Rice Engineering Mag2010 01

FALL 2010

Rice Engineering Takes on Grand ChallengesIn Classrooms, Labs and Communities

A major theme of this issue of Rice Engineering magazine is leadership. Our approach, tackling the Grand Challenges, was

inspired by the leadership of the National Science Foundation in working to identify those problems that most threaten our planet

in the coming years. At Rice, our faculty, students and research scientists have been working on some of these problems for years

and are making significant contributions to finding solutions to them.

In what may be our most far reaching contribution to the solution of the Grand Challenges, we will launch the Rice Center for Engineering

Leadership this Fall. Funded by a gift from Rice engineering alumni John and Ann Doerr, the Center will make it possible for us to give our students the tools, opportunities and guidance, when needed,

to develop their innate leadership abilities. Our goal is to contribute to the solution of the Grand Challenges by graduating engineers

with the leadership skills needed for solving these tough problems and to introduce innovations in engineering education. In this

issue, we look at some of the ways we will endeavor to do this.

Putting together a collection of stories like those in this issue is a challenge in itself: how does one choose from the many

examples of how we are contributing to the Grand Challenges? There is simply not enough room to include every faculty member,

research scientist and student who is making a contribution.

So, while we include a story about using nanotechnology in cancer treatment, we do not highlight the important work of John McDevitt,

the Weiss Professor of Chemistry and Bioengineering, who has developed a cost-effective Bio-Nano-Chip that can provide patients

with early warning of the onset of disease, cutting the time and cost of treatment. While we tell of research into many aspects of neuroengineering, we cannot cover Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Ed Knightly’s new grant to create one

of the nation’s first, real-world tests of wireless communications technology that uses a broad spectral range—including dormant

broadcast television channels—to deliver free, high-speed broadband Internet service. And while we have a story about swarm robots,

we do not highlight the materials breakthroughs from the lab of Pulickel Ajayan, the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood

Anderson Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and of chemistry. In the past two years his lab has

produced the blackest material known to man, small, lightweight flexible batteries and field-effect transistors that are printed with

nano-infused ink. This last discovery may enable inventors to print transistors on materials of any kind, especially on flexible substrates.

I hope you enjoy reading about the important work we have focused on in this issue and I’m confident that in the years

to come, we’ll be reporting on significant developments from Rice engineering in solving the Grand Challenges.

C. Sidney BurrusWilliam and Stephanie Sick Dean of Engineering (Interim)

New faculty

In step with the Grand Challenges

Unraveling the mysteries of the human brain

Shedding light on cancer treatment

Robot swarms to the rescue

Solar power meets nanotech for water purification

Back to the (carbon) future

From ‘skunkworks’ to Learning Machine

Engineering Leaders for the 21st Century

Improving water delivery and peoples’ l ives

Students learn about the air they breathe

Awards

Alumni

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CONTENT

Genevera Allen returns to Rice as an assistant professor in statistics to teach in the same

department where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 2006. Allen completed a Ph.D. this past summer at Stanford University. She holds a joint

appointment with Baylor College of Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics and is also a

member of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital.

Allen says she is looking forward to imparting the passion she holds for statistics and research

in her Rice students. She hopes to emphasize applications that will engage students with real world questions and stimulate critical analysis.

Yuri Dabaghian, assistant professor of computational and applied mathematics,

will arrive at Rice in October through a joint appointment with the Texas Children’s Hospital

Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute and the Baylor College of Medicine.

Dabaghian previously served as a research scientist in the Department of Physiology at the Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at the

University of California, San Francisco, where he was also a post-doctoral fellow. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, R.I. and a master’s

degree in physics from the Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics in Moscow and the Moscow

Institute for Physics and Technology.

Aydin Babakhani, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, joins the Rice faculty

from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., where he served as a

research scientist in electrical engineering.

Babakhani also earned a doctorate and master’s degree in electrical engineering at

Caltech and served a year as a post-doctoral scholar there. He studied for his bachelor’s

degree in electrical engineering at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran.

His research interests lie in the general area of electromagnetics, radio frequency/microwave

and analog/mixed-signal integrated circuit design. His current efforts focus on designing novel

integrated electromagnetic structures, circuits and systems in the wavelength regimes of

millimeter and sub-millimeter. Some potential applications are in spectroscopy, biomedical

imaging, radar and high-speed communication.

Taking on the two roles won’t be unfamiliar. While studying at Rice, Allen worked as a statistical programmer and analyst for Baylor. She also completed research in statistical genomics for Rice researchers as they collaborated with Baylor colleagues.

Allen’s research interests are statistical learning, applied multivariate analysis, convex optimization and high-dimensional datasets in bioinformatics and biotechnology. She hopes to develop models for understanding neuroimaging, genomic and proteomic data with colleagues at Baylor while continuing her statistical methodology research at Rice.

Allen was a VIGRE (Vertical Integration of Research and Education) Graduate Fellow at Stanford and had an undergraduate VIGRE fellowship while studying at Rice. She also was the recipient of a Rice University Distinguished Trustee Scholarship from 2003–2006.

His main research interest is the study of mechanisms of spatial representation and the geometric principles of information processing in the brain. Using electrophysiological recordings of brain activity in rats, he has developed theoretical, computational and phenomenological models of observed neural network activity.

Dabaghian was a Sloan Swartz Fellow at UCSF and was awarded a National Institutes of Health grant to fund hippocampal-parietal correlations research over four years. He taught as a visiting assistant professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. for two years and served as a visiting lecturer at the University of Rhode Island during his Ph.D. studies.

Babakhani won the Charles H. Wilts Prize last year for the best doctoral dissertation in the Caltech electrical engineering department. He received the Grand Prize in the Stanford/Berkeley/Caltech Innovator’s Challenge in 2006 for his work on implementing a 77-GHz on-chip radar transceiver with antennas in silicon. He earlier won a graduate fellowship award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Microwave Society. He also won a gold medal in the 30th International Physics Olympiad in 1999.

Genevera Allen

Aydin Babakhani

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yuri Dabaghian

Jeffrey Tabor, an assistant professor of bioengineering, comes to Rice from the University of California-San Francisco, where he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Voigt Lab.

Tabor received a Ph.D. in molecular biology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. In 2001, also at UT Austin, he earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and biochemistry and studied evolutionary biology for two years within that program.

Tabor’s principal research interests are in systems and synthetic biology. He has been part of a research team that designed a “bacterial photography” system in which communities of E.coli bacteria act as living films capable of “printing” images of light with patterns of gene expression.

The work, which has been widely chronicled in journals and the popular press, has recently been extended to allow multiple colors and to engineer E.coli to function as an image processing computer. At Rice, he hopes to lead a team of students and post-doctoral fellows in the engineering of novel multi-cellular behaviors, with the goal of understanding how gene regulatory networks underlie biological complexity.

Tabor’s team won the inaugural 2004 iGEM competition and received the Best Model Driven Design Award at iGEM in 2005. In 2008, he received a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award as a National Institutes of Health post-doctoral fellow.

Rouzbeh Shahsavari joins the Rice faculty in January as an assistant professor of civil and environmental

engineering. He earned his doctorate at MIT this past summer. Shahsavari holds a master’s degree in civil engineering and applied mechanics from McGill University in Montreal and a bachelor’s degree from

Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran.

At MIT, Shahsavari conducted research on atomistic modeling of calcium-silicate-hydrate gel, the main source of strength in cement-based materials. He

hopes to advance the broad science of composites and engineering of sustainable materials, including

cementitious materials and concrete to help reduce the energy use and carbon emissions that traditional cement manufacturing produces. He plans to teach

new courses at Rice on molecular mechanics and computational nanoscience for green infrastructure.

Ashok Veeraraghavan, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, will join the Rice faculty from

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in Cambridge, Mass., where he is a research scientist.

Veeraraghavan earned his master’s degree and doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from the University

of Maryland College Park in 2004 and 2008, respectively. He earned a bachelor of technology in electrical

engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 2002. In 2005, he was a visiting researcher at

the Australian National University in Canberra.

Shahsavari was winner of the $100,000 first prize in the MIT business plan competition this year for a nanoengineering concrete idea based on his research. His entry competed against some 350 others. He was also winner of $15,000 in the MIT Clean Energy Prize for his work on Energy Efficiency in Infrastructures. He held various graduate fellowships, including a three-year National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada fellowship.

Veeraraghavan’s primary research interests are in computational imaging and computer vision. He will join the Rice Digital Signal Processing Group, where he will explore the synergy between signal processing and imaging in order to design imaging devices that, through generalized optics and subsequent computational algorithms, exceed the capabilities of traditional cameras and computer vision.

He also works in vision for robotics and computational scientific imaging and microscopy. As a graduate mentor, he helped to develop vision-based navigational aids for the blind, to make the University of Maryland blind-friendly. Based on his Ph.D. work, Veeraraghavan was named a Distinguished Dissertation Fellow by the University of Maryland.

Jeffrey tabor

Rouzbeh Shahsavari

Ashok Veeraraghavan

RICE ENGINEERING 2009 3

With the 20th century well behind us and the monumental challenges of the 21st ahead, engineers have stepped forward and identified the Grand Challenges for the new century—opportunities that they consider “achievable and sustainable to help people and the planet thrive.”

These problems were chosen through discussions across the global engineering community, led by the National Academy of Engineering.

