glycerin glut.” Many manufacturers not only are unable to sell glycerin, but also must pay to dispose of it.

Researchers across the globe are racing to find ways to turn waste glycerin into profit. Some are looking at traditional chemi-cal processing, such as using catalytic reactions that break glycerin into other chemicals, while others are focusing on bi-

ological conversion, in which a microorganism is engineered to eat a specific chemical feedstock and excrete something useful. Many drugs are made this way, and the chemical processing industry is increasingly finding bioprocessing to be a “greener,” and sometimes cheaper, alterna-tive to chemical processing.

Gonzalez and his colleagues might have found such a solu-tion to the glycerin glut. “We identified the metabolic pro-

Ramon Gonzalez (left) and Syed Shams Yazdani have identified the metabolic processes and conditions that allow a strain of E. coli to convert glycerin into ethanol.

cesses and conditions that allow a strain of the bacterium E. coli to convert glycerin into etha-nol,” Gonzalez said. “It’s also very efficient. We estimate the operational costs to be about 40 percent less that those of pro-ducing ethanol from corn, and the process will show higher yields and lower cost than can be obtained using common sug-ar-based feedstocks like glucose and xylose.”

Gonzalez’s report on the research, co-authored by post-doctoral research associate Syed Shams Yazdani, appears in Cur-rent Opinion in Biotechnology. Graduate students Yandi Dhar-madi and Abhishek Murarka assisted with the research, which is funded by the U.S. Depart-ment of Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.

—Jade Boyd

“We identified the metabolic processes and conditions that allow a strain of the bacterium E. coli

to convert glycerin into ethanol.”—ramon gonzalez

6 rice sallyport


“Cell phones have vibrators in them now, and many of the newer models have sensors that could be used to receive our signals, so it’s feasible to think of the devices we are already carrying as a platform for this technology,” said Zhong, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.

This explains why Microsoft awarded Liebschner and Zhong a grant to develop OsteoConduct, the technology the two invented last year. OsteoConduct transmits digital information through bones using acoustic sound patterns. The sounds can be created by anything that vibrates.

In the lab, the researchers use hand-held and bench-mounted gadgets. The vibrations can be imperceptible in some applications, such as health monitoring or simple data exchange, and perceived in others. For example, a patient wearing a drug-release system might benefit by sensing when drugs are administered.

“Microsoft is interested in computing applications related to both health care and mobile devices, and this hits both of those,” said Liebschner, assistant professor of bioengineering.

The idea for OsteoConduct came after Zhong heard Liebschner present results from his lab at last fall’s Texas Instruments Innovation Fund Day, a conference highlighting TI-funded research at Rice. Liebschner described the development of a new hand-held

system for diagnosing osteoporosis with low-level sound waves. Zhong, sitting in the audience, thought immediately of work he was doing.

Teeth Clicks

During a research internship just before joining Rice, Zhong worked with several Microsoft researchers who devised solutions to improve voice recognition by filtering out the sounds created when people click their teeth together during speech.

“At the time, I thought, ‘This is information that they are throwing away,’ and I wondered if there might be another way to use it,” Zhong said. After joining Rice, Zhong and graduate student Tamer Mohamed built a hands-free method of using teeth clicks to control a computer.

At the TI conference, Zhong asked Liebschner if his findings suggested that the sound of teeth clicks might travel through a person’s skeleton. Liebschner thought they might, and the two agreed to test the idea.

Liebschner said one of the most exciting dis-coveries about this research has been just how clearly sound travels through bone. In one of the earliest tests, a signal from the wrist was clearly detected at the hip, having traveled the length of the arm and spine.

“We were all surprised to see these signals propagate through 20 or more joints,” Liebschner said. “It worked much better than we’d anticipated for the power levels we used.”

Unique Skeletal Identification

Liebschner said one probable reason the discovery went unnoticed for so long is the variability of human bone tissue. Sound vibrations are commonly used to test the skeletal structures of buildings after earth-quakes, but no two people have exactly the same acoustic pattern in their bones. However, Liebschner said, this variability has an upside, too.

“Because every person has a unique acoustic signature in their bones, we believe we can develop that for security authentication,” Liebschner said. “For example, you might grab a door handle in a secure facility, and it would only allow you inside if it recognized your profile. The acoustic signature of the skeleton is thought to be more secure than fingerprints or retina scans.”

Other applications Zhong and Liebschner are considering include hands-free operation of mobile phones and other devices, secure data transmission, health monitoring and diagnostics, and commu-nication with implantable transducers.

Bioengineering graduate student Michael Cordray and undergraduate Mimi Zhang are co-inventors of the technology. Researchers include electrical and computer engineering graduate students Brett Kaufman and Tamer Mohamed and bioengineering graduate students Dania El-Daye and Nick Tobaoda.

—Jade Boyd

The Wrist Bone’s Connected to the Cell Phone

Michael Liebschner and Lin Zhong perform research to develop a new technology that lets mobile electronic devices communicate by sending vibrations through bones.

Michael Liebschner and Lin Zhong make no bones about rattling cages—rib cages, that is. The two engineering faculty members are involved in joint research to de-velop a new technology that lets mobile electronic devices communicate by send-ing vibrations through bones.

fall ’07 7


Neurofibromatosis is characterized by the formation of tumors of peripheral nerve cells. Scientists know the dis-ease is caused by defects in a gene called Nf1, but they have yet to find out precisely how the defective genes cause tumors to form.

In seeking biochemical pathways responsible for neurofibromatosis tumors in humans, Stern’s research group compiled evidence from dozens of painstak-ing experiments on mutant fruit flies, each with a spe-cific genetic flaw that testified to the power of the one or more proteins involved. The researchers used fruit flies for several reasons: The insect’s genome has been sequenced, it takes only two weeks to grow a new gen-eration of fruit flies, and scientists know which fruit fly genes are analogous to the human genes associated with neurofibromatosis.

“Our results suggest that having a defect in Nf1 begins a kind of biochemical domino effect that eventually leads to tumor growth,” said Stern, professor of biochemistry and cell biology.

In their experiments, the researchers created more than two dozen mutant strains of fruit flies, including variet-ies that were either missing the genes to make one of the four proteins or were encoded to over express, or make extra amounts of, one of the four. Some mutants were designed to carry more than one defective trait.

Nerves from each mutant strain were examined. By comparing the mutant strains — each with a specific de-fect or set of defects — the researchers built a case that the absence of neurofibromin allows several proteins to work in concert to inhibit a regulatory group of proteins that are key players in regulating genes responsible for programmed cell death and DNA repair — two common culprits in cancer.

Stern says the project required an enormous amount of work in the lab and wouldn’t have been possible with-out the dedication and motivation of research techni-cian William Lavery. A paper on the research appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience, and Stern and Lavery’s co-authors include research technician Michelle Wells, postdoctoral research assistant Veronica Hall, graduate student James Yager and undergraduate Alex Rottgers. The research is supported by the Department of Defense Neurofibromatosis Research Program.

—Jade Boyd

Genetic Flaw Starts Neurofibromatosis’

Biochemical Domino EffectMichael Stern’s latest research into the formation of neurofibromatosis tumors reads something like a federal racketeer-ing indictment, except that Stern is tracing proteins instead of laundered money, and he’s looking not at offshore accounts but at biochemical paths of cause and effect.

The need was heightened even more when the Texas State Board for Educa-tor Certification added Chinese to the certifications for languages other than English. In fact, a College Board survey showed that nearly 2,400 high schools would have liked to offer the AP Chi-nese course in 2006–07 but did not have qualified teachers.

Rice has stepped in to fill the gap with plans to establish the Institute for Chinese Language Teaching, an en-deavor supported by a $400,000 grant from the Freeman Foundation. Initially, the ICLT will train individuals who already are proficient in speaking Chi-nese, due to heritage or education, and who want to teach in middle and high schools. The program eventually will recruit, train and produce teachers of Chinese for kindergarten through 12th grade. No other such certificate pro-grams are offered in the South.

The institute builds on the priority set forth in the Vision for the Second Century to make tangible contributions in the K–12 area and increase interna-tional understanding at Rice.

“One of the missions of Rice is to serve the community,” said Lilly Chen, senior lecturer at the Center for the Study of Languages and director of the ICLT. “By establishing the certificate program, we are answering that call.”

Through a series of online and face-to-face courses, the ICLT will offer a low-cost, two-year summer program designed to fit into teachers’ schedules and budgets. The institute will not pro-vide state certification; instead, it will prepare teachers to be certified through

classes that aren’t offered elsewhere in the South and grant them scholar-ships to pursue certification at Rice or elsewhere.

“As our lives become more global and China continues to be a strong economic partner, our young people need to be equipped to collaborate across borders. It is increasingly important for people to have a rich and deep understanding of other cultures. We want to prepare teachers to communicate that understanding to their students, who could work with Asia in the future.”

—Steven Lewis, director of Asian Studies

Responsibilities for launching the ICLT will be shared by the School of Humanities, the Asian Studies program, the Center for the Study of Languages and the Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies. The project team also is working with institutions around the state, including the Region IV Educa-tion Service Center, the national Chinese Language Association of Secondary–El-ementary Schools and regional and local Chinese language teachers’ associations. Also, the ICLT plans to work with local schools to implement Chinese language courses beginning with the schools’ 2008 summer school programs.

Find out more about the program at www.teachers.rice.edu.

—Jessica stark

Opening the Doors to Asia through LanguageLike many other large cities, Houston has a high demand for well-trained Chinese language teachers for its local schools.

8 rice sallyport


That problem may have been solved by research conducted at Rice’s Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotech-nology. “Our work knocks down a big barrier in developing quantum-dot-based photovoltaics as an alternative to the con-ventional, more expensive silicon-based solar cells,” said principal investigator Mi-chael Wong, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.

Quantum dots are megamolecules of semiconducting materials that are smaller than living cells. They interact with light in

unique ways — giving off different-colored light or creating electrons and holes — due partly to their tiny size, partly to their shape and partly to the material they’re made of. Scientists have studied quantum dots for more than a decade, with an eye toward using them in medical tests, chemi-cal sensors and other devices.

One way to achieve cheaper solar cells is to make them out of quantum dots. Prior research has shown that four-legged quan-tum dots — called tetrapods — are many times more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than are regular quantum dots. But Wong said that current methods of producing tetrapods lead to a lot of par-

ticles with missing arms or arms that are of uneven length or crooked. Even in the best recipe, 30 percent of the prepared particles are not tetrapods.

CBEN’s formula, developed by Wong and graduate student Subashini Asokan with CBEN director Vicki Colvin and graduate student Karl Krueger, produces same-sized particles, more than 90 per-cent of which are tetrapods. Significantly, these tetrapods are made of cadmium selenide, a compound that has been very difficult to produce in this configuration.

The method is not only cheaper but safer than conventional methods because it uses cetyltrimethylammonium bromide instead of the normally used alkylphosphonic acid compounds. Cetyltrimethylammonium bromide is used in some shampoos, and for producers looking to ramp up tetrapod production, this means cheaper raw mate-rials and fewer purification steps.

The research was funded by the Nation-al Science Foundation, 3M Corp., Ad-vanced Aromatics LP, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and Rice University. It appeared online May 1 in the journal Small.

—Jade Boyd

Quantum Dot Solar PanelsBetter, cheaper solar energy panels may soon be possible thanks to arrays of molecu-lar specks of semiconductors called quantum dots. The idea of quantum-dot-based voltaics is not new. It’s long been known that four-legged cadmium selenide quan-tum dots, in particular, are effective at converting sunlight into electrical energy. The problem has been in finding a manufacturing method that makes high-quality dots in sufficient quantities.

“Our work knocks down a big barrier in developing quantum-dot-based photovoltaics as an alternative to the conventional, more expensive silicon-based solar cells.” —michael Wong

Nanodevice, Build ThyselfRice University chemists have discovered that tiny building blocks known as gold nanorods spontaneously assemble them-selves into ring-like superstructures.

The finding, which was published in the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, could poten-tially lead to the development of novel nanodevices like highly sensitive optical sensors, superlenses and even “invisible” objects for use in the military.

“Finding new ways to assemble nano-objects into superstructures is an important task because, at the nanoscale, the properties of those objects depend on the arrangement of individual building blocks,” said principal investigator Eugene Zubarev, the Norman Hackerman-Welch Young Investigator and assistant professor of chemistry.

Although ringlike assemblies have been observed in spherical nanoparticles and other symmetrical molecules, until now such structures had not been documented with rod-shaped nanostructures.

Like many nanoscale objects, gold nanorods are several billionths of a meter in size. The nanorods Zubarev used have a central core of inorganic crystal, and attached to their surfaces are thousands of flexible, chainlike organic polymer molecules. The combination of inorganic and organic features results in a hybrid structure that proved to be critical to the research.

Working with Rice graduate student Bishnu Khanal, Zubarev placed the nanorods in a solution of chloroform, which is an organic solvent. As the chloroform evaporated, its surface temperature dropped low enough to cause condensation of water droplets from the air, much like what happens when dew forms. As thousands and thousands of microdroplets of water con-densed on the surface of the chloroform, the nanorods that had been suspended in the solution started to press up against the droplets and form rings around them. The polymer coating prevented the rods from being absorbed into the droplets because it is insoluble in water. After the droplets evaporated, the nanorods remained in their ring formation.

Thousands of well-defined rings can be produced in a matter of seconds using this method. “It is surprisingly simple and can be used for organizing nanocrystals of various shapes, size and chemical compositions into circular arrays,” Zubarev said. “When nanorods are organized into a ring, significant changes occur in their optical and electromagnetic properties.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Welch Foundation.

—B. J. almond

fall ’07 9


When one of the founders of a field says you’ve made a major breakthrough, you can pretty well bet you’ve found something important.

The breakthrough in this case is a new way to analyze the moving parts of large proteins, which will make it easier for structural biologists to clas-sify and scrutinize the active sites of proteins implicated in cancer and other diseases. The researchers used a mathemati-cal algorithm to narrow down all the possible ways a protein might flex and bend in conjunc-tion with information captured via X-ray crystallography, a tech-nique in which protein crystals are bombarded with X-rays, to reveal the precise three-dimen-sional arrangement of every atom in the protein.

The interinstitutional research involved scientists from Baylor College of Medicine and Rice, led by Jianpeng Ma, who holds joint appointments at both insti-tutions. “Increasingly,” Ma said, “our discipline is faced with de-ciphering the structure of large, complex proteins in which some parts are constantly moving, even when the protein is locked in a crystal form.”

According to Harvard Uni-versity’s William Lipscomb, a Nobel laureate who co-founded protein crystallography, “This success is revolutionary for the field of structure biology and is one of the largest technical leaps forward in X-ray refinement in the last two decades. It will fun-damentally change the way peo-ple do structural refinement for large and flexible complexes.”

A protein is a chain of amino acids strung end-to-end, and Ma said current techniques are good at deciphering all but the most flexible parts of proteins.

However, the most flexible parts often are those most vital to the protein’s function — such as the site where an enzyme catalyzes a reaction or where a signaling protein docks with its partners.

“When proteins move, they do it for a reason,” said Ma. “It is perhaps ironic that current techniques give us the fuzziest detail in the regions where we desire the most clarity.”

Ma first imagined developing a new mathematical algorithm to zero in on these mobile sites about a decade ago, and after

four years of working the prob-lem himself, with very little progress, he assigned it to Rice graduate student Billy Poon in mid-2001. “The success of this project,” Ma said, “is really a story about Billy’s perseverance and determination.”

Poon never lost faith in the basic premise of the project, although producing results took some time. “All indications were that it should work,” he said. “I did start to get worried in the fourth and fifth years be-cause I needed to finish.”

The project’s pieces started to fall into place last fall, but a huge hurdle remained: The pro-tein Ma and Poon were using as a test case had to be “fitted” to the map that Poon’s program had produced. This final step was like an enormous puzzle, and to solve it, students put on special goggles that allowed them to see computerized 3-D representations of both the map and the protein. They would then fit the parts of the protein within the mapped area, al-though in doing so, they often inadvertently moved a different part of the protein out of align-ment elsewhere. The problem was magnified by the fact that only a small fraction of the en-tire puzzle was visible on the screen at one time.

The task of fitting the protein fell to BCM student Xiaorui Chen, who joined Ma’s group as part of her medical school rotation. Protein fitting is an art for which Chen has an enor-mous talent, Ma said, in part because she has studied proteins since high school.

When the problem finally was solved, Poon was overjoyed at being able to publish the results of his long years of study. “If anything, I was even happier,” Ma said. “Nobody was sure it would work out before that, and it’s a rare treat when a sci-entist gets to witness a success like this one.”

Other co-authors of the pa-per were BCM faculty members Florante Quiocho and Qinghua Wang. Poon was supported by the Houston Area Molecular Biophysics Predoctoral Train-ing Program. Other funding agencies that contributed to the work were the National Insti-tutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Welch Foundation, as well as Hewlett Packard and Intel via their support of the Rice Teras-cale Cluster. The research ap-peared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

—Jade Boyd

Protein Puzzle Falls into Place

Chen fits together 3-D representations of proteins.

