Rice Magazine 5

Contents3 Nanoshells target
cancer cells.
6 Rice drivers now have
something to hoot
about thanks to a new
custom license plate.
8 Compounds with novel
magnetic properties are
scarce. Emilia Morosan’s
solution? Create new
ones.
4 Forget shag, flat
weave and twisted
tuft. The latest word
in carpets is nano.
6 The kudos continue for
the Rice MBA program
in entrepreneurship.
6 What effect does gen-
der have on donating
to meaningful causes?
14 Oil Speculators and the
Future of Oil Futures
9 The way to increase
voter turnout may be
simpler than anyone
suspected.
5 What if high-tech
surgical tools, de-
signer drugs and
diagnostic gadgets
could make health
care cheaper and
save lives at the
same time?
7 No one knows exactly how much Earth’s climate will warm, but current
predictions about global warming might be incorrect.
46
4

Rice Magazine • No. 5 • 2010 1
Students
Features
Students
17 Protecting art from the ravages of
time can be almost as easy as putting
togetherTinkertoys.
18 For most people, doing something on a
lark means buying a lottery ticket or going
out for ice cream. For others, it’s protecting
a computer system under attack.
18 This fall, Rice welcomed a record
number of smiling new faces to
campus. Learn a little bit about who
they are.
19 The Graduate Student Association at 40
Arts
40 A young symphony conductor
discovers that the most valuable
lesson he learned at Rice applies to life
as much as it does to music.
42 Sharing the joy of dance requires
openness, creativity and, above all, the
performer’s best effort.
Bookshelf
44 Before Henry DavidThoreau took
up residence at Walden Pond, he
accidentally set fire to more than 300
acres of forest.
44 In this day of huge agribusinesses,
niche agriculture is making a comeback
acrossTexas.
45 Joyful, optimistic and unflinchingly
honest poems help a renowned
physician deal with personal grief.
45 Desegregating private universities in
the South was far more complex than
simply mandating change.
Sports
46 Running, swimming and cycling are
serious fun for the new Rice University
Cycling andTriathlon club.
48 When the 2012 Summer Olympic
Games in London roll around, Mauro
Hamza will be the coach behind the
foils.
20 Spotlight on Women in the Sciences
and Engineering
Women seeking careers in the natural sciences
and engineering at Rice have faced challenges
inherent in traditionally male-dominated fields of
academia, but many have more than overcome
them to earn world renown and become role
models for aspiring young researchers.
32 Cybertracker
“You really don’t get it, do you?,” Eric Garland
told the music industry back in 1994. “This isn’t
about Napster, and it isn’t over. It’s only just
begun.”
b y D a v i d M e n c o n i
34 Welcome to the Chao Center
The new Chao Center for Asian Studies focuses
on transnationalism, with an eye toward
collaborative research.
b y M e r i n P o r t e r
36 Far Afield
When it comes to digging up the dirt on
humankind’s past, nothing beats hands-on
experience.
b y C h r i s t o p h e r D o w
34
36
42

2 www.rice.edu/ricemagazine
Rice Magazine
Vol. 66, No. 5
Published by the
Office of Public Affairs
Linda Thrane, vice president
Editor
Christopher Dow
Editorial Director
Tracey Rhoades
Creative Director
Jeff Cox
Art Director
Chuck Thurmon
Editorial Staff
B.J. Almond, staff writer
Jade Boyd, staff writer
Franz Brotzen, staff writer
Jenny West Rozelle, assistant editor
David Ruth, staff writer
Jessica Stark, staff writer
Mike Williams, staff writer
Photographers
Tommy LaVergne, photographer
Jeff Fitlow, assistant photographer
The Rice University
Board ofTrustees
James W. Crownover, chairman; J.D.
Bucky Allshouse; D. Kent Anderson; Keith
T. Anderson; Subha Viswanathan Barry;
Suzanne Deal Booth; Alfredo Brener; Robert
T. Brockman; Nancy P. Carlson; Robert L.
Clarke; Bruce W. Dunlevie; Lynn Laverty
Elsenhans; Douglas Lee Foshee; Susanne
Morris Glasscock; Robert R. Maxfield; M.
Kenneth Oshman; Jeffery O. Rose; Lee H.
Rosenthal; Hector de J. Ruiz; Marc Shapiro;
L. E. Simmons; Robert B. Tudor III; James S.
Turley; Randa Duncan Williams.
Administrative Officers
David W. Leebron, president; Eugene Levy,
provost; Kathy Collins, vice president
for Finance; Kevin Kirby, vice president
for Administration; Chris Muñoz, vice
president for Enrollment; Linda Thrane, vice
president for Public Affairs; Scott W. Wise,
vice president for Investments and treasurer;
Richard A. Zansitis, general counsel; Darrow
Zeidenstein, vice president for Resource
Development.
Rice Magazine is published by the Office of
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to university alumni, faculty, staff, graduate
students, parents of undergraduates and
friends of the university.
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Send address changes to:
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©January 2010 Rice University
F o r e w o r d
Welcome to a new decade — the decade in which Rice celebrates its
100th anniversary as a premier institution of higher learning. Many ele-
ments have contributed to Rice’s excellence, not the least of which is our
outstanding faculty. Though Rice’s initial faculty had only 12 members, it
has, from the beginning, provided students with the in-depth knowledge
not simply to succeed in the world, but also to make significant contribu-
tions to it. Today, that faculty has even greater depth, and its numbers
have grown to 647 full-time, 143 part-time and 274 adjunct members.
But quality isn’t about numbers. It’s about depth and breadth. Rice has consistently
proved resilient in recruiting individuals to its faculty who provide a wide range of
disciplines, experiences and perspectives. Recent years have seen groundswell changes
in faculty demographics, particularly in the recruitment of women in fields that have been
predominantly occupied by men. Because this has been especially true in the sciences
and engineering, we wanted, in this first issue of the decade in which Rice will celebrate
a milestone anniversary, to honor the many ways that our women scientists and engineers
have contributed to the university’s growth and stature, from research that expands human
understanding and well-being to diversity and leadership.
When we decided to devote so many pages to female leaders in the sciences and engineer-
ing, I worried that the variety we strive for in the magazine might be missing from this
issue. I needn’t have.
One story that’s sure to interest our readers is a tour of Rice’s newest colleges: Duncan and
McMurtry. Not only are they two of the most innovative and attractive buildings on campus,
they also are among the most environmentally conscious, both in design and construction.
We also visit the Barbara and David Gibbs Recreation and Wellness Center. The facility, as
I can attest from my daily visits, rivals the best commercial
health clubs in Houston with its bright, airy, well thought-out
spaces and state-of-the-art exercise equipment. Even better, it’s
staffed by the same friendly, helpful personnel from the old
Rec Center. (Hats off to my friends at the front desk: Deirdre,
Rudy and Lupita.)
Our other features continue the variety, beginning with
“Cybertracker,” a profile of Eric Garland ’94, one of the world’s
leading authorities on digital piracy. “Welcome to the Chao Center” provides a look at the most
recent addition to Rice’s impressive list of research centers, which focuses on transnationalism,
and its founding director, Tani Barlow. “Far Afield” unearths the history, aims and training
program of the Rice Archaeological Field School. And “Dance” waltzes us around the Rice
Dance Theater. We also introduce you to one of Rice’s newest and most exciting athletic clubs,
Rice University Cycling and Triathlon.
We hope you enjoy these and the many other articles in this issue. And be sure to stay tuned
for future issues because you won’t want to miss any of the exciting developments at Rice in
the decade ahead.
Corrections
In the last issue, the article “Touch the Sky” contained two errors. The name of the tower on the Humanities Building should have
been spelled Russ Pitman Tower rather than Russ Pittman Tower. Also, the caption for the photo of the Crystal Campanile lists
Michael Graves & Associates as one of the architects, but Graves served as a consultant only, not as an architect on the project.
Christopher Dow
cloud@rice.edu

Sallyportt h r o u g h t h e
Nanoparticle Could
Combine Cancer
Diagnosis and Treatment
ResearchersatRiceUniversityandBaylor
CollegeofMedicine(BCM)havecreateda
singlenanoparticlethatcanbetrackedin
real time with magnetic resonance imag-
ing (MRI) as it homes in on cancer cells,
tags them with a fluorescent dye and kills
them with heat.
The all-in-one particle is one of the first ex-
amples from a growing field called “thera-
nostics” that develops technologies physi-
cians can use to diagnose and treat diseases
in a single procedure. Tests so far involve
laboratory cell cultures, but the researchers
said MRI tracking will be particularly advan-
tageous as they move toward tests in animals
and people.
“Some of the most essential questions in
nanomedicine today are about biodistribu-
tion — where particles go inside the body
and how they get there,” said study co-author
Naomi Halas. “Noninvasive tests for biodis-
tribution will be enormously useful on the
path to FDA approval, and this technique
— adding MRI functionality to the particle
you’re testing and using for therapy — is a
very promising way of doing this.”
Halas, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor
in Electrical and Computer Engineering,
and professor of chemistry, biomedical
engineering, and physics and astronomy,
is a pioneer in nanomedicine. The all-in-
one particles are based on nanoshells —
particles she invented in the 1990s that
are currently in human clinical trials for
cancer treatment. Nanoshells harvest laser
light that would normally pass harmlessly
through the body and convert it into tu-
mor-killing heat.
In designing the new particle, Halas
partnered with Amit Joshi, assistant professor
in BCM’s Division of Molecular Imaging, to
modify nanoshells by adding a fluorescent dye
that glows when struck by near-infrared (NIR)
light. NIR light is invisible and harmless, so NIR
imaging could provide doctors with a means of
diagnosing diseases without surgery.
In studying ways to attach the dye, Halas’
graduate student, Rizia Bardhan, found that
dye molecules emitted 40–50 times more
light if a tiny gap was left between them
and the surface of the nanoshell. The gap
was just a few nanometers wide, but rather
than waste the space, Bardhan inserted a
layer of iron oxide that would be detectable
with MRI. The researchers also attached an
antibody that lets the particles bind to the
surface of breast and ovarian cancer cells.
In the lab, the team confirmed that the
fluorescent particles targeted cancer cells and
destroyed them with heat. Joshi said the next
step will be to destroy whole tumors in live
animals. He estimates that testing in humans
is at least two years away, but the ultimate
goal is a system where a patient gets a shot
containing nanoparticles with antibodies that
are tailored for the patient’s cancer. Doctors
would then observe the particles’ progress
through the body, identify areas where tu-
mors exist and kill the tumors with heat.
“This particle provides four options —
two for imaging and two for therapy,” Joshi
said. “We envision this as a platform tech-
nology that will present practitioners with a
choice of options for directed treatment.”
The researchers hope to develop spe-
cific versions of the particles that can attack
cancer at different stages, particularly early-
stage cancer, which is difficult to diagnose
and treat with current technology, and to use
different antibody labels to target specific
forms of the disease. Halas said the team
has been careful to choose components that
already are approved for medical use or are
in clinical trials.
Bardhan and BCM postdoctoral associ-
ate Wenxue Chen are coprimary authors of
the paper. Additional Rice co-authors include
Emilia Morosan, assistant professor of phys-
ics and astronomy, and graduate students
Ryan Huschka and Liang Zhao. Additional
BCM co-authors include Robia Pautler, as-
sistant professor of neuroscience and radiol-
ogy; postdoctoral associate Marc Bartels; and
graduate student Carlos Perez Torres.
The research was sponsored by the Air
Force Office of Scientific Research, the Welch
Foundation and the Department of Defense’s
Multidisciplinary University Research
Initiative.
—Jade Boyd
View the paper in the journal Advanced
Functional Materials:
››› ricemagazine.info/39
The image shows breast cancer cells after treatment
with light-activated nanocomplexes. The live cells
are shown in green, and the dead cells, shown in red,
are within the white-circled area where a laser was
applied. Photo: R. Bardhan
“Some of the most essential questions in
nanomedicine today are about biodistribution —
where particles go inside the body
and how they get there.”
—Naomi Halas