Like many other academic institutions, the George R. Brown School of Engineering has examined its research and education programs to ensure that they are aligned with these challenges. What we have found is that not only are our efforts in these areas in step with the NAE’s goals, but our size and agility as an institution position us well to have a major impact in meeting the Grand Challenges.

Our faculty, students and alumni are engaged in activities that fall squarely into the four broad areas of the Grand Challenges: sustainability, health, vulnerability and joy of living. We are doing research and development in clean water and solar technology; affordable, socially appropriate medical technologies for the developing world; cyber security and defense technologies; and the development of new modalities for learning, to name a few. Our faculty and alumni serve on presidential advisory committees, national advisory boards and foundations. With a new center focused on engineering leadership, our students will have many opportunities to develop the skills needed to help shape not only engineering in the 21st century, but also science, business and public policy.

In the pages that follow, we outline a few of the research areas in which we’re engaged that will help meet the Grand Challenges, and introduce the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership, which we are launching this fall. In some cases, our research efforts are being applied to problems today, while others are breaking into new areas where solutions are still years away. And although we have the potential to play a crucial role in meeting the Grand Challenges, our greatest impact may be made through our students as they become leaders and decision makers in the decades ahead.

In step with the Grand Challenges


The human brain, with its billions of individual cells all communicating at once, is so staggeringly complex

that understanding just how it works may be science’s toughest challenge. But researchers at Rice and

neighboring Texas Medical Center (TMC) institutions are up for the fight, with the ultimate aim of being able

to treat gravely damaging neurological diseases.

“What goes on in the brain, much less individual neurons, is a problem that really interests neuroscientists,

neuroengineers and mathematicians,” said Steve Cox, Rice professor of computational and applied

mathematics and adjunct professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine. “If we can make

progress in better understanding neuron behavior, the field is wide open for advancement.”


Unraveling the mysteries of the human brain

Cox, who was one of the first at Rice to conduct research in this area is collaborating with Peter Saggau, a Baylor College of Medicine professor of neuroscience and adjunct professor of bioengineering at Rice. In experiments with animal brain cells, the researchers use precisely positioned laser beams to probe individual neurons with a newly developed microscopic imaging system. “In neurons filled with specific fluorescent molecules, we can very accurately measure the activity in their dendrites (tree-like neuronal input structures) at hundreds of sites simultaneously and study neuronal information processing,” Saggau said.


The researchers use mathematical models to guide the imaging experiments with the hope that their

findings will lead to understanding how normal, healthy neurons work, Cox said. Such knowledge

could later reveal ways to restore neuronal functioning that has been lost in patients who

have suffered brain injuries or neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or epilepsy.

“What this research is about is reverse-engineering the brain,” Saggau added. “There really is no

greater engineering challenge out there.”

Robert Raphael, the T.N. Law Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Rice, who has taught courses in

neuroengineering since 2002, is studying the molecular forces involved in hearing within the brain. With the

aid of undergraduate and graduate students, Raphael is studying the ear’s membranes, proteins and outer

hair cells—the tiny sensors responsible for mammalian hearing—to better understand how the inner ear works.

With John Oghalai, a physician and surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital, Raphael is exploring whether new neuroprosthetic devices based on the use of laser light rather than electricity could replace currently available cochlear implants. In today’s implants, electricity is used to stimulate the auditory nerve and the signals are recognized as sound, he said. But performance is limited because single neurons or small clusters of neurons cannot be specifically targeted since electrical current spreads out.

When laser light is used to activate neurons, on the other hand, the light can be tightly focused on single neurons. “We want to stimulate auditory neurons using this method to test the feasibility of this approach in restoring hearing,” Raphael said. “We hope this research will lay the foundation for a new generation of neuroprosthetic devices to help restore hearing.”

Additional work in neuroscience within the School of Engineering is being undertaken by Marina Vannucci, professor of statistics. She is analyzing data from human interactions between patients with various psychiatric disorders and normal individuals. In the study, Vannucci and Baylor College of Medicine’s Read Montague, professor of neuroscience, Terry Lohrenz, research fellow, and Misha Koshelev, an M.D./Ph.D. candidate, found that profound changes occur in the people interacting with the disturbed individual.

Newly appointed assistant professors Genevera Allen and Yuri Dabaghian represent the increasingly formalized ties between

Rice University and Texas Medical Center institutions. Their joint appointments bring the number of shared faculty to three, with Jeffrey Jacot in bioengineering, Dabaghian in

computational and applied mathematics and Allen in statistics.

Dabaghian and Allen have appointments as research scientists at the Texas Children’s Hospital Jan and Dan

Duncan Neurological Research Institute and Baylor College of Medicine. Both are engaged in neuroscience research.

Dabaghian will put his understanding of mechanisms of spatial representation and geometric principles of

information processing in the brain to work, while Allen brings experience in statistical genomics and hopes to develop

new models for understanding neuroimaging data.

“Understanding normal brain development and the mechanisms underlying neurological disorders is becoming increasingly dependent on interactions between scientists in different disciplines,” said Huda Zoghbi, director of the institute and professor of pediatrics, molecular and human genetics, neurology and neuroscience at Baylor.

She said the computational expertise brought to bear by Allen and Dabaghian will help biomedical researchers decipher the enormous complexity of the data they generate, and should help to find answers to some of the most challenging neurobiological problems today.


“We analyzed a large group of previously recorded interactions involving healthy persons and people diagnosed with a

variety of psychological disorders, and found that a healthy person’s behavior is indeed quantitatively and systematically

influenced by their partner’s pathology,” Vannucci said. “These results could ultimately lead to a different way of

understanding and diagnosing psychological diseases.”

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Chair, Behnaam Aazhang, said researchers in his department would like to become

more involved in the neuroengineering collaborations with TMC institutions, putting to work its strengths in analog and digital embedded systems, signal processing and machine learning.

Such research could lead to developing new interfaces between living neural tissues and non-living machines, Richard Baraniuk,

Victor E. Cameron Professor in Engineering, said. “Designing man-made systems that interface with living neural systems will

profoundly improve our understanding of neuroscience and the inner workings of the brain. We should be aggressively pursuing a broad and deep research agenda in this rapidly emerging area.”

Strengthening ties with the Texas Medical Center

“What this research is about is reverse-engineering the brain . . . there really is no greater engineering challenge out there.”

—Peter Saggau

Yildiz Bayazitoglu starts with the familiar basics of mechanical engineering—heat transfer and fluid mechanics—and moves on to the treatment of cancer with lasers and nanoparticles embedded in human tissue.

“The current interesting research areas are all interdisciplinary. Who could have guessed that a mechanical engineer would be working to help people suffering from cancer?” said Bayazitoglu, the Harry S. Cameron Chair in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science.

For more than four years her research has been aimed at fine-tuning a procedure known as nanoparticle-assisted photothermal therapy, a technique in which tumors are destroyed or weakened with heat generated by the local absorption of laser energy.

Bayazitoglu’s strategy is to target more diseased tissue while limiting the damage to healthy tissue. She uses computer simulations to quantify the effect of heating nanoparticles with near-infrared lasers, factoring in the size and composition of both the cancerous cells and the surrounding non-diseased cells.

“I’m trying to make sure we understand all the pros and cons of the technology. We’re dealing with people’s lives, keeping them alive and helping them to live longer. We must be very thorough,” she said.

Shedding light on cancer treatment


The pioneers in treating cancer with light-activated gold nano-particles are two Rice University researchers representing diverse disciplines.

In 1998, Naomi Halas, the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and professor in biomedical engineering, chemistry, physics and astronomy, invented nanoshells, a class of multilayered nanoscale particles with unique optical properties. Her colleague, Jennifer West, is the Isabel C. Cameron Professor, department chair for bioengineering and professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering.

Human tests of a system they devised using nanoshells heated by near-infrared lasers are under way at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The heat destroys the tumor and leaves healthy tissue unaffected. Because the heating is localized, it affects only cells adjacent to the nanoshells.

Halas is a leading expert on nanophotonics and is the founder and director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice. She and West founded the Houston-based research company Nanospectra Biosciences, Inc., based on technology patented by the university. West is a leading researcher in the biomedical applications of nanoshells, and in biomaterials and tissue engineering.

Treatment moves into human trials


Bayazitoglu and her colleagues have discovered they can optimize the technique’s impact by using two lasers simultaneously. Simulations suggest tumors as large as one centimeter, treated with lasers surgically inserted with fiber optics using a minimally invasive procedure, produced the most uniform and effective temperatures.

The first part of the modeling is optical—that is, simulating the responses to laser exposure—then thermal, projecting possible damage to tissue by approximating the temperature distribution throughout the healthy and cancerous tissue.

Lasers and nanoparticles, in particular gold nanorods and silica-gold nanoshells, have previously been used to treat cancer. A company founded by Rice scientists Jennifer West and Naomi Halas, Nanospectra Biosciences, Inc., is conducting human tests of a system using nanoshells heated by near-infrared lasers. Bayazitoglu and West are members of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice, a leading center for nanophotonic research founded and directed by Halas, Stanley C. Moore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“Moving this promising therapeutic approach from the biomedical lab to a medical procedure that works optimally each time, every time, requires the type of effort and analysis Yildiz is developing,” Halas said. “It is gratifying to us all that she is pursuing these important studies.”

Bayazitoglu hopes to refine such treatment by taking into account the light-scattering properties of nanoparticles. She is concerned that nanoparticles near a tumor’s surface obstruct the laser light from reaching those closer to the center.

