News

The Ken Kennedy Institute hosted the 16th annual Energy High Performance Computing Conference on February 28 — March 1, 2023, with post-conference workshops on March 2. The Energy HPC Conference is the premier meeting place for key stakeholders to engage in conversations about challenges, opportunities, and new developments advancing high performance computing in the energy industry.

Take a look at our March 21, 2023 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's March Member of the Month: Lauren Stadler, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Research Faculty, NEWT

Take a look at our March 15, 2023 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our March 7, 2023 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our February 22, 2023 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's February Member of the Month: Loren Hopkins, Professor in the Practice of Statistics at Rice University; Chief Environmental Science Officer and Bureau Chief in the Data Science Division at the Houston Health Department.

Take a look at our February 16, 2023 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our January 24, 2023 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's January Member of the Month: Vladimir "Vova" Braverman, Victor E. Cameron Professor of Computer Science. Prior to joining Rice, Vova was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, with the secondary appointment in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics.

Take a look at our January 18, 2023 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute’s annual graduate fellowship program awarded $65,000 to nine Rice graduate students in four departments within the George R. Brown School of Engineering.

The Ken Kennedy Institute awarded $105,000 in Computational Science and Engineering Fellowships to seven incoming graduate students at Rice, within the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Wiess School of Natural Sciences.

Take a look at our December 13, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's December Member of the Month: César Uribe, Louis Owen Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering. César Uribe joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice in January 2021 after being a Postdoctoral Associate in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems-LIDS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-MIT until 2020. He also holds a visiting professor position at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

The Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University hosted the inaugural AI in Health Conference on November 7–9, 2022. The conference, held on Rice University’s campus in Houston, TX, brought together thought leaders from across academic, clinical, and corporate settings to explore the intersection between healthcare and artificial intelligence.

Lydia Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and a professor of bioengineering, mechanical engineering and electrical and computer engineering and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute, has won the IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal.

Rice University and the Houston Methodist Academic Institute have launched a seed grant program to foster innovative research between their faculty, collaborating researchers and clinician scientists. Each institution will share equally in the funding of 20 multiyear projects in robotics, imaging, nursing, cardiovascular engineering and psychological and behavioral health.

Take a look at our November 29, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's November Member of the Month: Tolga Tezcan, Professor of Operations Management; Academic Director of Business Analytics. Prior to joining Rice, Tolga Tezcan was on the faculties at the University of Illinois, the University of Rochester and London Business School, and he also served as an academic director at London Business School. Tolga currently teaches courses on Operations Management, Business Analytics and Data Mining.

Take a look at our November 15, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our November 1, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

ACM and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS) have named Ian Foster, a Professor at the University of Chicago and Division Director at Argonne National Laboratory, as the recipient of the 2022 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. The Ken Kennedy Award recognizes pathbreaking achievements in parallel (high-performance) computing. Foster is cited for contributions to programming and productivity in computing via the establishment of new programming models and foundational science services.

Rice Computer Science faculty members Lydia Kavraki and Marcia O’Malley are among 35 scientists named Oct. 25 to a list of the world’s top women scientists in robotics, energy and science at the iROS 2022 Conference in Kyoto, Japan. The international conference focuses on intelligent robots and systems.

Take a look at our October 25, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's October Member of the Month: Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Vice President for Research; Professor, Materials Science and Nanoengineering, Physics and Astronomy. Ramamoorthy Ramesh, a condensed matter physicist and materials scientist with more than 25 years in academia, industry, national labs and government service, was named Rice University’s vice president for research on August 15, 2022.

Take a look at our October 17, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our Community Newsletter with updates about the 2022 AI in Health Conference from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our October 12, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our September 19, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's September Member of the Month, Dr. Patricia DeLucia, Associate Dean for Research, School of Social Sciences; Professor of Psychological Sciences. Dr. DeLucia joined Rice University in 2018.

Take a look at our September 7, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our August 24, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's August Member of the Month, Dr. Ashok Veeraraghavan, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering; Professor, Computer Science. Dr. Veeraraghavan received his B.Tech. in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2002, and his master's and Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2004 and 2008, respectively. Ashok joined the ECE Department in 2010.

HOUSTON – (Aug. 1, 2022) – To showcase the state of artificial intelligence in health and help health care innovators forecast the coming decade of AI development in health, imaging, genomics and more, Rice University’s Ken Kennedy Institute is organizing and hosting the AI in Health Conference Nov. 7-9 at Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative in the Texas Medical Center (TMC).

Rice CS’ DATA Lab won Outstanding Paper at the 2022 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). DATA Lab was founded by Xia “Ben” Hu, CS associate professor and director of Rice’s Data to Knowledge Lab (D2K). Hu specializes in interpretable machine learning, automated machine learning and network analytics.

Planning tasks and motions for robotic manipulators like arms and hands is one of the areas in which members of Rice University’s Kavraki Lab excel.

Take a look at our July 26, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's July Member of the Month, Dr. Behnaam Aazhang, J.S. Abercrombie Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Director, Rice Neuroengineering Initiative (NEI). Dr. Aazhang is a Fellow of IEEE and AAAS, and a distinguished lecturer of IEEE Communication Society. He received his B.S. (with highest honors), M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1981, 1983, and 1986, respectively.

Researchers in Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering—a leader in bioengineering, computer science, and statistics—leveraged their combined strengths to secure a new National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for developing principled phylogenetic analysis methods. The grant, Scalable Bayesian Inference with Applications to Phylogenetics, will receive funding in excess of $890,000.

“The competitive and prestigious Powe Award is given as public recognition for the quality and promise of research of junior faculty members. Projects must fall within the disciplines of – engineering & applied science; life sciences; mathematics/computer sciences; physical sciences; or policy, management, and education.”

Take a look at our June 28, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's June Member of the Month, Dr. Xia (Ben) Hu, is the Director of the Data to Knowledge Lab (D2K) and an Associate Professor of Computer Science. Dr. Hu received BA and MS degrees from Beihang University and his PhD from Arizona State University. Dr. Hu has published over 100 papers in several major academic venues, including NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, WWW, IJCAI, AAAI, etc. An open-source package developed by his group, namely AutoKeras, has become the most used automated deep learning system on Github (with over 8,000 stars and 1,000 forks).

Xia “Ben” Hu, associate professor of computer science (CS), has been named the new director of the Data to Knowledge Lab (D2K) at Rice.

Can caches be smart and still be as fast? Or, in more specific application, can caches still perform quickly and effectively even with increased volume and typos, misspellings, and redundancy—all the things we see in real life searches?

Take a look at our May 17, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's May Member of the Month, Dr. Eric Chi, is an Associate Professor of Statistics at Rice University. Dr. Chi received BA and PhD degrees from Rice University and an MS from the University of California, Berkeley. His PhD studies were funded through a Department of Energy Computational Sciences Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF). As part of this fellowship, he completed research practica at Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Genevera Allen at Rice has been elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) for her "notable contributions to statistical learning, leadership in data science education, and service to the profession."

Take a look at our May 3rd, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The 15th annual Energy High Performance Computing Conference, organized by the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University, was held in-person on Rice campus on March 1-3, 2022.

Nanotechnology is increasingly important to the development of treatments for cancer. But to succeed, clinicians need to understand it.

A National Institutes of Health grant to Rice University and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center will help train future medical professionals to translate these tools to the clinic.

Akane Sano, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Rice, has been awarded the 2021-22 Young Faculty Research Award

The award is given annually to an assistant or associate professor whose published work, program development results, software and other research contributions are judged outstanding.

Rice University’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, Teaching and Service has been given to Lydia E. Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, professor of Bioengineering, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and professor of Mechanical Engineering at Rice University. She is also the Director of Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute.

To understand why Statistics’ Philip Ernst won this year’s George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching, Rice’s top teaching award, one need only read a few of the student comments in anonymous evaluations of his STAT 310 course.

Behnaam Aazhang, the J.S. Abercrombie Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), is the recipient of the 2022 Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Adviser Award. It is given “in recognition of the achievements of a faculty member’s doctoral students who completed all degree requirements during the last four years.”

Take a look at our April 19, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's April Member of the Month, Dr. Guha Balakrishnan, is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. Before joining Rice, Dr. Balakrishnan received his BS (2011) degrees in Computer Science Engineering and Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, and his MS (2013) and PhD (2018) degrees in EECS from MIT.

Philip Ernst, associate professor of statistics (STAT) at Rice, is the 2022 recipient of the George R. Brown Award for Excellence in Teaching, the university's most prestigious teaching award.

It recognizes “continuing excellence in teaching and exemplary commitment to the education of undergraduate or graduate students within the School of Engineering.”

While big data and data science are sometimes used interchangeably, they’re tangibly different concepts. Big data is a result or outcome of technological innovation and refers to extremely large sets of data, such as from sensors and smart devices that make up the Internet of Things. Data science refers to the process and technique of working with that data and the skills one develops to do so. Many fields intersect in data science, including statistics and computer sciences.

Yingyan Lin, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Rice, has received the 2021 ACM/SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in Design Automation for “demonstrating outstanding potential as an educator and researcher in the field of electronic design automation (EDA).”

Kaiyuan Yang, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Rice, has won a $500,000 National Science Foundation CAREER Award to study the reliability and security of wireless, battery-less, minimally invasive (WBMI) bioelectronics.

The highly competitive five-year grants are given to early-career faculty members who demonstrate potential to serve as academic models and leaders in research and education. The NSF gives about 500 such awards across all disciplines each year.

Jacob T. Robinson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE), and of bioengineering, has received the Charles Duncan Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, given annually by the Rice academic deans on the recommendation of senior faculty.

Take a look at our April 12, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our April 5, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our March 29, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

“My research is in a category called quantum materials,” said Hanyu Zhu, Rice University assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering (MSNE). “We explore materials’ electronic properties that must be understood more through quantum than classical physics. One of our ultimate research goals is to find materials that make computers work more and eat less, in terms of electricity.”

Loren Hopkins, the chief environmental science officer for the City of Houston Health Department and professor in the practice of statistics at Rice University, has been named to the National Academies’ Committee on Community Wastewater-based Disease Surveillance.

Take a look at our March 22, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our March 15, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's March Member of the Month, Dr. Meng Li, is the Noah Harding Assistant Professor of Statistics at Rice University. Before joining Rice, Dr. Li was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University (2015-2017). His recent research focuses on statistical modeling of challenging data that arise in scientific and industrial applications such as images, functional data, networks, and tree-structured data, with theoretical guarantees and scalable implementation.

Philip Ernst, associate professor of statistics (STAT) at Rice, has been elected to the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) Leadership Academy.

The award is given to early career researchers who contribute significantly to the future of statistical science, including the foundations, methods, practice and application of the discipline. The Academy recognizes statistical scientists for “their talents, leadership potential and achievements to date.”

“For 60 years, it’s been a dream that we would have an AI that can write computer programs,” says Chris Jermaine, Professor and Chair of Rice University’s Department of Computer Science.

Two researchers in computer science (CS) at Rice have received a highly competitive NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to further their work on AutoEdge.ai, an automated machine-learning platform for edge devices.

You may often hear the terms data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) used interchangeably. While these are all connected, there are meaningful differences. Machine learning is the science of designing self-running software that can learn autonomously or in concert with other machines or humans. Machine learning helps make artificial intelligence — the science of making machines capable of human-like decision-making — possible.