Jianpeng Ma, Billy Poon and Xiaorui Chen

“This success is revolutionary for the field of structure biology and is one of the largest technical leaps forwards in X-ray refinement in the last two decades. It will fundamentally change the way people do structural refinement for large and flexible complexes.” —William Lipscomb, harvard university

10 rice sallyport


fall ’07 11

Rice University physicist Tom Killian remains unfazed. He’s one of a growing group of researchers worldwide who are unlocking some of the mysteries of plasmas by doing something nature never does — freezing them to less than a degree above absolute zero.

“Our plasmas behave differ-ently because they’re cold,” Kil-lian said. “The particles inside them slow down to the point that they feel one another and interact with their neighbors much more strongly than stan-dard plasmas, and we have the technology to take pictures of them while they do it.” He hopes to make his cold plasmas give up some of the secrets of their dense, hot, energetic cousins.

“The field sprang into exis-tence only recently, when tech-nology advanced to the point where we could make exotic states of nature that were previ-ously limited to the realm of theory,” Killian said. There are fewer than a dozen laboratories in the world working on ultra-cold neutral plasmas, but the field is growing quickly because technology is bringing previ-ously unperformed experiments within reach.

Ultracold plasmas are some-thing of a conundrum. To start with, matter in a plasma state doesn’t exist as discrete atoms. Instead, plasma is a kind of atomic soup that contains about equal numbers of free-flowing electrons and ions. Plasmas have some of the properties of

a gas but differ from gases in that they are good conductors of electricity and are affected by magnetic fields.

In Killian’s laboratory, plasmas are created and cooled by lasers. They exist only for about one-thousandth of a second, but that’s long enough to be photographed. By slightly varying the conditions of the plasma and by photographing it at various points throughout its short lifespan, Killian and his colleagues are opening a window on a bizarre place where matter behaves in fundamentally different ways than are normally observable.

Researchers already have made liquidlike systems that resemble the interiors of gas giant planets like Jupiter. Now, several research groups around the world, including Killian’s, are racing to become the first to create a solid neutral plasma — a bizarre state of matter believed to exist in the crust of super-dense neutron stars.

“The concept of a solid plasma is counterintuitive,” Kil-lian said. “How can you have this flowing mix of ions and electrons in a solid form?” In

nature, the answer lies in the density of the material. In a neutron star, for example, a tea-spoon of matter has a mass of about 100 million metric tons. So a plasma there becomes solid due to the crushing density of its surroundings. In the lab, Kil-lian hopes to get the same effect by making the plasma ultracold.

“People ask what applications there are,” Killian said. “It’s a natural question, and though there are some indications of ways we might use ultracold neutral plasmas — to improve electron microscopy, for ex-ample — researchers in this field are primarily inspired by a desire to explore new realms of nature that no one has ever seen before.”

Killian’s team includes post-doctoral researcher Hong Gao, graduate students Jose Castro and Sampad Laha and former graduate students Priya Gupta and Clayton Simien. Killian was invited by the editors of Science magazine to summarize the state of the emergent discipline in a review article.

—Jade Boyd

Deep Freezing PlasmasForget solids, liquids and gases. Plasmas are, by far, the most abun-dant state of matter, accounting for about 99 percent of the visible matter in the universe. But you’re not likely to encounter plasma here on Earth. Strongly interacting plasmas naturally occur only in very dense and energetic environments where it isn’t possible to set up a laboratory, such as a white dwarf star.

There are fewer than a dozen laboratories in the world working on ultracold neutral plasmas, but the field is growing quickly because technology is bringing previously unperformed experiments within reach.


It’s not a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket … unless you’re a senita moth.

Found in the parched Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona and northern Mexico, the senita moth depends on a single plant species — the senita cactus — both for its food and for a place to lay eggs. The senita cactus is equally dependent on the moth, the only species that pollinates its flowers.

Senita cacti and senita moths have a rare, mutually depen-dent relationship, one of only three known dependencies in which an insect actively polli-nates flowers for the purpose of assuring a food resource for its offspring.

“Mutualistic relationships like this present a problem for eco-logical theory,” said Nat Hol-land, Rice assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biol-ogy. Holland co-discovered the senita moth–senita cactus mutu-alism in 1995 and has studied it ever since.

The problem is that the moths lay their eggs inside the cacti’s flowers immediately af-ter pollination, and when the eggs hatch, the moth larvae eat the fruit, destroying the plant’s chances to produce seeds. The-ory predicts extreme ecological instability for this relationship: As moth populations increase, more fruits are destroyed and fewer new cacti appear, and the spiral continues until both spe-cies disappear. But in this case, that hasn’t happened.

Holland, who quipped that

his “real” lab is 1,500 miles away, spends several months each year observing the moths and cacti at several locations in the Sonoran Desert, including Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southern Arizo-na. But his primary research site for more than a decade has been a desolate, 30-acre patch of des-ert straddling three ranches near Bahia de Kino on the Gulf of California. Holland and his stu-dents sometimes go weeks with-out seeing other people at the sites, aside from stray cowboys.

empirically to find out how well they predict what really happens.”

Traditional theory of such mutualistic interactions leads to predictions of unbounded population growth or instabil-ity and eventual doom due to one species overexploiting an-other. These predictions clearly don’t square with what Holland and his students see happening in the Sonoran Desert, where both species thrive. His models suggest that one mutualist may exert some control over the

other’s population increases, such that neither unbounded growth nor overexploitation ensue.

“I’ve always been interested in the community ecology of mutualism — the larger puzzle — and this moth–cactus re-lationship is just one piece of that,” Holland said. “When we discovered the relationship, I immediately thought of using it to look at the bigger picture, but I wound up spending a de-

cade working on the population ecology of mutualisms, a pre-requisite for understanding the larger puzzle.”

Now Holland is returning to his earlier interests in com-munity ecology. “We want to understand how the structure of mutualistic communities influ-ences the stability and dynam-ics of individual species and of whole networks of species,” he said. The results suggest that the structures of mutualistic communities complement those of predator–prey food webs, a

finding that presents the tanta-lizing possibility of developing an overarching scheme that in-corporates elements of both.

Holland’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Geo-graphic Society and the Nation-al Park Service.

—Jade Boyd

The solitude provides valu-able time for Holland to syn-thesize what he’s learned in the desert, which is important because his ultimate goal is a fundamental rethinking of eco-logical theory for such mutu-alistic interactions. “I develop theoretical models that attempt to explain mutualistic relation-ships like the one between the moth and the cactus,” he said, “and I take those models into the field and examine them

There’s More to Life Than Predator Eats Prey

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12 rice sallyport


When Nagarajaiah was in high school in Bangalore, India, the BBC ran a series on different types of bridges that showed how scientists study their vibrations to determine if they are safe. “One program analyzed in great detail the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington,” he recalled. “That really fired my imagination and made me want to know more about how struc-tures behave dynamically.”

Today, the Rice professor of mechanical engineering stud-ies the structural integrity of bridges and monitors their safety. Careful examination and testing of failed structural com-ponents coupled with computer modeling might help determine the cause of the collapse in Min-neapolis, Nagarajaiah said, but recreating the scenario will be a painstaking process that could take months.

“By eliminating certain types of causes, such as the piers not failing, engineers might be able to estimate the possible cause of the collapse,” Nagarajaiah said. “Photos show that the two piers of the steel three-span truss arch bridge are still intact, so I sus-pect that fatigue fracture in one of the trusses is likely to have been a contributing factor.”

how Bridges Are Inspected

Structural damage on bridges, such as fatigue cracks and frac-tures in hidden members and joints, are not always visible to the eye. Engineers assess struc-tural integrity by monitoring the soundness of the entire bridge and then zeroing in on specific sections. Sensors placed on sam-ple areas of the bridge record strains caused by vibrations and movement of the bridge and any excessive strains or force in structural members. These mea-surements are incorporated into a computer model developed on the bridge’s original design. If analysis reveals problem areas that need closer inspection, the areas in question can be exam-ined with ultrasonic sensors.

Once the inspection of a bridge has been completed, engineers rate the structure’s overall condition on a scale es-tablished by the Federal High-way Administration. A score of 9 indicates excellent condition. A rating of zero is assigned to a failed bridge, which means it is beyond corrective action. A score of 1 indicates imminent failure, and 2 indicates criti-cal condition. Nagarajaiah said

scores below 3 require shutting down a bridge immediately.

The eight-lane Interstate 35W bridge that crossed the Mis-sissippi River near downtown Minneapolis received an average score of 5 when it was inspected in 2005. An overall score of 5 represents fair condition and in-dicates that all primary structural elements are sound but may have minor section loss, crack-ing, spalling or scour (erosion of soil around the base of the pier that may cause the pier to tilt).

“Obviously there were some deficiencies, but none serious enough to warrant closing the bridge,” Nagarajaiah said. “It’s very rare for an entire bridge to collapse. Usually only one or two sections collapse.”

He attributed the collapse of the whole bridge to its de-sign, which, he said, is typical of bridges built in the 1950s and 1960s. The 40-year-old I-35W bridge was built with a continu-ous truss across two supports, the overhang at each end con-necting to the ramps from the road. These overhangs created negative bending forces to bal-ance the positive bending forces in the center span, but the de-sign did not include redundant spans, components or supports. So when one overhang failed, there was nothing left to hold up the center span.

“The failure probably started on the south-end span and then progressed to the center span and north-end span,” Nagarajaiah said. “The piers look fine, so I suspect one of the trusses failed, causing the domino effect.”

Fascinated by Bridges

Nagarajaiah, who recently was appointed to chair the nonprofit U.S. Panel on Structural and Health Monitoring and Con-trol, is expanding his interest in structural assessment of bridges and buildings to aerospace sys-tems, including the Internation-al Space Station.

“The backbone of the space station is a large truss, similar to a bridge,” he said. “NASA wants us to monitor it and come up with a real-time assessment of the structure’s condition.”

Nagarajaiah said the trag-edy in Minnesota will serve as a wake-up call for more careful monitoring of bridges. Federal regulations require that most bridges be inspected every two years, but Nagarajaiah advocates more frequent and careful in-spections using new structural monitoring techniques in addi-tion to visual inspection.

“The U.S. has about 590,000 bridges, and 162,800 of them have been identified as being de-ficient,” Nagarajaiah said. Struc-tural deficiencies were found in 81,300 bridges, and 81,500 are functionally obsolete. “If we expect bridges to last 100 years, the federal government needs to spend the money to maintain them,” he said. “It’s not some-thing we can ignore.”

—B. J. almond

Rice Engineer Shares Insight on Bridge Inspections

A bridge collapse, such as the one in Minneapolis on Aug. 1, is the last thing Satish Nagarajaiah wants to see, even though film footage of a famous bridge collapse is what sparked his interest in the behavioral structure of bridges.

Before and after photos of the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis

fall ’07 13


The entering class of freshmen that arrived for 2007 O-Week is one for the record books.

In addition to being Rice’s largest group of first-year students, the 742 freshmen were selected from the largest applicant pool in Rice’s history — 8,972 students.

The incoming class represents a 4 percent increase over the 715 freshmen enrolled last year and demonstrates Rice’s commitment to gradually expanding undergradu-ate enrollment by 30 percent as part of the Vision for the Second Century.

There are other distinguishing features of the newcom-ers to Rice, as well:

• Underrepresented minorities account for 20 percent of the new class — a figure that has been on the rise over the past few years. For example, the 57 African-American freshmen represent a 50 percent increase over the 38 in last year’s class.

• Forty-eight percent are Texans, and 45 percent are from other parts of the U.S. or are U.S. citizens living abroad. Seven percent are foreign nationals. The latter is a 15 percent increase over the number of first-year foreign nationals in last year’s entering class and reflects the V2C goal of Rice becoming a more internationally fo-cused university.

• There are 397 males and 347 females in the entering class. One factor that contributed significantly to the higher number of males was an 18 percent increase in the number of students planning to major in engineering, a field traditionally dominated by men.

• The SAT middle 50 percent score range for the incoming class is 1,330 to 1,500; the ACT middle 50 percent score range is 29 to 34. Seventy percent of the students were in the top 5 percent of their high school class.

• Eighty percent of the freshmen were involved in some form of community service in high school.

• Forty percent speak more than one language.

• Thirty-three percent served as president of a club or other organization.

• Fifty-eight percent were varsity athletes.

“The class of 2011 brings a high degree of academic achievement and intellectual vitality,” said Chris Muñoz, vice president for enrollment. “Their contributions to school, family and community are significant. We are delighted to welcome them to Rice.”

—B. J. Almond

Rice’s Largest Class of FreshmenArrives for O-Week

14 rice sallyport

[ S T U D E N T S ]

Composed of ice crystals that melt into a gas that can ignite, methane hy-drates have been dubbed “ice that burns.”They’re formed tens to hun-dreds of meters below the ocean floor, where tempera-tures plunge and the weight of the water above exerts pres-sures of thousands of pounds per square inch. As much as 20 trillion tons of methane are estimated to be locked away in gas hydrates on the outer edg-es of the Earth’s continents, and according to the Depart-ment of Energy, commercial development of just 1 percent of the United States’ hydrate resources would more than double the nation’s proved gas reserves.

The problem is finding it.But that may have gotten

a little easier thanks to the award-winning research of Rice graduate student Gaurav Bhatnagar, who works in the lab of George Hirasaki, the A.J. Hartsook Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

Bhatnagar has developed a way to use a single variable — the depth of the interface

Locating “Ice That Burns”

between sulfate and methane in marine sediments — as a shorthand measure to effec-tively predict where hydrates will occur and the quantity of the hydrate accumulation.

“Sulfate can be measured more accurately than other geochemical data and may be a better indicator of the presence of gas hydrates,” Bhatnagar said. “Moreover, sulfate data can be obtained from shallow cores, which also avoids the complications aris-ing from drilling through hy-drate layers.”

The importance of Bhat-nagar’s work hasn’t gone unnoticed. In 2006, he won the Society of Petroleum En-gineers’ Gulf Coast Regional Student Paper Contest, the SPE’s International Stu-dent Paper Contest and an Outstanding Student Paper Award from the American Geophysical Union. The re-search is supported by Rice’s Shell Center for Sustainability and by a Kobayashi Graduate Fellowship.

For more information about Rice’s gas hydrate research, visit www.ruf.rice.edu/ ~hydrates.

—Jade Boyd

Thanks to the award-winning research of rice university graduate student gaurav Bhatnagar, the search for gas hydrates just got easier. Bhatnagar is a chemical engineering doctoral student in the lab of george hirasaki, the a.J. hartsook Professor in chemical and Biomolecular engineering.

according to the Department of energy, commercial development of just 1 percent of the united states’ hydrate resources would more than double the nation’s proved gas reserves.

fall ’07 15

[ S T U D E N T S ]

This summer, a dozen Rice Uni-versity students left the country and their comfort zones to em -bark on a service trip to San Lucas Tolimán, Guatemala, to work on projects requested and directed by indigenous people. Arranged through the International Service Project program developed by Rice’s Community Involvement Center, this is the seventh trip to the site.

“It is not about ‘us’ coming to help ‘them,’” said senior Jane Sundermann, one of the program’s student co-coordi-nators. “It is about ‘all of us’ working together to achieve mutual goals. Our job there is to work where we are needed or as the community leaders see fit. I am so excited to work side by side with the members of the community and talk to them about their lives.”

In the past, groups have worked on developing a cen-trally located women’s cen-ter. Rice students also have helped build a medical clinic, a dental clinic, a school and a children’s park and have contributed to a reforestation project. Each project was built from the ground up, including moving boulders to clear land and participating in building construction.

“Rice has been intimately involved in the community, and that is what makes this trip so unique: the long-stand-ing relationship with the peo-ple of San Lucas Tolimán,” said Christa Leimbach, as-sistant director of the Com-munity Involvement Center. “The opportunity to stay for two weeks in the same place really enables the students to

learn about the culture and, in turn, learn about themselves.”

Leimbach, who accompa-nied the students, facilitated pretrip education and trip logistics, but she gives most of the credit to the student volunteers. “It’s a student-led trip and a student experience,” she said. “These are incredible students who are helping oth-ers on their own time, in the midst of their busy academic lives. I’m grateful for the op-portunity to go with them, watch them grow and see what they are capable of.”

Under the leadership of student co-coordinators Sun-dermann and Karina Rad-ulescu, the students spent the spring semester learning about Guatemala and raising funds for the trip by baking cook-ies, washing cars, organizing a dodgeball tournament and writing countless letters re-questing support from friends, family and the Rice commu-nity. For many of the students, none of it felt like work.