The photonic nanoparticles in a tumor are effective in absorbing the laser light and thus generating heat. In especially dense tumors, however, the same quality prevents some of the light from reaching the deeper portions of the tissue. The phenomenon is known as “extinction.”

“The ideal is to put the nanoparticles at the center of the tumor and then kill it from the center out,” Bayazitoglu said.

One of the goals of her research is to determine the therapeutic effects of such treatment variables as laser wavelength, power and exposure time, and various concentrations of customized nanoparticles on a variety of human tissues.

naomi HALAS

jennifer WEST

If humans are to travel to distant space and colonize Mars, it will likely be intelligent robot “swarms” that pave the way, says James

McLurkin, assistant professor of computer science at Rice.

“There are places that man can’t physically go, and large numbers of autonomous robots are the answer,” said

McLurkin, who has been pushing the boundaries of robotics over the past 15 years in industry and academia.

The professor’s zeal for robotics has drawn students to him since he was hired last year by the George R. Brown School

of Engineering. This fall, he is teaching his first class, which is designed for engineering students from multiple disciplines.

Since joining Rice, he has outfitted a state-of-the-art lab and recruited some of the best and brightest students to advance

his research interests. The team worked most days and through the wee hours of the morning this summer, developing new

and more efficient distributed algorithms and coffee cup-sized robots that can work together towards a larger goal.

This is not as outlandish as it sounds, McLurkin said, explaining that the idea is borrowed from biology and nature. Just as

thousands of bees or ants work in concert to better their hives or colonies, so too can robots further the interests of their swarm.

“If an ant or bee falls by the wayside, others naturally take over. In the robotics field, sensors and feedback and highly developed algorithms can enable robots to behave similarly, with individual

robots copying the behaviors of other robots,” he explained.

His robots have the capability to cluster, disperse and follow, and they can orbit. They are equipped with bump

sensors, self-chargers, a radio modem and audio system, and wheels. They travel autonomously but in a swarm.

Such robots could have infinite uses, but a key purpose could be to serve defense and security interests. If robots were deployed to swarm over a nuclear missile silo compound, for instance, they could work together to

provide security and detect intruders. If one or more became disabled, nothing would be lost; whatever a disabled robot had discovered would be known

by the others, and they could take over any task with fewer members.

“If one falls, the others do the job,” McLurkin said. “Just like ants taking over for fallen ants.” He noted that the robotics software is

completely scalable, so the number of robots in the swarm can increase or decrease without affecting the accomplishments of the group.

McLurkin said an aim of his current work is to drive down the cost of each robot, to perhaps as low as $100 per device. If this goal is achieved, he hopes

to market the devices to engineering programs at colleges and universities around the country for classes and research. At the moment, most schools

have to develop robot devices on their own, which is costly and time consuming. “I’d like to make the ‘Rice robot’ available as a research platform

in robotics,” he said. “This could really advance the state of the science.”

Before coming to Rice, McLurkin was a researcher at the University of Washington, where he taught robotics courses. He previously worked as a technical lead at iRobot, heading a Defense Department-funded program on swarm robots. The

New York native earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. in computer science at MIT, where he also earned his undergraduate degree. He completed another

master’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.



TO THE RESCUE


Pedro Alvarez likens the use of nano-scaled photocatalysts for the purification of drinking water in

developing countries to the widespread acceptance of cell phones in the same parts of the world.

“In those countries often there are no land lines, no central facilities for communications. Few people have technical

training, yet anyone can use a cell phone. In the same way, we think we’ve found a reliable, inexpensive way

of making drinking water available to the people,” said Alvarez, George R. Brown Professor and chair of civil

and environmental engineering at Rice University.

Water-borne pathogens are estimated to cause between 10 and 20 million deaths a year worldwide. More than 4,000

children each day die of diarrhea. The people hardest hit often are unable to afford the measures necessary

to ensure reliable sources of safe drinking water.

“Ultraviolet light is increasingly being used to disinfect water and wastewater. The problem is, it doesn’t work

effectively with viruses. It takes care of many other organisms but viruses are difficult to kill,” Alvarez said.

He referred to the practice of placing contaminated water in transparent PET-bottles or glass bottles and exposing them to

sunlight—often by placing them on a roof—for at least six hours. Ultraviolet radiation kills many of the diarrhea-causing pathogens.

Alvarez and his research colleagues hope to enhance the strategy of disinfecting water with naturally occurring ultraviolet

light by introducing fullerenes into the treatment process. Fullerenes are the nanoparticles first discovered in 1985 by

Rice chemists Robert Curl and the late Richard Smalley and by Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex in England.

Known as C60 or water-soluble buckyballs, they are “excited” by light and are toxic to various microorganisms, including bacteria, parasites and viruses. Fullerenes are safer to use than such traditional treatment methods as chlorine and ozone, both of which are disinfection byproducts that have been associated with cancer.

With chemistry professor Lon Wilson, Yuri Mackeyev, a postdoctoral research assistant in chemistry and Jaesang Lee, a postdoctoral research assistant in civil and environmental engineering, Alvarez has devised a means of adding a molecule to the fullerenes and thus making them soluble in water. A pilot project testing the method in the town of Guanajuato in central Mexico has proved promising.

The treated nanoparticles, attached to silica beads, might be added directly to water or could be applied to the interiors of tanks in waste water treatment plants to facilitate continuous use.

“You can do it in the middle of nowhere. You don’t need a big, sophisticated infrastructure or electricity, just sunlight, and local people with a minimum of training can do the work. It can even be done on the household or neighborhood scale,” Alvarez said.

The technology also has potential applications in the treatment of other organic pollutants, including pesticides and pharmaceuticals. Alvarez, Wilson, Lee and Mackeyev have applied for a patent and await approval.

“The greatest global challenge of the century is providing a safe, reliable, inexpensive source of drinking water to the people of the world,” Alvarez said. “This is our contribution.”


“The greatest global challenge of the century is providing a safe, reliable, inexpensive source of drinking water to the people of the world.”

—Pedro Alvarez

Solar power meets nanotech for water purification

Kyriacos Zygourakis believes that biochar—the charcoal-like substance that created the legendary fertile “black lands” of the Amazon basin—could become a big part of the fight to save the

planet from global warming.

“There’s a growing body of evidence that suggests the indigenous South American peoples were really onto something with their use

of biochar,” said Zygourakis, the A.J. Hartsook Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and department chair. “Some of these

fertile black soils are thought to be thousands of years old. This gives us confidence that we can also prepare stable biochars whose

carbon will remain in the soil for hundreds or even thousands of years. Such long-term sequestration will result in a net removal of

carbon from the atmosphere, safeguarding the environment, while at the same time improving modern farming methods.”

That is why Zygourakis and a multi-disciplinary team of Rice faculty and students, known as the Rice Biochar Group, have embarked on a project to study biochar. On the chemical engineering front, Zygourakis and his students are creating a library of data on the chemical composition and porosity of various kinds of biochar. In controlled experiments over the past year, they have converted biomass from several sources like apple wood and corn stover (the organic residue of harvested corn) into biochar. Using a newly developed research pyrolysis reactor, which is about the size of a small teapot, they heat biomass to extreme temperatures of 400 to 600 degrees Celsius using very little oxygen. The pyrolysis process is controlled by a sophisticated computer program and produces combustible volatiles, which can be burned to recover a large fraction of the energy needed for the process. Inside the reactor, the solid carbon-rich biochar is left behind.


BACK TO THE FUTURECARBON[ ]

The idea is not to burn the biochar as one would its kindred substance charcoal, but to bury it in the soil and therefore safely sequester much of the carbon that the plants absorbed from the

atmosphere. Zygourakis’s team runs a battery of analytical tests on the biochar and records information, creating a library of data that

can be used to unlock the secrets of the black soils of the Amazon.

“We want to better understand the fundamental mechanisms controlling biochar formation, so we are working to determine the

pyrolysis conditions that lead to highly stable biochars with optimal carbon sequestration capacity, nutrient retention and water holding

capacity,” Zygourakis said. “We are also studying how biochars can enhance plant growth and learning how biochar properties

influence the transport and retention of nutrients in various soils.”

Funding of $10,000 to develop a larger biochar reactor came from a City of Houston competition to develop innovative ways to dispose of storm-generated debris, such as that from hurricanes. The Rice Biochar Group placed first in that competition. A prototype reactor is already in operation and the biochar it produces is being placed in test containers with soil and plants in Rice labs and greenhouses.

There are additional economic advantages to biochar, Zygourakis said. If the U.S. eventually adopts a carbon cap-and-trade scheme, biochar production could become especially profitable because of its significant carbon sequestration capacity. In fact, at current European prices, it could generate up to $100 per ton of biomass converted into biochar. Houston alone produces as much as 90,000 metric tons of “green” waste each year in the form of trees, branches, grass clippings and other organic wastes, and such a program could become a sustainable revenue stream for the city.

The biochar research team is comprised of Zygourakis; Pedro Alvarez, George R. Brown Professor of Engineering and civil and environmental engineering department chair; assistant professors of earth science, Carrie Masiello and Brandon Dugan; Jennifer Rudgers, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology; earth science post-doctoral researcher Bill Hockaday, who recently accepted a faculty position at Baylor University; and several graduate students co-advised by these faculty members.