The first two faculty members to join the Rice Quantum Initiative, founded in 2021 with the goal of adding 12 new researchers to the effort, have been hired.

Take a look at our March 8, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Five young researchers in the George R. Brown School of Engineering are recipients of National Science Foundation CAREER Awards, among the most competitive and prestigious given by the federal agency.

The winners are Nathan Dautenhahn, assistant professor of computer science (CS); Xue (Sherry) Gao, T.N. Law Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE); Anastasios Kyrillidis, the Noah Harding Assistant Professor of CS; Geoff Wehmeyer, assistant professor of mechanical engineering (MECH); and Vicky Yao, an assistant professor of computer science.

Take a look at our February 28, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

HOUSTON – (March 1, 2022) – The development of computational tools and methods to analyze and interpret DNA methylation has earned Rice University computer scientist Vicky Yao a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

The five-year award, this one for $790,000, is granted to fewer than 400 American academics each year who are expected to make significant contributions to their fields of study.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's February Member of the Month, Dr. K. Jane Grande-Allen's research applies engineering analysis to understand and fight heart valve disease. This involves mechanical testing, biochemical measurements, and microstructural analysis of critical components found in the extracellular matrix (ECM) that makes up cardiac tissue.

Take a look at our February 22, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Rice University mechanical engineer Marcia O’Malley has been named a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in recognition of her “outstanding contributions to rehabilitation robotics, haptics and robotic surgery.”

Take a look at our February 15, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Kate Crawford, professor and leading researcher in the social impacts of AI, will serve as the keynote speaker for De Lange Conference XII. The lecture, “Atlas of AI: Mapping the Political Economies of Planetary Computation,” will be hosted by Moshe Vardi, University Professor and Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering.

By further exploring the theory and design of non-convex optimization, Anastasios “Tasos” Kyrillidis hopes to devise a technology for faster, more robust algorithms with impacts in many fields.

Béatrice Rivière, the Noah Harding Chair and Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM) at Rice, has been elected to a three-year term on the board of trustees of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

Take a look at our January 31, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Computer scientist Nathan Dautenhahn of Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering has been granted a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award, funding his “Least-Authority Virtual Architecture” strategy. The award, only given to young faculty making significant contributions within their fields, consists of $630,000 over five years starting in July.

Geoff Wehmeyer and his research group use Rice University’s electron microscopes to deepen understanding of nanoscale heat transfer and improve the performance of products ranging from transistors to light-emitting diodes and heat-assisted magnetic recording devices.

Three Rice UniversityElectrical and Computer Engineering(ECE) students are among 28 doctoral students worldwide receiving the 2021-2022 IEEE Solid State Circuit Society (SSCS) Predoctoral Achievement Award in recognition of their academic achievements and exceptional publications. The awardees are Yingying Fan, Yan He, Zhanghao Yu.

Take a look at our January 25, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Katherine Ensor, the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistcs at Rice University and president of the American Statistical Association, has been elected to the Texas A&M Academy of Distinguished Former Students.

Iron that rusts in water theoretically shouldn’t corrode in contact with an “inert” supercritical fluid of carbon dioxide. But it does.

The reason has eluded materials scientists to now, but a team at Rice University has a theory that could contribute to new strategies to protect iron from the environment.

Take a look at our January 18, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's January Member of the Month, Dr. Maria Oden has 25 years of combined academic, research, and clinical experience in biomedical engineering and engineering design. This solid background has been foundational to her leadership in biomedical engineering and use of engineering education to teach students to identify, innovate, and build devices and technologies that solve real-world problems.

Steel-reinforced concrete columns that support many of the world’s bridges are designed to withstand earthquakes, but always require inspection and often repair once the shaking is over.

These repairs usually involve replacing loose concrete and fractured steel bars and adding extra materials around the damaged area to further strengthen it against future loads.

Rice's Creative Ventures initiative has announced the recipients of this year's Technology Development Fund grants, which includes Computer Science Associate ProfessorXia Ben Hu.

“Perfect is the enemy of good enough,” said Rice University alumnus Souptik Barua ’19 as he describes his method for publishing multiple research papers within a relatively short period of time.

The Rice Eclipse Rocketry Team has been awarded a $1,000 grant from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The grant was presented to team members by Ashutosh Sabharwal, chair of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Rice University. The funds will be used to develop an actively guided parachute recovery system for Eclipse's rockets and ARCA, Eclipse's ground system control software for engine tests.

“Try to explain your project or research such that your grandmother can understand,” Illya Hicks (Ph.D. ’00) tells the Rice University students in his classes. “Figure out your audience and meet them at that level.”

Professors David Scott and Dennis Cox, with a combined 70 years of service to Rice University, have retired from the Department of Statistics (STAT).

“Both David and Dennis are consummate statisticians committed to the development and applications of statistics. In many ways, the Department of Statistics at Rice came to prominence because of them. They will be greatly missed,” said Rudy Guerra, professor and chair of STAT.

In celebration of UNESCO's World Logic Day, Moshe Vardi, University Professor and the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering, will give the 2022 Vienna Logic Day Lecture hosted by the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms at TU Wien. This year’s talk is titled “From Greek Paradoxes to Political Paradoxes.”

Kevin Kelly, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and former chair of the applied physics program at Rice, has been named a fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).

Kelly was recognized for his “contributions in compressive imaging.” He and Richard Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Engineering at Rice, were the first to develop an optical hardware implementation utilizing the mathematics of compressive sensing.

Ashok Veeraraghavan, professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE), has been named a Fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).

The designation is the highest honor conferred by the IEEE on its members. Veeraraghavan was recognized for his contributions to computational photography and computer vision.

He earned his Ph.D. in ECE from the University of Maryland in 2008 and joined the Rice faculty in 2011. He was promoted to associate professor in 2017 and professor in 2020.

Ray Simar, professor in practice of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, was invited to contribute to the Nov-Dec 2021 special issue of IEEE Micro. The publication celebrates the 50th anniversary of microprocessors and chronicles important milestones in their history.

Simar and Google’s Senior Software Engineer Reid Tatge were recognized for their significant contributions to the first VLIW DSP microprocessor.

Take a look at our January 11, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Registration is now open for the 15th annual Energy High Performance Computing Conference. Register today!

Take a look at our January 4, 2022 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

President David Leebron has signed an agreement to establish international cooperation between Rice University and the University of Florence, Italy, focusing on statistics and data science.

Scientists working on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded project, led by Rice CS' Todd Treangen, has compiled a list of mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that may make the omicron variant more resistant to neutralizing antibodies, including those from vaccinations.

Todd Treangen likens efforts to detect the omicron variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 in Houston’s wastewater to reconstructing a forest from a pile of woodchips.

“We’re dealing with small sequence fragments from the SARS-CoV-2 genome, derived from a mixture of variants of concern. So not only is this a computationally challenging problem to identify a specific variant, there’s uncertainty built into the process,” said Treangen, assistant professor of computer science (CS).

It’s now possible to quickly make ultrathin nanoribbons of molybdenum disulfide, with a speedy nickel nanoparticle leading the way.

Scientists discovered a way to transform millions of predatory bacteria into swirling flash mobs reminiscent of painter Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” as the unexpected result of experiments on a genetic circuit the creatures use to discern friend from foe.

Nine projects proposed by Rice University researchers have been granted seed funding by the Technology Development Fund, part of the university’s Creative Ventures initiative.

Rice University Provost Reginald DesRoches has named four recipients of seed grants under the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) program.

The awards of up to $50,000 will support work by Rice faculty and their collaborators on treatment for Parkinson’s disease, stroke rehabilitation, bolstering the immune system with engineered bacteria and detection of heart defects in children after operations.

The Ken Kennedy Institute’s annual graduate fellowship program has awarded $65,000 to nine Rice graduate students in five departments.

Recipients use fellowship awards to further research pursuits, attend conferences, travel, and develop networking relationships in industry. Past recipients have spent summers as research interns with sponsoring companies.

Take a look at our December 6, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's December Member of the Month, Dr. Arlei Silva received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, advised by Ambuj Singh, where he was also a postdoctoral scholar. Before that, he received a B.Sc and M.Sc degrees in Computer Science from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, in Brazil, advised by Wagner Meira Jr. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, hosted by Mohammed J. Zaki.

Marina Vannucci, Noah Harding Professor of Statistics (STAT) at Rice, has co-edited a textbook in the field of Bayesian statistics, her academic specialty.

Philip Ernst, associate professor of statistics (STAT) at Rice, has been named a visiting international research chair in the Department of Mathematics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Ernst will hold the prestigious “Chaire Internationale” in Brussels, Belgium, in June 2022.

Nine faculty members in the George R. Brown School of Engineering are ranked among the world’s highly cited researchers, including five in the materials science category.

The 2021 Highly Cited Researchers list is a global accounting of scientists who produced the last decade’s most influential papers, compiled by the Web of Science group, a Clarivate Analytics company.

Pedro Alvarez and Antonios Mikos, senior researchers in the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University, have been elected to the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Rice University materials scientists have helped colleagues at the University of Toronto make the first measurements of ultra-low friction in magnetene, a 2D material derived from magnetite.

Rice University computer scientists have discovered an inexpensive way for tech companies to implement a rigorous form of personal data privacy when using or sharing large databases for machine learning.

A couple of Rice University professors are among 63 Greek physicians and biomedical researchers from the past 200 years honored as part of the nation’s bicentennial.

Take a look at our November 30, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE Computer Society have named David Abramson, a Professor at the University of Queensland, as the recipient of the 2021 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. Abramson is recognized for contributions to parallel and distributed computing tools, with application from quantum chemistry to engineering design. He is also cited for his mentorship and service to the field.

Technical Contributions

The 5th Annual AI and Data Science Conference, organized by the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University, held the conference presentations and sponsored booths virtually (due to COVID-19) on October 25-26 with an in-person networking reception to conclude the main conference in the afternoon on October 26. An in-person add-on day with a technical workshop highlighting deep learning and high performance computing was held on October 27.

Take a look at our November 22, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our November 16, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Dan Kowal, the Dobelman Chair Assistant Professor of Statistics (STAT) at Rice, has received the inaugural Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award from the International Society of Bayesian Analysis (ISBA).

The award will be given annually to six junior researchers — three in North America or South America and three in Africa, Asia, Europe or Oceania — who are within five years of having received their doctoral degrees. Kowal earned his Ph.D. in STAT from Cornell University in 2017, and joined the Rice faculty that year.

The Kavraki Lab has introduced an online portal to help researchers screen COVID-19 drug candidates that might attack specific proteins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Lydia Kavraki and her colleagues at the University of Houston, the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Federal University of Ceará, Brazil, have posted a “user-friendly” web server offering scientists the chance to screen their drug candidates virtually in relation to known protein binding pockets on the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Want to keep the riffraff out of the gene pool party? Sneak in and slam the gate before they arrive.

That’s the central idea of a new strategy by Rice University scientists who seek to avoid gene-editing errors by fine-tuning specific CRISPR-base editing strategies in advance.

Reginald DesRoches, who is now serving as the university’s provost, has been named as the next president of Rice University.

Rice’s Board of Trustees selected DesRoches, an internationally recognized structural engineer and earthquake resilience expert, after a nationwide search for an academic leader to take command at one of the nation’s premier institutions of higher learning. DesRoches will succeed President David Leebron, who previously announced his plan to step down next summer after the end of the current academic year.