Nanocarpets Take Flight
With creations ranging from carpets to kites, you’d think Rice chemist Bob
Hauge was running a department store instead of a revolution in the world of
carbon nanotechnology.
In a paper published in Nano Research, Hauge’s research team described a method for making
“odako,” bundles of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNT) named for the large traditional Japanese
kites they resemble. Hauge’s method creates bundles of SWNTs that are sometimes measured in
centimeters, and the process could eventually yield tubes of unlimited length.
Large-scale production of nanotube threads and cables would be a boon for engineers in almost
every field. Hauge, a distinguished faculty fellow in chemistry at Rice’s Richard E. Smalley Institute
for Nanoscale Science and Technology, said the SWNT bundles could be used in lightweight, su-
perefficient power-transmission lines for next-
generation electrical grids; ultrastrong and
lightning-resistant versions of carbon-fiber
materials found in airplanes; batteries and fuel
cells; and microelectronics.
To understand how Hauge makes these na-
nokites, it helps to have a little background on
flying carpets and printing money.
Hauge and his team — which included
senior research fellow Howard Schmidt ’80
and Professor Matteo Pasquali, both of Rice’s
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular
Engineering; graduate students Cary Pint
’09, Noe Alvarez ’08 and Sean Pheasant ’06;
and Kent Coulter of San Antonio’s Southwest
Research Institute — used the same machinery
the U.S. Treasury uses to embed paper money
with anticounterfeiting markings to deposit
manufacturing elements onto a sheet of carbon
substrate. The top layer consisted of tiny iron
particles that cause nanotubes to grow under
proper conditions. Under that was a layer of
flaked aluminum oxide, and beneath that was a
release layer the team could activate with a sol-
vent to loosen the aluminum oxide and iron.
The process took off in a mesh cage placed
into a furnace, where the flakes lifted off and
“flew” in the chemical breeze of hydrogen
and acetylene flowing through the produc-
tion chamber while arrays of nanotubes grew
vertically in tight, forest-like formations under
them. The resulting mats of tubes looked re-
markably like the pile of a carpet.
While other methods used to grow SWNTs
have yielded a paltry 0.5 percent ratio of nano-
tubes to substrate materials, Hauge’s technique
brought the yield up to an incredible 400 per-
cent. Pint said that the process will likely facilitate large-scale SWNT growth.
Photos show that the odako follow the rounded form of the fibers even while growing to great
lengths, though the researchers note that shorter may be better for the manufacture of composite
materials. Odako growth may even be possible on other materials, such as quartz fibers and a variety
of metals.
“If we could get these growing so that we can pull one end out of the furnace while the other
end is still inside growing, then we should be able to grow meter-long material and start weaving it,”
Hauge said.
The key is the holy grail of nanotube growth: a catalyst that will not become depleted, enabling
furnaces to churn out continuous threads of material.
“You have to make that catalyst stay alive indefinitely,” Hauge said. “That’s a very difficult thing
to do, but it’s not impossible.”
—Mike Williams
Top photo: Microscopic bundles of “odako” grown at Rice
University shows single-walled nanotubes lifting iron and
aluminum oxide “kites” as they grow while remaining firmly
rooted in a carbon base.
Bottom photo: Odako grow from carbon fibers treated with
iron and an aluminum oxide catalyst. The bare fibers at left
were covered during the catalyst deposition process.
Space Rock
At halftime during the Rice–Navy
football game on Oct. 10, NASA’s
Johnson Space Center Director
Mike Coats presented President
David Leebron with a moon rock
andtheAmbassadorofExploration
Award, originally bestowed post-
humously to President John F.
Kennedy last July on the 40th an-
niversary of the Apollo 11 landing
on the moon.
NASA gave the award to
Kennedy for his directive, articu-
lated in his famous 1962 speech
at Rice Stadium, that humans
would reach the moon by the
end of the 1960s. Recipients of
the Ambassador of Exploration
Award are asked to select an edu-
cational institution or museum
where it can be displayed and
appreciated by all, and Kathleen
Kennedy Townsend, the former
lieutenant governor of Maryland
and daughter of Robert Kennedy,
presented the award to Rice on
behalf of the Kennedy family.
Also on hand during the pre-
sentation was Congressman Pete
Olson ’85 of the 22nd District
of Texas, which encompasses
Johnson Space Center.
Left to right: Pete Olson, David Leebron and Mike Coats

Health Care: Helping Africa Can Pay
U.S. Dividends
Technology often is blamed for the rise in U.S. medical spending
from 5 percent of the U.S. economy in 1960 to 16.5 percent today.
Butwhatifthesteadystreamofsurgicaltools,designerdrugsand
diagnostic gadgets coming out of university laboratories could
make health care cheaper — and save lives in underdeveloped
countries at the same time?
It’s already happening in Houston’s Texas Medical Center, where en-
gineering researchers from Rice University and Austin-based start-up
LabNow are putting the finishing touches on a toaster-sized machine
that is designed to diagnose virtually any disease or medical condition
for a fraction of the cost of modern U.S. clinical assays. The machine
already works for HIV monitoring and heart-attack screens and soon
will be used to diagnose various kinds of cancer.
Rice bioengineer John McDevitt originally designed the device
for use in rural Africa. McDevitt recently moved his laboratory from
Austin to Rice University’s BioScience Research Collaborative, home
to Rice’s Department of Bioengineering, one of the top 10 biomedical
engineering programs in the nation as ranked by U.S. News & World
Report.
“Typically the developing world gets the leftovers when it comes
to medical technologies,” said McDevitt, Rice’s Brown-Wiess Professor
in Bioengineering and Chemistry. “For HIV immune-function testing,
which is one of the most significant humanitarian problems on the
planet, we went to Africa first. Tens of millions of people need these
tests in sub-Saharan Africa, but only about 30 percent of the popula-
tion is now being served.”
The remaining 70 percent of the population lives in rural areas
without the stable electricity, refrigerators and trained lab personnel
needed to run the complicated tests now in use. In addition, the cur-
rent tests require a flow cytometer, a refrigerator-sized device that
costs as much as a new car.
McDevitt’s lab is all about miniaturization. It combines the latest
technology from microcomputing, nanotechnology and biotechnol-
ogy to shrink all the functions of a state-of-the-art clinical laboratory
onto a microchip the size of a postage stamp. These lab-on-a-chip ele-
ments contain tiny chambers where “biomarkers” react with proteins
and cells in a patient’s saliva or blood. The microchips are mounted
on disposable, plastic cards that are slotted into a battery-powered
analyzer that determines whether the patient is sick and how sick he
or she is.
LabNow is currently field testing the new analyzer in Africa, and
McDevitt said the field tests will determine how well the analyzer works
in the rural areas for which it was designed. Early results showed the
analyzer functions as well as a flow cytometer, but McDevitt’s analyzer
is expected to cost about one-fifth as much to produce.
Trials of a test for heart attacks also began this fall at Baylor College
of Medicine (BCM). That test, which McDevitt is conducting in col-
laboration with BCM Professor of Medicine Christie Ballantyne, uses
biomarkers in saliva to tell whether a patient is having a heart attack.
“Electrocardiograms miss up to 30 percent of heart attacks, delay-
ing treatment for hours until lab tests can be completed,” McDevitt
said. “Preliminary research found our saliva tests could be a great
complementary test to what’s already available. Safely moving false
alarms out of the ER would have a major impact on U.S. health care
costs for chest-pain patients.”
McDevitt said the disposable cards used in the saliva-based heart-
attack screens presently are manufactured using silicon fabrication
methods from the computing industry. The cards cost about $5 each,
but McDevitt’s laboratory is testing alternative materials that can be
used to produce the disposable cards for just pennies. Any biomarker
that’s specific to a type of cancer or other disease can be added to
these disposable cards to create a new type of test.
Now that the analyzer is nearing commercial availability, McDevitt’s
lab is making the transition from creating the technology that reads
the tests to creating the tests themselves.
“Finding and applying biomarkers for these tests is going to be our
new focus,” he said. “It’s akin to creating software for a computer rather
than the computer itself. Up to now we’ve been like Dell, but we’re go-
ing to be the Microsoft of biomarker signatures from here on out.”
—Jade Boyd
McDevitt’s lab is all
about miniaturization.
It combines the latest
technology from
microcomputing,
nanotechnology and
biotechnology to
shrink all the functions
of a state-of-the-art
clinical laboratory onto
a microchip the size of
a postage stamp.