“We want to better understand the fundamental mechanisms controlling biochar formation, so we are working to determine the pyrolysis conditions that lead to highly stable biochars with optimal carbon sequestration capacity, nutrient retention and water holding capacity.”

—Kyriacos Zygourakis

“Think of having a textbook that’s also a personalized tutor. That’s why we call the system the Learning Machine.”

That’s Richard Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at

Rice University. He’s describing the still-evolving “next level” of Connexions, the online open-educational

resource he and his colleagues started at Rice in 1999.

“We’re designing e-textbooks that are not just free and open-source but also capable of learning who is using them. Then

we can customize the presentation to individual students.”Connexions already reports more than 1.7 million site visits per month and offers more than 17 thousand “modules”—

learning units or individual texts—that can be used independently or reshuffled in combination with other material.

Students and educators from 190 nations have used it.

“The goal of Connexions was to break the bottleneck associated with conventional, paper-based textbooks. We

saw that textbooks offer only off-the-rack learning, with no custom-tailoring,” said Baraniuk, who believes Connexions

has achieved its initial goals of accessibility and low cost.

The Learning Machine project, which started as a “skunkworks” among Rice students and faculty last

spring, is aimed at personalizing the Connexions model. Just as Amazon.com and Netflix offer suggestions to

customers based on previous choices, the Learning Machine would guide a student through materials based

on his or her educational goals, history and needs.

“A team of both undergrads and grads is scoping out the relevant material and tools, and we expect to test a pilot in

the fall and a working prototype in 2011,” Baraniuk said.

Kyle Wenliang Li, a junior majoring in electrical and computer engineering who is part of the project, said, “I’m

working on the question/answer database that not only stores questions and answers but also tracks students’

responses. Then we can help students understand concepts better by suggesting readings and practice questions.”

Baraniuk sees the Learning Machines concept as a fulfillment of Advance Personalized Learning, one of 14 Grand Challenges posed in 2008 by the National Academy of Engineering. In a statement on its web site the NAE says:

“Given the diversity of individual preferences, and the complexity of each human brain, developing teaching methods that optimize learning is a major challenge for the software engineers of the future.”

“Imagine an e-text that’s not just a PDF file,” Baraniuk said, “but something that provides not only the text but also interactive features like simulations and real-time tutoring on solving problems. This kind of dynamic learning is the future of education.”

From ‘skunkworks’ to Learning Machine


“The goal of Connexions was to break the bottleneck associated with conventional, paper-based textbooks. We saw that textbooks offer only off-the-rack learning, with no custom-tailoring.”

—Richard Baraniuk


The Rice Center for Engineering Leadership strives to develop in our

students the foresight to identify our world’s pressing problems, the

resolve to tackle these challenges and a passion for innovative solutions.

We shall urge students to combine the technical excellence that

characterizes a Rice Engineering education with the ability to lead

generously, communicate effectively and design creatively. We

shall nurture students fluent in the international and entrepreneurial

aspects of their craft, mindful of their voice in the public square

and inspired by the opportunity to enrich the common good.

Engineers solve problems and our world supplies an abundance of complex problems.

To tackle them, engineers must transcend the tradition-bound image of their role in society and assume leadership

positions in research, business and public policy. The George R. Brown School of Engineering has founded the Rice Center for

Engineering Leadership (RCEL) to foster this transformation.

Rice has always equipped its engineering students with the technical knowledge and ambition to serve them well as professionals. The goal of RCEL, however, is to do more: turn engineering students

into visionaries, innovators and leaders who make a difference.

“We see the Center’s work as a way to engage our students to consider the bigger picture and how engineering fits into the social, political,

economic and environmental spheres of life,” said Mark Embree, Ann and John Doerr Professor and founding director of RCEL, which will be formally launched this fall. “From their first day of classes to their final projects, we want Rice engineering students to understand that

engineering can make a transformative difference for the good of society.”

A Centennial Campaign gift of $15 million from the Benificus Foundation, a charitable organization founded by longtime benefactors and Rice

alumni, John Doerr ’73 and Ann Doerr ’75, is helping to make the Center’s work possible. The Doerrs recognize the critical need for

engineers, who understand the complexity of today’s challenges, to step into leadership positions and use their insight to help solve these

problems. Rice President David Leebron lauded the Doerr’s contribution and their passion for leading the way. He said that, like the Doerrs, he believes “there is no limit to what talented and imaginative engineers

will be able to achieve to help solve the big challenges facing our world.”

When activities of the Center are fully under way, it will spawn an increased number of students entering engineering at Rice while

providing greater agility in developing new science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs, Embree said. Other

goals for the Center are to attract and retain diverse students to engineering, increase the number of industrial partners, and foster

more collaboration with other institutions, both nationally and internationally. Leading lights in academia and industry will be invited

to Rice for extended visits to share best practices in engineering education, entrepreneurship, public service and other areas.

When it comes to specific programs, though, Embree said, “This center is all about the students. We can come up with what we think are great ideas, but if they are not relevant to the students, they will fail. That’s why we have committees of graduate and undergraduate students to guide the Center in establishing activities that will be compelling and meaningful to students.”

This semester a dinner seminar series, “Short Talks on Big Problems,” is highlighting pressing challenges that face society. The seminars are student-produced and presented, according to Embree. Graduate students already have been holding workshops on various topics under the Center’s purview. First organized by engineering Ph.D. candidate Mona Sheikh, the mini-courses have covered subjects ranging from writing and communication, to software applications and data visualization. The popular courses have drawn faculty and undergraduates as well as graduate students.

“Our short courses have been really well received,” said Sheikh, who will receive her doctorate soon and whose goal is to work for a start-up, with an eye to becoming an entrepreneur. “I’ve designed the program so that it can be picked up and continued in the future under the RCEL’s leadership.”

To get an idea of what others are doing in engineering leadership, Embree, a member of the dean’s staff and a team of Rice students, including Sheikh, visited a handful of engineering leadership programs this spring. The group visited Penn State, the Gordon Center at MIT, the Keller Center at Princeton and Olin College. Olin does not have a leadership center, but the group wanted to see how an entire school is dedicated to developing leadership abilities through innovative curriculum.

“We received excellent information from people at each of the schools,” said Jim Wang, a senior in electrical and computer engineering. “Across the board, there was a view that developing leadership skills is a key part of making engineers truly effective.”Sheikh agreed. “It was enlightening—and reassuring for us that we at Rice are moving in the right direction.”

Preparing students for the Grand Challenges

Students must form the heart of RCEL. This belief has been the organizing principle behind our Undergraduate and Graduate Advisory Committees, and it motivated one of our most exciting and informative activities to date. In January, the External Advisory Committee suggested that we tour other engineering leadership centers. Frank Huband, executive director of the American Society for Engineering Education, drew upon the example of Olin College of Engineering, where students played a fundamental role in the design of the curriculum before the school’s inaugural year. Toward this end, we collected a group of undergraduates and hit the road.

During the break between the end of final exams and commencement, I flew to Pittsburgh with Ann Lugg, the School’s Director of Communications, and five undergraduates, Apoorv Bhargava, Max Grossman, Leslie Miller, Jim Wang, and Aron Yu. We rented two cars and headed for four schools: Penn State, which has a longstanding minor in engineering leadership, Princeton, home of the Keller Center, Olin College of Engineering and MIT, with its Gordon Engineering Leadership Program.

Between Princeton and Olin we stopped for an evening in New York City, where graduate student Mona Sheikh met us for the last two legs of our trip.

This journey was tremendously formative and informative. The trip drove home the remarkable enthusiasm our students have for the mission at hand, their creativity and ability to inspire their peers. Our students equipped themselves very well in our meetings, asking insightful questions of our hosts, then sharing their reactions in debriefings after each visit. Their participation also had significant symbolic value, communicating the central role that students play at the core of RCEL.

Given the success of this trip, we anticipate follow-up visits to schools in the Midwest and on the West Coast within the coming year. Beyond the practical programmatic insights such trips yield, they also help integrate RCEL into the growing national conversation about engineering leadership.

Learning from Othersby Mark Embree

There is something to be said for experience. An

important part of leadership development is reading

about, contemplating and discussing what qualities make

a leader, but experience is the most effective way to

develop those qualities. The Rice Center for Engineering

Leadership is focusing on four aspects of engineering

at Rice and emphasizing their inherent opportunities

for leadership development: design, communication

skills, international experience and entrepreneurship.

“Even a brilliant idea must be communicated clearly, concisely and persuasively,” said Tracy Volz, senior lecturer in professional communication for the George R. Brown School of Engineering.

Volz and her colleague Jan Hewitt, also a senior lecturer in professional communication, work with faculty and students to integrate written, oral and visual communication skills into the engineering curriculum. For instance, they assist students in designing posters, writing articles for publication and delivering oral presentations—all essential skills to furthering the vision of the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership.

“The ability to communicate effectively is at the core of leadership, for engineers and everyone else. To lead people you need to understand their backgrounds and values, explain your ideas in sufficient detail, place your recommendations within a particular context for a particular audience and convey a sense of your enthusiasm,” Volz said.

COMMUNICATION

Maria Oden, director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen at Rice, heard someone say an engineering

degree will become the liberal arts degree of the future—an idea she likes and reinforces with students.

“We assume that engineering students will gain a strong technical background at Rice. What we

also want to instill in them is the ability to push the technology into identifying and solving real-world

challenges. That’s where leadership comes in,” said Oden, professor in the practice of engineering.