“I’ve learned that service re-ally can be a way to live one’s life; a way to approach every day. And I like that lifestyle,” said Sundermann, a psychol-ogy major from St. Louis. She has been involved with a num-ber of service projects ranging from English as a Second Lan-guage tutoring to orphanage outreach in the Dominican Republic to constructing class-rooms in Mexico.

“Service has been one of the most important educational experiences I have had in my time at Rice,” Sundermann said. “It’s one thing to learn in the classroom, but to go out into the community and apply my knowledge and skills is an incredibly rewarding and educational experience.”

To learn more about the Community Involvement Center, visit www.ruf.rice.edu/ ~service.

—Jessica stark

Community Service as Lifestyle

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[ S T U D E N T S ]

Cannonball One, instituted in 1984, is the legal successor to the fabled Cannonball Run, an illegal coast-to-coast road race of the 1970s made famous by the 1980 movie of the same name. Rice student members of the Rice chapter of the Society of Automotive Engineers have participated in the new ver-sion of the event since 2005. The goal of the club is to give students practical experience in engineering automobiles for optimal performance and cre-ating innovative automotive technologies.

Now, rather than race across the country over public high-ways, Cannonball One par-ticipants drive an equivalent distance on 18 different race-tracks in 11 states during eight

days in May. Rankings are based on the amount of time driv-ers take to complete the given distance. The event is foremost one of endurance and vehicle preparation. There are no sup-port crews, each team is allowed only one set of street tires and competitors drive nearly 24 hours a day.

The Rice team, known as the Racing Owls, included David Carr ’07, Damen Hattori, Kevin Hirshberg, Nikolay Kostov, Lu-cas Marr and Will Pryor. The students invested more than 2,000 hours in the car during the 2006–07 school year. “This was our opportunity to enjoy our work and see if, and how, it improved the race car,” Hattori said. “Before we even made it back to Houston, we were talk-

materials science, who teaches the automotive engineering course for the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, began Rice’s One Lap tradition as an exercise for students to gain hands-on experience in working on a real race car. His many contributions include finding donated cars, providing car insurance, letting club members work in his pri-vate garage and working on the cars himself.

“His industry contacts and consistent high level of involve-ment have been some of the key reasons for the club’s success,” Hattori said. “Without him, we wouldn’t even be near the level we’re at now.”

The Racing Owls are looking for more sponsors to support the club’s efforts. Learn more about them at the Rice Society of Automotive Engineers Web site at www.ruf.rice.edu/~rsae/.

—Jessica Johns Pool

“This was our opportunity to enjoy our work and see if, and how, it improved the race car. Before we even made it back to Houston, we were talking about how we could make the car bet-ter for next year.”

Take a handful of Owls, one 1989 Alfa Romeo, a dash of ingenuity and a lot of endurance. Mix thoroughly and spread across 5,000 miles of road. That’s the Rice recipe for the Cannonball One Lap of America race.

ing about how we could make the car better for next year.”

The hard work paid off: The team finished 54th out of 87 total competitors, up from 85th out of 95 entries in 2005. Country Music Television was so taken with the Racing Owls that it featured the team in its coverage of the race.

Andrew Barron, the Charles W. Duncan Jr.–Welch Professor of Chemistry and professor of

—Damen hattori

Cannonball Running

fall ’07 17

[ S T U D E N T S ]

One way to overcome the tendency of the quotidian demands to push out the needed time for reflection is to accept occasional invitations to join other uni-versity presidents for meetings aimed at discussing more far-reaching trends affecting our future. For that reason, I was very pleased to be invited to two such gatherings: one in Seoul, South Korea, hosted by Seoul National Uni-versity on the occasion of the 61st an-niversary of its founding, and the other in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), In-dia, hosted by the Indian Institute of Technology.

For the conference in Seoul, the topic was the global vision and strategy of the research university in the 21st century. The next decades will see increasing pressure on research universities as they come to be viewed as essential drivers

of the “innovation” or “idea” economy. Nations and industrial enterprises alike will seek to derive from universities a competitive advantage in the inter-national economy. And although this recognition of the central importance of the research university will, in some ways, be to its benefit, other societal and global forces will cause the research university to experience increasing stress in fulfilling its traditional missions.

This stress will derive primarily from two sources: escalating competition in virtually all aspects of the education and research enterprise and greater diffi-culty in securing funding to support the rising costs of research. The competi-tion will be for faculty, for students, for funding, for intellectual property rights and for recognition and visibility, and each aspect of this competition will be

global. In part because of the democ-ratization of higher education (in the sense of being open to all regardless of their economic means), there will continue to be intense pressure against rising tuitions, even as resources are stretched. In addition, many (but not all) governments will be reluctant to use tax revenues to support increasingly ex-pensive research, especially research that yields uncertain returns when measured in local and national economic ben-efit. In the United States, for example, federal support of university-based re-search is expected to decline in real dol-lars next year. This occurs at the same time that other countries are pouring funds, essentially, into trying to replicate the American research university at its height.

These forces, as well as others, will continue to drive most research univer-sities to be three things that they tra-ditionally have not been: competitive, collaborative and global. The escalating competition is likely to force universi-ties to rationalize their operations. The threat from for-profit educational en-terprises and other parts of the educa-tional establishment that do not join the research endeavor with the educational endeavor will cause the reduction of cross subsidies that may exist between the research and educational parts of their operations. This effort to com-pete simultaneously as efficient provid-ers of higher-educational services and as contributors to the production of

Competition, Collaboration and the Rise of Global Higher Education

My days, like those of most university presidents, tend to get filled by the everyday tasks of oper-ating the university, engaging with the various parts of our university community and keeping the implementation of our strategic plan, the Vision for the Second Century, on track. Little time seems available to reflect on some of the broader trends that will affect universities in the coming decades.

By David W. Leebron, President, rice university

18 rice sallyport

fall ’07 19

knowledge through research will strain financial resources. Collaboration with industry in research is likely to increase, but this may lead to increased conflict over intellectual property rights and a blurring of research missions between university and industry that could be detrimental to basic research.

The increase in competition in virtu-ally every market in which universities operate (for students, for faculty, for research funding) will force universities to become more effective international actors as they seek to create the best opportunities for both students and faculty. In other kinds of enterprises, the result has been a rationalization and consolidation of the industry (account-ing, legal services and retailing come to mind). With universities, however, the barriers to consolidation (mergers and acquisitions) and, in most cases, to foreign direct investment (the establish-ment of foreign branches) will remain high. (A notable exception is the es-tablishment by some governments of “education cities” such as that in Qa-tar.) Instead, the forces of competition and globalization will encourage the majority of research universities to build strategic alliances and international col-laborations rather than establish over-seas branches.

As we consider the models likely to emerge, the most probable are the con-sortium model (now evident primarily with business schools), the global stra-tegic alliance (along the lines of airline

ties to establish the foundations of such relationships.

Where does all this leave a compara-tively small research university located in Houston? Because of our small size (reflected in the correspondingly small size of our individual departments), international collaboration in teaching and research is even more important to our success and to our ability to remain among the world’s great universities. Due to our outstanding reputation, we at Rice have opportunities to build in-ternational strategic relationships that belie our size. We must continue the process of leveraging our strengths and seeking out diverse sources to fund the research endeavor. Of critical impor-tance will be the development of col-laborative relationships with industry, and these are likely to involve both the research and teaching missions and to take place in the global context of both our and our partners’ endeavors. But even as we pursue advancement of Rice’s scientific and technological disciplines, we must keep in mind our distinctive commitment both to a liberal undergraduate education that includes the humanistic as well as the scientific and practical and to research that is driven by curiosity and a faith that all contributions to knowledge and under-standing have the potential to improve the human condition.

partnerships) and the occasional joint venture. However, because of the de-centralized, qualitatively variable and intellectually diverse nature of the re-search university, we can anticipate that the cooperation between parts — indi-viduals, departments and schools — will continue to dominate collaborative en-terprises between universities for some

time to come. Ultimately, however, and certainly within this century, we can expect to see universities develop much more deeply embedded rela-tionships that will cause us to look on today’s typical, vague “Memorandum of Understanding” between universi-ties as a quaint antecedent. Indeed, I think it could be said that we are now seeing a global scramble by universi-

“Due to our outstanding reputation, we at rice have opportunities to build international strategic relationships that belie our size. We must continue the process of leveraging our strengths and seeking out diverse sources to fund the research endeavor.”

“The increase in competition in virtually every market in which universities operate (for students, for faculty, for research funding) will force universities to become more effective international actors as they seek to create the best opportunities for both students and faculty.”

—David W. Leebron

—David W. Leebron

In addition, a new 30-second public service announcement appeared on Fox TV, ESPN and Rice’s own Jumbotron during football games. The PSA features permeable side-walks, the School of Architecture and the Shepherd School of Music using a “Who Knew” question-and-answer approach.

Then there’s the rice.edu Web site sport-ing a vibrant new shield that pops off of the page and a growing number of pages with new looks that include official brand-ing, clean new design and sharper content. Publications coming from different parts of the institution are clearly declaring their Rice affiliation by using the new logo. Even the Rice University Police Department’s Tahoes sport the new look.

“Rice’s owls look great on a tie, and I’ve got a few hundred to prove it,” said Bucky Allshouse, chairman of the board of trustees Public Affairs Committee. “But the owl on the shield in the new Rice logo is a beautiful statement of what we’re about — our un-conventional ways of approaching opportu-nities and problems, the wisdom that comes out of our teaching and research. This is one more way to unite us as a community and to tell the world about what we stand for.”

You hear it more and more often: “What’s going on at Rice? It seems more vibrant.”

Well, there’s a lot going on. The Vision for the Second Century is under way, and Rice is being transformed: new facilities built, older ones renovated, the student pop-ulation expanded, international and research programming enhanced, urban outreach

magnified. And alongside is a stepped-up communications campaign anchored in Un-conventional Wisdom and highlighted by Who Knew anecdotes.

“In this competitive academic market-place, the need to establish a recognizable brand — one that stands out and reflects the institution’s unique character — has never been greater,” said Rice President David Leebron. “If we want recognition as a great research university, we need to com-municate our strengths clearly, convincingly and often.”

“The hundreds of people we consulted in developing this initiative said the same thing again and again: Rice needs more sizzle. Un-conventional Wisdom is our secret sauce,” said Linda Thrane, vice president for Public Affairs. “Our positioning and marketing ini-tiative also will spice up our news media cov-erage, community outreach, publications, Web presence and other communications.”

The initiative also includes a comprehen-sive identity standards manual (www.rice.edu/ricebrand), the Who Knew Web site, Web templates and an online storefront for ordering branded stationery and business cards. Topping it off is the NPR campaign, featured on more than 1,440 stations dur-ing the popular “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” programs, plus Rice banners on npr.org.

“NPR’s audience of leaders in business, government and education are just the people we want to reach to raise awareness about Rice and its distinctive education, re-

W o R d S o F W I S d o m

millions of national Public radio listeners around the country heard that short phrase during its two-month run this fall. The nPr sponsorship — which generated 90 million impressions, or people contacts — is part of a comprehensive communications initia-tive to raise awareness of rice and help more people understand what sets it apart.

Rice University. Committed to transforming the

world with an uncommon approach to research and education. Rice • Unconventional Wisdom • rice.edu

“The new Rice brand strategy is designed to differentiate the university from other educational and research institutions by communicating what makes Rice unique — the wisdom that emerges from its research and teaching, embodied in the Athenian owl mascot — and the distinctive, sometimes quirky, way Rice goes about its business. Together, those add up to Unconventional Wisdom.”

—David W. Leebron

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What They’re Saying

“I think the single most impressive thing about the repositioning efforts currently going on at this university is the wonderful match between the quirkiness of Rice and the quirkiness of Linda Thrane and her team. Here is a group that seems to get a kick out of discovering, and then telling back to us, our own great story, and that makes us want to give them more.”

—Deborah HarterAssociate Professor of French

Speaker, Faculty Senate

“A stronger identity will help us on a global level. It’s just important for people to know who we are before we get there.”

—Jeff RoseRice Trustee

“As I told engineering alumni the other day, our unconventional wisdom has allowed us to succeed. And who knew that the George R. Brown School of Engineering’s success is central to American competitiveness?”

—Sallie Keller-McNultyDean, George R. Brown School of Engineering

“Rice students pride themselves on being different from students at other institutions across the country: We love our unique cul-ture, intimate atmosphere and collaborative approach to academic excellence.”

—Laura KelleyPresident, Rice Student Association

“Last year, during my tenure as president of the Association of Rice Alumni, I met with a student from New York City presently attending the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, and she lamented the fact that, while renowned in the southwest, Rice was virtually unknown in New York City. I was pleased and excited when Linda Thrane, vice president for Public Affairs, advised the ARA board that Rice was initiating a public relations campaign and soliciting input and participation from the board, alumni, faculty and administration. The members of the board were impressed with the ‘Unconventional Wisdom’ theme and the ‘Who Knew’ approach to highlighting Rice’s unique qualities. I firmly believe that this marketing campaign will be an integral part of accomplishing President David Leebron’s objective of raising Rice’s profile nationally and internationally.”

—Harry Gee Jr.Past President, Association of Rice Alumni

search and public service,” said Elisa Fink, Rice’s new director of marketing. “We hope that when people hear the spot, they go on-line to rice.edu, where they can read about the individuals and the work that make Rice a unique institution.”

The phrase “Unconventional Wisdom” was developed through an exhaustive se-ries of on- and off-campus interviews, focus groups and surveys to help find Rice’s voice. The branding and marketing campaign has been embraced by President Leebron and the Rice Board of Trustees.

“The board of trustees believes that ad-vancing Rice’s image broadly is crucial to achieving our vision, and we’re convinced the way to do this is through simple, au-thentic messages that we hammer home in all of our communications,” said chairman Jim Crownover. “In fact, the board believed in this so much that we rolled up our sleeves and got in there and worked on it. That’s the measure of how important this is.”

Hundreds of alumni, trustees, deans, fac-ulty, administrators, students and commu-nity members were interviewed or surveyed for the campaign, spearheaded by Public Af-fairs and OLSON, a national branding firm based in Minneapolis.

“Rice’s public image ought to be as distinctive as our university — classy yet quirky, smart yet cheeky — just like Rice and its students, faculty and alumni. We are delighted with the new initiatives,” said As-sociation of Rice Alumni President Charles Szalkowski ’70.

“Great institutions, like great people, of-ten spend the last bit of their energy on be-ing who they are or doing what they do. There simply isn’t time to worry about who’s watching or what message is getting out,” said Deborah Harter, associate professor of French and speaker of the Faculty Senate. “I am so grateful we now have at Rice a special team to do that worrying for us — whose sole purpose is to speak on behalf of the un-conventional wisdom that captures so well the essence of this surprising university and of the brilliant, offbeat, ‘who-knewing’ stu-dents and faculty who make it their home.”

The “Who Knew” marketing campaign is designed to raise interest using clever jux-tapositions, dichotomies or unexpected as-sociations. Several that already have made a public appearance are:

• Who knew an ocean belch could turn the Arctic green?

• Who knew that a happy home could cost less than a family car?

• Who knew that a baseball team with a .311 batting average would also have a 3.01 grade point average?

The rice.edu home page invites members of the Rice community to submit “Who Knew” ideas to a special Web site, which can

be found by clicking on the “Who Knew” icon.

The Rice Student Association is joining the initiative with a contest designed to col-lect student-generated “Who Knews.”

“The Who Knew campaign builds Rice spirit among the students by focusing on, and highlighting, what sets us apart,” said RSA President Laura Kelley. “Learning about these fantastic achievements produced by the school we belong to means that stu-dents will walk out of the Sallyport not only confident in their skills to make a difference as leaders, but also proud of the place where they received this great foundation.”

Trustee Jeff Rose ’77, an executive with Wells Fargo, has been advocating for Rice to create a stronger identity through consistent use of its official logo, colors, wordmarks and other brand assets. “Rice has a tremen-dous brand, but we have to manage it well and make more people aware of it — that can only help us in recruiting students and faculty and raising money,” he said.

Fink agreed. “At Rice, the biggest chal-lenge we face — external awareness — also is our greatest opportunity,” she said. “I look at marketing as the summation of all our communication activities — mail, e-mail, Web pages, events, word of mouth and be-yond. It magnifies all of our communica-tions with a single and strong voice.”

Fink is charged with overseeing Rice’s brand management and promotion pro-grams and working with communicators across campus to create and deploy messages that raise positive awareness of Rice and its many parts.

The new Rice brand initiative also can be a catalyst for alumni to re-establish ties with the institution and each other, said Vicki Whamond Bretthauer ’79, a trustee and alumni board member. “By getting the word out, it ultimately helps us get back in touch with our alumni all over the country and the world,” she said. “As visibility goes up, we’ll be seeing more people wanting to wear their Rice pins and hats and T-shirts and rekin-dling that relationship.”