The Georgia Tech Alumni Association has named Rice Provost Reginald DesRoches, a former professor and department chair in civil and environmental engineering at the institute, an honorary alumnus for his service and contributions to the community. He will officially receive the designation at the association's 2022 Gold & White Honors Gala Feb. 3.

Rice University researchers have received $1.3 million from the Office of Naval Research through the Defense Research University Instrumentation Program to create the world’s first printable military “smart helmet” using industrial-grade 3D printers.

Take a look at our November 9, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's November Member of the Month, Dr. Pedram Hassanzadeh studies turbulent flows and chaotic dynamical systems in complex natural phenomena and engineering systems using numerical, mathematical, and deep learning methods, guided by observational and experimental data. His work is often motivated by theoretical and applied problems related to environment and energy.

The Ken Kennedy Institute is awarding $45,000 in Computational Science and Engineering Fellowships to three graduate students at Rice, two of them in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.

The intersection of healthcare and artificial intelligence (AI) holds potentials, unlike any other innovation the medical industry has seen before. AI’s ability to operate and automate tasks at heightened speed, efficiency, and accuracy have already made an impact on day-to-day hospital care and administrative functions. While universal implementation is far from a reality and the long-term implications are uncertain, it’s necessary to understand the paradigms that make the marriage of AI and healthcare an innovative marvel.

Construction of the new $152 million, 266,000-square-foot engineering and science building on the engineering quadrangle at Rice is underway.

The facility, on the site of the former Abercrombie Engineering Laboratory, will feature five floors, including laboratories, classrooms, a makerspace, a cafe and a reception suite. It will serve as both a meeting place and a focus on campus for research and technological advances.

For Matteo Pasquali, the science is settled and the opportunity is clear. We already know how to make materials without carbon-dioxide emissions: split hydrocarbons and make clean hydrogen and useful carbon materials.

Daniel Kowal is a statistician and longtime baseball fan, two roles that can be difficult to distinguish.

“Baseball is all about statistics. Fans can casually rattle off what sounds like a lot of obscure numbers but are actually an important part of the game. Now statisticians are taking that sort of thing seriously,” said Kowal, the Dobelman Family Assistant Professor of Statistics (STAT).

The three-year-old Rice Neuroengineering Initiative (RNEI) got a big endorsement this year when the federal government kicked in an additional $8 million for one of its premier research projects – a wireless brain/machine interface.

This past June, we thought the COVID-19 situation was improving and we would soon return to normal at Rice, only for the Delta variant of the virus to upend our plans.

Despite the horrors of COVID, working from home for close to a year and a half gave families an opportunity to spend more time together, time to reflect and discover things about themselves. I feel I spent much more time with my wife and kids (though I’m not sure how excited about that they have been!).

Some of the claims made for quantum computing have been rather exaggerated, in the judgment of Anastasios “Tasos” Kyrillidis, the Noah Harding Assistant Professor of Computer Science. He urges caution.

“Quantum computing will never replace what we call classical computing. It will do certain things faster. With it we can process very large amounts of data. Not everyone will be doing quantum computing,” he said.

Béatrice Rivière, the Noah G. Harding Chair and Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM) at Rice, has been named a fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM).

Rivière was recognized for her “contributions to numerical analysis, scientific computing and modeling of porous media; for her exemplary mentorship and supervision of women in applied and computational mathematics; and for her distinguished record of service and outreach.”

Take a look at our October 19, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our October 12, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's October Member of the Month, Dr. Andriy Nevidomskyy, is an expert in theoretical condensed matter physics, working in the field of strong electron correlations in quantum materials. The collective behaviour of electrons in such materials often results in the emergence of new exotic quantum phases, such as the unconventional superconducti­vity.

A loose-fitting mask may be doing you no favors if you’re around SARS-CoV-2.

The virus that causes COVID-19 is evolving to spread more efficiently through aerosols — that is, through people’s breath. That makes tighter-fitting masks and better ventilation musts, according to a study by Todd Treangen, doctoral student Nicolae Sapoval and their co-authors.

How well does your sleeping brain prepare you for a new day? Researchers at Rice University backed by the U.S. Army Military Operational Medicine Research Program

Richard Baraniuk, the C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and founding director of OpenStax, Rice University’s educational technology initiative, has received the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education.

Take a look at our October 5, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our September 21, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Take a look at our September 15, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's September Member of the Month, Dr. Daniel Kowal, is the Dobelman Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics.

Dr. Kowal develops statistical methodology and algorithms for massive data sets with complex dependence structures, such as functional, time series, and spatial data. His recent work focuses on Bayesian models for prediction and inference, decision theory, discrete data analysis, and scalable approximations to complex models.

Computer scientists at Rice and the University of St. Thomas in Houston have received a $1.1 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant from a program aimed at fostering research at minority-serving institutions.

If one layer of borophene is good, will two be better? Scientists at Rice University and Northwestern University hope so, because they’ve now made the elusive material.

Borophene is a one-atom-thick material made of boron atoms, which mostly fall together in neat triangles when grown in a furnace on a proper substrate. Its high strength and excellent conductivity make it a good candidate for use in quantum electronics, energy storage and sensors.

Rodrigo Ferreira has joined Rice’s Department of Computer Science as an assistant teaching professor. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher in technology, culture, and society at the Rice Academy of Fellows. He has a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University (NYU).

“Rodrigo Ferreira is an expert in ethics and societal impacts of computing, and I'm especially pleased to have him contribute to the new Master of Data Science," says Chris Jermaine, chair of Rice’s Department of Computer Science.

Take a look at our August 31, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Even the simplest creatures seem extraordinarily complex when you look beneath the surface. Fortunately, hydra make that part easy.

Rice electrical and computer engineer Jacob Robinson and lead author and alumna Krishna Badhiwala of the university’s Brown School of Engineering are taking advantage of the animal’s transparency to do the hard part, manipulating the small, remarkably resilient creatures in just about every possible way to learn how they sense touch.

Rice University faculty members led by bioengineer Gang Bao have been awarded a $4 million grant by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) to establish the Genetic Design and Engineering Center (GDEC).

Roboticist Kaiyu Hang has joined Rice University’s Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor where he directs the Robotics and Physical Interactions Lab (RobotΠ Lab). His areas of expertise include robotic manipulation, physical interactions, motion planning, robot learning, robot control and probabilistic estimation.

Houston-based ThirdAI, a company building tools to speed up deep learning technology without the need for specialized hardware like graphics processing units, brought in $6 million in seed funding.

Neotribe Ventures, Cervin Ventures and Firebolt Ventures co-led the investment, which will be used to hire additional employees and invest in computing resources, Anshumali Shrivastava, Third AI co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

Take a look at our August 19, 2021 Spotlight with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute about our new AI/DS Conference.

You very likely have apps on your cellphone. New research at Rice University offers the possibility of apps for your actual cells.

Invisibly small carbon nanotubes aligned as fibers and sewn into fabrics become a thermoelectric generator that can turn heat from the sun or other sources into energy.

The Rice University lab of physicist Junichiro Kono led an effort with scientists at Tokyo Metropolitan University and the Rice-based Carbon Hub to make custom nanotube fibers and test their potential for large-scale applications.

An article co-authored by Joey Huchette, an adjunct faculty member in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University, has received the Beale-Orchard-Hays Prize from the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS).

Ashutosh Sabharwal, the Ernest Dell Butcher Professor and chair of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Rice University, and a pioneer in two areas of wireless and health technologies, has received, along with his former graduate student, Melissa Duarte, SIGMOBILE's 2021 Test-of-Time Award for their paper demonstrating the feasibility of full-duplex wireless radio systems.

Take a look at our August 10, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's August Member of the Month, Dr Jamie Padgett, is the Stanley C Moore Professor in Engineering and the Faculty Lead of CERISE. She researches the application of probabilistic methods for risk assessment of infrastructure, the subsequent quantification of resilience and sustainability, structural portfolios such as regional portfolios of bridges or oil storage tanks exposed to multiple hazards including earthquakes, hurricanes, or aging and deterioration.

Xia (Ben) Hu, associate professor in Rice’s Department of Computer Science, has won the 2021 ACM SIGKDD Rising Star Award. Hu was selected for his significant research in human-centric data mining and contribution to developing interpretable and automated methods to make complex machine learning algorithms easily used by domain experts.

In at least one sense, every man is an island, and every man-island has lots of inhabitants. But how they relate to each other is unclear.

A new project at Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering seeks to define the social order of such bacterial communities, collectively known as microbiomes. The initiative has received backing from the National Science Foundation in the form of a five-year, $2.8 million grant.

Three new faculty members in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have joined the George R. Brown School of Engineering, effective July 1:

Take a look at our August 3, 2021 Spotlight with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute about our new Medium channel.

Rice computer scientist Moshe Vardi has won the 2021 Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility from IEEE’s Society on the Social Implications of Technology (SSIT).

The progress of high performance computing can seem dizzying to outsiders. Yet, some argue that the rate of progress has been slipping in recent years. As supply chains grow more complex, primary building materials become more difficult to source, the R&D process lengthens, and corporate interests lead the way, the development of general-purpose technology has faltered. However, two pieces of recent research by researchers from Google and Rice University signal that the plateau in progress may just be a bottleneck to overcome.

Vaibhav Unhelkar, assistant professor of computer science, is one of six Rice faculty members to receive seed grant funding for collaborative research projects with institutions in the Texas Medical Center (TMC). The seed grants were provided via programs facilitated by Rice’s Educational and Research Initiatives for Collaborative Health (ENRICH).

Take a look at our July 27, 2021, Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Treangen Lab, in Rice University’s Department of Computer Science, is the recipient of a contract from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to develop the Harvest Variant software for integrated, collaborative real-time variant tracking of SARS-CoV-2. The ability to conduct real-time monitoring will support both CDC and the broader public health community’s understanding of changes to SARS-CoV-2 infectivity and transmissibility, vaccine efficacy, and fitness within human hosts.

Quantum computing has gone from science fiction to foreseeable reality within our lifetime. From Google to IBM, China to the U.S. — everyone everywhere seems fixated on realizing the power of quantum computing. But with all the hype and all the noise (yes, pun intended), it’s difficult to tell how far along the development of quantum computing really is. Here’s a brief overview of the state of quantum computing.

As part of Rice Computer Science’s emphasis on growth, the department has hired six new research and teaching faculty members, effective July 1, 2021.

Take a look at our July 21, 2021 Spotlight with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute about the 2021 Ken Kennedy AI and Data Science Conference.

Researchers who want bacteria to feel right at home in the laboratory have put out a new welcome mat.

Rice University bioengineers and Baylor College of Medicine scientists looking for a better way to mimic intestinal infections that cause diarrhea and other diseases have built and tested a set of hydrogel-based platforms to see if they could make both transplanted cells and bacteria comfy.

The fight against the Covid-19 pandemic is still ongoing in many parts of the world. Whether we will see its end soon is still a matter under debate. But one thing is certain — its impact on many aspects of our lives, especially the healthcare industry, will outlast the pandemic itself.

Rice University’s Phil Bedient has been awarded the American Institute of Hydrology‘s Ray K Linsley Award in honor of outstanding contributions in surface water hydrology.

Rice University computer scientists will take full advantage of new technology to sequence the genome of a single cell to decode mysteries contained in tumors.

Two researchers in bioengineering have received a three-year, $900,000 grant from the Robert J. Kleberg, Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation to develop a platform that would permit in-vivo genome editing.