Design teams work on projects for a semester or an academic year. Students solve technical

problems and in the process, learn to work as an integrated unit, developing ideas, advocating their

own and learning to compromise with others.

“Our students are already active on campus and in many extracurricular leadership roles. They don’t

always see that leadership abilities can also enhance their careers. Design teams provide them a wonderful

opportunity to enhance those skills,” Oden said.

DESIGN

To shepherd an idea from perceived need to creation of a marketable product calls for discipline, imagination and the elusive quality known as leadership.

“Entrepreneurship is a core aspect of our mission. We want our students to design effective solutions to the world’s problems; commercial viability is one way of gauging a design’s success,” said Mark Embree, Ann and John Doerr Professor and founding director of the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership.

One of the RCEL’s goals is to introduce engineering students to parallel skills—the traditional math and engineering core, coupled with a grounding in business and economics. The Center will partner with the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship to provide opportunities for entrepreneurial growth for students. The Alliance supports early stage technology ventures and hosts the Rice Business Plan Competition, the largest and richest in the world.

Embree cites Shuai “Steve” Xu ’09, whose OrthoIntrinsics team placed high in the competition last spring, as a model for business-minded engineers. Steve and his partner have a patent pending on a device to help doctors diagnose carpal tunnel syndrome and other hand disorders.

“Steve’s example shows our students what is possible,” Embree said.

Engineering students who study, work, research or perform community service abroad already

personify the mission of the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership, suggests Ratna

Sarkar, associate dean for global initiatives in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.

“Working in a foreign country, in a different culture and perhaps with people speaking a different

language, requires one to be resourceful, which is excellent training for leadership,” Sarkar

said, noting that Rice offers students hundreds of such opportunities in some 70 countries.

When students choose to travel abroad and learn to live and work in unfamiliar surroundings and among unfamiliar people, they can catalyze the process of becoming leaders. “They will have

new experiences at a higher frequency than they’ve ever had before. They will be challenged intellectually, emotionally and in other ways, and

the result is a new maturity,” Sarkar said.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE


Improving water delivery and peoples’ livesMAKING THE MOST

of a delicate balance

RICE CENTER FORENGINEERING LEADERSHIP

For more information about RCEL, visit http://rcel.rice.edu/.

For Garrett Grolemund, a graduate student in statistics, leadership opportunities have often been there for the taking. “I’ve attended mini-courses, which are popular and develop

engineering and leadership skills. I assisted Dr. Wickham when he taught one on data visualization. We had to double the

capacity for the course on microscopy because it quickly filled up despite most students being away for the summer,” said Grolemund, who serves on the graduate advisory committee

for the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL).

“The goals of our committee are two-fold,” said Mona Sheikh, graduate student in electrical and computer

engineering. “We want to provide graduate students with hands-on leadership experiences, and also help them

with career preparation—early—whether they’re going into academia or industry.” She said that the mini-courses have been an effective vehicle for this type of preparation

in an educational sense, because they expose graduate students to diverse technical and non-technical topics without requiring the commitment of a full semester.

Sheikh said the committee will define its goals and activities more formally in the next year and focus on more hands-on leadership opportunities. They are looking into creating a micro-MBA mini-course for engineers and scientists in coordination with the Rice Alliance for Business and Entrepreneurship, which sponsors the annual business plan competition, and Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business. The goal of this activity would be to encourage engineers to work on more entrepreneurial ventures. The committee also would like to organize more talks on managing a lab and research group as a young professor, and they’re looking at cross-disciplinary engineering projects for community outreach or perhaps national competitions.

“With graduate students there’s a delicate balance,” said Mark Embree, Ann and John Doerr Professor and founding director of RCEL. “They answer to their advisors and their funding sources. We want them to focus on research while being aware how other skills will enable their professional success. Those who continue in the academic ranks can take our programs with them—a crucial component of the RCEL vision.” And those who enter industry, will have had a far richer set of experiences as graduate students because of RCEL programs.


Team members quickly forged fruitful relationships with village elders and recruited local people to help. Community residents, ranging from 10-year-olds to elderly men, worked side-by-side with the Rice students throughout the project. That meant excavating the sites for the water tanks and helping mix and pour concrete for the foundations required to support the tanks. Other volunteers prepared meals.

“Building relationships with these people was the most gratifying aspect of the work,” said Ramirez, a junior majoring in mathematical economic analysis.

Maggie Murphy, who graduated this year with a civil engineering degree, kept a blog about her visit to El Pital in January. “I love seeing so many familiar, friendly faces and the amazing views of the lake and mountains,” she wrote. “I am also invigorated by the sight of people in the early morning carrying huge jugs of water up steep hills… I am reminded of what we are here to accomplish.”

The El Pital community water board has now formed rules to regulate the system and will set appropriate fees to ensure funds are available to maintain it. “The idea is for the system to be sustainable over the long run, long after the Rice students have gone,” said Nelson, a biochemistry and cell biology major.

The project in El Pital is not the first that Rice students have completed in El Salvador. In 2005, an EWB team completed a three-year solar lighting and water purification project in an 800-member community near to El Pital. Other Rice teams are currently working in Honduras and Nicaragua on water purification and distribution projects. About 75 Rice students are involved in the various projects at any one time. Membership in EWB is open to any academic major.

The overarching goal of EWB is to educate socially conscious engineers. The organization has some 180 student chapters working on 350 projects—generally centering on water, renewable energy and sanitation—in more than 45 nations.

Improving water delivery and peoples’ lives

A Rice University Engineers Without Borders (EWB) team completed a four-year long water distribution project this past

summer in the 300-person village of El Pital, El Salvador.At its essence, the goal for the Rice chapter of the international

humanitarian organization was to bring a reliable source of water to every house in the impoverished community.

The project was difficult because El Pital is located in hilly terrain where lower and upper areas were divided by the

community’s main water source, a running spring, said project leaders Elizabeth Ramirez and Jorgen Nelson. Residents living

in the higher area had to walk down the hill to collect their daily water from the spring and carry it back up to their homes.

With the project completed, there are now two major storage sites. A 15,000-liter storage tank near the spring serves the

community’s lower sector, while an electrically powered pump transports water to a 40,000-liter storage tank that serves the

upper sector. From each of the tanks, water is distributed to central points where pipelines transport it to community members’

houses. In all, about 1,400 meters of piping was installed.

Students first visited the community in 2006 to evaluate the project site, according to Nelson and Ramirez. That began an

assessment period when community support was gauged.

MAKING THE MOST

of a delicate balance

ENGINEERING LEADERSHIP


Daniel Cohan is an expert in understanding how pollutants affect air and the public’s quality of

life. But the advancements he is making aren’t just impacting atmospheric research—they are inspiring Houston Independent School

District fifth-graders’ interest in science.

Cohan, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice, pledged as part of his 2009 National Science Foundation CAREER Award to develop curriculum to engage students

in hands-on scientific measurements to help them understand air quality issues and meteorology.

The professor, who joined the Rice faculty in 2006, was assisted by chemical engineering undergraduate

student Kavita Venkateswar, who had previously done math lesson planning for San Antonio elementary

school students. The curriculum the two produced was unveiled for fifth-grade science teachers. Twenty educators were trained at the Rice Elementary Model

Science Lab on how to lead students in taking weather and atmospheric measurements. The project kicked off last fall and is to continue for the next four years.

Lauren Topek, then-science coach for the Westbury feeder schools, and Markeshia Ellis, former science

coach at Horace Elrod Elementary School, said Cohan’s focus on competencies required by the Texas

Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exam was perfect for fifth-graders. Students from the pilot schools, Elrod,

Ralph Anderson, Cynthia Ann Parker, and Eleanor Tinsley Elementary, took part in the initiative. Students learned how to use digital hygrometer/thermometers,

infrared thermometers and ozone scanners, and charted their findings. Ellis’s students created a web

site and blogged about their experiences, with Cohan occasionally commenting online on the students’ work.

“Partnering with Dr. Cohan brought real-world experiments to the classroom,” said Topek. “For our students to truly

grasp science concepts and for our teachers to teach deeply and rigorously, we’ve got to connect classroom

learning to their lives. This did it … it really helped students understand current issues we face in Houston

and how weather and air pollutants affect them.”

Students learn about the they breathe AIRCohan said the effort succeeded beyond his

expectations. “Fifth grade is a critical time to spark students’ passion for science. In catching

them when they have a natural curiosity about the weather and the environment, we showed that science is not merely an abstract concept, but

something that directly impacts their communities. We hope some of these students may now see a

future for themselves in science or technology.”

The program could have impacts far beyond just one Houston school district, he noted. The curriculum is

available online through Connexions, Rice’s online electronic publishing project, and can be downloaded for free. It has already been accessed more than 100 times.

“We are extremely proud of what Daniel Cohan has done with HISD,” said engineering Associate Dean Janice Bordeaux, an expert in educational reform at the college level. “For Rice faculty, it’s a model to follow on how to be engaged in local school systems.”

Before joining the Rice faculty, Cohan worked as an air quality expert for the Georgia Environmental Protection Division and was a Fulbright Scholar in Australia. He earned a doctorate in atmospheric sciences from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2004 and received a bachelor of arts in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1998.

Rice assistant professors Sibani Lisa Biswal, of chemical and biomolecular engineering and Junghae Suh, bioengineering, have won National Science Foundation CAREER Awards.

