15 professors receive FIF awards

15 professors receive FIF awards

FROM RICE NEWS STAFF REPORTS

What role does gender play in Mexican-American immigrants’ health?

Can we create inexpensive new devices for doctors to use in resource-poor environments?

Is there a genetic link to political behavior?

These are just some of the questions that Rice professors will be researching using the Faculty Initiatives Fund awards they recently received from Rice.

The 15 award winners are John Alford, April DeConick, Rebekah Drezek, Bridget Gorman, Benjamin Kamins, Mary Ellen Lane and Daniel Wagner, Clover Lee, Michael Lindsay, Caroline Masiello and Johnathan Silberg, Kirsten Ostherr, Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Qimiao Si and Douglas Natelson.

Their research proposals were chosen on the basis of how it would meet the goals of the Vision for the Second Century, said Neal Lane, the Malcolm Gillis University Professor, who headed the selection committee. Special emphasis was placed on institution building, including potential for future funding; collaboration, especially between institutions; and international cooperation, especially with Asia or Latin America.

John Alford

ALFORD

Alford’s project, ”The Biological Substrates of Political Behavior,” takes Aristotle’s observation that ”man is by nature a political animal” and aims to take this literally and assess it empirically. An interdisciplinary research team will look into the biology of political behavior to identify particular human genetic alleles that correlate with known political phenotypes.

Describing himself as ”extremely gratified” by the award, Alford said, ”Outside funding for connecting biology and political science is still largely centered within one area or the other, and convincing evidence of a genuine productive working relationship across these fields must be present for funding requests to be taken seriously within either area.”

”I am also very gratified by the faith that Rice has shown in me by backing what is clearly non-traditional work for a Political Scientist,” Alford added.

April DeConick

DeCONICK

DeConick, the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies, will use her funding to gather 20 of the world’s leading experts on early Christianity and Gnosticism at Rice for The Codex Judas Congress.

The two-day conference will examine the newly discovered ancient Christian papyrus book known as the Tchacos Codex or the Judas Codex. The book includes the Gospel of Judas, which was first made public in 2006.

“It is extremely important for scholars to come together as a community and share their insights and training, to examine this ‘new’ ancient book collectively. This congress will give us an opportunity to do so and move forward the study of early Christianity and Gnosticism,” DeConick said. “It is one of those events that puts Rice on the cutting edge of research in early Christianity.”

Rebekah Drezek

DREZEK

Drezek, associate professor in bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering, will evaluate an expansion of the Rice Teaching Grant Program by creating a parallel graduate arm of the Brown Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Grant competition. This pilot program will last one year to evaluate the number and quality of applications submitted.

The goal is to fund improvements in graduate level courses, just as teaching awards are used to update and improve undergraduate classes.

“This program would provide a direct, easy way to get funding for one-time projects that would in turn facilitate Rice competing for larger, longer term federally-funded curriculum grants,” said Drezek. “Teaching awards of a few thousand dollars can make a dramatic impact in how a class is taught and how students learn.”

Bridget Gorman

GORMAN

Gorman, professor of sociology, will study how gender shapes the Mexican-American immigrant health. She noted that researchers have for some time been exploring why the health of Mexican-Americans is so good, given the group’s relatively poor economic standing. This new project will provide a basis to obtain funding from the National Institutes of Health for a more expansive project addressing this same issue.

”We have a lot of suspicions,” Gorman said, including better diet, more supportive family networks, health selection in that only healthy persons choose to move to a new country. ”But there’s still a lot we don’t know — including whether these processes operate the same for men and women.”

Mary Ellen Lane and Daniel Wagner

LANE

Lane and Wagner, both assistant professors of biochemistry and cell biology, will use their funding to expand research currently conducted at the Rice Core Zebra Fish Facility and develop it into a self-supporting facility. Additional staff will give the facility the manpower to collaborate with other Texas Medical Center institutions and become a core facility for this promising research. This includes performing gene knock-down, over-expression and mis-expression experiments, as well as analysis of gene expression.