Who’sMoreGenerous,MenorWomen?
Donating to meaningful causes is an important facet of American
life, but how do individuals choose where to spend their chari-
table dollars? A recent study co-authored by Vikas Mittal, Rice
University’s J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Management, showed
thatmenandwomentakedifferentapproachestodonatingbased
on their gender and moral identities.
A series of three studies, published in the August 2009 Journal of
Consumer Research, examined whether men and women would do-
nate to victims of natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina and the
South Asian tsunami, and to terrorism victims in London and Iraq.
“Men and women are different, but the caricatures of how we
differ are wrong,” Mittal said. “This and other new research give us
insight into how the genders make decisions about money.”
Research over the past several years has found that individuals
with a feminine gender identity — predominantly women — are mo-
tivated by communal goals such as the welfare and nurturing of other
people, while those with a masculine identity are driven by “agentic”
goals, including assertiveness, control and a focus on the self. The
study authors describe “moral identity” as the extent to which notions
Owls on Wheels
Now Rice drivers have something to hoot about thanks
to a new custom license plate developed by the Texas
Department of Transportation in conjunction with the Rice
Office of Public Affairs.
Learn how to purchase your own Owl license plate:
of being moral are central and important to one’s self-identity.
The studies found that women who placed a high importance on
being moral gave equally to victims of the South Asian tsunami and
Hurricane Katrina. Men who believed strongly in morality, on the
other hand, were more inclined to donate to Katrina victims only.
When it came to victims of terrorism, women gave to victims in both
London and Iraq, while men donated only to the London group.
“In terms of donations, we found that women expand their circle
outward,” Mittal said. “They tend to view
victims of the tsunami as much a part of
the ‘in-group’ as people suffering after
Katrina, who are actually much closer
to home. Men were willing to donate to
Katrina victims but considered the tsu-
nami victims members of the ‘out-group.’
With the terrorism studies, women con-
sidered victims of both London and Iraq
attacks as members of their circle, while
men expanded their group only as far as
those injured in London.”
The findings could be particularly
relevant for fundraisers and nonprofit
leaders. “Although it would mean more
time and effort,” Mittal said, “creating
communications pieces that target men
and women separately should have a
positive impact on donations.”
Mittal has long been interested in examining how men and wom-
en make financial choices and how new science helps us understand
the differences in psychology between the genders. A 2008 study he
co-authored on gender and investing found that women are generally
more conservative and seek to minimize losses, while men tend to
take greater investment risks, with the hope of maximizing gains.
“Women are more nurturing,” Mittal said. “This orientation cre-
ates differences in how they take risks, communicate, donate and
approach other aspects of their lives. These are not biological differ-
ences. They are based on psychology and on the different things that
women learn to value in socialization processes.”
— Julia Nguyen
Rice MBA Program Places
Fifth in Entrepreneurship
The kudos continue for the Rice MBA program in entrepre-
neurship, recently ranked No. 5 among U.S. graduate entre-
preneurship programs by the Princeton Review. It was one of
25 undergraduate and 25 graduate programs selected from a
pool of more than 2,300. During the last two years, the Rice
entrepreneurship program has moved up a total of 17 spots,
from No. 22 in 2007 to No. 16 in 2008 to its current position in
the 2009 rankings.
For more on the rankings, visit:
››› entrepreneur.com/topcolleges
Learn more about the Rice MBA:
››› business.rice.edu
“Men and women
are different,
but the carica-
tures of how
we differ are
wrong. This
and other new
research give us
insight into how
the genders
make decisions
about money.”
–Vikas Mittal

No one knows exactly how much Earth’s climate will
warm due to carbon emissions, but a new study this
week suggests scientists’ best predictions about
global warming might be incorrect.
The study, which appears in Nature Geoscience, found that climate
models explain only about half of the heating that occurred during a
well-documented period of rapid global warming in Earth’s ancient
past. The study, which was published online, contains an analysis
of published records of a period of rapid climatic warming about
55 million years ago known as
the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal
Maximum, or PETM.
“In a nutshell, theoretical
models cannot explain what
we observe in the geological
record,” said oceanographer
Gerald Dickens, a co-author
of the study and professor of
Earth science at Rice University.
“There appears to be something
fundamentally wrong with the
way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”
During the PETM, for reasons that are still unknown, the
amount of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere rose rapidly. For
this reason, this period of climatic warming, which has been
identified in hundreds of sediment core samples worldwide,
is probably the best ancient climate analogue for present-
day Earth.
In addition to rapidly rising levels of atmospheric car-
bon, global surface temperatures rose dramatically during the
PETM. Average temperatures worldwide rose by about
7 degrees Celsius — about 13 degrees Fahrenheit
— in the relatively short geological span of
about 10,000 years.
“You go along a core and everything’s
the same, the same, the same, and then
suddenly, you pass this time line and
the carbon chemistry is completely
different,” Dickens said. “This has been documented time and again
at sites all over the world.”
Based on findings related to oceanic acidity levels during the
PETM and on calculations about the cycling of carbon among the
oceans, air, plants and soil, Dickens and co-authors Richard Zeebe
of the University of Hawaii and James Zachos of the University
of California at Santa Cruz determined that the level of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere increased by about 70 percent during
the PETM, not quite a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Since the start of the industrial revolution, carbon dioxide
levels are believed to have risen by about one-third, largely due to
the burning of fossil fuels. If present rates of fossil-fuel consump-
tion continue, the doubling of
carbon dioxide from fossil fu-
els will occur sometime within
the next century or two.
Doubling of atmospheric
carbon dioxide is an oft-talked-
about threshold, and today’s
climate models include accept-
ed values for the climate’s sen-
sitivity to doubling. Using these
accepted values and the PETM
carbon data, the researchers
found that the models could only explain about half of the
warming that Earth experienced 55 million years ago.
The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something
other than carbon dioxide caused much of the heating
during the PETM. “Some feedback loop or other pro-
cesses that aren’t accounted for in these models — the
same ones used by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change for current best estimates of 21st
century warming — caused a substantial
portion of the warming that occurred
during the PETM.”
—Jade Boyd
“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain
what we observe in the geological record.
There appears to be something fundamentally
wrong with the way temperature and carbon
are linked in climate models.”
—Gerald Dickens
Read the study:

Rice condensed-matter physicist Emilia Morosan, who uses furnaces in her lab to
create compounds with novel magnetic properties, has landed a highly coveted
Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science
Foundation (NSF).
CAREER awards support the research and educational development of young scholars who are
likely to become leaders in their field. Among the most competitive grants awarded by the NSF,
which gives out only about 400 per year across all disciplines, each comes with a five-year grant
of up to $550,000.
For her CAREER grant, Morosan has an ambitious goal: discover and perfect the synthesis of
compounds that are not normally magnetic but that can become “itinerant ferromagnets.” Only two
such unusual compounds are known to exist: scandium-indium and zirconium-zinc. Unconventional
superconductivity and possibly other exotic phase transitions are believed to occur in these com-
pounds, and Morosan is confident that physicists can learn much from the materials if they have
more of them to study.
When itinerant ferromagnets are cooled below a critical temperature, they go through a phase
transition — changes of matter from one state and set of characteristics to another, such as ice to
water and water to steam. By appropriately manipulating these compounds, the phase transition
can be tuned to absolute zero temperature. These changes are fundamentally different from more
familiar phase transitions, such as a liquid freezing. In the case of the zero-temperature phase
transitions, quantum and not thermal fluctuations take over, and they are therefore called quantum
phase transitions.
In ferromagnetic materials — such as common refrigerator magnets — the magnetic “mo-
ments” of each atom are perfectly aligned. The reason that other materials, like plastic or silver
spoons, don’t stick to the refrigerator is that they have no magnetic “moments.” In itinerant fer-
romagnets with no magnetic constituents, magnetism occurs even though there are no magnetic
“moments” to be aligned.
“This is the result of a collective behavior that cannot be traced back to any single atom’s mo-
ment,” Morosan said. “The theories that attempt to explain this behavior are incomplete at best. It
would clearly help to have new materials to study.”
Utilizing the partial theories available, Morosan plans to systematically create and test crystal-
line compounds containing two or more transition metals in search of new itinerant ferromagnets
that could help physicists better understand the underlying physics of quantum phase transitions.
It may sound like hunting for a needle in a haystack, but Morosan is confident that she has a
good chance of finding undiscovered itinerant ferromagnets during the course of her research.
“The worst thing that can happen is that I end up discovering new compounds that I wasn’t
looking for to begin with,” she said. “I will take that failure mode anytime.”
—Jade Boyd
Her Honor
Annise Parker, a 1978 graduate of
Rice University, defeated former
City Attorney Gene Locke in the
Dec. 12 runoff for Houston mayor.
The first openly gay mayor of one of the na-
tion’s largest cities, Parker teased her sup-
porters as she began her victory speech. “I
am proud, very proud, to have been elected
the first [pause], the very first graduate of
Rice University to be mayor of Houston.”
She did not make an issue of her sexual ori-
entation during her campaign.
“We’re united in one goal, and that is
making Houston the city that it should be,
could be, can be and will be,” Parker said in
her victory speech. “Houston is a city built
on dreams, but these dreams have always
been powered by hard work, creativity, com-
mon sense and cooperation.”
A native Houstonian, Parker attended
Rice from 1974 to 1978 and was a member
of Jones College. She graduated with a
bachelor’s degree in anthropology and so-
ciology. She was elected city controller in
2003, 2005 and 2007 following a stint on
the Houston City Council as Houston’s first
openly gay elected official.
As mayor, Parker will work closely with
fellow Rice alumnus Harris County Judge Ed
Emmett ’71, who is the presiding officer of
Harris County Commissioners Court. Other
Rice alums currently holding elected office
are Texas Rep. Scott Hochberg ’75, Texas
Sen. Eliot Shapleigh ’74, and U.S. Reps. Pete
Olson ’85 and John Kline ’69. Former Harris
County Judge and former Mayor of Houston
Roy Hofheinz ’32 attended Rice but did not
earn a Rice degree.
—Franz Brotzen

