Neal Lane earns Gillis professorship

Neal Lane earns Gillis professorship

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

Neal Lane has been appointed the Malcolm Gillis University Professor, Rice’s first named university professorship.

The appointment, made by President David Leebron upon the recommendation of Howard Hughes Provost Eugene Levy and with the approval of the Rice Board of Trustees, becomes effective July 1.

Neal Lane

To recognize the achievements of Gillis, 52 donors contributed the $4 million required to create professorship. The board then officially established the chair and presented it to Gillis as he prepared to step down as president of Rice last year.

The title of “university professor” is an appointment-at-large, enabling the faculty member to teach in any academic department and share expertise broadly across disciplines to foster greater intellectual pursuits at Rice.

“University Professor is the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member at Rice,” said Leebron. “Dr. Lane was the first to receive this honor when he returned to Rice in 2001 after serving as President Clinton’s science adviser, and the fact that he’s receiving a named university professorship in addition to the previous honor reflects the extraordinary high regard our trustees and administration have for him.”

Lane, who is also a senior fellow in science and technology at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and a professor of physics and astronomy, expressed gratitude for the special privilege of having a chair named after one of Rice’s presidents.

“I’m enormously humbled and honored by being named the first holder of this chair,” Lane said. “Rice has had exceptional presidents throughout its history, and Malcolm is very much a leader in that presidential sequence. I am very grateful to President Leebron and the Rice board for giving me this recognition.”

Lane praised Gillis’ accomplishments as president, noting that Gillis recognized Rice as a world university, focusing on international studies and developing important collaborations with such institutions as Imperial College London and International University Bremen in Germany.

Lane also noted that Gillis strengthened ties with institutions in the Texas Medical Center. “The future of medicine will be determined by advances in medical research, and the success of Rice, Baylor College of Medicine, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston will depend, in large measure, on the relationship we have with one another.” The medical center will benefit from the powerful knowledge and technologies being developed at Rice, particularly in bioengineering and nanotechnology, Lane said.

He credited Gillis with improving diversity at Rice, with recruiting and retaining outstanding faculty — including more women faculty — and with facilitating the university’s interdisciplinary development. “Malcolm made sure the deans were supportive of an environment where walls were as low as they could be between schools and departments,” Lane said.

When Lane was in Washington serving as director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) or as assistant to the president of the United States for science and technology, Gillis kept him informed of what was happening at Rice and reminded him that the Rice community was anxious to have him return after his service in government. “That was always comforting, especially during political skirmishes. When the opportunity did come to return to Rice, my wife, Joni, and I were enormously excited and pleased,” Lane said.

In addition to his activities on campus, Lane plans to stay involved with national activities by serving on boards and committees and giving lectures in forums that are important to Rice. He recently chaired the search committee to find a new director for the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which plays a prominent role in the future of high-energy physics in the United States. He serves on the board of University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which is of interest to Rice faculty studying atmospheric and space science. He also serves on the boards of the Houston Museum of Natural Science; Reasoning Mind, a nonprofit company that is developing online tools for math learning in K-12 schools; and Civilian R&D Foundation, which supports science and technology in the former U.S.S.R.

Lane chairs or serves on several committees of the National Academies; American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics; the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; the government of Taiwan; and Los Alamos National Laboratory. He chairs a new statewide task force to study the medically uninsured and under-insured of Texas.

Lane will also focus his interests in public policy that relates to science and technology through his work with Rice’s Baker Institute.

Lane earned his undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Oklahoma in the early 1960s. He joined the Rice faculty in 1966 as an assistant professor of physics and was named chair of the physics department in 1977. While departmental chair, Lane spent 1979 serving as director of the Division of Physics for the NSF. Lane left Rice in 1984 to become chancellor of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. In 1986, he returned to Rice as provost, a position he held until 1993, when President Clinton named Lane to lead the NSF, the federal agency that provides billions of dollars to support research and education in science (including social sciences), mathematics, engineering and technology. Lane also served ex officio on the National Science Board for six years.

In 1998 Lane became Clinton’s assistant for science and technology and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. In these roles, Lane provided the president with advice in all areas of science and technology and space policy, and he coordinated policy and programs across the federal government. He also co-chaired the president’s Committee of Advisers on Science and Technology Policy and managed the president’s National Science and Technology Council.

In 2001 Lane returned to Rice, where he had been an award-winning teacher and researcher in atomic and molecular physics for more than 27 years. During his earlier years at Rice, he was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and twice won the George R. Brown Prize for Superior Teaching.

Lane is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Women in Science. He also has studied as a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland, Department of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University, and has held several visiting fellowships at JILA (formerly the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) in Boulder, Colo., where he is an adjunct fellow.

In addition to Lane, the only other university professors at Rice are Gillis, the Ervin Kenneth Zingler Professor of Economics and professor of management; Robert F. Curl Jr., the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor of Chemistry; Kenneth W. Kennedy Jr. ’67, the Ann and John Doerr Professor in Computational Engineering in Computer Science and professor in electrical and computer engineering; and Richard Smalley, the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry and professor of physics.