Take a look at our July 13, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Scientists at Rice University’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) are part of a study to develop an inhalable COVID-19 vaccine.

The project led by Rutgers University and CTBP scientists at Rice and Northeastern University has produced two vaccine strategies. Both are scalable and adaptable and can be transported and stored at room temperature.

A thin shell of soft polymer can help keep knotty ceramic structures from shattering, according to materials scientists at Rice University.

Ceramics made with 3D printers crack under stress like any plate or bowl. But covered in a soft polymer cured under ultraviolet light, the same materials stand a far better chance of keeping their structural integrity, much like a car windshield’s treated glass is less likely to shatter.

Rice University computer scientists are sending RAMBO to rescue genomic researchers who sometimes wait days or weeks for search results from enormous DNA databases.

DNA sequencing is so popular, genomic datasets are doubling in size every two years, and the tools to search the data haven’t kept pace. Researchers who compare DNA across genomes or study the evolution of organisms like the virus that causes COVID-19 often wait weeks for software to index large, “metagenomic” databases, which get bigger every month and are now measured in petabytes.

A small fungal enzyme could play a significant role in simplifying the development and manufacture of drugs, according to Rice University scientists.

The Rice lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Xue Sherry Gao and collaborators isolated a biocatalyst known as CtdE after identifying it as the natural mechanism that controls the chirality — the left- or right-handedness — of compounds produced by the native fungal host.

Innovation propels business, but big data underpins innovation. From tech giants and mega-corporations to nonprofits and small businesses, harnessing the power of data and developing sophisticated methods to manage and analyze that data is a distinctive advantage that drives growth, efficiency, and profitability.

Take a look at our July 6, 2021, Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

A small fungal enzyme could play a significant role in simplifying the development and

Lab-bred cells like to have it their way, producing recombinant (aka artificial) proteins based on however many plasmids they randomly get. But the intuition and hard work of a Rice University alumnus will go a long way toward preserving the rank and file.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's July Member of the Month, Jesse Chan, is an Assistant Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics. He researches numerical methods for PDEs and scientific computing. More specifically, his recent work has focused on high order finite element and discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods, provably stable methods for wave propagation and fluid dynamics, efficient high performance implementations on many-core and GPU architectures, and discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin (DPG) methods.

Rice University scientists are starting small as they begin to figure out how to build an artificial brain from the bottom up.

A small fungal enzyme could play a significant role in simplifying the development and manufacture of drugs, according to Rice University scientists.

Six research collaborations between faculty from Rice and institutions in the Texas Medical Center (TMC) have received seed grants through programs facilitated by Rice’s Educational and Research Initiatives for Collaborative Health (ENRICH).

Take a look at our June 29, 2021, Spotlight with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The influencers featured include groundbreaking roboticists, founders of high-tech companies and medical experts. They are CEOs, professors, and astronauts, working to improve our world, from building nanostructures to forging pathways to the stars. These women steer the course of engineering toward far-reaching and exciting horizons. They are at the top of the engineering field today, as leaders and innovators; transforming the profession and inspiring future engineering students.

Take a look at our June 22, 2021, Spotlight with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute on the Data Science Coast to Coast Seminar Series.

Lisa Biswal, the William M McCardell Professor in Chemical Engineering at Rice University, has been named associate dean for faculty development in the George R. Brown School of Engineering, a newly created position, effective June 15.

Rice University bioengineer Gang Bao, a pioneer in the search for a way to treat and perhaps cure sickle cell disease, is co-author of a significant step forward revealed in Science Translational Medicine and led by his colleagues at Stanford University.

Take a look at our June 15, 2021, Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Kavraki Lab doctoral students Constantinos Chamzas, Zachary Kingston and Carlos Quintero-Pena, together with Rice Department of Computer Science faculty members Anshumali Shrivastava and Lydia Kavraki, presented their new paper "Learning Sampling Distributions Using Local 3D Workspace Decompositions for Motion Planning in High Dimensions" at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). The paper was nominated for best paper in cognitive robotics.

Scientific studies describing the most basic processes often have the greatest impact in the long run. A new work by Rice University engineers could be one such, and it’s a gas, gas, gas for nanomaterials.

A new strategy to reduce the side effects suffered by patients undergoing treatment for head and neck cancers now has the support of the National Institutes of Health.

Computer scientist Lydia Kavraki of Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering has won a prestigious National Institutes of Health U01 grant to develop a new approach to model and analyze protein-ligand interactions in cancer research.

Rice’s Moshe Vardi has won the 2021 Donald E. Knuth Prize, one of theoretical computer science’s most prestigious annual awards.

Vardi, University Professor and the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering, was honored for “high-impact, seminal contributions to the foundations of computer science.”

The novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has stressed the U.S. health care system in an unprecedented manner, highlighting both the system’s resilience and fragility. The National Academy of Medicine’s (NAM) Health and Technology Interest Group sponsored a program at the 2020 NAM Annual Meeting focused on “Telehealth and Telemedicine: Accelerated Change in the Era of a Pandemic”, which emphasized both the promises and challenges observed during this recent period of accelerated innovation [1,2].

Sometimes things are a little out of whack, and it turns out to be exactly what you need.

That was the case when orthoferrite crystals turned up at a Rice University laboratory slightly misaligned. Those crystals inadvertently became the basis of a discovery that should resonate with researchers studying spintronics-based quantum technology.

Houston’s “energy capital of the world” status is here to stay — no matter the type of energy — according to a new report from Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Take a look at our June 1, 2021, Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's June Member of the Month, Kirsten Siebach, is an Assistant Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences. She researches "source-to-sink" sedimentary processes on Mars and early Earth to interpret the history of water and surface environments early in our solar system.

Moshe Vardi, Rice University Professor and the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering, has been honored with the 2020 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award. He shares the award with Hector Levesque of the University of Toronto.

Moshe Vardi, University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, will give the annual Vienna Gödel Lecture. This year’s lecture is titled Technology is Driving the Future, But Who Is Steering? From the Vienna Circle to Digital Humanism. It will be hosted online on May 27, 2021 from 5PM to 7PM CDT and is open to the public.

In this talk, Vardi will discuss why the ethical lens is too narrow for dealing with technology’s impact on society.

Take a look at our May 18, 2021, Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

In an important step toward the clinical application of synthetic biology, Rice University researchers have engineered a bacterium with the necessary capabilities for diagnosing a human disease.

Rice University bioengineers are fabricating and testing tunable electrospun scaffolds completely derived from decellularized skeletal muscle to promote the regeneration of injured skeletal muscle.

Five Rice University engineering laboratories are part of a $33 million national effort to develop a wireless, fully implantable device that can control the body’s circadian clock, halving the time it takes to recover from jet lag and similar disruptions to the body’s sleep/wake cycles.

Stanislav Sazykin, an associate research professor of physics and astronomy who was highly respected in his field of space science, died suddenly on May 3 at 49. The cause of his death has not yet been determined.

Sazykin joined Rice in 2000 as a postdoctoral researcher, rising quickly to associate research professor.

Implants that require a steady source of power but don’t need wires are an idea whose time has come.

Now, for therapies that require multiple, coordinated stimulation implants, their timing has come as well.

Rice University engineers who developed implants for electrical stimulation in patients with spinal cord injuries have advanced their technique to power and program multisite biostimulators from a single transmitter.

A student project to predict the need for maintenance in natural gas compressors and avoid unexpected shutdowns has won this year’s Data to Knowledge Lab Showcase, a competition to highlight semesterlong capstone projects by interdisciplinary teams that use real-world data to solve problems.

In one of the first studies of its kind, medical and engineering researchers have shown wearable devices that continuously monitor blood sugar provide new insights into the progression of Type 2 diabetes among at-risk Hispanic/Latino adults.

Take a look at our May 4, 2021, Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's May Member of the Month, Satish Nagarajaiah, is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. Dr. Nagarajaiah's research areas focus on Structural Dynamic systems, earthquake engineering, seismic isolation, structural control and monitoring, adaptive stiffness systems, smart tuned mass dampers, sparse structural system identification and low rank methods, and non-contact laser based strain sensing using nanomaterials.

The Rice University Faculty Senate has approved the creation of a new professional master’s degree in the George R. Brown School of Engineering, the Master of Engineering Management and Leadership (MEML), to become available to students beginning in the fall.

Marcia O’Malley, the Thomas Michael Panos Family Professor in Mechanical Engineering (MECH), has been named the associate dean for research and innovation for the George R. Brown School of Engineering, effective May 1.

BJ Fregly, a professor of mechanical engineering and bioengineering and a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research, has been named a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

The honor goes to ASME members who have been practicing for a minimum of 10 years and “have been responsible for significant engineering achievements,” according to the organization. Fregly joins more than 3,000 engineers previously named fellows.

Remember Hurricane Harvey? Look west and there was an atmospheric block. Remember the Great Freeze of 2021? Look north and there was a block.

Marina Vannucci, the Noah Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice, has been awarded the 2020 Zellner Medal from the International Society of Bayesian Analysis (ISBA).

The medal recognizes ISBA members who have “rendered exceptional service to ISBA over an extended period of time, with a long-lasting impact.”

Anshumali Shrivastava, Assistant Professor in Rice’s Department of Computer Science, has been recognized for his accomplishments as the recipient of the 2021 Young Faculty Research Award. He also has appointments in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Statistics.

Philip Ernst, associate professor of statistics (STAT) at Rice, is a 2021 recipient of the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching.

Participants in a study of learning daily behaviors and working productivity will get up to $150 for 30 days research study period. This study will be conducted remotely.

Take a look at our April 20, 2021, Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Is the adoption of legal sports gambling in America a boon or bane?

The question will be one of many on the controversial topic at the Ninth Eubank Conference on Real World Markets at Rice University, which will focus this year on sports analytics and gaming risk management. The event will look at how computational tools and big data impact sports and change fan experiences through gambling.

Congratulations are in order for Yang Zhao, a doctoral student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Rice University who has been awarded the 2020 Cadence Women in Technology Scholarship.

A sense of loyalty keeps Adesola “Dessy” Akinfenwa coming back to Rice University, two years after earning her degree.

“I’m grateful for the education, of course, and getting a good job, but I really do value the sense of community Rice ingrained in us. There is a feeling of friendliness and common purpose,” said Akinfenwa, who earned a B.A. in statistics (STAT) in 2019.

Researchers from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine are part of a national effort to accelerate genome-editing research and develop gene-editing technologies and therapies.

The goals and planned activities of the Somatic Cell Genome Editing Consortium (SCGE) were described in a paper published in Nature by more than 70 principal investigators on 45 SCGE projects funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Rice University computer scientists have demonstrated artificial intelligence (AI) software that runs on commodity processors and trains deep neural networks 15 times faster than platforms based on graphics processors.

Neurosurgery’s history of cutting diseases out of the brain is morphing into a future in which implanting technology into the brain may help restore function, movement, cognition and memory after patients suffer strokes, spinal cord injuries and other neurological disorders. Rice University and Houston Methodist have forged a partnership to launch the Center for Translational Neural Prosthetics and Interfaces, a collaboration that brings together scientists, clinicians, engineers and surgeons to solve clinical problems with neurorobotics.

Take a look at our April 6, 2021, Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Charles Sidney Burrus — “Sid” to almost everyone — whose boyhood fascination with electricity set him on a path to become a pioneer in digital signal processing during a long and influential career at Rice University, died April 3.