Vote Centers May Help Get Out the Vote
People have been trying to increase voter turnout for decades, using
a variety of reforms that would ease the challenges would-be voters
face each election. The answer may be simpler than anyone suspected.
It hinges on the creation of Election Day vote centers (EDVCs), which are nonprec-
inct-based locations for voting. The sites are fewer in number than precinct-voting
stations, are centrally located to major population centers (rather than distributed
among many residential locations) and rely on countywide voter-registration data-
bases accessed electronically at each polling site. Voters in a given jurisdiction are
provided ballots appropriate to their registration address.
Working with a grant from the Pew Charitable
Trusts, Bob Stein, the Lena Gohlman Fox Professor
of Political Science, and Greg Vonnahme ’04, now
an assistant professor at the University of Alabama,
have studied EDVCs. Their findings indicate that
EDVCs increase voter turnout in general and among
infrequent voters in particular and that they are
more effective than previous efforts, like relaxed
absentee voting, voting by mail and in-person early
voting. The research was published in the Journal
of Politics.
To study the effectiveness of EDVCs, Stein and
Vonnahme examined polling data from counties in
Colorado and Texas to understand voters’ feelings
about the entire voting process. Larimer County in
northern Colorado dropped its 143 precinct-based
polling places in 2003, and replaced them with 22
vote centers. It was the first county in the country
to move to EDVCs. Weld County, which is adjacent
to Larimer, continued with precinct-based voting.
From 1990 through 2000, voter turnout was
higher in Weld County than in Larimer County.
“Turnout in Larimer County, however, increased
at a faster rate than in Weld County after Larimer
County’s adoption of Election Day vote centers in
2003,” Stein and Vonnahme noted. The increase in
Larimer County came despite the fact that many
voters actually had to travel greater distances to
vote at the EDVCs.
“The convenience of voting might not directly
correspond to the distance between where people
live and their polling site,” the authors hypothesized. “For example, a person might
prefer to vote at a polling location that is two miles from their house but on the
way to work rather than at a polling site that is only a mile away from their house
but in the opposite direction.”
In a separate study, Stein and Vonnahme conducted exit polls of 538 voters at
10 EDVCs in Lubbock, Texas, in November 2008. For comparison purposes, they
also interviewed 251 voters at six precinct sites in Potter County and 402 voters at
five precinct sites in Randall County. “The results,” they wrote, “tentatively suggest
the EDVCs increase voter turnout, particularly among less engaged voters.”
In addition, the Lubbock survey results “also show that EDVCs seem to in-
crease voters’ satisfaction with polling place operations,” which may help explain
the higher turnout. The exit polls found voters were generally pleased with the
length of lines, the availability of parking and the helpfulness of poll workers.
The researchers cautioned that the findings are far from conclusive. The areas
studied are small and may have unique characteristics, and the studies cover only
a short time frame. However, they concluded that EDVCs are the first reform that
seems to have led to higher voter turnout overall and, perhaps more importantly,
among infrequent voters.
—Franz Brotzen
RisetotheChallenge
Rise to the challenge and fill out your questionnaire at:
www.rice.edu/centennialchallenge
Their findings
indicate that
EDVCs increase
voter turnout in
general and among
infrequent voters
in particular and
that they are more
effective than
previous efforts,
like relaxed
absentee voting,
voting by mail and
in-person early
voting.
Recent graduates like Stephanie Taylor ’05 are sup-
porting Rice’s world-class education and influencing its
national ranking through the Centennial Challenge to
YoungAlumni.Ifyougraduatedbetween1999and2009,
Karen ’79 and Rich Whitney ’80 will match your gift to
the Rice Annual Fund 2-to-1 until March 20, 2010.
Name: Stephanie Taylor
Graduation year: 2005
Major: Civil engineering
[ W h y I G i v e
]#61

Construction@rice
This year, Rice University is going for the gold.
Not only did the campus welcome the largest freshman population
in university history, but it also is housing around 150 of them in
twonewresidentialcollegesthatoutshinethecompetitioninen-
ergyefficiencyandinnovation.Inthenearfuture,DuncanCollege
is expected to go where only a handful of other college dormito-
ries have gone before by earning gold certification from the U.S.
GreenBuildingCouncil’sLeadershipinEnergyandEnvironmental
Design (LEED) program. Rice also will apply for LEED gold certi-
fication for McMurtry College.
The opening of McMurtry and Duncan colleges — respectively the
10th and 11th residential colleges at Rice — marks only the second time
since 1971 that the university has added new colleges. With 324 beds
each, they are Rice’s largest residences and have equalized the student
populations on the north and south sides of the campus, with each side
now capable of housing approximately 1,400 students each.
Fresh Faces
At the beginning of the fall 2009 semester, Duncan and McMurtry each
welcomed 75 freshmen, as well as students from the two south colleg-
es that are currently under renovation. McMurtry College’s population
was rounded out with 236 students from Will Rice College, while 226
Baker College students moved into Duncan. Most are slated to return
to the south side of campus when renovations are completed this fall,
but several Will Rice and Baker students will stay on at the new col-
leges as part of a group of 350 current Rice sophomores and juniors
who were invited at random to populate Duncan and McMurtry in the
coming academic year.
The new Duncan and McMurtry students are in the process of
forming their own college traditions — such as drafting constitutions,
designing crests and hosting social events — by studying those of the
other nine colleges. These responsibilities also include selecting the
masters, resident associates, college coordinators, college officers and
O-Week coordinators who will begin serving in fall 2010.
Sister Colleges
Packed with thoughtful, sustainable details, the colleges are mirror
images of each other with only a few exceptions. Both are built with
the wood-molded St. Joe brick that hallmarks the Rice campus, al-
though in slightly different colors, and both feature cypress siding on
the first floor. However, the iconography at Duncan College will have
a sustainability focus, and Duncan houses a classroom finished with
green materials and furnishings and will feature displays to help teach
Rice students about sustainable living.
The colleges also differ in the design of their masters’ houses —
which were planned to be identical until the design of Duncan’s house
was altered to save a 52-inch live oak — and in the design of each
commons. Though they were built of similar materials, the Duncan
College Commons was constructed in a traditional rectangle, while
the McMurtry College Commons’ circular shape was inspired by the
prospect of accommodating arena theater.
Sustaining a Lifestyle
With features such as thick walls, double-paned windows, efficient
lighting and smart thermostats, the new residential colleges are two
of the most energy-efficient buildings on campus and reflect Rice’s
commitment to environmental responsibility.
“We estimate that these colleges will use half as much energy as
they would have if they had just been built to the minimum code,”
Good as Gold

Feeding the Night Owls
One of the most inspired features of the new colleges’ de-
sign can be found at Duncan and McMurtry’s West Servery:
alate-nightservicewindowthatstudentswillrunasabusi-
ness after campus serveries have closed.
The service will begin in spring 2010, and the success of its
inaugural semester will play a large role in determining how it
— and potentially a similar operation in the East Servery, which
is under renovation — will be run in the future. Tentatively, the
window will operate from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., Monday through
Saturday. Students will set the price points for the menu, which
likely will feature salads, heat-and-serve foods such as Quiznos
sandwiches and pizza, and drinks.
“We’ve never done this before, so we’re just going to see
what happens,” said Rice Director of Residential Dining David
McDonald, who will be paying for the operation’s food and
supplies out of the Office of Housing and Dining budget until
the business is able to turn a profit. He also will advise the
students on best practices. “If it’s popular, we’ll expand it, and
if it’s not working, we’ll initiate some marketing campaigns. We
don’t want to give the students too much structure, so I’m giving
them quite a bit of leeway on this.”
said Rice Director of Sustainability Richard Johnson, who also is a
professor in the practice of environmental studies in sociology. He
added that the colleges would use approximately 40 percent less wa-
ter due to their front-loading washing machines and low-flow toilets
and showers.
Both colleges offer many other sustainable features, as well.
Vegetated “green” roofs help reduce the buildings’ energy consump-
tion, minimize storm-water runoff, limit damage from hailstorms,
and provide a habitat for songbirds and other native animals and
insects. Low-emitting indoor finishes such as concrete flooring con-
tribute to indoor environmental quality. And both colleges provide
extensive bicycle storage and are close to public transportation and
Rice’s Zipcar services.
During construction, as much as 95 percent of construction waste
was recycled. In addition, many of the building materials used were
manufactured within 500 miles of Houston — which reduced trans-
portation-related environmental impacts — and fly ash was used ex-
tensively as a substitute for Portland cement, which yielded a stronger
concrete with a substantially smaller carbon footprint.
Chic, innovative prefabricated restroom pods reduced construction
waste, traffic to worksites and the number of on-site subcontractors.
The ultramodern pods made even more headlines when they were
featured in the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s Cellophane
House exhibit last year.
“For me, these colleges represent a living laboratory for how to
design buildings that respond to the environmental challenges of the
21st century,” Johnson said. “Students will be able to learn about is-
sues concerning energy, water and climate change in their classes and
then return to their rooms in buildings that are physical manifestations
of how to respond to these issues. In that way, these new buildings
offer both education and inspiration.”
—Merin Porter

Construction@rice
“It is a fabulous addition to our campus in every sense,”
said Rice University President David Leebron. “It will help
us reinforce our sense of community as we bring students,
faculty and staff together, and it will enable all members of
our community to stay physically fit while they pursue their
intellectual endeavors.”
The two-story building, which opened Sept. 25, features an
industrial-style interior with lofty ceilings, exposed ductwork,
and concrete floors and beams. A freestanding concrete stair-
case serves as a lobby centerpiece, and pinewood benches,
handrails and other accents add warmth to the interior. In ad-
dition, Rice has commissioned a hanging sculpture by former
Rice Gallery artist Aurora Robson to fill the vertical space cre-
ated by the lobby’s 36-foot ceiling. The artwork is scheduled for
installation in January.
The recreation center’s first floor offers 9,000 square feet
of state-of-the-art cardio and weight machines, as well as
four racquetball and two squash courts, an activity area that
includes ping-pong and pool tables, and men’s and women’s
locker rooms. In addition, an outdoor-adventure center allows
members to rent equipment for camping, rock climbing, white-
water rafting and other excursions. Just outside the building are
two basketball courts, and 15 Florida sabal palms surround a
2,400-square-foot recreation pool and a 50-meter competition
pool.
The second floor features two basketball courts, four multi-
purpose rooms for group fitness and dance classes, a practice
and performance studio specifically designed for Rice Dance
Theater, and a large multipurpose activity court for indoor
soccer and other sports. The facility, which also features a
personal-training and fitness-assessment center, adjoins a new
GettingPhysical
The new recreation center is part of a major construction initiative
fueled by the Vision for the Second Century’s goal of increasing
Rice’s student body and raising its international profile.
When Rice students, faculty and staff
want to exercise more red cells than
graycells,thenewBarbaraandDavid
GibbsRecreationandWellnessCenter
offerstheperfectsolution.Withevery-
thing from weight machines, swim-
ming pools and ping-pong tables to
basketballandracquetballcourts,the
103,000-square-footcenterprovidesa
host of fitness options for Rice com-
munity members.