Sallie Keller-McNulty, dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering, said the messaging is based on what gives Rice distinction. “I do believe it is through unconventional wisdom that we will suc-ceed,” she said. “We’re not like other universities in many ways. We have to be smart, and we have to use our unconven-tional wisdom to attract the best students, faculty and resources.”

fall ’07 21

22 rice sallyport

“All the construction on campus is part of the implementation phase of the V2C,” said Kevin Kirby, vice president for administration “There are lots of things being implemented, such as faculty initiative programs. The construction just happens to be something that people can see and touch.”

The construction is partially inspired by a master plan developed in 2002 with the help of award-winning architect Michael Graves. The study was commissioned with an eye toward embracing the opportunities presented by the close proximity of the Texas Medical Center. It delineates Fondren Library as the campus axis and suggests the relative placement of build-

FE&P has taken extra steps to keep the cam-pus and surrounding communities informed about current and planned construction proj-ects, Bryson said, and its recently opened Con-struction Information Center is an example. Located in a cluster of temporary buildings at the corner of College Way and Alumni Drive, this is the place to ask questions, see architec-tural models of planned buildings and view an informative PowerPoint presentation about work under way all over campus.

“The CIC is intended to be a place where our campus community, as well as visitors, can pop in and see what’s going on,” said Bryson. The center will stay on campus until current construction projects are completed in three years.

“Ultimately, it will be wonderful to have those facilities added to the campus, and they will serve our research and teaching mission very, very well,” she said. “However, during this period, there are going to be some growing pains, and we want people to know where they can go when they have questions or concerns.”

Visitors to the CIC will have an opportunity to learn more about the sustainability features of the planned buildings, which are designed to be “green.”

“We’ve made a commitment that all new buildings will be able to be Leadership in En-ergy and Enviornmental Design certified, which is the industry standard for certification related to construction,” said Bryson. “We like to be creative about each project and try to think in innovative and original ways so that we’re really coming up with the right sustainable answer for each project.”

LEED certification is a nationally accepted standard for the design, construction and op-eration of buildings promoting sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, environmentally friendly materials selection and indoor environmental quality.

For more information about FE&P’s planned and current construction projects, visit the CIC or the construction update Web site at facilities.rice.edu. Updated images from construction webcams also are available online.

—merin Porter

ings, paths, fields and structured parking.“Campus plans done prior to 2002 did not

include any sort of physical engagement with the Texas Medical Center,” said Barbara White Bry-son, associate vice president of FE&P. “We asked Michael Graves to show us how, instead of turn-ing its back on the Texas Medical Center, the uni-versity can actually turn around and shake hands.”

The plan has been revised several times since its initial inception, most recently to accom-modate the goals of the V2C. The V2C’s as-piration to increase the undergraduate student body by 30 percent has resulted in considerable changes to the study by creating the need to expand existing colleges and to add new ones.

Rice’s Vision for the Second Century already exists on paper, but Facilities, Engineering and Planning is turning the touchstone into the tangible. Across campus — and even well beyond — passersby can see the signs of prog-ress in the form of new buildings, construction fences and groundbreakings.

fall ’07 23

Taking a Bigger Byte

Most of us have a hard time keeping our home computer working. Imagine what it’s like organizing and maintaining a complex university network that serves 7,400 faculty, staff and students. That’s what network administrators in Rice’s Office of Information Technology face every day. But the task has just gotten a little easier with the opening of Rice’s new state-of-the-art Data Center. Located on South Main, the Data Center is the

most recent and visible element of a holistic three-year project designed to create a tech-nological foundation to support teaching, learning and research into the next decade. Titled “From Megabyte to Petabyte and Beyond: Future-Ready Network at Rice University,” the project has included a major, simultaneous overhaul of academic, administrative and research cyber-infra-structure, said Kamran Khan, vice provost for Information Technology. “Reliability, security and quality of service were the big drivers for this project. With the new infra-structure, the possibilities are endless.” The project’s accomplishments haven’t just been noticed on campus. Campus Technology magazine recently named Rice a Campus Technology Innovator and cited

the university as the first academic institu-tion to use multiprotocol label-switching virtual private networks. Rice was one of only 13 universities chosen for the 2007 award out of a pool of more than 330 nominees. “When making our selections, we look for true innovation — projects that involve not only a solid technology implementa-tion, but also something more that really makes the school stand out,” said Rhea Kelly, managing editor of Campus Tech-nology. “Rice is being recognized for its forward-looking networking project — its

decision to forego traditional switched net-working to leverage carrier-class technology and create a high-capacity, advanced virtu-alized network, allowing students, faculty and researchers to do some pretty amazing things on campus.” IT began planning for the undertaking in 2004 then gathered input from faculty and students and acquired funding in spring 2005. Contractors soon began installing 1,400 miles of copper wire in 63 buildings on an unusually fast timeline. Just one year later, IT used itself as a guinea pig by test-ing its own migration to the new system. In summer 2006, residence halls were re-wired, and, by move-in week, IT had set up temporary help desks in each hall to help with the new network connections. The

group then systematically began migrating faculty and staff to the new network. The 20,000-square-foot Data Center, which officially opened in July, offers plenty of room to grow for future computing needs. Its state-of-the-art cooling systems and 65-foot elevation offer protection from Houston’s heat and floods. “Considering the scope of this project, it’s amazing to see what we’ve accomplished in the past 18 months,” said William Deigaard ’93, director of networking, telecommunications and Data Center operations. The initiative has dramatically improved

several areas of campus information tech-nology infrastructure by increasing network stability and bandwidth and enabling wire-less access across campus while significantly decreasing the number of viruses. The project also consolidated servers, provided centralized firewalls and reduced the risk of data loss. “Improved gigabit connectivity also al-lows our researchers to solve very large data-intensive problems and connect to national gigabyte networks,” Khan said. “This project gives Rice the backbone it needs to accomplish the goals outlined in the Vision for the Second Century and provides additional services for our faculty, students and staff.”


Campus Technology magazine named Rice a Campus Technology Innovator and cited the university as the first academic institution to use multiprotocol label-switching virtual private networks.

24 rice sallyport

Plans for New duncan College Has Students Seeing “Green”

Rice has unveiled plans for its 11th residen-tial college to be named in honor of Anne and Charles Duncan in recognition of their $30 million gift to support Rice’s unique residential college system and their long-standing commitment to both Rice and environmental conservation. It will be built near the northeast corner of campus and is scheduled to open to students in fall 2009.

“Anne and Charles have been important forces in Rice’s history,” said Rice President David Leebron. “Their support in helping Rice nourish a dynamic, expanding and en-vironmentally sustainable residential college system is yet another example of their vision-ary commitment to Rice, to Houston and to the environment.”

The five-story, 324-bed college will be built concurrently with McMurtry College. Both colleges figure prominently in the uni-versity’s plan to expand its student body by 30 percent, which is one of 10 objectives of Rice’s strategic plan for its second century.

“Anne and I believe that residential colleges are an important centerpiece of the Rice undergraduate experience,” said Charles Duncan. “We are pleased to participate.”

Duncan College will be one of the most environmentally sustainable buildings ever built in Houston and will be the first build-ing at Rice — and among the first in Hous-ton — to receive gold-level certification from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards program. LEED certifi-cation is a nationally accepted standard for

the design, construction and operation of buildings promoting sustainable site devel-opment, water savings, energy efficiency, environmentally friendly materials selection and indoor environmental quality. A gold rating is second only to platinum as the highest level of LEED certification. To date, no building in Houston has achieved the platinum level.

Duncan College will feature environmen-tally friendly building materials, and Rice is making a special effort to use materials that are extracted and manufactured in the sur-rounding region.

Among Duncan College’s other sustain-able features are reduced energy consump-tion by at least 25 percent and reduced water consumption by at least 30 percent, compared with similar buildings simply built to code. A green roof with low-maintenance plants will reduce energy needs for heating and cooling, and smart controls will shut

off air conditioners when the windows are opened. Prefabricated bathrooms will reduce the generation of on-site construction waste, and there will be a classroom finished with green materials and furnishings for Rice stu-dents interested in sustainable living.

Anne and Charles Duncan College will be the second major building on campus to bear the couple’s name. The first is Anne and Charles Duncan Hall, built in 1996 and home to the George R. Brown School of Engineering.

“The fact that two buildings on the cam-pus will bear the Duncans’ name shows that Anne and Charles’ longtime support of Rice is as sustainable as the green features of the new residential college,” said Jim Crownover, chairman of the Rice Board of Trustees. “They are distinguished role mod-els for leadership, imagination and giving

back to Rice and to the city.”The Duncans have a long-standing inter-

est in preserving the environment. Charles was U.S. Secretary of Energy under Presi-dent Jimmy Carter and chaired the Business Coalition for Clean Air. Anne serves on the board of the Nature Conservancy of Texas.

A 1947 graduate of Rice, Charles served many years as a Rice trustee, including chair-ing the Board of Trustees from 1982 to 1996, when he became chairman emeritus. Last year, Rice’s James A. Baker III Insti-tute for Public Policy awarded him its first James A. Baker III Prize for Excellence in Leadership — a tribute to his achievements in education, philanthropy, government and business. Duncan also served as deputy secretary of defense under President Carter. He was president of Duncan Foods and The Coca-Cola Company, was chairman of Rotan Mosle Financial Corp., and currently is chairman of Duncan Interests. He has

received the Distinguished Alumni Award, the Distinguished Owl Club Award and the Gold Medal from Rice.

Anne has been an active supporter of the Shepherd School of Music. She served as a member of the Shepherd Society Govern-ing Council and Advisory Board, notably as its chairwoman and secretary, and as chair-woman of the dedication committee for Alice Pratt Brown Hall. She co-chaired the Shepherd School of Music 30th Anniversary Gala last year. The event raised a record $2.3 million for merit-based endowed scholar-ships, including the Anne and Charles Dun-can Concertmaster Chair.

—B. J. almond

fall ’07 25

“The fact that two buildings on the campus will bear the Duncans’ name shows that Anne and Charles’ longtime support of Rice is as sustainable as the green features of the new residential college.” — Jim Crownover

As Rice University plans its centennial celebration for 2012, construction crews already have begun work on one of the cornerstones of the university’s ambitious expansion plan for its second century: a new physi-cal plant that will simultane-ously open Rice’s undeveloped southwest campus to future construction while preserving the only remaining example of native biosphere in the Texas Medical Center.

“Construction of new facili-ties is the most tangible sign of progress on any university cam-pus, and in many ways Rice’s South Utility Plant embod-ies the principles that underlie Rice’s Vision for the Second Century,” said Barbara White Bryson, associate vice president for Facilities, Engineering and Planning. “We’re on the cusp of a building boom unlike any in Rice’s history. By midsum-mer, more than $500 million in construction projects were under way.”

Most of the campus growth during the coming century will take place along the north–south axis, a move that reflects Rice’s increasingly close relation-ship with sister institutions in the Texas Medical Center. The South Utility Plant will set the stage for that growth, Bryson said, and its innovative design will enhance education and re-search at Rice while preserving one of Houston’s historic natu-ral areas. Rice’s existing physical plant already is operating near capacity and cannot be expanded to supply the amount of chilled water and steam required to heat and cool the new buildings.

Designed by renowned New

Mexico-based architect Antoine Predock, the south plant will be located on Main Street about a quarter mile north of University Boulevard. “Our options were limited as to where we could site the new plant,” Bryson said. “Building new steam tunnels is very expensive, so the new facil-ity must be tied to our existing steam tunnels and water pipes. If we’d built this on the far edge of campus, the costs would have been prohibitive.”

plant,” said Rice director of sustainability Richard Johnson. “There are some design features we can incorporate with the initial construction and several others that we’ll be able to add in the future.”

The plant is being con-structed of energy-efficient building materials. The roof, for example, most likely will be either a high-albedo “cool roof” or vegetated, which will save energy on heating and cooling

Possible elements for the future include a stack cladded with photovoltaic solar panels to generate power that would feed directly into the Rice grid, using fuel cells to supplement energy production or provide uninterrupted power to nearby buildings and installing wind turbines that take advantage of air currents near the plant’s cooling towers or created by the “canyon effect” winds from the nearby Texas Medical Center. Another possibility is arraying a large number of elevated pho-tovoltaic panels over parking lots to provide shade as well as gather clean electrical power.

The south plant design al-ready exceeds goals for federal and regional air emission reduc-tion, but Rice will continue to work with the city of Houston and with industry to pursue and test innovative technologies to further reduce emissions, Bry-son said.

The plant also will serve as a learning environment for Rice students, who will be able to see into the control room where state-of-the-art energy model-ing and monitoring software will reduce building energy use. In addition, the site is adjacent to the Harris Gully Natural Area, a favorite teaching venue for faculty in Rice’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Bryson said Predock recognized the design challenge as an opportunity to preserve the area for future generations of students and Houstonians.

The $54.5 million plant is slated to begin operations next summer.

—Jade Boyd

“Green” Power

The unique facility not only embodies state-of-the-art power generation technology but will be aesthetically pleasing. “Pre-dock’s design shatters a lot of preconceptions that people might have when they think of a physical plant,” said David Rodd, university architect. “For one thing, it’s beautiful. It’ll also be relatively quiet, and in many ways, it will be among the most environmentally sensitive buildings on Rice’s campus.”

Measuring about 220 feet by 70 feet, the building will screen most of the transformers and other heavy external equipment behind walls and an earthen berm. “Sustainability is incorpo-rated at every level in the south

costs. The plant incorporates a number of state-of-the-art power generation features such as condensate harvesting, in which condensate from air-handling units at the nearby Collaborative Research Center will be piped back in for use in the cooling towers rather than being discharged into city storm sewers. Conditioned spaces in the plant will be cooled and heated by a geothermal heat pump, which transfers heat from the building to the soil on hot days and from the soil to the building on cold days. The plant will be integrated into Rice’s world-class system for modeling and monitoring en-ergy consumption.

“Predock’s design shatters a lot of preconceptions that people might have when they think of a physical plant. For one thing, it’s beautiful. It’ll also be relatively quiet, and, in many ways, it will be among the most environmentally sensitive buildings on Rice’s campus.”

—David rodd

26 rice sallyport

Construction Cams

No more peeking through holes in the fence to keep tabs on campus construction: Bird’s-eye views provided by webcams are just a click away, and images are updated every 10 minutes. The webcams for the Collaborative Research Center and the South Utility Plant are in place, and additional cams will be installed at most major building sites as construction gets under way. Images can be viewed at: facilities.rice.edu.

Covering the Canopy

Despite all the campus construction that will take place over the next few years, one thing will stay the same: the number of trees on campus. In fact, the campus will have more trees than before as well as more total trunk girth as more mature trees are planted.

“We will have no net loss of trees,” affirmed Barbara White Bryson, associate vice president for Facilities, Engineering and Planning. “One of the distinguishing features of the Rice campus is the presence of more than 4,000 trees of various species, many planted nearly 100 years ago. It is important to us to preserve as much of this natural endowment as possible.”

Fulfillment of this commitment requires positioning buildings to preserve and protect as many existing trees as possible, moving some trees and planting new ones to replace those that are impossible to save. Director of sustainability Richard Johnson, grounds superintendent Ron Smith and university architect David Rodd are collaborating with project managers on this effort. Each potentially impacted tree is assessed by an urban forester, Stephen Anderson. The teams also consult with members of the Lynn Lowrey Arboretum Committee, which includes faculty from Rice’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, to determine opportunities to plant trees native to Texas as well as the traditional live oaks. While the live oak symbolizes Rice to many, the presence of other species will increase biodiversity in the tree canopy on campus.


shakespeare graduate apartments

autry court

student recreation center

fondren Library Pavilion

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fall ’07 29

“What’s your college?” That’s the question rice alumni ask when they first meet, not “When did you graduate?” or “What was your major?”

The question often is asked in present tense because time doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to college affiliation. once a member of any of the nine — soon to be 11 — residential colleges, always a member. it is just one indication of how powerfully the college system, which turns 50 this year, has affected undergraduate student life at rice. celebrations for the college system’s semicentennial began in march and ran through homecoming.

B A k E R C o l l E G E

Named for: Capt. James A. Baker, attorney for William Marsh Rice and founding chairman of the Rice Board (1891–1941)

Built/Established: 1914/1957 (One of the five original colleges; built as East Hall. Baker Commons built in 1912.)

First master: Carl R. Wischmeyer (electrical engineering)

Traditions: Originally housed men. Coed conversion: 1973. Along with Hanszen, the first of the colleges to go coed. The first named college. BakerShake is an annual Shakespeare performance produced by the residents of Baker College. The college is known for Baker 13, a monthly event anticipated by members of all residential colleges. The college opens its halls for an annual crawfish broil.

Famous for: Baker Commons served as the university’s central dining hall for 43 years. It is a primary stop on most campus tours because of its beautiful, high-vaulted ceilings and Elizabethan design.