Burrus, the Maxfield and Oshman Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and former dean of engineering, was 86 years old.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's April Member of the Month, Fred Oswald is a Professor of Psychology, Herbert S Autrey Chair in Social Sciences, and Director of Graduate Studies. Dr. Oswald's research areas focus on Industrial/Organizational Psychology including workforce readiness, quantitative methods (meta-analysis, psychometrics, and big data). Dr. Oswald's lab is the Organization & Workforce Laboratory (OWL).

Béatrice Rivière, the Noah G Harding Chair and Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM) at Rice, has been named a fellow of SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), the world's largest professional association devoted to applied mathematics.

Rivière was recognized for her “contributions in numerical analysis, scientific computing, and modeling of porous media.” She is one of 28 newly elected SIAM fellows.

Illya Hicks, professor of computational and applied mathematics (CAAM), has been named chair of that department, effective July 1.

Hicks joined the Rice faculty in 2007. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in CAAM in 2000 from Rice. From 2000 to 2006 he was a member of the Industrial and Systems Engineering faculty at Texas A&M University.

Marina Vannucci, the Noah Harding Professor of Statistics (STAT) at Rice, has been awarded the 2020 Zellner Medal of the International Society of Bayesian Analysis (ISBA).

The medal recognizes ISBA members who have “rendered exceptional service to ISBA over an extended period of time, with a long-lasting impact.”

Forget the mood ring. Akane Sano has a far better idea.

The Rice University electrical and computer engineer is developing software to detect and predict emotional stress in people through data from wearable and mobile technologies and provide safe and personalized feedback to manage and enhance emotion. She has received a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award to pursue that goal.

Two Sigma Investments has presented Richard Tapia, University Professor and director of the Tapia Center for Excellence and Equity in Education at Rice, with a gift of $75,000 in recognition of his “research and mentorship of doctoral students within the fields of computational and applied mathematics.”

Take a look at our March 23, 2021 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Starting this Spring, the Rice ECE professional master's program had a name change to the Master of Electrical and Computer Engineering (MECE).

There are many ways to test municipal wastewater for signs of the virus that causes COVID-19, but scientists in Houston have determined theirs is the best yet.

OpenStax, Rice University’s educational technology initiative, is improving diversity and representation in its textbooks by closely reviewing user feedback and enlisting help from advocates for racial, ethnic, LGBTQ and gender equity.

As an entrepreneur, nanotechnology pioneer Naomi Halas has harnessed the interactions between light and metal nanoparticles to take on two of the world’s most intractable technical challenges: treating cancer and producing clean energy on demand.

As a young scientist, Halas recalls, she would read academic journal articles and wonder how often the discoveries that were detailed within actually bore out the authors’ lofty ambitions.

Carbon Hub, Rice University’s zero-emissions research initiative, has awarded seed grants for seven projects that will rapidly advance its vision for transforming the oil and gas sector into a leading provider of both clean hydrogen energy and solid carbon products that can be used in place of materials with large carbon footprints.

Take a look at our March 9, 2021, Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's March Member of the Month, Vaibhav Unhelkar, is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. By merging expertise from AI, robotics, and human factors engineering, Unhelkar has developed algorithms to enable fluent human-robot interaction and deployed collaborative robots among humans. In his on-going research, he is developing computational techniques to combine data and human expertise (i.e., for human-in-the-loop AI) and to improve transparency of intelligence machines.

Rice computer science professor Chris Jermaine has been named the new permanent chair of the Department of Computer Science after serving as interim chair since January 1, 2021. Jermaine succeeds Luay Nakhleh in this position, who was promoted to become the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the university’s George R. Brown School of Engineering.

Jermaine is currently program director of Rice’s Data Science Initiative but will step down from that position effective July 1, 2021.

Ilinca Stanciulescu, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice, died Sunday after battling cancer. She was 49.

The Ken Kennedy Institute’s 14th annual Oil & Gas High Performance Computing Conference will be held March 5, virtually and free of charge.

Tracking the origin of synthetic genetic code has never been simple, but it can be done through bioinformatic or, increasingly, deep learning computational approaches.

A new theory by Rice University scientists could boost the growing field of spintronics, devices that depend on the state of an electron as much as the brute electrical force required to push it.

Take a look at our February 23, 2021, Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Yingyan Lin, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering, has won a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to make deep learning hardware accelerators more efficient and its development faster.

Terror, be gone! This happy landing was pure delight.

It remains to be seen how well the Perseverance rover and its helicopter, Ingenuity, perform as they traverse the surface of Mars, but for the moment NASA and Rice geologist Kirsten Siebach are getting a moment to celebrate with the spacecraft’s long-awaited successful landing on Feb. 18.

Rice University bioengineer Laura Segatori has been named a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).

She is one of 175 new fellows elected this year by peers and members of the AIMBE College of Fellows for her “outstanding contributions to the development of protein engineering and synthetic biology tools for biomanufacturing technologies and cell therapies,” according to the institute.

Chemical and biomolecular engineer Haotian Wang of Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering has been selected as a 2021 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow.

Wang is one of 128 early career scientists and engineers at 58 U.S. and Canadian institutions “whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of scientific leaders,” according to the Sloan Foundation.

With so many questions still surrounding COVID-19, there is one certainty: Pandemic-related research is here to stay.

“The research on it will last, and it’s going to create a lot of impact,” said the Ken Kennedy Institute‘s Anton Zhang ’16.

Take a look at our February 9, 2021, Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Rice University researchers have created a “defective” catalyst that simplifies the generation of hydrogen peroxide from oxygen.

Rice scientists treated metal-free carbon black, the inexpensive, powdered product of petroleum production, with oxygen plasma. The process introduces defects and oxygen-containing groups into the structure of the carbon particles, exposing more surface area for interactions.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's February Member of the Month, Su Chen, is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Data to Knowledge Lab (D2K). Her doctoral research lies in the interaction of methodology, theory and computation of Bayesian statistics and their applications to high dimensional data analysis.

When aboveground storage tanks fail during a storm and their toxic contents spread, the threat to human health can and probably will flow downwind of the immediate area.

Rice University is launching a master’s degree program in data science with online and on-campus options.

The public is invited to look in upon Rice University’s third annual Datathon, sponsored by the Rice Data Science Club and the Data to Knowledge Lab (D2K). This year the event will go virtual, with students from Rice and other institutions working with provided datasets to solve challenges.

Datathon 2021 will take place Feb. 5-6, with cash and other prizes for results judged to be the best.

The Ken Kennedy Institute is excited to announce the formation of their new External Advisory Board that will assist with identifying new ideas and new opportunities to elevate the Ken Kennedy Institute and Rice University. The External Advisory Board will assist the Institute in their mission of bringing together the Rice community to collaboratively solve critical global challenges by fostering innovations in computing and harnessing the transformative power of data alongside the Institute's Faculty Advisory Committee.

Take a look at our January 12, 2021, Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

Wireless communication directly between brains is one step closer to reality thanks to $8 million in Department of Defense follow-up funding for Rice University neuroengineers.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the team’s proof-of-principle research toward a wireless brain link in 2018, has asked for a preclinical demonstration of the technology that could set the stage for human tests as early as 2022.

Marina Vannucci, the Noah Harding Professor of Statistics (STAT) at Rice, has co-authored an article on Bayesian statistics published in the first issue of Nature Reviews Methods Primers.

“It’s an honor to have our work featured in the inaugural issue. Nature has always been highly respected by researchers and scholars, and we’re happy to have our work highlighted like this,” said Vannucci, whose article is titled “Bayesian statistics and modelling”.

Carbon nanotube fibers are not nearly as strong as the nanotubes they contain, but Rice University researchers are working to close the gap.

A computational model by materials theorist Boris Yakobson and his team at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering establishes a universal scaling relationship between nanotube length and friction between them in a bundle, parameters that can be used to fine-tune fiber properties for strength.

In collaboration with Google, Rice University’s Department of Computer Science has launched a 10-week data science summer program for undergraduates. The Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program offers participating students unprecedented one-on-one access to faculty mentors as they work together on cutting-edge research. This hands-on experience will give students a significant advantage when pursuing a graduate degree or a future career in data science.

A major international journal is celebrating the 30th anniversary of influential models co-created by Walter Chapman, the William W Akers Chair Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's January Member of the Month, Risa Myers, is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Computer Science Department. She teaches databases and data science. Given her extensive industry experience, one of her key teaching goals is to bring real world data, applications, and challenging to the classroom.

An atypical two-dimensional sandwich has the tasty part on the outside for scientists and engineers developing multifunctional nanodevices.

An atom-thin layer of semiconductor antimony paired with ferroelectric indium selenide would display unique properties depending on the side and polarization by an external electric field.

A sweet new process is making sour more practical.

Rice University engineers are turning carbon monoxide directly into acetic acid — the widely used chemical agent that gives vinegar its tang — with a continuous catalytic reactor that can use renewable electricity efficiently to turn out a highly purified product.

Rice University engineers hope to make life better for those with replacement joints by modeling how artificial hips are likely to rub them the wrong way.

Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine researchers have found a way to mimic conditions in intestines, giving them a mechanical model for the real-time growth of bacterial infections.

In a new study, they demonstrate a lab tool that simplifies simulations of the human intestine, making it more practical to find treatments for diseases like infectious diarrhea.

Rice D2K Lab students, working with capstone project sponsor OpenStax, developed a data-driven approach to identifying students falling behind in classes. The goal of the project was to provide teachers with actionable predictions and to strengthen student-teacher connections. In our current remote learning environment, these predictors were especially important, as students were having fewer interactions with teachers.

Which Rice research provided the best paper of 2020? Would you believe it was published in 2008?

Baylor College of Medicine researcher Meng Wang had already shown that bacteria that make a metabolite called colanic acid (CA) could extend the lifespan of worms in her lab by as much as 50%, but her collaboration with Rice University synthetic biologist Jeffrey Tabor is providing tools to answer the bigger question of how the metabolite imparts longer life.

When surgeons remove cancer, one of the first questions is, “Did they get it all?” Researchers from Rice University and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have created a new microscope that can quickly and inexpensively image large tissue sections, potentially during surgery, to find the answer.

Nanomaterials researchers in Finland, the United States and China have created a color atlas for 466 unique varieties of single-walled carbon nanotubes.

The nanotube color atlas is detailed in a studyin Advanced Materials about a new method to predict the specific colors of thin films made by combining any of the 466 varieties. The research was conducted by researchers from Aalto University in Finland, Rice University and Peking University in China.

A monthslong study to determine the number of Houstonians carrying COVID-19 antibodies revealed infections may have been four times greater than viral tests showed, according to collaborators at the Houston Health Department, Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine.

Data released by the city today is based on blood collected from volunteers in randomly selected households and tested for the presence of COVID-19 antibodies, an indication of previous infection.

Illya Hicks, professor of computational and applied mathematics (CAAM) at Rice, was formally inducted as a fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) during the institute’s annual meeting last month.

Computer science assistant professor Anshumali Shrivastava and statistics graduate student Zhenwei Dai have discovered a more efficient way for social media companies to keep misinformation from spreading online using probabilistic filters trained with artificial intelligence.

A project that uses data science techniques to help save babies with congenital heart defects won the Fall 2020 Virtual Showcase held by Rice University’s Data to Knowledge Lab (D2K Lab).

Ten student teams competed in the end-of-semester event to show their work with the D2K Lab, which connects community members with student expertise in the analysis of data that can make a difference to society.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's annual graduate fellowship program has awarded $50,000 to seven Rice graduate students in five departments.