two-story office building that houses recreation center staff and
Rice’s Wellness Center.
Located at the northwest corner of Alumni Drive and
Laboratory Road, the new recreation center is part of a ma-
jor construction initiative fueled by the Vision for the Second
Century’s goal of increasing Rice’s student body and raising
its international profile. Like all other recently constructed
buildings on campus, the center adheres to the Leadership in
Energy and Environmental Design standards developed by the
U.S. Green Building Council. It was designed by SmithGroup
(formerly F&S Partners), Lake/Flato Architects and the Office of
James Burnett and is named in honor of Rice alumni David ’71
and Barbara Jenkins Gibbs ’73, who made the lead gift for the
$41 million facility.
“Rice University and its gym were defining influences in
my life,” said David Gibbs. “Whenever I would get in a funk
or a solution to a problem failed to present itself, I headed to
the gym, and after a good workout, I was ready to get back to
my studies with the juices flowing. This has worked for me my
entire life. I’m a believer in lifelong fitness.”
Another believer, Student Association President Patrick
McAnaney, raced to be the first person to use the new weight
room when the recreation center opened its doors. “This is the
most anticipated day during my time at Rice,” McAnaney said.
The replacement of Rice’s 1950s-era gymnasium with the new
recreation center makes Rice “perfect,” he said.
Memberships to the new facility are currently available to
Rice students, faculty, staff, retirees, Rice trustees, and their
spouses and domestic partners.
—Merin Porter and Jessica Stark
Learn more about the center:
››› rice.edu/recreation

When the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) eased
regulations in the oil futures market through the Commodity
FuturesModernizationActof2000,thecommissionreasonedthat
speculation wasn’t influencing oil futures markets. According to
a study by energy experts at Rice University’s James A. Baker III
InstituteforPublicPolicy,however,thecommission’sactionwas
based on inappropriate analysis.
The authors of the study are Kenneth Medlock, an energy and resource
economics fellow at the Baker Institute and lecturer of economics, and
Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy studies fellow at the Baker Institute and as-
sociate director of the Rice Energy Program.
In “Who Is in the Oil Futures Market and
How Has It Changed?” they present new
evidence that shows a clear increase in the
size and influence of noncommercial trad-
ers, or “speculators”: about 50 percent of
those holding outstanding positions in the
U.S. oil futures market, compared with only
about 20 percent prior to 2002. The report
also finds that the correlation between oil
and the dollar has strengthened significantly
over the past several years.
Jaffe and Medlock note that, while
the question of what has produced sharp
swings in oil prices since 2005 is a complex
one that requires further and deeper study,
there are “inescapable facts” that need to be
part of the debate about regulating the activities of institutions bet-
ting on movements in oil price purely for financial gain. Specifically,
speculators, which the CFTC designates as any reportable trader who
is not using futures contracts to hedge, have increased their footprint
in the marketplace dramatically since the late 1990s.
Hedgers are typically producers and consumers of the physical
commodity who use futures markets to offset price risk. By contrast,
speculators seek profits by taking market positions to gain from
changes in the commodity price but are not involved in the physical
receipt and/or delivery of the commodity.
“To protect the U.S. economy and American consumers, there
needs to be greater market oversight,” Medlock said. “The tremendous
increase in the market presence of speculators by fifteenfold speaks
for itself.”
As noted in a 2007 U.S. Government Accountability Office re-
port, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 made it
easier for financial players to obviate speculative limits and made it
more difficult for the CFTC to regulate oil futures markets. Changes
at London’s International Petroleum Exchange (now ICE Futures,
a subsidiary of IntercontinentalExchange) regarding U.S. delivery-
based contracts also created problems with monitoring and limiting
speculative activity because these contracts were outside the juris-
diction of the CFTC.
While there were short windows of time before 2001 when the
price of oil and the value of the dollar were correlated more strongly,
a dramatic sustained period of high correlation emerged during the
2000s, according to the study. Given this new strong interconnection,
the authors note, the threat to the United
States’ economic health and national secu-
rity is that the dollar risks getting caught in
a vicious cycle where continually rising oil
prices feed the U.S. trade deficit, leading
to increased U.S. indebtedness and there-
by an even weaker dollar, which further
drives oil prices higher.
The authors conclude that new poli-
cies are needed. When oil prices rose
in 2007–08 from $65 per barrel to $125,
governments around the world, including
the United States, built strategic stock-
piles. This policy signaled to oil market
participants and the Organization of the
Petroleum Exporting Countries that gov-
ernments would not use strategic petroleum stocks to ease prices
under any circumstances except major wartime supply shortfalls.
This allowed speculators to confidently expand their exposure in oil
market futures exchanges without fear of repercussions or revenue
losses from a surprise release of U.S. or International Energy Agency
strategic oil stocks.
“We need to re-evaluate our policies for how we utilize strategic
oil stocks in light of the oil/dollar linkages,” said Jaffe. “Clearly, our
government needs to fashion a better response.”
—David Ruth
Download a PDF file of the complete study:
Amy Myers Jaffe Kenneth Medlock

Local businesswoman and Rice University alumna Randa
DuncanWilliamswaselectedtotheRiceBoardofTrustees
at the Dec. 10 board meeting.
Duncan Williams is co-chairwoman of EPCO Inc., the private hold-
ing company for three public partnerships that form one of North
America’s largest midstream transportation and energy networks:
Enterprise Products Partners L.P., Enterprise GP Holdings L.P. and
Duncan Energy Partners L.P. She also serves on the board of direc-
tors of Enterprise GP Holdings L.P. and is president of DLD Family
Investments, a family asset management company.
Active in the Houston community, Duncan Williams is a former chair-
woman of the Houston Museum
of Natural Science board, and she
chaired the museum’s gala last year.
She has been highly involved with
the Children’s Learning Institute
at the University of Texas Health
Science Center at Houston, where
she has served in an advisory and
fundraising role. She also has served
on the boards of the Houston
Zoo, the Girl Scouts of San Jacinto
Chapter and the River Oaks Baptist
School, among others.
“Educating kids and getting
them excited about all the possibili-
ties available to them is important to me,” Duncan Williams said.
At Rice, Duncan Williams is a member of the School of Social
Sciences Advisory Council and a former board member of the
Shepherd Society. She serves as a nonboard member of the Academic
Affairs committee of the Rice Board of Trustees.
“Randa has developed a distinguished record of business accom-
plishments, community service and philanthropic leadership,” said
Jim Crownover ’65, chair of the Rice Board of Trustees. “That combi-
nation of skills, experience and passion will be a tremendous asset
to our board.”
Rice President David Leebron said Duncan Williams offers a won-
derfully broad vision and passion for Rice. “Randa chaired the Houston
Museum of Natural Science board at a time when the museum was
experiencing great growth,” Leebron said. “Rice, too, is undergoing
growth in many ways — in our student body, our research endeavors
and our engagement with our home city, among others — and Randa’s
record of leadership during times of great opportunity and challenge
will serve our vision for the university well.”
Duncan Williams is a 1985 graduate of Rice with a B.A. in political
science and economics, and she was a member of Hanszen College.
She received a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center in 1988
and then practiced law with Butler & Binion L.L.P., where she handled
toxic tort cases. In addition, she worked on maritime and property
liability cases at the firm Brown, Sims, Wise and White P.C. She joined
EPCO in 1994 and became the company president and CEO in 2001.
In 2007, she was elected group co-chairwoman of EPCO.
The EPCO family of public companies provides services to pro-
ducers and consumers of natural gas, natural gas liquids, crude oil, re-
fined products, liquefied petroleum gases and petrochemicals. EPCO
also has an indirect significant equity interest in Energy Transfer
Equity L.P. and owns Enterprise Transportation Co., one of the top 10
tank truck companies in the country.
Including Duncan Williams, the Rice board consists of 22 trustees.
—B.J. Almond
Randa Duncan Williams Elected to Rice Board
“Randa has developed a distinguished record of business
accomplishments, community service and philanthropic leadership.
That combination of skills, experience and passion
will be a tremendous asset to our board.”
—Jim Crownover
“Randa chaired the Houston Museum of Natural Science board at a
time when the museum was experiencing great growth. Rice, too, is
undergoinggrowthinmanyways—inourstudentbody,ourresearch
endeavors and our engagement with our home city, among others —
and Randa’s record of leadership during times of great opportunity
and challenge will serve our vision for the university well.”
—David Leebron
Randa Duncan Williams

Jun Yao, a graduate student in the labs
of James Tour, Doug Natelson and Lin
Zhong, drew the Rice Owl and wordmark
at the behest of his friend and colleague
Noe Alvarez, who recently earned his
doctorate at Rice. He used a mouse to
painstakingly trace the images into a com-
puter program that controls the electron
beam of an electron scanning microscope.
“I really wanted to use the Rice logo made
of nanotubes on one of my slides for the
Ph.D. defense committee,” Alvarez re-
called. “We finished the drawing in time,
but the electron scanning microscope we
needed to create the image at the nano-
scale was broken.”
Alvarez said that he and Yao made
the nano-owls for fun, but they still
wanted to get a good look at their cre-
ations. When Alvarez later noticed that
the microscope had been repaired and
was sitting idle, he grabbed the opportu-
nity to make a few portraits of the tiniest
owl ever. The images consist of more
than 10 million nanotubes — each of
which is about 1/50,000th the diameter
of a hair — and appear to the naked eye
as barely visible dots.
Yao explained that the process of
creating the images involved layering a
silicon wafer with a 10-nanometer-thick
alumina substrate and a slim coating
of liquid poly(methyl methacrylate),
aka PMMA. “We bake it at 180 degrees
centigrade for two minutes to crystallize
the liquid,” he said. “We already had
the image in the computer, so we just
had to program the electron beam to
trace the pattern into the PMMA.”
They used a developer to wash
away the PMMA that had been ex-
posed to the electron beam, followed
by deposition of a .5-nanometer iron
catalyst film and then an acetone bath
to remove the catalyst outside the
nano-owl pattern. “Then we put it in
the reactor, where the carpet grows in
about 15 minutes,” Alvarez said.
Alvarez, who worked in the labs
of co-advisers Tour and Robert Hague,
a pioneer in the growth of nanotube
bundles, will leave Rice soon for a
postdoctoral position at Japan’s National
Institute of Advanced Industrial Science
and Technology.
—Mike Williams
Tiny Owls Take Flight
You might want to fly this Rice Owl and wordmark at Rice’s next baseball
game, but since each is only about twice the width of a human hair, you’d
needaverytinypennant.Theimagesaremadeofcarbonnanotubesgrown
incarpetsbymeansofaprocessdevelopedatRice.(SeearticleonPage4.)
Jun Yao, left, and
Noe Alvarez stand at
the electron scanning
microscope they used
to capture images of
their nano-scale owl
and Rice wordmark.
Theimagesconsistofmorethan10millionnanotubes–eachofwhichisabout1/50,000ththediameterofahair–andappeartothenakedeyeasbarelyvisibledots.