B R o W N C o l l E G E

Named for: Margarett Root Brown, wife of Rice benefactor Herman Brown

Established: 1965

First master: Frank Vandiver (history)

Traditions: Originally housed women. Coed conversion: 1987. The last female-only college. The college residents consistently demonstrate their athletic ability by winning the President’s Cup. Brown’s College Night tradition is a daylong event in which residents attend classes in outrageous costumes and return to their quad for an evening celebration. Brown Day is a Saturday cookout complete with sports and other competitions all day long. The walkway connecting the Jones and Brown colleges to the rest of the campus is known as Virgin’s Walk. Legend has it that any person who kicks out every light along Virgin’s Walk will meet a companion before the evening’s end.

Famous for: Originally the smallest college, Brown is now the largest. The first floor showcases a wide variety of paintings and antique furniture donated by the George R. Brown family as a tribute to Margarett Root Brown’s love of the arts.

By christopher Dow

30 rice sallyport

B R I d G E S

“The residential colleges provide a unique bridge between living and learning for Rice University undergraduates,” said Robin Forman, dean of undergraduates. “For half a century, the colleges have successfully fostered and reinforced, in unique and lasting ways, the same values that Rice hopes to instill in students through teaching and research — independence, integrity, initiative, collaboration and creativity — as well as those values that we prize most in our neighbors and fellow citizens — self-governance, tolerance, loyalty, volunteerism and consideration for others.”

Rice’s residential college system originally was envisioned by the university’s found-ing president, Edgar Odell Lovett, who was impressed by a similar system developed by his mentor, Princeton University President Woodrow Wilson. Unlike the English residential college system that was Wilson’s model, the American system did not have any fundamental educational responsibility. Instead, it offered informal learning oppor-tunities, intellectual stimulation, fellowship, social and athletic activities and democratic self-government.

Wilson’s system remained unrealized at Princeton until after Rice adopted its own system, but several other examples did exist, notably the systems at Harvard, Yale and the California Institute of Technology. Rather than choosing simply to emulate a system used by one of those institutions, the committee that had been formed to develop the Rice system adapted appropriate elements from among them, creating a unique blend of features. The formula worked, and today, Rice’s college system stands not only as the most persistent and distinguishing feature of the Rice undergraduate experience, but also as the most widely admired and copied college system in the United States.

The three oldest dormitories on campus — East, South and West Halls — were re-named Baker College, Will Rice College and Hanszen College, respectively, and newly built Wiess Hall became Wiess College. Although Baker is the oldest named college, the college system at Rice officially began on March 27, 1957, when the members of Will Rice College moved into their rooms and ate their first meal together. Later that year, the first campus housing for women, Jones College, was constructed, becoming the first residence hall built under the college system.

The introduction of the college system brought about a political revolution on campus. “Until 1957 student affairs had been handled by the class organizations,” Fredericka Mein-ers wrote in her book, “A History of Rice University: The Institute Years, 1907–1963,” “but the classes clearly had little place in the colleges. When the ‘Campanile’ announced in February 1958, during the first full year of the system, that students’ pictures would appear with their colleges instead of their classes, protest resulted in a referendum in which the college arrangement won by a slim margin.”

The conflict continued when the newly created Inter-College Council came into con-flict with the already existing Student Council. “After a fierce campaign,” Meiners wrote, “students passed a new constitution for the Student Association that created a Student Senate composed mostly of college officers.”

Since then, student self-government has been a powerful component of the Rice undergraduate experience. By placing responsibility for initiating activities, develop-ing traditions and enforcing discipline on the students themselves, the college system encourages a sense of social and personal responsibility. Each college has its own court to handle minor infractions, and the University Court, which evolved from the Inter-College Court, is the judicial system of student peers that enforces the Code of Student Conduct and the Honor System.

k E y T o S U C C E S S

The real key to the success of Rice’s residential college system, however, may be that it truly is a home away from home. A college isn’t a dorm filled with strangers — it’s a large extended family. At the top is the college master or, more often, masters. The position is filled by a faculty member or married faculty members who reside in a house adjacent to the college. In the beginning, the responsibilities of a master were vague. “When President [William V.] Houston asked William H. Masterson to become [the first] master of Hanszen,” Meiners wrote, “the professor asked what a master did. ‘I don’t really know,’ Houston replied, ‘whatever you find useful.’”

If the masters are, in a sense, the parents of a college’s extended family, its associates are like its aunts and uncles. Resident associates, who live in the colleges, most often are faculty, and nonresident associates are drawn from faculty and even staff. Associates of both types lend further stability and share their valuable knowledge and life experiences with students. Associates generally serve only for a few years, but professor of political science Gilbert Cuthbertson, affectionately known as “Doc C,” has set a record that few, if any, will break: He’s been a resident associate of Will Rice College for more than 40 years.

d U N C A N C o l l E G E

Named for: Charles Duncan, former member and chairman of the Rice Board (1975–77, 1981–96), and his wife, Anne, both Rice benefactors

Announced: 2007. Construction projected to be completed in late 2008 or early 2009.

First master: TBN

Famous for: The first building at Rice — and among the first in Houston — to be built to the gold level of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards.

H A N S z E N C o l l E G E

Named for: Harry Clay Hanszen, member and chairman of the Rice Board of Governors (1946–50)

Built/established: 1916/1957 (One of the five original colleges; built as West Hall.)

First master: William H. Masterson (history)

Traditions: Originally housed men. Coed conversion: 1973. Along with Baker, the first of the colleges to go coed. Crane Day is an annual event commemorating the morning a construction team nearly dropped a crane on the dorm, forcing the evacuation of more than 100 residents. Hanszen hosts a yearly Mardi Gras party, in which students compete in a dance contest for a cash prize. Known as the “family college.”

Famous for: Its original building, now called the Old Section, is considered by many to be the most beautiful of Rice’s original three dormitories. The first college to develop a college crest. Hanszen students created the “Corner for the Dreaming Monkey” coffeehouse in the attic of Hanszen’s Old Section in 1967. Named for a statue of a daydreaming monkey that resided there, it served students until Willy’s Pub opened in 1975. Hanszen students founded the predecessor of KTRU in 1967 using the wiring of a defunct buzzer system connected to all the rooms as an antenna. The next year, they were given space in Rice Memorial Center, and KOWL went on the air using antennas attached to Jones and Brown Colleges.

fall ’07 31

J o N E S C o l l E G E

Named for: Mary Gibbs Jones, wife of Jesse H. Jones, founder of the Houston Endowment Inc.

Established: 1957 (One of the five original colleges.)

First master: Calvin M. Class (physics)

Traditions: Originally housed women. Coed conversion: 1980, integrating with then all-male Lovett College. An annual “Birthday Bash” is held to honor the college’s namesake. Past celebrations have included a petting zoo and a college-sized crawfish boil. Every fall, Jones residents conduct a Turkey Drive to raise money for a local food bank. Floors compete against each other, and the one that raises the most receives an all-you-can-eat pizza party. Jones residents are tossed into the “Fairy Fountain” on their birthdays.

Famous for: First on-campus housing for female students and first residence hall built specifically as a college. The building went almost completely unfurnished for its first six weeks. In the early days, the culture was quite conservative since the college was all female. Women were expected to maintain ladylike manners, and the college’s house mothers enforced strict rules dur-ing visits by men from the south colleges. In 2001, an addition connecting Jones North and Jones South on four levels was added, creating a new Jones Commons. A new kitchen and servery now serve Jones, Brown and Martel.

l o V E T T C o l l E G E

Named for: Edgar Odell Lovett, founding president of the Rice Institute (1908–46)

Established: 1969

First masters: Robert Curl (chemistry) and Jonel Curl

Traditions: Originally housed men. Coed conversion: 1980, integrat-ing with then all-female Jones College. The Casino Party is an annual event featuring an elaborate themed outdoor facade. Residents play traditional casino games with fake money that is converted to raffle tickets and prizes. Lovett residents like to show their spirit by bleaching their hair yellow-orange during Willy Week and spray painting it blue and yellow for Beer Bike.

Famous for: Designed in the 1960s during the time of riots, Lovett has a brick-and-wire grating enclosing the outside hallways. It is rumored that the architects took the country’s political climate into account in creating the design, and Lovett is considered “riot proof.” Residents affectionately call the building “The Toaster” due to the unusual exterior.

32 rice sallyport

m A R T E l C o l l E G E

Named for: Marian and Speros Martel, Rice benefactors

Established: 2002

First masters: Arthur Few (physics and astronomy) and Joan Few

Traditions: Originally coed. A birthday celebration is held each year on Jan. 28, honoring the day the college’s first residents moved in. In addition to marching through the Sallyport in Lovett Hall during formal matriculation ceremonies, incoming Martel freshmen promenade through the college’s own sallyport. Oktoberfest is held annually in the college’s quad, featuring traditional German food and an oompah band. Activities include a pie-eating contest, the strongest man competition (participants hold buckets filled with sauerkraut) and the strongest waiter/waitress com-petition, in which contestants hold trays of steins filled with water.

Famous for: Volunteers from the other eight colleges joined incom-ing freshmen to make up Martel’s original student population. Martel is the only college that features a sallyport. Heavy flooding from Tropical Storm Allison delayed construction by two months, and the first residents lived off campus during the college’s first semester.

S I d R I C H A R d S o N C o l l E G E

Named for: Sidney Williams Richardson, Rice benefactor

Established: 1971

First master: J. Venn Leeds (electrical engineering)

Traditions: Originally housed men. Coed conversion: 1987. Every Friday at 3 p.m., residents officially kick off the weekend with the rock song “Back in Black” blaring from Sid Rich’s speaker system. This song begins the three hours of music known around campus as Radio Free Sid. The residents play balcony ball, a game in which competitors at-tempt to throw a tennis ball from the ground floor to each consecu-tive floor above. If the ball reaches the top, it is dropped through a six-story arm tunnel. Tailgate parties are a Sid tradition to help students relax after a long week of studying. Activities are held in the “Sid Country Club,” where students grill burgers, eat snacks and play beach volleyball.

Famous for: At 14 floors, Sid Richardson is the tallest building on campus and is affectionately known as the “Tower of Power.” Although the building is 14 floors tall, it only has seven “stories.” The creative architects cleverly designed the college to have only seven elevator stops.

m C m U R T R y C o l l E G E

Named for: Burton McMurtry, former member of the Rice Board (1988–2004), and his wife, Deedee, both Rice benefactors

Announced: 2006. Construction projected to be completed in late 2008 or early 2009.

First master: TBN

“The presence of faculty in the college as masters and associates adds an academic component to the college,” said John Hutchinson, a former master of Wiess College and current master of Brown College. “But more than that, the interaction of faculty and students in the college elevates the experiences of both, who can learn from and understand each other in contexts outside of academics.”

Another key to the success of Rice’s college system is the random selection process that populates each college with a demographic cross section of the student body. Phi-losophy majors rub shoulders with bioengineering students, athletes with nonathletes and freshmen with seniors, all in a mutually supportive environment that blends students from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds.

Hutchinson emphasized the value of students from different class years living side by side. “This provides a natural system for mentoring by the upperclassmen that includes academic assistance, academic advising, social and cultural orientation, self-governance and role modeling,” he said. “By not separating our students in the residences accord-ing to their class year, we create leadership opportunities for our upperclassmen and individual support for our new students.”

E d U C A T I o N A l o P P o R T U N I T I E S

The college system, created in part to accommodate a growing student population, has evolved into the hub of student life at Rice. Bernard Aresu, professor of French studies, master of Lovett College and former master of Brown, pointed to a number of student-planned activities for which the colleges are best-known, including academic advising, theater and cultural, sporting and social events of all sorts. He also noted that the colleges sponsor college courses that provide educational opportunities not found in regular academic offerings.

“What do Saul Bellow, Vice Admiral James Stockdale, Allen Ginsberg, John Irving, Julian Bond and Tom Stoppard have in common?” he asked. “They and many other famous people have informally mingled, over the years, in commons or masters’ houses for the sole and unimpeded benefit of Rice students. That is a unique feature of our college system.”

T R A d I T I o N S , C o m P E T I T I o N A N d J A C k S

By 1961, the personalities, identities and traditions of the original colleges already were emerging.

Because it is the first-named of the colleges, Baker considers itself to be the classic resi-dential college. Its oldest building, Baker Commons, was originally called the Institute Commons and was the central dining facility for more than 40 years.

Wiess College’s first master, Roy Talmadge, instituted mandatory Wiess blazers — complete with crests — for formal Sunday dinners. Freshmen served upperclassmen while sporting the green beanies that indicated their status as “slime,” as freshmen were called back then.

Hanszen’s first master, William Masterson, went Talmadge one better. Hanszen be-came known as the “gentlemen’s college,” and members were required to wear ties to dinner every evening. It was a tradition that proved to be transitional: By the mid-’60s, many members fulfilled the requirement by tying a piece of string around their necks over their T-shirts. The rule finally was abolished after one Hanszenite appeared at din-ner wearing only a tie.

The first intercollege competition was Beer Bike, held in May 1957. Hanszen — the “gentlemen’s college” moniker notwithstanding — was disqualified for taking illegal shortcuts as the riders circled the course around the interior campus roads. Baker Col-lege emerged the winner. The fiercely competitive race continues today, and other in-tercollege rivalries have included basketball, tug-of-war, and even a neatness and good maintenance contest.

Inevitably, sanctioned competitions weren’t enough, and other intercollege rivalries developed, beginning with the burning of Hanszen’s Christmas tree late in 1957 by an unnamed rival college. Even though Rice undergraduates are randomly assigned to the colleges, it doesn’t take them long to develop a strong sense of community, including which colleges are rivals and which are allies. “As freshmen, we were just kind of taught that Wiess sucks and smells and is bad,” commented Hanszen alumna Catherine Arthur Noble ’99. Meanwhile, freshmen at Wiess received an equally unflattering description of Hanszen.

The more intense rivalries tend to arise out of competitive events such as Beer Bike and intramural athletics, but they also can be determined by location: You’re apt to plot against the college you see out your window. Pranks, referred to as “jacks,” have

fall ’07 33

W I E S S C o l l E G E

Named for: Harry Carothers Wiess, member and chairman of the Rice Board (1944–48) and Rice donor

Built/Established: 1950/1957 (One of the five original colleges; built as Wiess Hall.)

First master: Roy Talmadge (biology)

Traditions: Originally housed men. Coed conversion: 1983. The Ubangee tradition is Wiess residents’ creative take on the modern “dog pile.” In 1964, an ambitious resident “composed” a musical titled “Hello Hamlet.” Residents perform the Shakespearean spoof once every four years. Each Halloween, Wiess elects a “college idiot,” who wins the honor to serve as the “Great Pumpkin.” Then, with candles and lyrics in hand, residents parade around campus singing Halloween songs.

Famous for: Until Brown was built, Wiess was the smallest college — only 100 rooms and a small commons. The first, and to-date only, college to be completely rebuilt. Identified as the most spirited college on campus. Wiess became home to the most notorious jackers in Rice history when a team of Wiessmen turned the statue of William Marsh Rice in the Academic Quad to face Fondren Library just to demonstrate that the 180-degree turn was possible.

included stealing Beer Bike bikes, bombardments of slingshot-launched water balloons and “takeovers” of other colleges. One year, Baker President Steve Graham drew the other college presidents to a bogus meeting during which Baker freshmen duct taped the other presidents beneath a sign that read “I♥Baker.” And in a series of “noise wars” in the early 1960s, members of Will Rice placed huge loudspeakers on their balconies and played loud music or sound effects in an attempt to “blast out” Hanszen and Baker.

One of the most notorious jacks in Rice history wasn’t directed at another college but at the university itself. In 1988, a team of Wiessmen turned the statue of William Marsh Rice in the Academic Quad around to face Fondren Library, just to demonstrate that the 180-degree turn was possible. An expensive crane and a whole day were required to reverse what the ingenious Wiess students had accomplished in a few hours with a simple A-frame. Although the culprits had to pay for the contractor, they did so by sell-ing T-shirts printed with the blueprint of the A-frame and the slogan, “Where there’s a Willy, there’s a way!”

C o l l E G E S N E W A N d R E C A S T

Baker and Hanszen Colleges went coed in 1973, and within 15 years, all the colleges had a mixture of male and female students. But aside from that, no major organizational changes took place in the college system until April 4, 2002, when Rice officially welcomed Martel College as its ninth college and the first new college since 1971.

Named for Rice donors Marian and Speros Martel, the new college added much-needed residential space, and the construction project was combined with updates and expansions to Jones and Brown Colleges. Professor of physics and astronomy Arthur Few and his wife, Joan, who formerly served as masters of Baker College, were named Martel’s founding masters.

Also in 2002, the original Wiess College building was demolished, and a new Wiess building was constructed next to Hanszen College, which received its own updates, including a new commons.