Recipients use fellowship awards to further research pursuits, attend conferences, travel and develop networking relationships in industry. Past recipients have spent summers as research interns with sponsoring companies.

Ashutosh Sabharwal, the Ernest Dell Butcher Professor and chair of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Rice, and a pioneer in two areas of wireless and health technologies, has been elected a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

The Rice University lab of physicist Junichiro Kono will share in a $1 million grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) to develop advanced systems that improve imaging of proteins, cells and tissues.

Christopher Jermaine, professor of computer science, has been named interim chair of his department at Rice, effective Jan 1.

Astronauts appear to age faster in space, but understanding why could mitigate the effects for future long-distance travelers.

That is the simple conclusion of a study on years’ worth of data from astronauts and animals collected by NASA’s GeneLab and shared with an international team of researchers, including the Rice University lab of computer scientist Todd Treangen.

Take a look at our December 2020 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's December Member of the Month, Farès el-Dahdah, is a Professor and Director of the Humanities Research Center and an Affiliated Professor with the School of Architecture.

A team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University has developed artificial intelligence models that help them better understand the brain computations that underlie thoughts. This is new, because until now there has been no method to measure thoughts.

Rice alumni and supporters gathered physically and virtually Nov. 18 to celebrate the establishment of the Sidney Burrus Chair in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.

Made possible by the generosity of Ann and John Doerr, the chair honors Burrus, a pioneer in the field of digital signal processing (DSP), the recipient of multiple teaching awards and an early advocate for the use of technology in teaching and learning.

Luay Nakhleh, the JS Abercrombie Professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Rice University, will become the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the university’s George R Brown School of Engineering on Jan. 1, 2021.

Nakhleh will succeed Interim Dean and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Robert Griffin, who was appointed to the position July 1 when former Dean Reginald DesRoches took office as Rice’s provost.

Computer Science professor Anastasios Kyrillidis leads one of six teams of Rice University researchers that have been tapped to develop their good ideas with the aid of grants from the InterDisciplinary Excellence Awards (IDEA). The Creative Ventures Funds Program has awarded him a two-year grant worth about $75,000.

Multidisciplinary awards support high-risk, high-reward initiatives as six teams of Rice University researchers have been tapped to develop their good ideas with the aid of grants from the InterDisciplinary Excellence Awards (IDEA).

Rice, MD Anderson team models complex that immune system uses to recognize viruses.

“Position 4” didn’t seem important until researchers took a long look at a particular peptide.

That part of the peptide drawn from a SARS-CoV virus turned out to have an unexpected but significant influence on how it stably binds with a receptor central to the immune system’s ability to attack diseased cells.

The complaints heard most often about the COVID-19 pandemic regard the scarcity of reliable tests and the time required to get the results.

Until recently, the only method for detecting severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the viral cause of COVID-19, was nucleic acid testing based on real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a procedure that is laborious, time-consuming and must be performed by skilled technicians.

When their labs on campus shut down in March, Caleb Kemere and Jacob Robinson wanted a way to use their skills to protect medical workers on the COVID-19 front lines.

After consulting with Dr. Sahil Kapur, a plastic surgeon at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Robinson and Kemere realized something often misunderstood by the public: N95 masks use essentially the same filtration method as more readily available surgical masks.

Flash graphene, wireless defibrillator win honors in international Tech Briefs competition.

Rice University was a double winner in the annual Create the Future Design Contest, an international competition in its 19th year put on by Tech Briefs.

“We are witnessing something unique. With the wave of measures to control the spread of COVID-19, we have seen a wave of noise diminution. The world has become a quiet place.”

The transformation of the Mechanical Laboratory, one of the first buildings constructed on the Rice campus, into Maxfield Hall is well underway.

Also nearing completion is construction of the Rice National Security Research Accelerator in Dell Butcher Hall.

Take a look at our November 2020 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's November Member of the Month, Dr. Sylvia Dee, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences.

Dr. Dee's research interests are in paleoclimate, climate dynamics, earth system modeling, and global change.

Dr. Dee earned her PhD from the University of Southern California in Earth Sciences, and her BSE from Princeton University in Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) have named Vivek Sarkar of Georgia Institute of Technology as the recipient of the 2020 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award.

Sarkar is recognized for "foundational technical contributions to the area of programmability and productivity in parallel computing, as well as leadership contributions to professional service, mentoring, and teaching."

Marrying two layers of graphene is an easy route to the blissful formation of nanoscale diamond, but sometimes thicker is better.

While it may only take a bit of heat to turn a treated bilayer of the ultrathin material into a cubic lattice of diamane, a bit of pressure in just the right place can convert few-layer graphene as well.

Engineers at Rice University and Texas A&M University have found a 2D material that could make computers faster and more energy-efficient.

Their material is a derivative of perovskite — a crystal with a distinctive structure — that has the surprising ability to enable the valleytronics phenomenon touted as a possible platform for information processing and storage.

U.S. and Italian engineers have demonstrated the first nanophotonic platform capable of manipulating polarized light 1 trillion times per second.

Join the Ken Kennedy Institute Team. Apply now for the Data Science Fellow position. Apply at: https://jobs.rice.edu/postings/24863.

Open Date: 10/19/2020

Close Date: 11/02/2020

Salary Information: $42,100-$67,400

Join the Ken Kennedy Institute Team. Apply now for the Data Scientist position. Apply at: https://jobs.rice.edu/postings/24862.

Open Date: 10/19/2020

Close Date: 11/02/2020

Salary Information: $54,100-$89,300

Rice Computer Science’s Treangen Lab is part of a multi-institution study aimed at better understanding why some critically ill patients develop multidrug-resistant infections.

The Dynamics of Colonization and Infection by Multidrug-Resistant Pathogens in Immunocompromised and Critically Ill Patients program, also known as DYNAMITE, received an $11 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to conduct this five-year study.

Marcia O’Malley, the Thomas Michael Panos Family Professor in Mechanical Engineering (MECH) and director of the Mechatronics and Haptic Interfaces Lab at Rice, was named the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Dynamic Systems and Controls Division Nyquist Lecturer for 2020.

O'Malley delivered her lecture, “Haptics: A Hot Topic with Controls at its Core,” during ASME’s Dynamic Systems and Control Conference, held virtually Oct. 5-7.

The Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment Center (NEWT), a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center (ERC) with its headquarters at Rice University, has earned a five-year renewal to continue its work on next-generation water treatment systems.

Haotian Wang of Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering has been honored with a Packard Fellowship, one of 20 researchers in the nation to win the award this year.

Rice civil engineers Satish Nagarajaiah and Kalil Erazo have been awarded the 2019 Takuji Kobori Prize by the International Association of Structural Control and Monitoring (IASCM) for their paper “Bayesian structural identification of a hysteretic negative stiffness earthquake protection system using unscented Kalman filtering.”

An unintended consequence of industry’s quest to expand the internet could be a boon for weather prediction and climate research.

The Ken Kennedy Institute is awarding $135,000 in Computational Science and Engineering Fellowships to nine graduate students at Rice University.

In the last six months, the world has changed in countless ways. We work differently, we drive less, we spend less time with our friends and families. Humanity has become quiet in a way we have never been before.

The transformation of the Mechanical Laboratory, one of the first buildings constructed on the Rice campus, into Maxfield Hall is well underway.

Also nearing completion is construction of the Rice National Security Research Accelerator in Dell Butcher Hall.

When you take a medication, you want to know precisely what it does. Pharmaceutical companies go through extensive testing to ensure that you do.

With a new deep learning-based technique created at Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering, they may soon get a better handle on how drugs in development will perform in the human body.

There are few topics more on the minds of the American public than the 2020 presidential election. Rice Computer Science professor Dan Wallach is a computer and election security expert who has teamed with the nonprofit VotingWorks on NSF RAPID grant-funded research to validate and improve open-source technology for voting by mail.

Take a look at our October 2020 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's October Member of the Month, Dr Illya Hicks, is a Professor in the Department of Computational & Applied Mathematics and the former Faculty Advisor to the President.

Dr. Hicks' research interests are in combinatorial optimization, integer programming, graph theory, and matroid theory. Some applications of interests are social networks, cancer treatment, and network design. His current research is focused on using graph decomposition techniques to solve NP-complete problems and he teaches courses related to discrete optimization.

Scientists and statisticians at Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering have worked long hours for months to help the city of Houston monitor the spread of COVID-19 through traces of the coronavirus found in wastewater treatment plants.

Stripes are in fashion this season at a Rice University lab, where engineers use them to make images that plain cameras could never capture.

Their compact Hyperspectral Stripe Projector (HSP) is a step toward a new method to collect the spatial and spectral information required for self-driving cars, machine vision, crop monitoring, surface wear and corrosion detection and other applications.

A dose of artificial intelligence can speed the development of 3D-printed bioscaffolds that help injuries heal, according to researchers at Rice University.

A team led by computer scientist Lydia Kavraki of Rice’s Brown School of Engineering used a machine learning approach to predict the quality of scaffold materials, given the printing parameters. The work also found that controlling print speed is critical in making high-quality implants.

Points matter when designing nanoparticles that drive important chemical reactions using the power of light.

Researchers at Rice University’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) have long known that a nanoparticle’s shape affects how it interacts with light, and their latest study shows how shape affects a particle’s ability to use light to catalyze important chemical reactions.

A simpler and more efficient way to predict performance will lead to better batteries, according to Rice University engineers.

That their method is 100,000 times faster than current modeling techniques is a nice bonus.

A graph that maps the capacity of batteries to cathode thickness and porosity shows a laborious search based on numerical simulations (black square) and a new Rice University algorithm (red dot) return nearly the same result. Rice researchers say their calculations are at least 100,000 times faster. Illustration by Fan Wang

Rice University engineers will gain a better understanding of brain activity over time with the support of the National Institutes of Health.

Rice computer scientist, Lydia Kavraki and bioengineer Antonios Mikos have been elected to the prestigious Academia Europaea for their “sustained academic excellence.”

Kavraki was recognized for her accomplishments in robotics, artificial intelligence and computational biomedicine, and Mikos for his work in biomaterials and tissue engineering. Both are natives of Greece. Kavraki joined the Rice faculty in 1997, Mikos in 1992.

Rice University engineer Haotian Wang has been awarded a four-year, $2 million collaborative grant by the Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore how waste carbon dioxide, the bane of Earth’s atmosphere, can be directly converted into pure liquid fuels.

Rice University could be the first institution to change the way the world filters drinking water or how fast and how long phones can hold a charge -- and they’re getting $100 million to do it.

The Robert A. Welch Foundation has donated the money to Rice for a new research hub to engineer new technologies and innovative materials.

Rice University researchers have received a $1.5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop an open-source platform to meet the urgent need of developing and validating machine-learning (ML) based innovations for future wireless networks and mobile applications.

Take a look at our September 2020 Newsletter with updates from the Ken Kennedy Institute.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's September Member of the Month, Dr. Cymene Howe, is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology. She is also a faculty member with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Deep learning is an increasingly popular form of artificial intelligence that’s routinely used in products and services that impact hundreds of millions of lives, despite the fact that no one quite understands how it works.

The Office of Naval Research has awarded a five-year, $7.5 million grant to a group of engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians and statisticians who think they can unravel the mystery. Their task: develop a theory of deep learning based on rigorous mathematical principles.