Students
Room with Many Views
Protecting art from the ravages of time can be almost as easy as
putting together Tinkertoys, thanks to a group of Rice students
who have developed a system that may revolutionize the way
museums handle complex storage issues.
The four undergraduates and their mentor, Matthew Wettergreen ’08,
came up with the modular system over the course of nine intense
weeks. Wettergreen, who holds a doctorate in bioengineering from
Rice, said that museums have depended
for decades on the old-fashioned method
of building plywood boxes around things
they want to store. But when conserva-
tors at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
(MFAH) approached Rice’s Sallie Keller,
the William and Stephanie Sick Dean
of the George R. Brown School of
Engineering, and Gary Wihl, then dean
of the School of Humanities, about find-
ing a better way, they inspired the cre-
ation of the Engineering Design for Art
and Artifact program.
“We wanted visible storage,” said
Wynne Phelan, conservation director at
the MFAH. “We wanted materials that
were not harmful and did not produce
acid that would attack artworks. And we
wanted a modular system that was easily
assembled.”
Maria Oden, director of the Oshman
Engineering Design Kitchen and profes-
sor in the practice of engineering edu-
cation, recruited Wettergreen to run the
program, and he in turn chose the par-
ticipating students: Nicole Garcia, Rhodes
Coffey Jr., Caleb Brown and Kristi Day.
The students received fellowships from
Rice’s Center for Civic Engagement to
spend the summer brainstorming, build-
ing and learning business planning
through the Rice Alliance for Technology
and Entrepreneurship.
“We took a week and a half to come
up with as many solutions as we could,”
said Wettergreen, who still has the 500
three-by-five cards containing their ideas.
Packaging was only part of the problem, he explained.
“Some of the design constraints were that the art
had to be visible and that it had to interact with
the environment, because some of the pieces
are made of harmful chemicals that give off
gas. In a concealed and enclosed environ-
ment, that off-gassing will accelerate the deg-
radation of the artwork, so the piece has to
remain open to the air.”
The team’s elegant solution incorporates
interchangeable elements of steel tubing,
vented Plexiglas panels, snap-on cast-
ers and myriad connectors that
link all the bits together. The
tubes are 30, 60 and 90 inches
long and can be combined
to make containers of any
multiples of those dimensions. That makes the system remarkably
versatile. “They’re still cuboidal, like the plywood boxes, but you don’t
have to cut new wood each time you make one,” Wettergreen said.
“You can arrange them into many configurations.”
Part of the solution’s out-of-the-box inspiration can be credited
to the diversity of the project team. “I love the fact that our team
had students in humanities and art history as well as engineering,”
Keller said. “This project went beyond my wildest imagination in
terms of what they accomplished. I didn’t think they’d end up at a
place where the MFAH would actually use their prototypes to store
precious artifacts.”
The museum is using the system to store several pieces. One is a
15-foot piece, “La sordidez,” by José
Antonio Berni. “It’s fairly light for its
size,” Wettergreen said of the piece,
which is made of found materials.
“But that also means it’s fairly frag-
ile.” Two other pieces — a bronze ti-
tled “The Bronco Buster,” by Frederic
Remington, and a wax-and-plaster
bust — also were packaged.
The team used standard en-
gineering procedures to solve a
problem not usually addressed by
engineers, and that opens doors to a
world of possibilities Keller is eager
to explore, starting with a fall course
taught by Wettergreen on engineer-
ing for art conservation.
“It’s a really exciting time to build
a strong programmatic connection,”
Keller said, “not only in the storage
of artifacts, but also in this whole
interplay between art, science, engi-
neering and technology.”
—Mike Williams
From left, Nicole Garcia, Rhodes Coffey, Kristi Day and Caleb Brown.

For most people, doing something on a lark means
buying a lottery ticket or going out for ice cream. For
Michael Dietz, it means untying the knots bogging
down a computer system under attack — for fun, glory
and even a little bit of prize money.
The Rice University graduate student in computer sci-
ence went to the 18th USENIX Security Symposium in
Montreal last fall, intending to take in sessions and do
a bit of networking, and he did all that. But in the eve-
nings, he and two impromptu teammates coded their
way to victory in the Security Grand Challenge.
Dietz arrived with no plan to compete, but he was
intrigued when the grad student he was sharing a room
with, Sunjeet Singh of the University of British Columbia
in Vancouver, suggested they check out the challenge.
The event gave five teams responsibility for vir-
tual servers into which organizers had programmed all
kinds of bugs. Competitors had to find the bugs, squash
them and make the systems as unhackable as possible.
Dietz and Singh found a third willing conferee, grad
student Justin Cummins of the University of California,
Davis, and the team spent two days uncovering
the diabolical traps that contest organizers
had set for them.
“Our virtual machine had five com-
puter programs critical for a medical ap-
plication,” Dietz said. “We had about three
hours on the first day to try to harden the
servers against attack.”
At the end of the first day, he and his
teammates were surprised to find them-
selves in first place. “Suddenly, there was
incentive,” he said. “We could win this.”
On the second night, Dietz and his
colleagues worked into the wee hours and
found programs embedded within other
programs that would trigger attacks
by even more programs. “The
organizers were very tricky,”
Dietz said. “They were doing
things I hadn’t seen before,
just to try to trip us up.”
Between sessions, he
said, organizers would run
specially designed bots to
try to find holes in their
work. But a final coding
tweak by Singh assured
the team a narrow victory
over runners-up from the
University of Washington.
Dietz was low-key about
the victory and his share of
the $5,000 prize. “It was an
interesting diversion,”
he said.
—Mike Williams
TheCoderIsaChamp
—Jennifer Evans
Michael Dietz
This fall, Rice welcomed a record number of smiling new
faces to campus. The 896 freshman students were selected
from the largest applicant pool — 11,173 — in the univer-
sity’s history. The incoming class is almost 14 percent
larger than last year’s class, putting Rice’s Vision for
the Second Century plan for a 30 percent expansion
of the undergraduate student body ahead of schedule.
“It’s not just the quantity of students entering Rice this year that is impres-
sive, but also the quality and the diversity, ethnically and geographically,”
said Chris Muñoz, vice president for enrollment. “We have students from
foreign countries that have never been represented at Rice. They bring
unique cultures and histories to the university and enrich the educational
experience for all.”
Among other distinguishing characteristics of Rice’s
Class of 2013:
• Underrepresented minorities make up almost
20 percent.
• The number of Mexican-American, Chicano,
Hispanic and Latino students increased by al-
most 20 percent over last year.
• More than 7 percent of the students are
African-American, which sustains the growth
from the previous year.
• Thirteen percent are foreign nationals, an in-
crease of 67 percent from last year that sup-
ports Rice’s V2C goal of becoming a more
internationally focused university.
• The number of U.S. students from outside of
Texas is up by almost 17 percent over last year.
About 44 percent of the entering class is from
Texas, and more than 40 percent comprises
students from other parts of the U.S. and U.S.
citizens living abroad.

Students
A Grand Day for GSA
If one can measure success by the number of friends a person has, Tom
Nicholsisanextraordinarilysuccessfulman.TheHoustondermatologistand
Rice alumnus was pleased to be in the company of many friends when the
university hosted its 40th-anniversary celebration of the Graduate Student
Association (GSA) in October.
Nichols’ hard work and foresight were driving forces behind the GSA’s formation at the
close of the turbulent 1960s, when the number of graduate students at Rice doubled from
400 to 800 at the behest of then-president Kenneth Pitzer.
Since then, Rice’s doctoral and master’s candidates — including the
university’s current graduate student population of about 2,300 — have
had Nichols and his associates to thank not only for the GSA, which has
historically stood up for students on the issues that matter to them, but
also for Valhalla, the graduate student lounge that Nichols founded.
“Many, many people made a tremendous effort back in the sixties to
have the GSA and Valhalla come together and form better means of com-
munication between graduate students, between the students and fac-
ulty, between the students and administration and, ultimately, between
the students and trustees,” Nichols said.
Partly as a result, the university’s work on behalf of graduate stu-
dents in recent years has included the construction of the Rice Village
Apartments, a reduction in the cost of medical care, new graduate programs
in sociology and art history and increased
stipends.
Other speakers at the event also addressed
the importance of graduate students to the life of
the university. Paula Sanders, dean of graduate and
postdoctoral studies, noted that the first graduate student
at Rice earned a doctorate in mathematics in 1918 —
and stayed to teach. “Graduate students are now, as they
have always been, a fundamental part of this university
and an essential part of this intellectual community,” she
said.
Julia Smith Wellner ’01, former GSA president, cur-
rent chairwoman of the Graduate Alumni Committee
and an assistant professor at the University of Houston,
told current graduate students assembled at the celebra-
tion that it’s important to maintain a connection to Rice.
“Please stay involved with us, whether that means joining
the Friends of Fondren, the ‘R’ Society or the Graduate
Alumni Committee,” she said. “Join Rice in whatever way
is appropriate for you — but don’t disappear.”
Last year’s GSA president, Michael Contreras, raised
a toast to Bob Patten, the Lynette S. Autrey Professor in
Humanities, who has worked diligently on GSA’s behalf
since he was appointed to a three-year term as Graduate
House master in 1993. Even now, Patten works to maintain a sense of community among
graduate students in ways that go above and beyond the call of duty.
Current GSA President Kristjan Stone, a graduate student in physics and astronomy
who rose through the organization’s ranks, noted that the GSA has worked hard in recent
years to bring international students into the fold by creating clubs and networking events
designed to coax them away from their research and into the larger community.
Alison Contreras, who coordinated the anniversary event and has served as the GSA’s
secretary and historian, said the organization has aided her greatly in navigating the
complexity of earning a Rice degree. “It has helped me understand the inner workings
of the administration,” the environmental engineering student said. “You have to be able
to work not just with the research side, but also with the administration. Along with the
social aspects, that’s what I’ve gotten most out of the GSA.”
At the celebration, the GSA introduced a history of the association by graduate stu-
dent Laura Renée Chandler that will be available on the association’s Web site.
—Mike Williams
Top photo, from left, Tom Nichols, the GSA’s founding president;
President David Leebron; Julia Smith Wellner ‘01, chairwoman of
the Graduate Alumni Committee; Paula Sanders, dean of graduate
and postdoctoral studies; and Michael Contreras, last year’s GSA
president, who served as master of ceremonies.
Learn more about the Graduate Student Association:
››› gsa.rice.edu
Michael Contreras
Kristjan Stone
“Many, many people
made a tremendous
effort back in the sixties
to have the GSA and
Valhalla come together
and form better means
of communication
between graduate
students, between the
students and faculty,
between the students
and administration and,
ultimately, between the
students and trustees.”
—Tom Nichols