In 2006, the university announced the addition of Rice’s 10th residential college: Mc-Murtry College, named for Rice benefactors Deedee and Burton McMurtry. Burton not only served on the Rice board but, as a student in 1956, was on the original committee that set out the mission and basic organizational design of the college system.

And this year, Rice’s 11th college — Duncan College — was made possible thanks to former Rice board chairman Charles Duncan and his wife, Anne. McMurtry and Duncan Colleges will be built adjacent to one another and will be among the most en-vironmentally conscious buildings on campus. (See story on Page 25.) Their location at the north side of campus will help create a better sense of balance with the colleges grouped on the south side.

U N I T y I N d I V E R S I T y

During its 50-year life, the Rice residential college system has expanded from an idea into the central social structure of the university’s undergraduate population, provid-ing a strong and vigorous way of life. While the rivalries and competitions build bonds among the college residents, it is the diversity of personalities, ages and life experiences into which students are immersed that makes the greatest impact.

“On the eve of Rice’s second century, the residential colleges remain the most prominent and distinctive element of the Rice undergraduate experience,” Forman said. “Continually evolving to better support our students, while remaining forever focused on the original vision of President Lovett, the colleges reflect Rice’s true commitment to providing a challenging, exciting and rewarding experience for all of our students.”

Jade Boyd, Franz Brotzen, Nancy Burch ’61 and Jennifer Evans contributed to this story.

W I l l R I C E C o l l E G E

Named for: William Marsh Rice Jr., nephew of William Marsh Rice and member of the Rice Board (1899–1944)

Built/established: 1912/1957 (One of the five original colleges; built as South Hall.)

First master: James Street Fulton (philosophy)

Traditions: Originally housed men. Coed conversion: 1977. Will Rice is well known for its hard-core dodgeball, kickball and four-square tournaments. The Will Rice Quad is home to the college’s grueling nine-month Wiffle Ball season. Home to the longest-serving resident associate on campus: Doc C, who has logged more than 40 years in the college. Doc C’s experiences and stories are legendary and are an integral part of Rice and Will Rice’s history.

Famous for: The first residence hall built on campus. The college of gods and goddesses, Will Rice is the only college ever to have swept Beer Bike three times.

For more information, visit Rice’s Residential Colleges Web Site:

www.futureowls.rice.edu/futureowls/Residential_Colleges1.asp

34 rice sallyport

For a kid who grew up in the tiny town of Lyon, Miss. (population 300), the teeming streets of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) might seem a long way from home. But Michael Owen ’73 has never let cultural differences slow him down. Today, as the U.S. consul general for western India, Owen oversees American diplomatic interests in one of the most dynamic — and dynamically evolving — places on Earth. Within India, the world’s largest democracy, he is the State Department’s principal officer for a region whose population, 260 million, is exceeded by only three countries.

The first member of his family to attend college, Owen, 55, went on from Rice to earn graduate degrees at Princeton and Iowa State University. His Foreign Service career has taken him to Europe, Asia and Africa. Prior to being appointed general consul for western India in 2005, he served as deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires in Tanzania. An economic spe-cialist with a flair for languages, he’s amply gifted with the paramount skill of a Foreign Service officer: He genuinely likes meeting people. He knows how to ask questions, whether of high-ranking officials or rural villagers; he knows how to listen to answers and he has the technical insight to turn as-pirations into effective policy. Owen and his wife, Annerieke, a native of the Netherlands and a naturalized Amer-ican citizen, have two children: son Bren-dan, a student at Princeton, and daughter Sigrid, who recently graduated from the American School in Bombay. “Much to our delight,” Owen reports, “Sigrid entered Rice this August as a member of the Class of 2011.” We recently caught up with Owen to talk about life in Tanzania, the current state of U.S.–India relations — and baseball.

Sallyport: Were you already thinking of a career in the Foreign Service as an undergrad at Rice?

owen: That didn’t happen until the mid-1980s. At Rice, I had a double major in civil engineering and economics. Three courses and professors in particular still stand out. There was an upper-level civil engineering course taught by Nat Krahl, who instilled an aesthetic sense that encouraged me to look beyond the pure efficiencies of design and insist on elegance. Another great class was 20th-century literature taught by Terrence Doody, which awakened an enthusiasm for literature. And Charles McClure taught a course in public affairs that got me inter-ested in public service. After graduating, I went on to receive a master’s in public affairs from Princeton and a master’s in creative writing from Iowa State University. But I always had a great interest in for-eign travel and cultures — I took several backpacking trips to Europe and North Af-rica in the 1970s and took a year off work as a journalist in 1980–81 to trek across Africa. Over a period of six months, I drove with a group (among whom was my future wife) from London to Cape Town and then hitchhiked back to Europe via

another route. This was a real life-altering experience. It convinced me that I wanted an international career. I knew a couple of people who already were in the Foreign Service, and they convinced me to apply.

Sallyport: What was your first overseas post?

owen: Dublin. Adjusting to life in Ireland was remarkably easy. I have red hair and a red beard (nowadays there’s more than a bit of gray as well), so many people assumed I was Irish. The biggest adjustment was learning to drive on the left side of the road. After Ireland, I served in Mauritania, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Tanzania and now here in Mumbai. In between, I’ve had two assignments at the State Depart-ment in Washington, D.C. I’ve enjoyed every one of my tours and found plenty that was fascinating in every place. Even a country like Mauritania, which is one of the world’s poorest and is essentially all desert, has a fascinating his-tory and culture. I think that’s one of the lessons of foreign travel: No matter where you are, if you take the time and effort to look and listen carefully, you will find something fascinating.

Diplomat Michael Owen Has Made a Career of Representing U.S. Interests Abroad

“I’ve enjoyed every one of my tours and found plenty that was fascinating in every place. I think that’s one of the lessons of foreign travel: No matter where you are, if you take the time and effort to look and listen carefully, you will find something fascinating.”

—Michael Owen

fall ’07 35

Sallyport: What is Tanzania like? The capital, dar es Salaam, has such a storybook-sounding name.

owen: Yes, Dar es Salaam means “haven of peace” in Arabic, and it is a very peaceful place. The city is laid out along a beautiful stretch of the Indian Ocean coastline — there are gorgeous white sand beaches right next to the center of town. Dar es Salaam has an interesting mélange of African, Arabic and South Asian cultures as a result of centuries of seafaring trade among countries ranging from India to the Arabian Peninsula and down to Tanzania. And just offshore is the island of Zanzibar, which was the entrepôt for trade in ivory, spices and slaves through the 18th and 19th centuries. It was from here that Henry Stan-ley launched his inland expedition to track down David Livingstone in the mid-1800s. The Tanzanian landscape is absolutely spectacular. There is nothing quite like seeing tens of thousands of wildebeest galloping across the Serengeti in the an-nual migration. And, of course, lions and cheetahs are lying in wait for the weak and the slow — if you watch the migration just for a while, you’re sure to see a chase. You also can see hundreds of elephants, always encircling and protecting their young, and thousands of pink flamingos in the lakes of northern Tanzania. The remote Mahale Mountain National Park has the largest population of chimpanzees in Africa. Unique as they are, all these parks are threatened by human encroachment. As the human population of Tanzania grows, the demand for grazing and farmland con-tinues to increase, creating more pressures. When elephants trample crops or leopards chow down on livestock, you have a major conflict. Our work with the African Wild-life Foundation was focused on mitigating these conflicts and helping local popula-tions have a stake in preservation of the parks through responsible ecotourism.

Sallyport: What were your duties as deputy chief of mission, the State department’s No. 2 man in Tanzania?

owen: Whenever the ambassador leaves, the DCM becomes the chargé d’affaires, which means he is chief of the mission but not ambassador, because the Senate hasn’t confirmed him. We had a 20-month vacan-cy without an ambassador in Tanzania, so I was chargé for that period. Essentially, my role was to manage the day-to-day opera-tions of the embassy. The most important part of the job is to coordinate the work of the various sections and agencies that are part of the mission to ensure there is no duplication of effort and no working at cross-purposes. In Tanzania, for example, the United States Agency for International Development, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Peace Corps were all do-ing HIV/AIDS counseling. I had to ensure they were all working in a consistent, com-plementary manner.

Sallyport: How severe is the AIdS crisis in Tanzania?

owen: This is the most important chal-lenge facing Tanzania. As in most countries in eastern and southern Africa, Tanzania has a very high HIV prevalence rate. Best estimates are about 10 percent for preva-lence. Prevalence is equally high among women and men, and there is serious con-cern that AIDS could spread rapidly in the next few years. Tanzania already has several hundred thousand AIDS orphans. The United States has launched the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in 12 countries in Africa, including Tanzania. This program focuses on preven-tion, care and treatment and is the single largest development assistance program we have in Tanzania. Five different agencies are involved in this effort: the State Depart-ment, USAID, the Defense Department, the Peace Corps and the Centers for Dis-ease Control. Managing the efforts of these five agencies was a major challenge, but we are starting to see results. Tanzanian blood banks now have safe blood, millions of people have access to voluntary counseling and testing, and antiretroviral medicines are available for people who are HIV positive.

36 rice sallyport

Sallyport: Where is our relation-ship with India headed?

owen: Relations between the United States and India are at an all-time high. After years of suspicion and distance during the Cold War, we’ve grown dra-matically closer, particularly in the last few years. Our two governments now cooperate in virtually every sector you can imagine. We have a new trade policy dialogue to promote bilateral trade, an Agricul-tural Knowledge Initiative to help boost Indian agricultural productivity, an energy dialogue to promote clean and renewable energy sources and a program to cooperate in space exploration. Our two militaries are holding joint training exercises, and we also are now cooperat-ing closely on counterterrorism. We’ve seen dramatic growth in trade and visiting trade delegations in both directions, and there are more students from India in the United States than from any other country. The number of visas we issue to Indian citizens to travel to the United States this year will almost double over last year.

Sallyport: We’ve heard a lot late-ly about the outsourcing of jobs to India, particularly in the soft-ware/IT sectors, but also in ac-counting and other professional fields. Should we be worried?

owen: Actually, most academic stud-ies have shown outsourcing to produce a net benefit for the United States. As U.S. companies become more profit-able, their share prices and dividends rise, and they are able to increase in-vestment levels. But I think even more important is the fact that investment and outsourc-ing between India and the United States

has become a real two-way street. In-dian companies are investing significant amounts in the U.S. economy in a wide variety of sectors, from hotels to alumi-num production to food and beverages. Just a few months ago, we issued visas to senior officials of an Indian company that had bought a U.S. glass manufac-turing company in Chapter 11. The Indian investment kept the company solvent and saved more than 200 jobs. I think the recognition of these two-way flows is very important, and to maintain these flows, we have to keep both our markets open.

Sallyport: So a dynamic Indian economy is in the best interest of the United States?

owen: India is home to almost one-fifth of the world’s population, and it is a very young nation, with more than 50 percent of its population under the age of 25. Its economy is growing impres-sively, with recent real growth rates in the 7 to 10 percent range, and it is rap-idly becoming one of the larger econo-mies in the world. Our exports to India are growing at double-digit rates. They have the po-tential to continue growing very rapidly for years to come since our bilateral trade is still relatively modest. So a healthy Indian economy is important to our own economy as a source of trade and investment. But even more important, you have to keep in mind that some 700 mil-lion people in India still live in poverty, with incomes of less than $2 per day. A strong Indian economy with steady growth is vital to lifting these people out of poverty, and that’s an objective we all should favor.

Sallyport: How does your current position in western India — consul general — differ from your previ-ous post?

owen: Every U.S. embassy around the world is headed by an ambassador — who is chief of mission — and a deputy chief of mission. In India, both the ambassa-dor and DCM are at our embassy in New Delhi, but the United States also has three constituent posts in the country: consulate Mumbai, consulate Chennai and consulate Calcutta. And we will soon open a fourth consulate in Hyderabad. A consul general, also referred to as a principal officer, heads each of these constituent posts. I am the U.S. consul general for western India, based in Mumbai. We represent the United States and U.S. interests in five states of western India — Goa, Maharash-tra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhat-tisgarh — which have a combined popula-tion of some 260 million people. We have to establish and maintain a good working relationship with the gov-ernments of all five states in our district. We follow economic and financial devel-opments very closely, particularly because Mumbai is India’s financial center, and the Indian Central Bank, the Securi-ties and Exchange Board and the two national stock markets and commodities exchanges are all located here. Most of India’s nuclear establishment — includ-ing the Department of Atomic Energy, the Nuclear Power Corporation and the Atomic Research Center — are all located here, too, so we need to establish a good relationship on this front as well. We host a large number of U.S. trade delegations, we watch out for the interests of some 40,000 American citizens living in western India, and this year, we will issue about 200,000 visas to Indian citizens who want to visit the United States.

—Michael Owen

—Michael Owen

“A vast number of Indians formulate their opinions primarily from popular culture sources such as American TV programs or rap music and, consequently, often view Americans as a bunch of sex-crazed, gun-toting materialists.”

fall ’07 37

Sallyport: Is economic develop-ment the most challenging part of your job?

owen: Explaining American society and values to Indians who have only a lim-ited exposure to the United States is the most challenging aspect. A vast number of Indians formulate their opinions pri-marily from popular culture sources such as American TV programs or rap music and, consequently, often view Americans as a bunch of sex-crazed, gun-toting materialists. In addition to reaching out to Indian audiences, particularly outside urban areas, we send a significant number of In-dians from all walks of life to the United States each year for three- to four-week intensive study tours in which they meet Americans with similar interests. These typically are people who never have been to the United States. It’s gratifying that almost all return with a vastly different, more positive, view. I think it’s important here to distin-guish between U.S. policies and U.S. values. Many Indians may disagree with some U.S. policies, but they generally embrace American values such as personal freedom, democracy and opportunity, once they are aware of them.

Sallyport: living abroad for such long stretches, there must be things you really miss.

owen: Baseball! I’m a long-suffering Houston Astros fan and try to follow their season closely. That’s much easier with the Internet, but I still miss actually going to games. And, of course, Owls’ baseball — last spring and summer, I was up in the middle of the night trying to follow the College World Series.

Sallyport: Between Tanzania and India, you’ve lived amid poverty that most of us can’t really com-prehend.

owen: It’s important to look beyond the physical manifestations of poverty and look at individual people. No matter how downtrodden people are, most still have aspirations for the future. One of the most jarring things about India, and Mumbai in particular, is the extreme contrast between rich and poor. In south Mumbai, there are some of the glitziest buildings and wealthiest people in the world, and right outside, people are sleeping on the sidewalk. No matter how often you see this, you never really get used to it. On the other hand, I’m constantly amazed by the creativity of the poorest of the poor, who find some very innovative ways to make a living. Mumbai has the largest slum in Asia — Dharavi — which is home to more than 1 million people. I’ve visited there several times, and it’s endlessly fasci-nating to see the tiny enterprises that people begin in order to eke out a living. It’s amazing to see how people manage to save tiny amounts on a regular basis that allow them eventually to pay their kids’ school expenses, invest in a bicycle or expand their business. This is why microlending is so vitally important in poverty reduction. I’ve seen so many instances in India, Tanzania and Ghana in which poor wom-en get a small loan — say $50 — that al-lows them to start a microbusiness. This might be sewing clothes, making fruit juice or growing and selling spices. The women work hard, get the business go-ing, repay the loan, save and expand the business and, thus, are able to help their families. Microfinance is so important — and the role of women is, absolutely — in poverty reduction.

“No matter how downtrodden people are, most still have aspirations for the future.”

fall ’07 39

Klineberg, a professor of sociology at Rice since 1972, is the driving force behind the Houston Area Survey, the longest-running collection of data ever amassed about an American city. He knows Houston as few others do and easily rattles off the numbers — the racial demo-graphics, say, or the median income, the unemployment rate or the ton-nage entering the port. Just as often, he talks about Houston and the changes it has gone through as if the city is an old and valued friend.

The survey covers environmental issues, economic outlooks, im-migration, ethnic communities, women’s rights, attitudes toward re-ligious diversity and much more. “It is an incredibly rich set of data,” Klineberg said, the chair he’s sitting in barely able to contain the move-ment of his energetic enthusiasm. “When we step back, we see a city that underwent a total collapse of the economy and then a recovery into a restructured economy, all the while going through remarkable demographic changes.”

A Survey Is Born

Klineberg started the survey in 1982 after being called on to teach a re-search methods class. He wanted to offer the best and most interesting material he could, and a survey of Houston seemed like an appropriate way to give his students real-world, hands-on experience.

“That first class was a group of extraordinary undergraduates,” Klineberg said. “They helped create the questionnaire from scratch, and together, we did all the telephoning. They worked hard, and I am enormously grateful to them, as I am to all the survey classes that fol-lowed.”

Using a list of random phone numbers provided by a local research company, the students in that spring 1982 class called until they had completed 412 systematic interviews. “In the beginning,” Klineberg said, “we defined our ‘sample universe’ as anywhere we could call from Rice without having to pay long distance.” Today, the survey offi-cially covers Harris County and reaches an average of 650 respondents every year.