Rice University computer scientist Todd Treangen and his bioinformatics group are collaborating with Great Basin Scientific, a molecular diagnostics company, to optimize the design and computational evaluation of molecular detection assays for the SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA, the pathogen that causes COVID-19. The aim of the co-development partnership is to streamline development and commercialization of robust and genetically stable COVID-19 testing.

Rice University computer scientist Lydia Kavraki was recently named one of the ‘World’s 50 Most Renowned Women in Robotics,’ according to Analytics Insight, an influential platform dedicated to insights, trends, and opinion from the world of data-driven technologies. The list recognizes “the best women leaders who hold extensive experience and influence in robotics and their innovations are redesigning the future of businesses worldwide as well.”

Researchers at Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering are using data gathered before a deadly 2017 landslide in Greenland to show how deep learning may someday help predict seismic events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

RAMBO, short for Rice Advanced Magnet with Broadband Optics, is a unique instrument that engineer, physicist and materials scientist Junichiro Kono created in 2013 in collaboration with colleagues in Japan. RAMBO is a study in extremes, the first device that lets researchers use a wide spectrum of laser pulses to examine the behavior of materials that are simultaneously cooled near absolute zero and subjected to a massive pulse of magnetic energy.

Maria Oden, director of Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK), co-director of the Rice 360˚ Institute for Global Health and a teaching professor of bioengineering, has been named to the 2020 Class of Fellows by the Biomedical Engineering Society.

Carbon nanotube fibers made at Rice University are now stronger than Kevlar and are inching up on the conductivity of copper.

The Rice lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Matteo Pasquali reported in Carbon it has developed its strongest and most conductive fibers yet, made of long carbon nanotubes through a wet spinning process.

Kathy Ensor, the Noah G Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice, has been elected the 117th president of the American Statistical Association. The three-year commitment will include a one-year term as president-elect beginning Jan. 1, 2021; a one-year term as president effective Jan. 1, 2022; and a one-year term as past president beginning Jan. 1, 2023.

Author: MATT WILSON

The Ken Kennedy Institute's August Member of the Month, Dr. Vicky Yao, is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science.

Vicky was a postdoctoral fellow at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and received her PhD from the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. She has numerous publications including her most recent, "RNA Identification of PRIME Cells Predicting Rheumatoid Arthritis Flares" in the New England Journal of Medicine (Jul 2020).

On Friday, July 17th, the COVID-19 International Research Team (COV-IRT) held an online symposium on the virus co-sponsored by the Rice Department of Computer Science and the Ken Kennedy Institute. The event brought together an international team of researchers investigating the COVID-10 pandemic and its potential treatment. It was co-organized by Rice University computer scientist Todd Treangen along with postdoctoral researcher Leo Elworth.

The discovery of an early warning sign of rheumatoid arthritis flare-ups could provide a way to cut them off at the pass.

Rice University computer scientist Vicky Yao is co-lead author of a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine detailing the discovery of a type of cell that activates a week or two before an arthritic episode. The discovery may represent a new treatment target for warding off flares in advance.

The research is also the topic of an editorial in the journal.

On Friday, July 17th, the COVID-19 International Research Team (COV-IRT) will reconvene online to presents its second virtual symposium. The web-only symposium will run from 10:00 a.m. CST to 4:30 p.m. CST and will feature researchers from all over the world discussing COVID-19 related topics including vaccine development, protein modeling, antibodies and much more.

Rice Computer Science Assistant Professor Vicky Yao co-led a team of researchers who have described, for the first time, specific genes and pathways in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

A paper published by Yao and colleagues at Rockefeller and Princeton universities, among others, details molecular-level profiles of neurons in rodents similar to those in humans.

Two faculty members in the George R. Brown School of Engineering has been selected to take part in the National Academy of Engineering’s 26th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.

Jesse Chan, assistant professor of computational and applied mathematics (CAAM), and Ashok Veeraraghavan, professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and of computer science, are among 85 early-career engineers from academia, industry and government chosen for the honor.

The Ken Kennedy Institute's July Member of the Month, Dr. Santiago Segarra, is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Rice University researchers, including computer scientist Dan Wallach, are teaming with nonprofit VotingWorks to validate and improve open-source technology for voting by mail, work that will give local elections officials an important option if they're flooded with applications from voters asking to cast mail ballots in November due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rice University computer scientist Todd Treangen has received a C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (C3.ai DTI) Award for computational biology research applying artificial intelligence (AI) models to COVID-19 mitigation. Treangen is developing novel bioinformatics algorithms and driving comparative genomic analyses to determine how SARS COV-2 is changing over time.

Marek Kimmel, professor and associate department chair of statistics (STAT) at Rice, has received a $100,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid Response Research grant to investigate how the SARS-CoV-2 virus is likely to evolve in humans.

Kimmel’s proposal is titled “Mathematical Tools for Analysis of Genomic Diversity of SARS-CoV-2 Virus in the Context of Its Co-Evolution with Host Populations.” Rapid Response grants are awarded to research proposals judged to have “severe urgency.”

Angela Wilkins has been named executive director of Rice University’s Ken Kennedy Institute.

She takes over for longtime director Jan Odegard, who left the university’s hub for computing and data science research to become senior director for industry and academic partnerships at the Ion, the Rice-led Houston innovation facility.

In combinations predicted by Rice materials theorist

Three faculty members, and members of the Ken Kennedy Institute, in the George R. Brown School of Engineering have been named to endowed chairs, effective July 1.

Junichiro Kono, professor of electrical and computer engineering, of materials science and nanoengineering, of physics and astronomy, and chair of applied physics, will become the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor in Engineering.

Daniel Kowel, assistant professor of statistics (STAT), will become the Dobelman Family Assistant Professor of STAT.

Lydia Kavraki has been honored for her foundational contributions to the discipline with this year’s ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award.

Kathy Ensor, Noah G Harding Professor of Statistics (STAT), has been elected president of the 19,000-member American Statistical Association (ASA).

Rice University computer scientist Todd Treangen has been awarded $1.5 million for an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) project to develop new DNA screening tools.

The award is the third phase of a $2.7 million dollar contract from the Functional Genomic and Computational Assessment of Threats (Fun GCAT) program, which is managed by IARPA in the office of the director of National Intelligence.

Keith Cooper, who came to Rice as a freshman in 1974 and now serves as the L John and Ann H Doerr Chair in Computational Engineering, among many other roles, is the 2020 recipient of the Rice Faculty Award for Excellence in University Service and Leadership.

The award was created in 2018 and is given to a faculty member who has made “significant and distinctive contributions to the mission of Rice through exceptional university service and leadership.”

Lydia Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science at Rice, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid Response Research grant to implement a “computational pipeline” to help identify fragments of SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins that could be used as targets for vaccine development.

Rice University computer scientist Lydia Kavraki has delivered a virtual plenary talk at the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Some 1,270 people attended Kavraki’s presentation, “Planning in Robotics and Beyond,” when it was streamed online June 2 and participated in the live question and answer session. Another 833 people have subsequently watched it.

The George R. Brown School of Engineering awarded Lydia Kavraki with the 2019/20 Outstanding Faculty Research Award.

The Outstanding Faculty Research Award is awarded to faculty who most contributed to highly impactful publications or publicly available software, based on research conducted at Rice and published/developed dring the period January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2019.

“We know the future is coming. It always has. We are ready for it.”

The speaker is Vincent Saubestre, CEO and president of Total EP Research and Technology USA. The setting was the 13th-annual Rice Oil & Gas High Performance Computing Conference hosted by the Ken Kennedy Institute on March 2-4.

Lydia Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science (CS), has received IEEE’s Robotics and Automation Society Pioneer Award for her fundamental contributions to robot design, including “the invention of randomized motion planning algorithms and probabilistic roadmaps.”

D-Day, the largest seaborne invasion in history, relied heavily on weather conditions. June 5, chosen by Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower to be D-Day, was the first date in a narrow three-day window with the necessary weather conditions.

The 2019-20 recipients, their fellowships and the amounts are:

HOUSTON (January 14, 2020) - The Ion, an entrepreneurship center being developed in the old Sears building in Midtown by the Rice Management Company, has named three new senior directors to its team.

HOUSTON (January 7, 2020) - Tayfun E. Tezduyar, the James F. Barbour Professor of Mechanical Engineering (MECH) and co-director of the Team for Advanced Flow Simulation and Modeling at Rice University, has received the Computational Mechanics Award of the Asian Pacific Association for Computational Mechanics (APACM).

HOUSTON (November 13, 2019) - Climate change will increase the size of stalled high-pressure weather systems called "blocking events" that have already produced some of the 21st century's deadliest heat waves, according to a Rice University study.

Atmospheric blocking events are middle-latitude, high-pressure systems that stay in place for days or even weeks. Depending upon when and where they develop, blocking events can cause droughts or downpours and heat waves or cold spells. Blocking events caused deadly heat waves in France in 2003 and in Russia in 2010.

A trio of faculty members at Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering will be part of a push by the Texas Heart Institute (THI) to further the development of their novel leadless, wirelessly powered pacemaker system.

Rice University and the Army have established a five-year, $30 million cooperative agreement for research to enable advanced materials and next-generation networks. The effort is aimed at unprecedented intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance specifically focused on next-generation wireless networks and radio frequency (RF) electronics.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) have named Geoffrey C. Fox of Indiana University Bloomington as the recipient of the 2019 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. Fox was cited for foundational contributions to parallel computing methodology, algorithms and software, and data analysis, and their interfaces with broad classes of applications.

A Rice University scientist and his colleagues are booting their search for dark matter into a study they hope will enhance all of data science.

Rice astroparticle physicist Christopher Tunnell and his team have received a $1 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to reimagine data science techniques and help push data-intensive physical sciences past the tipping point to discovery.

By some time next year, predicts Raghua Ramakrishnan, there will be more than 20 billion connected electronic devices in the world.

“The amount of data exchanged by sensors will be more than the amount exchanged by human beings,” said the CTO for Data and a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, speaking at the third annual Rice Data Science Conference. The Oct. 14-15 event was hosted by the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology and drew some 340 leaders from industry and academia.

Rice University computer scientist Lydia Kavraki has been named director of Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute, a 160-member institute that plays a key role in transforming Rice’s research landscape.

Zachery Cordero suggests we think of the new Additive Manufacturing, Performance and Tribology (AMPT) Center at Rice University as a “three-circle Venn diagram,” drawing from multiple disciplines, schools and departments in engineering and science.

“As we organized it, the center stands on three overlapping pillars. It’s more like a web than a straight line, and touches many industrial applications,” said Cordero, assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering (MSNE), and one of the center’s three founders.

Adding five ambulances to southwest neighborhoods served by the Houston Fire Department (HFD) Emergency Medical Services program would cut an average of 10 critical seconds off response times to calls for help, according to data models developed by recent Rice University graduates.

Rice bioengineers’ filter-paper models hint at how valves calcify.

Paper is at the heart of an experimental device developed by Rice University bioengineers to study heart disease.

A fold makes something more compact, as anyone who knows how to pack will attest. Folds also are important in the field of genetics. For example, we know genomic DNA, which is roughly 2 meters long, is folded so it can fit inside a cell nucleus that has a diameter of about 10 μm (micrometers).

Casually look at a cell’s genome, its collection of chromosomes, through a standard microscope. We seem to see a chaotic jumble of noodles. But, using much more powerful imaging techniques, we see how the genome folds into about 10,000 loops that do not become entangled with one another.