Spotlight
onWomen
in the Sciences
and Engineering
By Christopher Dow

Women seeking careers in the natural sciences
andengineeringatRicemayhavefacedchalleng-
es inherent in traditionally male-dominated fields
of academia, but many have more than overcome
them to earn world renown and to become role
models for aspiring young researchers — both
women and men.
R
ice’s charter called for “a thorough polytechnic school,
for males and females,” and the inaugural student
body reflected that in its composition of 48 men and
29 women. From the beginning, the university encour-
aged women in the sciences and engineering despite
early criticism about the lack of stereotypically “femi-
nine” courses such as home economics. One mother called the school
to find out what the curriculum would be, and when she was told her
daughter would study science and math, she commented that those
did not sound like subjects a girl might like.
President Edgar Odell Lovett disagreed and proclaimed his pride
in the “unusually fine group of young women” who bore “their full
share in making and maintaining the good name of the Rice Institute.”
Students — women or men — who wanted a thorough education
could find it at Rice.
Rice’s inaugural faculty of 10 was entirely male, however, and
while Alice Crowell Dean ’16 was Rice’s first female instructor fol-
lowing her graduation — a teaching fellow, interestingly enough, in
mathematics — it wasn’t until 1950 that Katherine Fischer Drew ’44
(history) joined Rice as the first woman to hold a full-time, tenure-
track faculty position. In 1965, Krystyna Ansevin (biology) became the
first woman faculty member in the natural sciences, and Mary Fanett
Wheeler ’71 (computational and applied mathematics) was the first
woman hired in engineering.
By the mid 1990s, women at Rice comprised 32 percent of the fac-
ulty in the humanities and 23 percent in the social sciences, but only
9 percent in the natural sciences and 7 percent in engineering. Today,
those numbers have grown, and women account for 42 percent of the
faculty in the humanities, 35 percent in the social sciences, 17 percent
in the natural sciences and 19 percent in engineering.
Women also serve in a number of top academic and administra-
tive roles. Sallie Keller is the dean of the George R. Brown School
of Engineering, and Cindy Farach-Carson is Rice’s first associate vice
provost for research. Kathleen Matthews served as dean of the Wiess
School of Natural Sciences for 10 years until stepping down at the end
of 2008. Rice women faculty chair four Rice science and engineering
departments and serve as directors of several research centers and
institutes, and many are elected members of professional societies or
are editors of professional journals.
This year, women comprise about 48 percent of Rice’s overall
undergraduate enrollment, including 50 percent of the students in
the natural sciences and 34 percent in engineering. Among graduate
students, women make up 34 percent of the sciences and 28 per-
cent of engineering. That’s good news since graduate students are
the pipeline that produces the researchers and university faculties of
the future.
Even so, experts say, all too often cultural biases disadvantage
women from fulfilling their potential in the sciences and engineering.
Overcoming those disadvantages is important to the country’s future
economic health, according to “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling
the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering.” The
report, published by the National Academies Press in 2007, found that
women have the ability and drive to succeed but still face barriers at
every educational transition, from high school on up. Those obstacles
include discrimination, implicit bias from both men and women, and
evaluation criteria that disadvantage women.

22 www.rice.edu/ricemagazine22 www.rice.edu/ricemagazine
Stellar Achievements
Rice, along with many other universities, is making special efforts to
overcome those barriers. One such effort is Rice ADVANCE, a five-
year program funded by the National Science Foundation. (See related
article on page 30.) Just as important as any program, however, are
people: the women among Rice’s natural sciences and engineering
faculty who were not deterred from realizing their goals and are now
making some of the most important discoveries and advancements
found anywhere on the planet.
Naomi Halas is a perfect example. Her efforts in nanoscale science
and technology span applications in manufacturing, materials technol-
ogy, nanophotonics and, perhaps most important, bioengineering and
biomedicine. Over the past several years, she has worked to develop
nanoshells that can be used to deliver medicines to targeted areas of
the body, and that research recently has taken a dramatic turn with
layered nanoshells that actually seek out cancers then light up under
particular wavelengths of radiation
to allow physicians to literally target
the diseased tissue with lasers. (See
related article on Page 3.)
Halas’ incredible range of re-
search has earned her professorships
in four Rice departments (electrical
and computer engineering, chem-
istry, bioengineering, and physics
and astronomy) and recognition by
many professional societies. She has
received the Department of Defense
Breast Cancer Research Program
Innovator Award from the congres-
sionally directed Medical Research
Programs, and she has been named
a National Security Science and
Engineering Faculty Fellow by the
Department of Defense. Last fall, she
was elected to the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences.
Another member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences is bi-
ologist Joan Strassmann, one of the
world’s foremost experts on the evo-
lution of social behaviors, such as
competition, cooperation and altru-
ism, and the genetics that underlie
them. Earlier in her career, she was
known for her work with wasps, but
for the past decade, she and long-
time research partner David Queller
have studied the social amoeba
Dictyostelium discoideum. They have
found that the presence or absence of a single gene can influence the
likelihood that an individual amoeba will sacrifice itself for the good of
the colony. Strassmann’s work earned her a prestigious Guggenheim
Fellowship in 2004, and in 2009, she was elected president of the
international Animal Behavior Society.
Rebecca Richards-Kortum was already a rising star for her research
on the diagnosis and treatment of cancer in women, but she vaulted
into the elite ranks of the faculty when she became both the first Rice
woman and, at age 43, the youngest Rice faculty member ever elected
to the National Academy of Engineering. The NAE also recognized her
leadership in bioengineering education and global health initiatives,
such as Beyond Traditional Borders, which takes a multifaceted ap-
proach to health in the developing world and includes a focus on the
underrepresented role that women’s economic and social empower-
ment play in global health.
In a one-month span this past fall, Richards-Kortum helped land a
$2.4 million grant from the National Cancer Institute, won a National
Institutes of Health stimulus grant to develop a cancer-diagnosing
camera small enough to fit inside a needle, secured Rice’s first grant
from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a needle-free
technology for diagnosing malaria, and won additional funding from
the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for an innovative biomedical
training program she established in 2006.
When Vicki Colvin, another renowned Rice researcher, was
named to Discover magazine’s list of 20 Young Scientists to Watch in
2000, most people had never heard of nanotechnology. The following
year, she took the reins of Rice’s federally funded Center for Biological
and Environmental Nanotechnology, the only academic center in the
world dedicated to studying how nanomaterials interact with living
organisms and ecosystems. Two years later, when the public voiced
concerns over nanotechnology in the environment, Colvin was called
to testify before Congress as the world’s leading academic expert on
nanotechnology risks. Colvin has co-authored dozens of studies about
ways to mitigate the environmental risks of nanotechnology and use
nanotechnology to clean the environment. In 2004, for example, she
and colleagues found a simple method to reduce the toxicity of water-
soluble buckyballs by a factor of more than 10 million. Nanorust,
a pollution-cleaning nanoparticle she co-discovered, made Forbes
magazine’s list of Top Five Nanotech Breakthroughs of 2006.
As government regulators search for the root causes of the global
financial crisis — and for the means to prevent future crises — they
are asking for help from Rice statistician Katherine Ensor. Ensor, chair
of the Department of Statistics, has spent more than a decade devel-
oping computational models of world financial markets. She helped
found Rice’s Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems
seven years ago, and she spearheaded the effort to create an under-
graduate minor in financial computation and modeling — the first
undergraduate minor offered by the university — in 2007.
Ensor recently was asked by the Office of the Comptroller of the
Currency — the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s principal banking
regulatory agency — and the National Institute of Statistical Sciences
to help organize two workshops on financial modeling. The ultimate
goal is a computer program that lawmakers can use to test how new
banking regulations will play out in the market.
Another theme of Ensor’s work is environmental modeling, and
she was asked by then-Houston Mayor Bill White to work with city
regulators to develop computer models that more accurately explained
the causes of the city’s air pollution — work that Ensor hopes to carry
over with the new administration of Mayor Annise Parker ’78.
New Generations
These women are just a few of the many at Rice who are making
world-class discoveries and leading the way in their various fields.
Those fields cover the entire spectrum, from the nanoscale to astro-
nomical distances, from the creation of novel materials to the develop-
ment of computing systems, and from an in-depth understanding of
the earth to insight into ecology and evolutionary biology.
But despite their diverse interests and methodologies — and status
ranging from senior researcher to assistant professor — these women
have one notable thing in common: They serve as role models and
mentors to younger generations of women who come to understand
that they, too, can attain similar levels of achievement. This goes be-
yond ADVANCE’s formalized Triad Mentoring Program to the fact that
female students have the opportunity to work daily with other female
researchers in labs led by women.
In the following pages, we celebrate Rice’s women in the sciences
and engineering — many of them pioneers in their fields — as they
tell us about their academic careers and groundbreaking research.
With reporting by Jade Boyd and Mike Williams
Thesewomen
arejustafew
ofthemany
atRicewho
aremaking
world-class
discoveries
andleading
thewayin
theirvarious
fields.