Biswal’s $415,000 award will fund research into the development of new colloidal microstructures. Colloids are mixtures with properties between those of a solution and a finely suspended fluid. Biswal works with paramagnetic colloids—particles containing random traces of iron oxide—that organize into linear chains under the influence of an external magnetic field. She is researching methods for linking colloids, using proteins, DNA or other molecules, so they remain in chains even when the magnetic field is removed.

Biswal joined the Rice faculty in 2006. She earned a doctorate and a master’s degree in chemical engineering from Stanford University. She did her undergraduate work at the California Institute of Technology and completed postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley.

Suh’s CAREER Award will bring $440,000 to her research efforts over the next five years. She is working with Jonathan Silberg, assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Rice, to create a virus-based gene therapy delivery technique keyed to breast cancers. Her group will pursue a strategy that extends the reach of biomolecular targeting.

Suh joined the Rice faculty in 2007 after serving as a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory for Genetics, Salk Institute for Biological Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

NSFCAREERaward

lisa BISWAL

junghae SUH

The School of Engineering’s outstanding young faculty have garnered many awards in the past five years, including these NSF CAREER Awards:

2009: Daniel Cohan, Civil and Environmental Engineering; Oleg Igoshin, Bioengineering; Luay Nahkleh, Computer Science

2008: Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio, Civil and Environmental Engineering; Kartik Mohanram, Electrical and Computer Engineering; Walid Taha, Computer Science; Wotao Yin, Computational and Applied Mathematics

2007: Michael Diehl, Bioengineering; Ramon Gonzalez, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; Farinaz Koushanfar, Electrical and Computer Engineering

2006: Scott Rixner, Computer Science

2005: Robert Raphael, Bioengineering; Eugene Ng, Computer Science


Moshe Y. Vardi has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s foremost scholarly honors.

Vardi is the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice. He has won international recognition for his research on the application of logic to computer science and his many contributions to the computing research community. A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Vardi recently received the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) 2010 Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award and the Computing Research Association’s 2010 Distinguished Service Award.

Vardi earned his doctorate in computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1981. He managed the Mathematics and Related Computer Science Department at IBM’s Almaden Research Center prior to joining Rice in 1993. His research interests include database systems, computational-complexity theory, multi-agent systems, and design specification and verification.

Founded in 1780, the academy is among the oldest and most prestigious honorary societies in the country. The society’s who’s who list of current and former members includes Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and James A. Baker III, honorary chairman of Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

The 2010 class of 211 fellows and 18 foreign honorary members includes Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners and recipients of Academy and Grammy awards. The class includes actor Denzel Washington, Nobel Prize-winning economist Myron Scholes and CNN international correspondent Christiane Amanpour.

moshe y.

VARDIAAAS FELLOW


sallie KELLERNISS SACKS AWARD

Sallie Keller, former William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Engineering, is the 2010 recipient of the Jerome Sacks Award for Outstanding Cross-Disciplinary Research. The honor is bestowed

by the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS).

NISS is dedicated to strengthening and serving the national statistics community, most notably by catalyzing community

members’ participation in applied research driven by challenges facing government and industry. It performs high-impact research on important national issues for major government and industrial clients.

The organization is headquartered in Research Triangle Park, N.C.

Keller recently moved to Washington, D.C., to become director of the Science and Technology Policy Institute, which advises

the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science

Foundation and the departments of Commerce and Energy.

michael

DEEM

DONALD L. KATZ AWARD

AIChE PROFESSIONAL PROGRESS AWARD

Bioengineering’s Michael Deem is the 2010 recipient of the Professional Progress Award in Chemical Engineering,

one of the highest achievements bestowed by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE).

Deem, the John W. Cox Professor in Biochemical and Genetic Engineering and professor of physics and astronomy,

was recognized for his pioneering theoretical work that brought visionary ideas and new tools to vaccine design,

mathematical biology and nanoporous materials structure.

“Professor Deem is a renaissance man of basic and applied research,” said David Hellums, the A.J. Hartsook Professor Emeritus of

Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, who led the nomination. “The depth of his knowledge skillfully blends mathematics, physics,

chemistry, biology, philosophy and engineering to advance life science and medicine, and his work is shedding light on some

of the most challenging biological questions of our time.”

Deem received AIChE’s Allan P. Colburn Award in 2004. In receiving the Professional Progress Award, he joins a select group of eight people nationally who, in the last 25 years, have received both of

what are considered the highest academic recognitions from AIChE.

Deem has discovered new methods to quantify vaccine effectiveness and antigenic distance for influenza. His pepitope measure of

antigenic distance explains how the influenza vaccine can have both positive and negative efficacy and has shown to be more predictive

in characterizing the immune response to vaccine and virus than the gold-standard animal model studies. The work has positioned

him as a noted authority on the early detection of new viral strains.

Founded in 1908, AIChE is the world’s leading organization for chemical engineering professionals with more

than 40,000 members from around the globe.

Walter Chapman, the William W. Akers Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and director of the Energy and Environmental Systems Institute, has won the 2010 Gas Processors Association (GPA) Donald L. Katz Award.

The award was established by the GPA in 1985 in honor of Donald L. Katz, professor emeritus of the University of Michigan. It recognizes outstanding accomplishments in gas processing research and technology as well as excellence in engineering education.

Chapman’s research group uses molecular simulation, computer visualization, statistical mechanics and nuclear magnetic resonance to discover how material properties and structures depend on molecular forces. The group is also working on tools to predict properties and nanoscale structures of self-assembling complex fluids. Sandia National Laboratory, Dow Chemical and many other groups around the world have adopted one such model.

walter

CHAPMAN


Two Rice faculty members have been named fellows by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), a leading professional organization dedicated to the development of applied mathematical and computational methodologies.

Danny Sorensen, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM), and John Dennis, the Noah Harding Professor Emeritus of CAAM, were recognized for their significant contributions to the fields of applied mathematics and computational science.

SIAM FELLOWS

danny SORENSEN

john DENNIS

junichiro KONOAPS FELLOW

They join 32 other individuals named by the organization for showing excellence in research,

industrial work and educational and other activities related to mathematics or computational science.

Sallie Keller, the former William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Engineering, said the honor bestowed on Sorensen and Dennis recognizes their exceptional scholarship and leadership. “It is recognition from their peers that they have truly made a difference

in advancing the discipline,” she said.

Sorensen was specifically cited for his contributions to numerical linear algebra,

optimization and model reduction. Before joining Rice in 1989, he worked at the Argonne National

Laboratory in Chicago. He earned a doctorate and master’s degree from the University of California,

San Diego and studied as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis.

Dennis, who was a department chair in both CAAM and Computer Science, earned the honor for contributions to the theory and applications of nonlinear optimization. He received a doctorate from the University of Utah and a master’s and undergraduate degree from the University of Miami. He retired in 2002.

SIAM has more than 13,000 individual members who are computational mathematicians, computer scientists, numerical analysts, engineers, statisticians, physicists and educators from 85 countries. It has more than 500 institutional members, including colleges, universities, corporations and research organizations.

Junichiro Kono, professor of electrical and computer engineering and of physics and astronomy, has been elected a fellow of the Council of the American Physical Society (APS) “for contributions to optical processes in semiconductor nanostructures, including magneto-optical studies of Aharonov-Bohm physics in carbon nanotubes.”

The peer-reviewed election to APS Fellowship in the division of Condensed Matter Physics is a distinctive recognition of Kono’s outstanding contributions to physics. Current research in Kono’s lab focuses on the fundamental physics of semiconductor nanostructures and carbon nanomaterials.

Kono received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Tokyo and his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He was a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the University of California,Santa Barbara and a fellow in the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory at Stanford University before joining Rice.


Tomasz Tkaczyk has been awarded the 2010 Becton-Dickinson Professional Achievement Award by the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI). The honor recognizes his development of miniature and high-performance optical-imaging systems that have broad use in basic research and clinical applications.

The AAMI award includes a plaque and $1,500 prize, and is given annually to recognize outstanding achievements in the development of medical devices, instruments or systems.

Tkaczyk, an assistant professor in bioengineering and in electrical and computer engineering, received the award during a special session at AAMI’s annual conference in Tampa, Fla. in June.

The bioimaging tools developed in his laboratory at Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative use advanced technologies in optics, opto-mechanics, electronics and software, and biochemical materials to produce quality images and quantitative data at various lengths of scale. The devices and imaging systems, which are robust, portable, inexpensive, and adaptable to mass production, have tremendous potential for point-of-care diagnostics in various clinical settings around the world.

Founded in 1967, the 6,000-member AAMI is dedicated to increasing the understanding and beneficial use of medical instrumentation. Tkaczyk is the third Rice bioengineer to receive this competitive award.

richard BARANIUK

james TOUR

yildiz BAYAZITOGLURichard Baraniuk, Yildiz Bayazitoglu and

James Tour are among 531 members of the association to be named fellows this year.

The honor is given to those whose contributions are considered to be

socially or scientifically distinguished.

Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering,

was selected for his contributions to signal processing, particularly in multi-resolution

analysis, network monitoring and compressive sensing, and also for founding Connexions,

Rice’s open-education resource.

Bayazitoglu, the Harry S. Cameron Professor in Mechanical Engineering, was singled out for her

contributions to the field of radiative heat transfer and for her role as an educator, mentor and role model to young engineers. She is editor-in-chief

for the Americas of the International Journal of Thermal Sciences and was the first woman

in the half-century history of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers to receive the

organization’s Heat Transfer Memorial Award.