Naomi Halas, the Stanley C Moore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and founding director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice, has been named a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).

To be eligible for RSC fellowship, a nominee must have made “a substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science and medical science.”

Rice University bioengineer Rebekah Drezek has been appointed to serve on the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Drezek, a professor and associate chair of bioengineering and a professor of electrical and computer engineering, assumes her appointment immediately and will serve on the committee through 2022.

The White House has awarded Rice University bioengineer David Zhang a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the government’s highest honor for people who have recently begun their research careers.

Rice, Rutgers scientists test early proteins for potential as building blocks in synthetic biology.

Electrons are common currency in biological systems, supplying the power to live. Scientists at Rice and Rutgers universities have found a way to harness them through a very old metabolic transaction.

Rice University’s solar-powered approach for purifying salt water with sunlight and nanoparticles is even more efficient than its creators first believed.

NASA recently announced the Robonaut is fixed and nearly ready to go back to the International Space Station. Julia Badger, the autonomous systems technology discipline lead at NASA, spoke about her collaboration with Lydia Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science.

“We’re trying to be really specific about the types of tasks that we want the robot to be doing so that the robot can do those tasks without human intervention as much as possible,” Badger said in an IEEE Spectrum interview.

Antennas made of carbon nanotube films are just as efficient as copper for wireless applications, according to researchers at Rice University's Brown School of Engineering. They're also tougher, more flexible and can essentially be painted onto devices.

Rice bioengineers mix injectable scaffolds at room temperature to grow new tissue

On May 20 in Beijing’s historic Gong Zi Ting garden, Rice President David Leebron and Tsinghua University President Qiu Yong met to discuss collaboration between the two leading research universities and to ceremonially sign the establishment of the Rice-Tsinghua Joint Research Center for Human Capital and Sustainable Innovation.

Help for patients with sickle cell disease may soon come from gene editing to fix the mutation that causes the disease and boost the patient’s own protective fetal hemoglobin.

New research shows that using CRISPR-Cas9 and a corrective short DNA template to repair the sickle cell mutation in a patient’s hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) could be efficient and safe.

Rice University postdoctoral researcher Michael Stanford holds a flip-flop with a triboelectric nanogenerator, based on laser-induced graphene, attached to the heel.

Wearable devices that harvest energy from movement are not a new idea, but a material created at Rice University may make them more practical.

Standard snapshots from space don't quite show Earth in all its glory. There's so much more to see.

To reveal details impossible to observe with the naked eye, Rice University engineers are building a portable spectrometer that can be mounted on a small satellite, flown on an airplane or a drone or someday even held in the hand.

Technology could enable new medical, industrial, environmental biosensors

Rice University synthetic biologists have hacked bacterial sensing with a plug-and-play system that could be used to mix-and-match tens of thousands of sensory inputs and genetic outputs. The technology has wide-ranging implications for medical diagnostics, the study of deadly pathogens, environmental monitoring and more.

Rice-led project aims to transfer visual perceptions from the sighted to the blind

A Rice University-led team of neuroengineers is embarking on an ambitious four-year project to develop headset technology that can directly link the human brain and machines without the need for surgery. As a proof of concept, the team plans to transmit visual images perceived by one individual into the minds of blind patients.

A nanocomposite invented at Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering promises to be a superior high-temperature dielectric material for flexible electronics, energy storage and electric devices.

Researchers at Rice University and the University of Edinburgh have created HOUDINI, a neurosymbolic framework that allows lifelong learning of algorithmic tasks to transfer high-level concepts more effectively.

In a lifelong learning setting, models are trained on a series of tasks, and each training round is expected to benefit from previous rounds of learning.

With the hurricane season beginning June 1, Rice University experts are available to discuss storm-related topics with reporters.

Mixing two brittle materials to make something flexible defies common sense, but Rice University scientists have done just that to make a novel dielectric.

Dielectrics are the polarized insulators in batteries and other devices that separate positive and negative electrodes. Without them, there are no electronic devices.

Ten companies were recognized as “most promising” at the 2019 Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship‘s Startup Roundup May 6 at the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) in Houston.

More than 50 companies made two-and-a-half-minute business plan proposals to qualified investors and industry representatives attending the OTC, the largest offshore technology conference in the world. The following companies were deemed the most promising:

Rebecca Richards-Kortum, a Rice University bioengineering professor whose work has improved medical care for millions of newborn babies and saved lives in low-income countries, was recognized on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives May 1 for her recent induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Bioengineers have cleared a major hurdle on the path to 3D printing replacement organs with a breakthrough technique for bioprinting tissues.

The new innovation allows scientists to create exquisitely entangled vascular networks that mimic the body’s natural passageways for blood, air, lymph and other vital fluids.

Rice University will offer a unique online Master of Computer Science degree program for the first time in Fall 2019.

The program run by Rice's Department of Computer Science, ranked as one of the nation's top 20 by U.S. News & World Report, offers professionals a Rice degree that will enhance their current careers or help them pivot to new ones.

Rice, Texas A&M, UTHealth scientists discover coal-derived ‘dots’ are effective antioxidant Graphene quantum dots drawn from common coal may be the basis for an effective antioxidant for people who suffer traumatic brain injuries, strokes or heart attacks.

Their ability to quench oxidative stress after such injuries is the subject of a study by scientists at Rice University, the Texas A&M Health Science Center and the McGovern Medical School at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

Keith Cooper, the L. John and Ann H. Doerr Chair in Computational Engineering and professor in computer science, is one of nine faculty who received the 2019 George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching. The award honors top Rice instructors as determined by the votes of alumni who graduated within the past two, three and five years. Copper described what he believes is the most important thing students learn from him.

Engineering students use magnets, tracking sensor to drill bone, insert screws in just the right spot

Threading a needle is hard, but at least you can see it. Think about how challenging it must be to thread a screw through a rod inside a bone in someone’s leg.

Rice University seniors at the Brown School of Engineering set out to help doctors simplify the process of repairing fractured long bones in an arm or leg by inventing a mechanism that uses magnets to set things right.

During Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the world was focused on torrential, unprecedented rainfall and flooding that occurred in Houston, Texas. While no city could withstand four feet of rain in a few days, it was clear to all that Houston has a flooding problem. Bayous and creeks, man-made channels and flood control reservoirs simply couldn’t keep up with the stalled hurricane’s endless downpours on this coastal plain that is flat as a pancake. Land here drains slowly even on a good day.

Ongoing hydrology research at Rice University has the potential to increase Houston’s flood resilience with the use of high-performance computing (HPC). The research addresses inland flooding with a flood alert system that analyzes a small Houston watershed.

Five-year grant will support engineer’s work in ‘tribomechadynamics’ Defining Matthew Brake is as difficult as pronouncing the Rice University assistant professor’s field, a new branch of mechanical engineering he co-founded and named tribomechadynamics (TRY-boh-meck-uh-dy-nam-icks).

“I promise that the one hundredth time you say that, it just rolls off the tongue,” Brake quipped dryly in a recent Rice News interview about the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award that will help support his research in Rice’s Brown School of Engineering over the next five years.

Rice University researchers literally have a solution to deal with the glut of used lithium-ion batteries left behind by the ever-increasing demand for electric vehicles, cellphones and other electronic devices.

Rice bioengineers lead effort to print scaffolds to heal bone and cartilage

Bioscientists are moving closer to 3D-printed artificial tissues to help heal bone and cartilage typically damaged in sports-related injuries to knees, ankles and elbows.

Scientists at Rice University and the University of Maryland reported their first success at engineering scaffolds that replicate the physical characteristics of osteochondral tissue – basically, hard bone beneath a compressible layer of cartilage that appears as the smooth surface on the ends of long bones.

Andrew J Schaefer, the Noah Harding Chair and Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM) at Rice University, has been named a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE).

The Fellow award is the highest classification of membership in IISE, given in recognition of those who have made “significant, nationally recognized contributions to industrial engineering.”

Can music therapy slow the progression of degenerative brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and dementia while promoting well-being? A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will fund a new lab at Rice University that will explore this possible new inroad in the fight against such disorders.

Rice University bioengineer Maria Oden has been elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows.

Oden is a teaching professor of bioengineering, director of Rice's award-winning Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) and co-director of the Rice 360° Institute for Global Health.

If an antibiotic doesn’t kill all the bacteria that infects a patient, the surviving bugs may be particularly adept at timing their resurgence.

Theoretical scientists at Rice University have proposed a better way to understand how to prescribe antibiotics to kill every last bacterium or at least discourage them from developing resistance.

Anatoly Kolomeisky, a Rice professor of chemistry and chemical and biomolecular engineering, considers antibiotic resistance “the most serious problem of the 21st century.”

Although Hurricane Harvey’s waters have long since receded, it is only a matter of time before the next flooding event will strike the Bayou City. And when that storm comes, another of the area’s watersheds will have a flood alert system thanks to researchers from Rice University and funding from Rice’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.

Some 13 percent of the workforce in high-performance computing, the vanguard of the nation’s computational power, is female.

“We should be appalled and ashamed by that. Studies show that 80 percent of women in computing say they love their jobs, but 56 percent of them leave their organization at a mid-level point in their careers. There’s a lot of work to be done,” said Toni Collis, chair and co-founder of Women in High Performance Computing.

Klara Jelinkova, Rice’s vice president for international operations and information technology and chief information officer, received the President’s Leadership Award from advanced technology nonprofit Internet2 on March 6 at its annual global summit in Washington, D.C.

Jelinkova was recognized for exceptional leadership and service and enabling services and achievements beyond the scope of individual institutions that benefit the research and education communities, according to the organization.

Rice University integrated circuit (IC) designers are at Silicon Valley's premier chip-design conference to unveil technology that is 10 times more reliable than current methods of producing unclonable digital fingerprints for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Machine-learning techniques used by thousands of scientists to analyse data are producing results that are misleading and often completely wrong.

Dr. Genevera Allen from Rice University in Houston said that the increased use of such systems was contributing to a “crisis in science”.

She warned scientists that if they didn’t improve their techniques they would be wasting both time and money. Her research was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi is stepping up his game. After years of speaking out about the unintended ills of technology, he is marshaling support to directly address them through a campuswide Initiative on Technology, Culture and Society.

Kenji Takizawa, adjunct professor of mechanical engineering (MECH) at Rice University, will receive the JSPS Prize from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

A professor of MECH at Waseda University in Tokyo, Takizawa works at Rice with the research group of Tayfun Tezduyar, the James F. Barbour Professor of MECH and co-leader (with Takizawa) of the Team for Advanced Flow Simulation and Modeling.

The U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School may be the most elite training program in the world.

Béatrice Rivière, the Noah G Harding Chair and Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM) at Rice University, has been elected chair of the activity group on geosciences of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

SIAM is a nonprofit organization promoting applied mathematics and computational science for engineering, science and industry, with more than 14,500 members worldwide.

Rice University engineers have figured out how soil contaminated by heavy oil can not only be cleaned but made fertile again. How do they know it works? They grew lettuce.

Rice engineers Kyriacos Zygourakis and Pedro Alvarez and their colleagues have fine-tuned their method to remove petroleum contaminants from soil through the age-old process of pyrolysis. The technique gently heats soil while keeping oxygen out, which avoids the damage usually done to fertile soil when burning hydrocarbons cause temperature spikes.