Bonnie Bartel, Rice’s Ralph and
Dorothy Looney Professor of Bio-
chemistry and Cell Biology, re-
searches the molecular mechanism
of plant growth, specifically how
growth is influenced by the hor-
mone auxin.
A member of the Rice faculty
since 1995, she uses a variety of
methods to study how auxins,
which promote root growth and are
widely used by commercial grow-
ers, are regulated in Arabidopsis,
a small flowering plant native to
Europe. Her work has extended to
the study of plant microRNAs —
regulatory molecules that dampen
gene expression in both plants and
animals. Currently, she is using
genetic approaches to understand
how proteins enter and exit the
peroxisome, which are subcellular
organelles that house enzymes
implicated in auxin production. She
received Rice’s prestigious Charles
W. Duncan Jr. Achievement Award
for Outstanding Faculty in 2005.
Bartel considered studying
medicine during her undergraduate
days at Bethel College, but her love
of research led her to study biology
as a graduate student at MIT. She
has enjoyed working with numer-
ous students in her lab at Rice, and
in 2006, she received a four-year,
$1 million grant from the Howard
Hughes Medical Institute to develop
programs at Rice that combine un-
dergraduate teaching with research
and focus on bringing freshmen and
sophomores into research labora-
tory settings.
Bartel and her husband, Seiichi
Matsuda, who also is a professor at
Rice, have “one perfect child,” Ella,
age 12.
Linda Thrane: How did you all become scien-
tists, and how did you find your research areas?
Marjorie Corcoran: My field of research
picked me. I became interested in particle
physics when I was in the seventh or eighth
grade. I was reading about it and said, “Wow!
This is so amazing.” It went on from there.
Yildiz Bayazitoglu: I had a heat transfer
teacher in my third undergraduate year who
was very strong and very well known at that
time. He influenced me.
Cindy Farach-Carson: I failed home
economics!
Corcoran: My mom was a home ec teacher
and was chagrined that I could never do very
well in it.
Farach-Carson: I wanted to be a paleontolo-
gist. I loved dinosaur bones and all that stuff
and still have a collection, but I became a
bone biologist instead. I think the common
thing is that your path finds you. My dream
is to go back now and look at all my favorite
molecules in dinosaur bone marrow.
Bonnie Bartel: I was actually in premed. I re-
alized I could take all this biology, but then I
would have to go to medical school. It would
be interesting, but at the end I would be a
doctor. That was not at all appealing to me.
Julia Morgan: Apparently my mother knew I
would be a geologist when I was 8. We trav-
eled quite a bit to the mountains, and I would
complain about all the work you had to do
to climb to the top. I was miserable, which
made my parents very unhappy. Once, while
RoundtableDiscussion
A
Rice University may be small among America’s tier-one universities, but
it’s a giant among schools with top women researchers in the sciences
and engineering — not to mention the humanities and social sciences.
BonnieBartel
For this issue on women in science and engineering, Rice Magazine
brought together five who are among the best in their respective
fields to talk candidly about their lives as academics and how they’ve
succeeded in endeavors traditionally dominated by men. Here is
some of that lively conversation, moderated by Linda Thrane, Rice’s
vice president for Public Affairs.

Yildiz Bayazitoglu, Rice’s Harry
S. Cameron Professor in Mechanical
Engineering, has been at Rice since
1977. The first woman to earn a me-
chanical engineering Ph.D. from the
University of Michigan, she studies
heat transfer, radiation, energy and
fluid flow as they relate to the manu-
facture and processing of materials.
She and her students conduct
groundbreaking work in the con-
tainerless processing of carbon
nanotube-embedded materials; the
heating by electromagnetic radiation
of nanoparticles in biological sys-
tems; and the thermal transport of
nanoscale-altered surfaces, materials
and fluids.
Her work with her students
could lead to new ways to cool elec-
tronic devices, create nanoparticle-
enhanced materials with unusual
thermal and mechanical properties,
and advance cancer therapy that
uses lasers to heat nanoparticles in
tumors. In addition, she wants to de-
termine the magnitude of near-field
radiative heat exchange between
nanoparticles.
She serves as an editor-in-
chief 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 organiza-
tion’s Heat Transfer Memorial Award.
She also served as chair of the so-
ciety’s heat transfer division and has
authored an undergraduate textbook,
“Elements of Heat Transfer.”
Bayazitoglu has three adult
sons, all Rice graduates. She enjoys
mentoring minority and international
graduate students.
they were looking out at the beautiful view,
I found a green rock, and I spent the next
hour picking up every piece of green rock
there was. I guess that was a manifestation
of my curiosity about the Earth.
On M e nt o rs
Thrane: Many of you refer to having wonder-
ful mentors. Were they all male?
Bartel: Mine was.
Corcoran: Mine, in graduate school, was
male. There were no women. But he was
black, and he understood prejudice.
Farach-Carson: All white males.
Morgan: Mine was my mother, who was a
physicist. And my father was, too. The good
thing is, I’m not a physicist.
Corcoran: What kind of physics did they do?
Morgan: She was more in the mechanics side
of it. My father did materials science. She
tried very hard to have a faculty career and
didn’t succeed because she had children. But
I saw her try, and more importantly, I saw
her curiosity. She actually had interests in
many of the things her kids got into.
Thrane: Do you see mentoring as part of
your role?
Corcoran: Definitely. I’ve been at Rice 30
years, and it’s only recently that I’ve come to
realize how much impact I have on women
undergraduates. One who’s now tenured at
Princeton came back and gave a colloquium,
and she told me it made a huge difference to
her to have a woman on the faculty. I never
really appreciated that.
Bartel: I’ve had maybe 13 graduate students,
and two of them have been male. Our gradu-
ate students are slightly less than 50 percent
female, but there are two things going on:
Some women seek out a female adviser, and
there may be some males who seek out a
male adviser. Those two things have led to a
big skew in my lab.
Morgan: There’s no question that, being fe-
male in a department that’s dominated by
men, you play a unique role.
Farach-Carson: Were you the first?
Morgan: No, but I was the first woman with
tenure. Many students feel it’s easier to talk
about things with another woman, so I play
that role independently of being on their
committees. We’re visible evidence that one
can succeed.
On F amili e s
Thrane: How do you handle family life
issues?
Farach-Carson: Marry well.
Corcoran: You need to have somebody who
has his own work and understands your pas-
sion and how you’re driven because he has
the same passion.
Bayazitoglu: I think you have to be lucky,
YildizBayazitoglu
“There’s no question that, being female in
a department that’s dominated by men,
you play a unique role.”
—Julia Morgan

Mary “Cindy” Farach-Carson
joined Rice in 2009 to take on several
roles. As the university’s first associ-
ate vice provost for research, she
focuses on building collaborations
between Rice and local biomedical
research and educational institutions
centered on the new BioScience
Research Collaborative.
She is also a professor of bio-
chemistry and cell biology, with a
second appointment in bioengineer-
ing. The Galveston native began
her career as a bone biologist and
segued into cancer research. She’s
currently part of a National Cancer
Institute research project to study
how and why prostate cancer me-
tastasizes to bone.
After receiving her Ph.D. at
Virginia Commonwealth University
Medical Center (then the Medical
College of Virginia), Farach-Carson
was a postdoctoral fellow there
and at Johns Hopkins University
before moving to Texas, where she
joined the University of Texas M.D.
Anderson Cancer Center and taught
at Baylor College of Medicine for a
year. She achieved the rank of asso-
ciate professor with tenure at the UT
Health Science Center at Houston
and then joined the University of
Delaware in Newark, where she
taught biological and materials sci-
ences, coordinated a five-year reno-
vation project and planned the build-
ing of a laboratory for the Center for
Translational Cancer Research.
Even during her years away from
Houston, Farach-Carson, a mother
of four, would return every summer
to teach part of a tissue engineer-
ing course at Rice. She’s delighted
to have returned for the long term
with her husband, Dan Carson, who
succeeded Kathleen Matthews as
the dean of Rice’s Wiess School of
Natural Sciences.
a little bit. Actually, the unlucky ones are
likely not around. If you have problems at
home, you just cannot be a good performer
at work.
Bartel (to Corcoran): We’re both married to
professors, right? I don’t know how it was for
you, but when we had our one perfect child,
we could bring her into work. For the first
four months of her life, she was at Rice. If
we both had a meeting at the same time, she
went with him because it was like, “Look at
him. He’s so caring.”
Corcoran: Yeah, if a woman brings a baby to
a meeting, they don’t say that.
Bartel: So you have to be lucky there, too.
Not all kids are going to be amenable to that
kind of upbringing.
Bayazitoglu: It goes a little bit further. I have
three boys, and they were healthy. But if one
had had health problems or a learning prob-
lem or something else, my work would have
suffered.
Morgan: There are a lot of challenges and
stresses that go with being an academic. It’s
not a 9-to-5 job, five days a week. Children
do require a family life. It’s doable if the cir-
cumstances are right.
Corcoran: I think Julia had the key. It’s not a
9-to-5 job. Even now, I still work weekends.
You just have a certain number of things you
have to get done, right?
Farach-Carson: Research and parenting:
They’re both more than 40 hours a week. But
for me, the lines between what I call work
and what I call …
Corcoran: … fun! …
Farach-Carson: … are really blurry. If you do
what you love, it doesn’t feel like work. It’s
what I tell students: Choose something you
love, and it’ll work out.
Corcoran: Sometimes I’ll be in my office on
a Saturday or Sunday, and my youngest son
will call me and ask, “Why are you work-
ing on a Sunday?” Well, Connor, because it’s
what I like to do.
Farach-Carson: I was a spectacular failure at
partitioning my life, so …
Corcoran: Now you don’t have to.
Farach-Carson: I have an empty nest now.
It’s nice. It’s weird. My youngest just started
college. At about 4:30, I have this thing that
starts ticking, and I think, “I have to … oh,
no I don’t.” For 30 years, I’ve been running
home and trying to pick up somebody from
soccer or something.
Bayazitoglu: I had a Ph.D. student, a profes-
sor at the University of Florida who retired
recently — my students are retiring! — who
had two sons. One day she asked the old-
est one, “What do you want to become?” He
said, maybe a policeman or fireman. And she
said, “Why don’t you become an engineer?”
He said, “No, only girls become engineers.”
CindyFarach-Carson

Rice Magazine 5

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