Tour, Rice’s T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science, was honored for his contributions to the field of organic chemistry and nanotechnology, particularly for soft materials science, including conjugated polymers, fullerenes, nanotubes, graphene and nanomachines.

The AAAS has been naming fellows since 1874. The new fellows join 18 other current AAAS members on the Rice faculty who have been so honored.


AAAS FELLOWSThree Rice University professors have been named to this year’s class of fellows

by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the

world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

AAMI PROFESSIONAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

tomasz

TKACZYK

Rice and the George R. Brown School of Engineering experienced a banner year in the number of students who received National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships in 2009.

Current engineering graduate students receiving the prestigious distinction are: Benjamin Grant, Anne Hellebust and Jennifer Petsche, bioengineering students; Cen Bi Liu, electrical and computer engineering; Daniel Hashim, materials science; Kenneth Davis, mechanical engineering; and Devin Grady, computer science.

Engineering undergraduates to receive fellowships include: Joseph Rosenthal, bioengineering; Craig Corcoran, computer science; and Candase Arnold, civil engineering.

Graduate students who joined Rice this fall include Meaghan McNeill from Baylor University and Theodore Ming-Chien from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Former Rice engineering undergraduate students who are now studying in graduate programs elsewhere include Frank Ko, Cornell; George Pharr, Harvard; Laura Timmerman, Northwestern; James Winkler, Texas A&M; and Allen Chen, University of California, Berkeley.

Rice also had eight students from its natural sciences programs receive fellowships and another eight students in the social sciences.

The fellowship program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in the U.S. and abroad. Fellows benefit from a three-year annual stipend of $30,000 along with a $10,500 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees, a one-time $1,000 international travel allowance and the freedom to conduct their own research at any accredited U.S. or foreign institution of graduate education.

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION GRADUATE FELLOWSHIP


Azalia Mirhoseini, a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice, has won a prestigious Microsoft Research Graduate Women’s Scholarship.

Mirhoseini will receive $15,000 from Microsoft to support her educational endeavors. She is one of only 10 women studying at leading universities across the United States and Canada to receive such an award from the computer software maker this year. Other funds from the company will allow her to travel to conferences and seminars related to her research work.

Mirhoseini’s advisor, Farinaz Koushanfar, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and of computer science, said the 23-year-old scholar has already shown remarkable promise. “She is one of the most prepared international students I and my colleagues have ever met,” Koushanfar said.

Microsoft Research bestows the women’s scholarships annually. The company said its aim is to increase the number of women pursuing doctorates in the field of computer science.

Microsoft Research Graduate Women’s Scholarship

joseph

ROSENTHALHERTZ FELLOW

Joseph Rosenthal, ’10, now a Ph.D. student in bioengineering at Cornell University, was named a 2010 Hertz Fellow by the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation.

Rosenthal is the third Rice bioengineering student to receive the distinc-tion and the first to be named as an undergraduate. The Hertz Fellowships are among the nation’s most prestigious, with awards to fewer than three percent of those who apply. The fellowships cover tuition and fees and can be renewed for up to five years. It also includes a $31,000 stipend per year. The awards are available only to students studying engineering or applied sciences, with a strong emphasis on the physical sciences.

Following the announcement on the Hertz honor, Rosenthal received news that he was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fel-lowship. He also was a 2009 Barry M. Goldwater Scholar.

Three Rice undergraduate engineering students were named recipients of prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships for 2010. Michael Eastwood, a sophomore physics major with a minor in computational and applied mathematics (CAAM); David Sing, a junior bioengineering major; and Cindy Sung, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering with a CAAM minor.

The three will receive $7,500 annually for one or two years. They were among 278 Goldwater recipients out of more than 1,100 applicants from across the nation in the disciplines of mathematics, science and engineering.

Each of the students plans to attend graduate school and pursue research. Eastwood’s career goal is to become a professor after earning a doctorate in particle physics. Sing said he plans to pursue a joint program that will result in an M.D. and Ph.D. in bioengineering and a career in research. Sung said she wants to do research in robotics while working toward a doctorate in mechanical engineering. She also hopes to teach at a university.

Tal Einav, a senior physics and mathematics major in the School of Natural Sciences, also received the Goldwater Scholarship.

The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency that honors the late Barry M. Goldwater, who represented Arizona in the U.S. Senate.

GOLDWATER SCHOLARSHIP

david SING

michael EASTWOOD

cindy SUNG


Michael Contreras, a graduate student in civil engineering, has won a Fulbright Scholarship.

He is visiting Mexico this fall to study newly developed piezoelectric, small-scale windmills. Contrary to existing

electromechanical power generation from wind, the efficiency of these small-scale windmills actually increases as they

decrease in size because the technology revolves around harvesting energy from vibrations induced by wind excitation.

Contreras said he plans to develop techniques to further optimize this energy storage technique so the

windmills can become a viable alternative for Mexican municipalities that want to harvest self-sustaining power.

Sponsored by the U.S. government, the Fulbright Program is designed to increase understanding between the

people of the United States and those of other countries. Participants are chosen for their academic merit and

leadership potential and are given the “opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute

to finding solutions to shared international concerns.”

Tony Castilleja ’09 was named by the editors of Hispanic Engineer & Information Technology magazine as one its “40 Under 40” in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. The magazine says that those chosen for

this honor are the “vanguard of a growing number of Hispanic workers,” and that they “reflect not only the future

of America but offer outstanding examples of employer support.” A profile appears in the magazine’s Spring issue.

Castilleja, a propulsion engineer at Boeing, is also a student in the professional Master’s program in the Department

of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. He received the honor at a June event in Baltimore.

Castilleja founded the DREAM (Designing with Rice Engineers, an Achievement through Mentorship) program at Rice,

in which Rice undergraduates initially mentored students at Austin High School on Houston’s east side to prepare

them for college studies in science, math and engineering. Under his leadership, the program has extended its reach

to Chavez High School and KIPP Academy in Houston.

For these and other efforts, Castilleja was recognized by former Mayor Bill White with a Volunteer Houston Award in 2009.

michael

CONTRERAS

tony

CASTILLEJA

FULBRIGHT SCHOLARSHIP

‘40 Under 40’


Three School of Engineering teams were among the top winners in the 10th annual Rice University

Business Plan Competition in April. The competition is billed as the world’s largest and richest, with more than $1 million in prize money. It is organized by the

Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship and the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business.Teams competed in six categories—life sciences, information technology, energy, green tech, social

ventures and other technologies. Venture capitalists and other investors from around the country judged the

teams as they presented 15-minute business plans. The $385,000 grand prize was won by a University of Arkansas team, OsteoFlor, which is developing

a new medication that builds better bones.

Rice’s Rebellion Photonics placed second overall and received $15,000 plus the $100,000 Technology

Prize from Opportunity Houston and Greater Houston Partnership. Rebellion Photonics’ chemical detector

camera is a patent-pending technology that allows a high-resolution, large-format, hyperspectral

image to be taken instantaneously. The compact, portable device provides real-time, on-site, optical chemical detection. In addition, the team won the

Fish & Richardson $15,000 IP Powerhouse Award. The team took home a total of $137,150.

The team’s winning business plan is based on technology developed in the bioengineering lab of Rice’s Tomasz Tkaczyk, where Rebellion Photonics Chief Operating

Officer Robert Kester is a research scientist. The company is finalizing a worldwide exclusive license for

this technology with Rice’s Office of Technology Transfer.

In February, Rebellion Photonics won first place and $10,000 in the Bangkok Business

Challenge hosted by the Sasin Business School at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand.

OrthoIntrinsics, a team from Rice and the London School of Economics, took fourth place overall. It received the $2,500 Best International Team Award and was named winner in the Best Medical Device category.

Led by Shuai “Steve” Xu ’09, OrthoIntrinsics presented technology developed at Rice: PRIME, a patent-pending

medical device that directly and accurately measures intrinsic hand strength to diagnose carpal tunnel

syndrome and other hand disorders. Used as an outcome measurement tool, PRIME can significantly improve

clinical practice and promote evidence-based medicine.

Members of OrthoIntrinsics studied engineering at Rice as undergraduates. Xu said the engineering program made them all proficient technologists

with an ability to communicate, both of which contributed to their win. He and his bioengineering

senior design team developed the PRIME device at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen.

InfantAIR won the $10,000 Social Venture Prize, fourth place in the elevator pitch competition and fifth place in the semifinal round for a total of $11,750. InfantAIR is commercializing a continuous positive-airway pressure system named “Baby Bubbles.” It is a safe and affordable system designed to save infants’ lives by gently keeping their lungs inflated and increasing oxygenation. The device was developed through the Rice 360° program, which seeks to create technology solutions for world health.

The infantAIR team saw firsthand the need to serve the developing world. The members spent their spring break in Rwanda to better understand how their technology could benefit babies in developing countries. The team came away from that experience with a clear picture of the need for inexpensive medical devices.

“The success of the Rice teams in this world cup of business plan competitions really speaks to how well our university is preparing our students to innovate and lead real businesses,” said Bill Glick, dean of the Jones School. “Their collaborative and interdisciplinary ventures are the realization of Jesse H. Jones’ entrepreneurial spirit and civic-mindedness that we hope to instill in our students.”