At the time of the first survey, Houston was booming. “One mil-lion people had moved into Harris County between 1970 and 1982,” Klineberg said. “Eighty-two percent of all the primary-sector jobs in the city were tied to the oil business, and the price of oil increased tenfold during those years.”

Houston was world-famous for having imposed the least amount of

controls on development of any city in the Western world. Houstonians proclaimed themselves to be the epitome of what Americans could achieve when left unfettered by zoning, taxes and government regula-tion. “It was a chance to survey attitudes among Houstonians about the ‘social costs’ of this remarkable growth,” Klineberg said, “and to col-lect information on public concerns about issues such as traffic, crime and pollution.”

From Syllabus to Shaper

Klineberg never intended the survey to go beyond that first semester, but two months after the interviews were completed, the oil boom crashed. Practically overnight, Houston became a very different city, and Klineberg realized he would have to do the survey again the fol-lowing year. The Houston Post offered financial support in exchange for exclusive worldwide first-publication rights, and this made it possible to conduct the surveys on a regular basis.

“It became clear after five or six years that we were going to have to continue,” Klineberg said. “People were waiting each year to hear what we found. The surveys were providing objective and reliable in-formation gathered by people without an ax to grind and conducted with the highest level of professional expertise.”

The survey has become the basis for a pair of courses. In one, stu-dents develop the questionnaire and analyze the survey data; in the other, they assess how well the city is addressing the challenges it faces. A postdoctoral fellowship, funded by Houston Endowment Inc., aids in publishing the results in professional journals. Graduate stu-dents and faculty from across the social sciences at Rice are making use of the surveys, and the HAS Summer Fellowship Program encour-ages graduate students around the country to employ the data in their own research. In addition, the Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research, the world’s largest archivist of digital data, now includes the survey and makes its findings universally available.

The HAS finds, perhaps, its widest range of use outside academia. “It has become a valuable resource of reliable information on public attitudes and demographic trends,” Klineberg said. “I know that many nonprofits seeking grant support use the survey data as a background for why the work they’re doing is important.”

Klineberg gives innumerable presentations every year on the survey findings, including an annual report to the Greater Houston Partnership.

In more than a quarter of a century of collecting information about Houston and the people who live here, Stephen Klineberg has tracked the growth and development of one of America’s most extraordinary cities and, in the process, become a leading authority on urban development.

40 rice sallyport

Every couple of years, he presents the data to the Harris County del-egation of the Texas Legislature. Recently, he gave a talk to the Hearst Foundation in New York City, using Houston as a microcosm of the new America of the 21st century.

The HAS has produced unexpected benefits for Rice as well. When the Houston community was queried about what it knows about Rice, the Houston Area Survey was one of the most frequently mentioned projects. “The surveys have enhanced Rice’s visibility in the community,” Klineberg said, “and that helps to expand public recognition of Rice’s commitment to doing work that is of value to the city.”

A Unique View for a Unique City

The survey currently is funded by a consortium of contributors that in-cludes the AT&T Foundation, Gallery Furniture, Vinson & Elkins, the United Way and the Houston Chronicle. About one-third of the ques-tions are identical each year, another third are questions rotated every two or three years, and the final third are questions on newly emerging issues or concerns.

According to Klineberg, no other metropolitan area has been the fo-cus of a long-term survey of this sort. “There used to be a project called the Detroit Area Study, but it’s no longer active,” he said. “And there’s a Los Angeles County Survey every year, but it’s conducted with different investigators who come in with different ideas of what they want to study, so it doesn’t track many of the long-term trends.”

Nor, apparently, is there another comparable demographic area in the United States. “Houston is often thought of as Los Angeles’ little brother because it’s the same kind of spread-out city at the forefront of the new ethnic diversity,” Klineberg said. “But although Los Angeles and New York City together have one-third of all the foreign-born resi-dents in this country, no city has been changed as dramatically by the new immigration as Houston.”

Tracking Trends

The demographic trends are a principal focus of the survey. During the oil boom, Houston’s population growth was primarily composed of Ang-los. In sharp contrast, virtually all the growth in the last quarter-century has been from Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. “This traditionally biracial Southern city, dominated and controlled by white men, has suddenly become one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse metropolitan areas in the country,” Klineberg said.

No other city in America has a long-running record of this sort or has experienced such profound transformations. “You can see in Houston, more clearly than in any other city in the country, the economic and demographic contours of the new America,” Klineberg said. “What happens in Houston — how we manage that transition and how we succeed in building a truly inclusive, multiethnic society — will have enormous implications not just for Houston’s future, but for the Ameri-can future.”

The survey data also reveal the parameters of the new economy. “Houston was riding the resources of the industrial age,” Klineberg said. “We made money out of exploiting natural resources, such as cotton, timber, cattle and oil.” It wasn’t until the oil bust that Houston went through the same deindustrialization process as the rest of the country. Now, the city is in the midst of a global, high-tech economy, where the source of wealth has more to do with human resources and with access to cutting-edge knowledge.

“Houston’s long-term future is not going to be based on oil and gas,

but on the growth of bio-nano-info-envirotech,” Klineberg said. “Here, you can see the principal challenge of the new economy. If Houston is to experience continuing prosperity in the 21st century, it will have to develop into an urban destination that attracts the best and brightest in America — people who can live anywhere. And Rice is central to the growth of the knowledge economy in Houston.”

Changes and Challenges

Klineberg is struck by how much Houstonians seem to appreciate their city. “People consistently rate Houston more highly than other metro-politan areas,” he said. “They like the low cost of living, the diversity of restaurants and festivals and the fact that Houston is one of the few cities with world-class symphony, ballet, opera and repertory the-atre.”

In addition, the past few years have witnessed an increasing inter-est in urban life. “After 2004, we picked up a shift in the numbers of Anglos in the suburbs saying they would be very interested in someday moving to the city,” Klineberg said. “And there has been a decline in the proportion of Anglos living in the inner city who say they want to move to the suburbs.”

At the same time, the surveys have documented growing anxieties about crime, health care, immigration, traffic congestion and pollution common to all Americans. The public is increasingly worried that the country itself is headed for “more difficult times” rather than “better times.” A major issue, Klineberg said, is the need for vast improve-ments in public education.

“We live in a world where the ‘blue-collar path’ to financial security has largely disappeared, where having only a high school diploma can lock you in poverty,” he said. “We have to get this generation of young people through high school and into at least two years of community college, yet almost 50 percent of all Latino and African-American males are dropping out of high school. That spells disaster for any city in the knowledge economy, where a highly skilled work force is critical for economic prosperity.”

A second challenge is managing growth. “It is predicted that another 1 million people will move into Harris County in the next 20 years,” Klineberg said. “If we don’t take steps now to guide that growth in enlightened ways, much of this region’s remaining green space will disappear into subdivisions and parking lots, traffic congestion as well as air and water pollution will worsen, and the overall quality of life in the Houston area may well deteriorate in irretrievable ways. And if that occurs, can anyone doubt that the region’s prospects for sustained economic prosperity will deteriorate along with it? The key is to come together in a shared vision of the city we want to build, and then find ways to encourage the kind of development that can make it happen.”

The Bottom line

Every city in America is facing comparable challenges, and Houston is a microcosm of America in these respects. Without originally intending to, the HAS has captured and encapsulated Houston’s primary chal-lenges and made them easier to grasp, especially in a city that is so diversified and spread out. “The surveys show clearly how the city has changed, and they help to clarify what we need to do to go forward,” Klineberg said. “At Rice, the Houston Area Survey has become one of our best sociological teaching tools, and at the same time, it has ben-efited the wider community.”

fall ’07 41

“I might be attracted by the title,” he said, “or more by the look of the book — its anti-queness or the wear and tear. I have these books I’ll never read, and I wanted them for some reason, but I never knew why until I started drawing on them.” Clothbound books are Stilkey’s canvas. He uses only hardcover books, whose various colors of bindings lend visual presence; tattered paper-back romance novels and spy thrillers need not apply. He stacks up the books and creates his own world of jaded-looking humans and cavorting, anthro-pomorphic animals across their spines and covers. Stilkey’s installation at Rice Gallery, “When the Animals Rebel,” was part of the gal-lery’s annual Summer Window Series. He used a wall built just behind the gallery’s window as a backdrop and support for stacks and stacks of old books.

Some stacks started on the floor and soared to a height of 15 feet, some stacks were only a couple of books across and others were more than 10 feet wide. A few seemed to sit on invisible shelves, as if they were levitating against the Wedg-wood blue wall. Stilkey’s own thrift store and yard sale finds weren’t numer-ous enough to execute his vi-sion. Unwanted and duplicate books were donated for the installation by the Friends of Fondren Library, Half Price Books, Friends of the Hous-ton Public Library, Goodwill Industries of Houston, The Guild Shop, The Menil Collec-tion and Quarter Price Books. In the end, Stilkey wound up with around 5,000 volumes. He and the installation staff then went through all the books, removing the plastic library covers and checking to make sure there were no rare books in the mix.

When Stilkey paints over the stacks, as in his enormous at-tenuated portrait of a woman, the horizontal spines of the books undulate slightly and create a mosaic-like feeling. Because all the paintings are executed in grisaille (black, gray and white), the myriad hues of the book spines provide the only color, like walls built from multicolored bricks. The combination of the vividly col-ored bindings and his film noir approach to painting presents an appealingly skewed view of the world that is as alluring as it is unsettling. Stilkey sometimes opens a book flat to give himself a larger painting surface. Toward the center of the display, the bright red cover of the “LIFE Pictorial Atlas of the World” was splayed against the wall, and Stilkey painted the face of a man on it. The man’s body extended down over a tower of books, frozen in mid stride as he nonchalantly smoked a cigarette while seemingly being pursued by the black silhou-ettes of Hitchcock-like birds. Above, in the installation’s “sky,” flattened books painted with more birds were stuck to the wall at wonky angles to cre-ate a ragtag flock with possibly

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ominous intent. The other animals, at first glance, seemed more playful. A stork sported a top hat of the sort worn while delivering babies in 1950s cartoons. But its eye looked strangely human and quite sad, perhaps because its long beak was reduced to a tiny stub. An elephant seemed gleeful as it crushed a building under its rump. A kangaroo raised its front paws, clad in red boxing gloves, ready to fight, but the expression on its face, painted over an old green-colored copy of “The Adven-tures of Tom Sawyer,” was world-weary. Depicted along a floating row of vertical books, a white cat appeared caught in the act of slinking across a bookshelf. While most installations are short-lived affairs, the life span of “When the Animals Rebel” has been extended. Parts of the installation have, fittingly, been relocated to Fondren Library following the exhibition’s close. Fondren’s unwanted books have returned home, transformed, and Stilkey may yet gain some fans among librarians.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer

Mike Stilkey is a librarian’s nightmare. He’s long been a zealous collector of old books, but not for conventional reasons. He’s not into volumes because they are rare or first editions. He isn’t a voracious reader, plowing through anything and everything. In fact, Stilkey admitted that he judges books entirely by their covers.

Transformations

Clements had arrived in Nyeri, located in the Kenyan high-lands, the previous August to start a strings program for the Mount Kenya Academy, and her performance demonstrated that culture shock works in both directions. But if the people of Nyeri didn’t know what a vio-lin was before she arrived, they know now: Clements has 85 violin, viola and cello students ages 6 through 19. “I’ve got-ten the opportunity to create an experience through music for students who will forever remember learning violin and playing together and people en-joying their performances,” she said. “It builds their confidence and does something nice for the whole community.”

Clements can appreciate the transformative value of such an experience. Born in Dur-ham, N.C., she spent her early years in nearby Chapel Hill and

started playing the violin at age 6. When she was 11 and living in Melbourne, Australia, she joined the Junior Strings of Melbourne, a kid’s chamber orchestra that toured Europe for three weeks. “After that, I was hooked on violin,” she said. “I loved being part of a high-quality ensemble that was internationally rec-ognized. From that point on, I knew I would have my life’s work in music, though as I’ve gotten older, my career path has turned toward education.”

Violinist Boot Camp

Clements studied violin at the North Carolina School for the Arts before placing second in Boston Classical Orchestra’s Concerto Competition. The prize was a full scholarship to Boston University. In her se-nior year at BU, she met Sergiu Luca, the Dorothy Richard Starling Professor of Violin at Rice’s Shepherd School of Mu-sic, who was in Boston to visit a former student.

“I played some Bach for him,” Clements said, “and he suggested I audition at Rice. I wanted to study with him no matter where he taught. I knew he’d ensure I had the proper technique and all the tools I’d

need if I was going to have a career as a violinist.”

Clements refers to Luca’s training as “violinist boot camp.” “By the time you finish studying with him,” she said, “you know not just the entire repertoire, but a new way of an-alyzing music. Luca teaches you how to think about a musical piece so you can make decisions about how to play it and why you want to play it that way.”

While at Rice, Clements started a music preparatory pro-gram called String Fling with fellow students Ginger Neff ’03, Valdine Ritchie ’03 and Joanne Wojtowicz ’03, and the endeavor reminded her how important her own youthful experience with the Junior Strings of Melbourne had been. “After that, I really knew I wanted to teach kids,” she said. “I love designing programs to get kids inspired through music.”

Clements earned her master’s in violin performance in 2002 and played with the Houston Grand Opera for a year before moving back to Boston to teach at BU and the Duncan Hall School in Wellesley, Mass., and to work on a doctorate in music education at BU. To help make ends meet, she founded the Iris Ensemble, an all-female string quartet.

By chr istopher Dow

As a professional violinist, Gillian Clements ’02 has had her share of performances, but none more surprising than one she played in October 2006.

It wasn’t the size of the audi-ence that was daunting. Cle-ments often had played for much larger crowds, especially during her year with the Hous-ton Grand Opera. But among the 500 people packed into the church in Nyeri, Kenya, only a handful recognized that she was holding a musical instrument. The program read, “Mount Ke-nya Academy: Solo Violin,” and thinking there was a typo, the minister introduced Clements as, “Violet, from the Mount Ke-nya Academy.”

“I played the ‘Hungarian Dance’ by Brahms,” Clements said. “The audience almost fell over, and the jaw dropping was pretty amazing — not from being impressed, but just with confusion. It was like, ‘Who’s this white girl from outer space playing at our church? And what the heck is she doing up there? Is that an instrument?’”

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From Dissertation to Occupation

While Clements was looking for a project for her disserta-tion, fellow String Fling founder Neff, who had moved to South Africa, put her in touch with an outreach music program in Johannesburg. As Clements prepared to visit there, her uncle mentioned that a friend of his, Scott Hawkins, was at the Mount Kenya Academy. “I made a detour to Kenya and fell in love with the school,” she said. “It was the perfect fit for both me and the school.”

In exchange for starting the string program, Clements is given time to conduct research for her dissertation — a case study on the differences in how children learn both Western classical and traditional Kenyan music within the same institu-tion. But creating a strings pro-gram from scratch isn’t simple, even with students who know what a violin is. “The kids learn traditional Kenyan songs and dance on an informal basis,” Clements said, “and the school offers piano lessons, but before I arrived, teaching strings wasn’t even considered.”

The school owned a few violins in poor condition, but

stringed instruments are so rare in Kenya that even the main music shop in Nairobi had only two violins, which, Clements said, “were horrible by Ameri-can standards.” Violas and cel-los are even scarcer. “As far as I can tell,” she said, “there are probably 10 cellos, if that, in all of Kenya.”

That meant Clements would have to bring instruments with her. With help from Hawkins

and the school’s director, Chari-ty Mwangi, Clements organized funding to buy instruments. Then she went to a musical in-strument warehouse in Boston, where she played about 50 or 60 violins and violas. “I picked the best 30 to send over,” she said, “so I’d have something to work with.” A professor at BU also donated five cellos. After Clements arrived, she told the owner of the music shop in Nai-

robi that she had many students who needed instruments, and the shop managed to ship in a batch of violins from India so the students could buy them.

Rewards

All the effort was worthwhile. “The kids are intrigued and ex-cited about playing violin, viola and cello,” Clements said. “In Kenya, only the best schools in

Nairobi could even dream of of-fering stringed instruments. The fact that these kids can learn all three instruments out in the highlands of Kenya is a real novelty. The kids are fantastic — they do their absolute best and are just tickled to death when they get to perform for their peers and their parents.”

Clements has taken her students to Nairobi to see performances by the Nairobi

Orchestra and started a small string orchestra at her school. This past spring, she spent a lot of time preparing her students to take Grade 1 of the Associ-ated Board of the British Royal Schools of Music exams. There was no sheet music for the ex-ams in Kenya, so copies had to be faxed from England. “The kids who pass will have a cer-tificate for the rest of their lives that is recognized all over Eu-rope and Africa as a huge musi-cal accomplishment,” Clements said. “They will be able to get better jobs and more money just on the basis of having a simple music certificate because it sets them apart.”