Teams place highly in business plan competition

Miller created the 2.5-pound microscope as his senior design project last year, working with faculty in Rice 360˚: Institute for

Global Health Technologies. The goal was to make an inexpensive, portable and highly capable microscope that could be used in

developing countries where clinics may have limited access to lab equipment. The microscope was built with off-the-shelf parts

at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. Light to power the 1,000-times magnification device comes from an LED flashlight.

The microscope won this year’s Hershel M. Rich Invention Award, presented annually by Rice Engineering Alumni. Miller, who now works as a medical device designer for Thoratec in San Francisco, was the first undergraduate to win the award.

On his own time, he continues working to commercialize his microscope. He and Rice have contracted to produce

20 microscopes for field testing in the near future.

“The World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 million people died from tuberculosis in 2008,” said Rebecca Richards-Kortum,

Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering and founding director of Rice 360°. “[Miller’s microscope] could be used

to diagnose tuberculosis in community or rural health centers with limited infrastructure in the developing world, promoting

early detection and successful treatment of the disease.”

A new team of Rice students is now developing software to help untrained clinicians diagnose TB through image processing

on a smart phone, perhaps as an iPhone application.

A compact microscope invented by a recent Rice engineering school graduate is proving its potential

in the global fight against tuberculosis.

Andrew Miller’s portable, battery-operated “Global Focus” fluorescence microscope, which costs $240

to produce, works just as well as devices that cost $40,000 in diagnosing signs of tuberculosis. News of the device’s efficacy was made public in a paper

published by the journal PLoS ONE in August.

Miller, who graduated in 2009 with a degree in bioengineering, and colleagues at the Methodist Hospital Research Institute in Houston analyzed

samples from 19 patients suspected of having TB. The microscope performed just as well as the lab’s

reference-standard fluorescence microscope.


Low tech microscope gives high performance

The Rice Engineering Alumni board has named Lynn Laverty Elsenhans ’78, chairman and chief executive officer of Sunoco, Inc. and Sunoco Logistics, as its 2010 Outstanding Engineering Alumna. Justin Romberg ’97, ’99, ’04, an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was named Outstanding Young Engineering Alumnus.

Elsenhans joined Sunoco as its CEO and president in 2008 and was named chairman of the board last year, becoming the first woman to run a major U.S. oil company and Fortune Magazine Global 500 firm. Before assuming her roles at Sunoco, she spent many years at Shell, where she climbed the management ranks in various national and international posts. Last year, Forbes magazine placed her as No. 10 on its list of the “World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.”

Elsenhans earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematical sciences at Rice. She has said that she decided to attend Rice because of its reputation in math, engineering and science. The executive has remained active with the university, having served as a member of the board of trustees. She has been a major contributor to scholarship funds and to the renovation of athletic facilities. She also holds an MBA from Harvard.

Romberg has become well known within the signal processing and applied mathematics fields since joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 2006. He teaches courses in signal processing and pursues research into sampling theory for next-generation sensors, inverse problems and computational harmonic analysis. Recognition for his work includes a 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He also was named to a prestigious Packard Fellowship last year. In 2008, he received an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.

Earlier in his career, Romberg was a post-doctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology, did research at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and was a visiting researcher at the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions in Paris. He was also a fellow at UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. He is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Romberg’s doctoral advisor at Rice was Richard Baraniuk, Victor E. Cameron Professor in Engineering.

The awardees are to be honored at a reception in October.


lynn ELSENHANS

justin

ROMBERG

REA names 2010 outstanding alumni


Anderson contributes on many fronts

professional,public,personal,

What’s more, she added, Bedient “really cared about me and wanted me to do well and to learn and excel.” She flourished under his mentoring and still recalls how he went to considerable trouble to get permission for his protégé to work on a hydrological problem for her senior design project. Civil engineering students were required to design a structure under the school’s policies at the time. “He had to jump through some hoops and agree to oversee a project for me. It was a lot of extra work and trouble for him, but he did it,” she said.

Bedient remains impressed with his former student. “When I met Elle, she was this bright and wonderful young student who was trying to balance Division 1 tennis and a major in civil engineering,” he said. “I was so impressed that someone would work so hard to make a difference in both of those areas at the same time, but Elle pulled it off beautifully. She has gone on to be a highly respected hydrologic engineer in Houston and part owner of a small engineering firm, while also balancing her family life. She is a great example of what hard work and desire can produce.”

Anderson is active in various professional associations and continues to be involved with the University, serving on a committee to increase alumni engagement in engineering and also supporting Rice athletics. She volunteers at St. Francis Episcopal Day School where her 2½-year-old daughter, Ellison, is a student. In 2006, Anderson was named Texas Special Olympics Volunteer of the Year.

The engineer said her passion for her profession has not been dampened by the demands of marriage and motherhood (at press time she was expecting her second child with husband Clarke Kent Anderson ’01, a private equity investor). “When things get stressful or chaotic, I remember being a student at Rice in a very tough civil engineering curriculum while trying to play varsity tennis,” she said. “To this day, I haven’t had to deal with anything as difficult as balancing those things. So I realize I can handle anything else life throws at me.”


Elle Anderson ’01 says her life as an engineer, entrepreneur, community volunteer and working mom

is a constant juggling act. Along with two partners, the civil engineering graduate and former Owls tennis

standout co-founded an engineering consulting firm in Houston six years ago, and business is thriving.

The firm, Grounds Anderson, LLC, handles hydrology projects for clients that range from government

agencies to residential developers, to corporations and even homeowners. “We are trying to play a

part in keeping millions of people in the region reasonably safe from the threat of flooding,” she said. Anderson and her partners, John and Lynell

Grounds, do drainage studies, flood hazard mapping, Federal Emergency Management Agency map

revisions and mitigation plans among other projects.

A recent “project of a lifetime” for Anderson was heading a Harris County Flood Control District study to determine accurate digital terrain data, hydrologic and

hydraulic models and floodplain maps for the county. For the job, Anderson coordinated the work of more

than 30 engineers and surveyors. The findings will be used as a basis for crucial water decisions in the area for at least the next three decades. “It was the kind of project that illustrates just how big an impact

engineers and engineering can have on making the community a better place to live and work,” she said.

Although such projects can be stressful, Anderson said her experience as a Rice engineering student provided excellent preparation. “Professors at Rice really, really

challenge you academically,” she explained. “Rice’s small class size allows for lots of individual attention. And what you learn in addition to the basics, is that

engineering usually works best when it’s a team effort.”

In fact, Anderson said, she forged strong, lifelong relationships with fellow students while working

in small groups and balancing her studies as a key member of the varsity tennis team

(Anderson still ranks among the top women’s singles players in Rice Owl’s history).

Had the engineer followed her original plans, she would have headed for medical school after graduation.

But her focus changed after taking classes from Professor Philip Bedient, Herman Brown Professor

of Engineering, who is renowned for his teaching and research in hydrology and flood prediction

systems. “His passion was contagious,” Anderson said. “He’s the reason I became an engineer.”

Students honored at annual REA picnic

The Buckley-Sartwelle Scholarship in EngineeringCynthia Sung and Zhao Kong, both of mechanical engineering and materials science. Endowed by Jack Boyd Buckley ’48 and Helen Sartwelle Buckley ’44 in memory of their parents

The Bob Dickson Endowed PrizeDan Calderon, electrical and computer engineeringEndowed by H. deForest Ralph ’55 and his wife Martha, with additional funding from Dale Dickson Johnson and others

The Alan J. Chapman AwardHunter Gilbert, mechanical engineering and materials scienceEndowed by Melbern G. ’61 and Susan M. Glasscock ’62

The Thomas Michael Panos Family Engineering Student AwardJessica Chidi, mechanical engineering and materials scienceEndowed by Michael Panos ’52 and his sister, Effie

The Harrianna Butler Siebenhausen Award in Engineering Russell Carden, computational and applied mathematicsEndowed by C.H. Siebenhausen ’50 in honor of his wife, Harrianna Butler The Ralph Budd Prize for Best Engineering Thesis Joseph Camp, electrical and computer engineeringIn memory of Ralph Budd

The Hershel M. Rich Invention AwardRamon Gonzalez, chemical and biomolecular engineeringAndrew Miller, bioengineeringEndowed by Hershel M. Rich ’45, ’47 and his wife, Hilda

The James S. Waters Creativity Award Lucia Sun, electrical and computer engineeringEndowed in 1968 by an anonymous donor in honor of James S. Waters ’17

The 2010 Rice Engineering Alumni Student Awards

Picnic, held in April, featured the presentation of

scholarships recognizing outstanding juniors and

seniors. In addition to the scholarships, a number of

endowed awards also were presented. They were:

Rice Engineering Magazine is a production of the George R. Brown School of Engineering Office of Communications at Rice University.

Dean

C. Sidney Burrus, Interim

Associate deans

Janice Bordeaux

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Bart Sinclair

Editorial staff

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Dwight Daniels

Holly Beretto

Designer

Donald Soward

Contributors

Jade Boyd

Shawn Hutchins

Patrick Kurp

Mike Williams

Photography

Jeff Fitlow

Tommy Lavergne

Donald Soward

Dwight Daniels

Jade Boyd

Send comments or letters to the editor:Rice Engineering MagazineRice University MS 364P.O. Box 1892Houston, Texas 77251or email them to: [email protected]

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