Clements will leave Kenya late this fall to complete her doctorate in Boston, but she isn’t done passing on her love of music. “My ideal job would be to start a music program for kids at a university, such as the Shepherd School Preparatory Program,” she said. “I thrive on the conversations and ideas that spring from being surrounded by colleagues and students in a vibrant university campus like Rice.”

fall ’07 43

“my ideal job would be to start a music program for kids at a university, such as the shepherd school Preparatory Program.” —gillian clements

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44 rice sallyport

Strayer and the committee will be respon-sible for acquiring and maintaining pieces of art that will be displayed throughout campus to create a more vibrant and dynamic environment.

Strayer comes to Rice from Carnegie Mellon University, where she served as the director of the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery. In her time there, she greatly increased outreach efforts and engaged the community in gallery exhibitions.

“Houston is an amazing city at the forefront of contemporary art,” Strayer said. “In addition to a rich culture, it has a remarkable excitement and spark. Rice has a fantastic reputation and people I really want to work with. I consider it a great gift to be around people who are visionaries with the tal-ent and energy to see their ideas evolve into reality.”

While serving as the public art man-ager for Arts in Transit in St. Louis, Strayer helped orchestrate a summer art festival that featured a large tent with translucent images of insects. It was an unusual departure from the fes-tival’s previous installations, and edu-

Is There an Art History Doctor in the House?Houston’s art world recently grew a little healthier thanks to a new art history doctoral program at Rice. Supported by a $10 million grant from the Brown Foundation that will be used to fund graduate fellowships and foster a permanent collaborative research partnership with the Menil Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, it is the only such program in Houston.

“This wonderful grant from the Brown foun-dation will enable houston and rice to take an important step toward the shared goal of assuring that our city is a great center for the arts and humanities,” said rice President David Leebron. “it will enable the university to continue to foster deep collaborative relationships with our neighboring cultural institutions, especially the outstanding art museums of the city.”

students in the new doctoral program will study under scholar curators from the menil collection and the mfah as well as with faculty in rice’s Department of art history. collaborative research between the depart-ment and the museums will help make the program among the most competitive in the nation.

The funding also enhances the museum-collaborative Partnership, which began as a pilot project in 2005 with the help of suzanne Deal Booth ’77. The partnership has facilitated the appointment of fellows to teach in the Department of visual arts, a postdoctoral fellowship in art history and two new posi-tions in the rice gallery. it also has jointly sponsored lectures and publications with the menil collection.

The Ph.D. program, in conjunction with the partnership, reinforces houston as a destina-tion for serious art history scholarship and will expand the city’s reputation as an artistic hub as graduates go on to become teachers and curators across the country and expose others to the depth of houston’s offerings. other graduates may choose to put down roots and become part of houston’s vibrant community of gallery owners, museum educators, donors, independent scholars and faculty.

The doctoral program will benefit the mu-seums by providing them with scholars and research to help support the development of their collections. The scholars also will chal-lenge the museums to continue to rethink emerging areas of importance in photography, Latin american art and american art.

—Jessica stark

cational components and activities for children were built into the artwork.

“It was wonderful to see so many people from so many backgrounds expe-rience the art,” Strayer said. “There were highly sophisticated art scholars, chil-dren and passersby all drawn together by the work. To know I helped create this experience that transcended social roles was an incredible feeling.”

Strayer hopes to forge the same sorts of bonds across social and cultural lines at Rice, where outreach is a top prior-ity. She plans to involve students, faculty, staff and other interested parties in proj-ects by actively seeking their ideas, and she hopes to develop strong relation-ships with the Houston art community and beyond.

“Collaboration is so important in cre-ating meaningful pieces and encourag-ing each other to work in nontraditional ways,” Strayer said. “We are going to have many projects, and we want to give everyone a voice.”

—Jessica Stark

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Art Curator Adds Outreach Component to Campus ArtCampus tour guides will have a few more things to point out now that the Rice University Art Committee is in place and Jenny Strayer has been named university art curator.

“Houston is an amazing city at the forefront of contemporary art.” —Jenny Strayer

Cronin recently inked a deal with powerhouse publisher Ballantine Books for the North American rights to a trilogy of post-apocalyptic vampire nov-els set 100 years in the future. New York magazine reported the deal with Ballantine, a di-vision of Random House, to be worth $3.75 million. The first novel of the trilogy, “The Passage,” is scheduled for pub-lication in summer 2009, with books two and three to follow in 2011 and 2013. The vampires in Cronin’s novels aren’t the gothic crea-tures of traditional vampire stories, but ordinary men and women transformed by a virus spawned by a botched govern-ment experiment to lengthen human life span. Though the trilogy might be classified as science fiction, Cronin insists his work will find a home in many different genres. “People will call this what they want — science fiction, speculative fiction, even vam-pire fiction — and that’s fine,” Cronin said. “This is ultimately a story about the most basic questions we face as a society and a species — what it means to be a human being and who gets to be one.”

The idea for the trilogy was born from a request by Cronin’s 10-year-old daughter, Iris, who asked him to write a book about a girl who saves the world. The story chronicles the journey of an orphan girl who struggles to save humankind with her unusual powers to combat the viral epidemic. “It is rare to find a novel that delivers so many things we look for in a book: intense plotting, exquisite writing, memorable characters and a tremendous vision and imagi-nation,” said Mark Tavani, Cronin’s editor at Ballantine. “We’re very excited about publishing this trilogy, which we know will appeal to a wide mainstream audience.” Though the trilogy’s first installment won’t debut until summer 2009, it already is being hailed as a page-turner that combines the imaginative power of Stephen King’s “The Stand” and the headlong sto-rytelling of Michael Crichton’s early novels.

A vampire trilogy may seem like a departure from Cronin’s past works, but familiar themes, such as love, friendship and sac-rifice, emerge. Cronin said that although the books will feel a

little different from his other writings, the impulses that drove him to write this story are identical to those that have driven him in the past. “I simply wrote the book I wanted to write, the one that wanted to be written,” Cronin said. “Really, the whole thing has been an act of complete stubbornness from the start. When my wife asked me what would happen if no one took the book, I told her I would have written it for free. That’s how much I’m enjoying telling this story.” With the kind of recent suc-cess Cronin has enjoyed, many writers would pack up their offices and quit their day jobs, but Cronin doesn’t see it that way. He intends to return to the classroom, where he teach-es fiction writing. “I’ve been a teacher of one kind or another since I gradu-ated from college, and I don’t see any reason to stop now,” Cronin said. “Teaching keeps me grounded. It’s satisfying to be able to help young writers, and it’s good to be in touch with faculty colleagues.”

Cronin is not sure yet how he will use this experience in the classroom, but he wants his students to know that this kind of deal is extraordinary and hard to come by. More impor-tantly, he wants to make sure his students know that success is possible. “You can find readers,”

Cronin said. “Writing doesn’t have to be a solitary act. You can connect with people and find out what’s on their minds. That’s what happened with ‘The Passage.’ The manuscript hit a nerve, and editors re-sponded to it.” One caveat he’ll offer young writers: “Don’t attempt some-thing with such a big canvas until you’re pretty seasoned. I have a solid two decades of real writing experience under my belt, and it’s still a challenge for me.” Cronin, whose collection “Mary and O’Neil” won the PEN/Hemingway and the Stephen Crane prizes for best debut fiction, also is the author of the novel “The Summer Guest,” which was a Booksense national best seller. Other honors he’s received include a Whiting Writers’ Award, fel-lowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pew Foundation, the Na-tional Novella Award and an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

—Jessica Stark

—Justin Cronin

A Toothsome Deal

It’s hard to imagine English professor Justin Cronin with fangs, but his next novel has a lot of bite.

fall ’07 45

The Owls sent something of a shock wave through college swimming circles last season, posting their best league finish in 25 years of competition at the Division I level and taking second place at the C-USA meet. Now, head coach Seth Huston is preparing for an encore. The good news is that the Owls have lost only one senior from last year’s elite team, and the squad welcomes back 16 experienced letter winners and brings in some talented newcomers.

46 rice sallyport

FREESTylE

From the 50 meter to the mile, the Owls will be very competitive. With the veteran duo of senior Brittany Massengale and junior Caitlin War-ner leading the way, the Owls are particularly tough in the distance events. Both swimmers have quali-fied to compete in the U.S. World Open Water Championship Trials, with a chance to make the U.S. team for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Mas-sengale is the Rice record holder in the 500, the 1,000 and the mile and is the first swimmer in Rice history to make Team USA (in 2006). Warner has improved every year and proved to be a big scorer for the team at the annual C-USA meet. Freshman Karen Gerken is an all-state honoree who can contribute in the distance events, particularly in the 500.

If that’s not enough for dual meet opponents to think about, the Owls also have the reliable sprinting duo of juniors Carlyann Miller and Diane Gu. Gu won the silver medal in the 50 at the C-USA Championships with the Owls’ best mark of the year. Miller proved to be the team’s top performer in the 100 for the second year in a row, and her 1:49.91 in the 200 is the fourth-fastest time in school history. Versatile veterans like Skylar Craig, Keri Hyde, Megan Land, Erin Mattson, Pam Zelnick and Stephanie Eberhardt will contribute in the freestyle events. A few of the newcomers, like fresh-man Sally DeWitt, may get some work here as well.

BUTTERFly

Led by Mattson, the 2007 C-USA

champion in the 200-butterfly, the Owls have a wealth of talented fly-ers returning to the blocks. Mattson became the Owls’ first individual champion at a conference meet since 2003 with one of the best times in the 200 (2:01.94) in school history. She also is a steady performer in the 100, but it was Craig who had the team’s top mark in that event to take third at the C-USA meet. Also keep an eye on Angela Wo, a sophomore who missed the first half of last season with an injury but still scored in both butterfly events at the conference

meet. Now back to full health, she should be an even bigger factor in her second season at the Division I level. Juniors Natalie Kirchhoff and Hyde can be expected to continue scoring in the butterfly as they have done the previous two seasons, and newcomer DeWitt could help the team here, too.

BACkSTRokE

The Owls may have had five differ-ent swimmers score in each C-USA butterfly event, but backstroke is where they made the biggest strides

and provided an even heavier scor-ing punch. Four Owls finished among the top nine in the 100-back, and four placed in the top six of the 200. Craig won the C-USA silver medal in the 100 with the team’s top time of the year (56.95), and she took fourth in the 200. Hyde was fourth in the league in the 100 and fifth in the 200. Sophomore Justine Lin was third in the 200 with the fourth-best time in school history, and she was fifth in the C-USA 100. Wo won the C-USA’s consolation finals in the 100 as a freshman last season. Newcomers to watch are Kait Chura and Sarah Korellis. Rice will be without senior

speedster Amy Halsey, who is out due to an injury.

BREASTSTRokE

A year ago, the freshman trio of Eber-hardt, Allyson Lemay and Zelnick made strides in the breaststroke events. There’s every reason to expect more improvements from the group this season. Zelnick posted the team’s top time in both events, and her 1:05.24 in the 100 is one of the top marks in Rice history. Mix in freshman Ashten Ackerman, and Rice will be solid in the breaststroke category.

“We have a fantastic group of young women and the most depth since i’ve been here. hopefully that will help our versatility in dual meets and our ability to score big in the finals at the c-usa championships.”

Coach Seth Huston, now in his seventh year at the helm of the program, likes the team’s potential for 2007–08.

Here’s a look at the Owls event by event:

Brittany Massengale Erin Mattson Caitlin Warner

—seth huston

INdIVIdUAl mEdlEy

Of all the events, the individual med-ley may be the most unpredictable. Standout Jennifer Hill had the Owls’ top time in both the 200 and 400 last season, but she will undergo a redshirt season due to injury. Kirchhoff and Eberhardt improved over the course of the year and helped the team, but Huston may look to freshmen Ackerman, Chura and Korellis to fill in the ranks.

RElAyS

It’s pretty obvious that great individual talent can make for some eye-opening relays, and that is sure to be the case this season. In the 200-medley, the team of Hyde, Zelnick, Craig and Gu shattered the previous school record with a new time of 1:43.70. Miller replaced Gu in the 400-medley, and that foursome went on to win the first conference relay championship in school history. The three freestyle relay teams — each among the best in Rice history — are all back together again with the same personnel. Rice’s 400-free relay has a great chance to move from second to first in the record books, and the 800 team of Mattson, Massengale, Miller and Warner may be on a mission to crack the school record set more than 10 years ago.

The NCAA Championships are at Ohio State University in Columbus in March. “I know we have the tal-ent to score at the championships,” Huston said. “We just have to do what it takes as a team to achieve this goal: Be confident and consistent, and stay healthy.”

—John sullivan

fall ’07 47

[ S C O R E B O A R D ]

come almost unlivable due to political and ecological prob-lems. The Aeon Foundation launches a starship with a crew and passengers to find a new home and a clean slate.

The journey takes more than a thousand years, while the characters remain in suspended animation. On awakening, Catharin Gault, the heroine and starship’s physician, discovers that the lengthy stasis has damaged the genetic structure of the hu-mans aboard. It is up to Gault to find a way to repair the genes before the new colony perishes.

Latner said the novel started out as a short story that grew in the telling. She described the 10-year writing process as an adventure and a journey of discovery. “My highest aspira-tion is that one of my stories inspires someone to think about the universe differently,” Latner said. “That kind of thinking can bring hope — hope that can help someone get through a bad night.”

—Jessica stark

tion, in which either party could sweep the presidency and leg-islature or be swept aside. The result, according to the Blacks, is a type of uneasy equilibrium that accentuates the influence of specific geographic regions on the Democrats and Republicans and fuels greater ideological fervor.

The book employs survey data over the last half century to analyze the latest trends. Those trends include the dramatic shift of the South from being solidly Democratic to being the most reliable Republican politi-cal base, and the correspond-ing change in the Northeast — once Republican-dominated and now a Democratic strong-hold. The Pacific Coast has evolved into Democratic terri-tory in recent years, while the Mountains and Plains regions remain, for the most part, Re-publican. That leaves the Mid-west as the battleground where the two parties wage a continu-ing struggle for supremacy.

“Divided America” is the fourth book the Black broth-ers have co-authored. They also collaborated on “The Rise of Southern Republicans,” “The Vital South” and “Politics and Society in the South.”

Journey of Discovery

Though her first novel, “Hur-ricane Moon,” debuted only last summer, it is not the first time Fondren Library circulation assistant Alexis Glynn Latner ’80 has been published. In fact, in 2005, she was recognized as the seventh most-published female fiction writer in the 75-year his-tory of Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine.

In all her writings, she aims to provide people with food for thought, and “Hurricane Moon” is no different. The novel is set in the late 21st cen-tury, a time when Earth has be-

Friends of Fondren Library Honors Creative Efforts

rice alumni who have authored a book, composed a major musical work, edited a journal or held a one-person art show are honored ev-ery year by the friends of fondren Library. To be included in the list of honorees, contact mary Bixby at 713-348-5157 or [email protected].

“Divided America” Looks at Political Polarization in U.S.

Rice University political sci-ence professor Earl Black and his brother Merle, a professor of politics and government at Emory University, have written a new book that analyzes the polariza-tion that characterizes politics in the United States today.

Titled “Divided America: The Ferocious Power Struggle in American Politics,” (Simon & Schuster, 2007), the book describes how the regional strengths of the two main parties have split the electorate evenly and produced the current situa-

“My highest aspiration is that one of my storiesinspires someone to think about the universe differently. That kind of thinking can bring hope — hope that can help someone get through a bad night.”

—alexis glynn Latner

[ O N T h E B O O k S h E L F ]

48 rice sallyport

BroadenIng HorIzons wItH study

aBroad award

Now in his 54th year of teaching, Professor Franz Brotzen credits

Rice University for greatly expanding his perspective and ranks it alongside such life-shaping adventures as living in Brazil, serving as an intelligence officer during World War II and trav-eling abroad with his wife, Frances.

In order to provide Rice students with similar opportunities for discovery here and abroad, the Brotzens have made numerous contributions to the Rice Annual Fund for Student Life and Learning. They also established the Brotzen Summer Travel Award several years ago. In addition to making these generous contributions, the Brotzens have included in their will a bequest for a permanent endowed fund, thus ensuring that future generations of students will benefit from their Rice gift.

To learn more about this fund or about making charitable gifts to Rice through your estate, please contact the Office of Gift Planning for gift illustrations and calculations tailored to your situation.

Phone: 713–348–4624 • E-mail: [email protected] • Web site: www.giving.rice.edu/giftplanning

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houston, Texascommunications services–ms 95P.o. Box 1892houston, TX 77251-1892

Rice’s new shield and “Who Knew” campaign are just parts of a comprehensive commu-nications initiative to raise awareness of Rice and help more people understand the Unconventional Wisdom that sets it apart. Read all about it on page 20.

Rice Magazine Fall 07

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