WAGNER

”The local biomedical community is very excited about using the zebra fish model to identify the role of particular genes in development and disease,” said Lane. ”Our zebra fish model is a particularly powerful system for investigating the in vivo functions of specific genes since it combines classic genetic and embryological methods with current molecular and in vivo imaging methods.”

Benjamin Kamins

KAMINS

Kamins, professor of bassoon, will help support a two-and-a-half day forum for students from the nation’s elite schools of music including Juilliard, Eastman, Curtis, Northwestern and the Shepherd School of Music. The forum will introduce students to a broad spectrum of career paths in music performance.

“Our music students still view traditional careers in orchestras, chamber music and solo playing as the primary models for success in the profession, while other performance models, such as teaching artists and composite careers, may be overlooked,” said Kamins. “We’ve recently developed curriculum designed as a response to these areas of concern within our school and the profession, and this forum will further strengthen our efforts to help young musicians.”

The forum, scheduled for October, is the first collective action being taken by premier music education institutions to create a national focus on new careers in classical music performance.

Clover Lee

LEE

Lee’s project will jump-start the Rice School of Architecture China Program (RSAC), which seeks to analyze the buildings rising from rapid industrialization and urbanization in China. Lee is an assistant professor of architecture.

This project, “Scale vs Size,” will study architectural projects built in China that range in size from 400-square-foot housing units to shopping centers of half-a-million square feet.

The FIF award will support the first two studio visits to China in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta, where the student teams will conduct a series of typological case studies and collect data. The studios will be conducted in collaboration with Hong Kong University. The students will return to Rice to work individually on design projects.

Michael Lindsay

LINDSAY

Lindsay’s project, ”The Social Dynamics of Leadership: Elite Power and American Society,” seeks to expand understanding of U.S. elites and the influence they have on society. Lindsay, assistant professor of sociology, will create a dataset of 600 elite interviews to examine five components of elite power.

”This is a tremendous boost for me,” Lindsay said of the award announcement. ”This award provides much-needed help at a critical stage in my project’s development. Early on, a creative new venture can be challenging, but with this support, I’ll be able to start my research and generate some preliminary results, which will be useful in attracting other funding sources to finish strong. As someone new to Rice, I appreciate the encouragement it provides.”

Caroline Masiello and Johnathan Silberg

MASIELLO

Masiello, assistant professor of earth science, and Silberg, assistant professor in biochemistry and cell biology, will create the prototype for an annual, competitive visiting fellows program that draws excellent young academics from, China, India and Latin America.

SILBERG

The program’s research will focus on an emerging area of interest at Rice; sustainable energy generation in the 21st century.

“Rice has a great collaborative culture and we intentionally designed the program to leverage this” said Masiello. “We have an offer out to our first fellow, a Latin American expert on greenhouse gas emissions from tropical agriculture, Dr. Tibisay Pérez. We’ll begin looking for our second fellow in the fall with the help of a search committee.”

Rice faculty will also play an important role in identifying international
candidates who they’d like to work with more closely, said Masiello. The fellowship will be advertised nationally and internationally.

Kirsten Ostherr

OSTHERR

Ostherr, assistant professor of English, will research and develop a curriculum for Rice undergraduates and Texas Medical Center medical students to explain the media developments in imaging technologies, and the advantages and disadvantages of those developments.

Ostherr’s project, Health Media Literacy, will build upon existing research and teaching interests of Rice faculty and will benefit from the expertise of colleagues involved in the collaboration with Baylor through the Center for Medical Ethics in Health Policy.

In her proposal, Ostherr asserts that in order to use visual media as effective educational tools, physicians and other health experts must learn to recognize the underlying interpretive paradigms that structure their “ways of seeing.”

Health Media Literacy will challenge the existing paradigm in media literacy training by examining the mode in which content is delivered.

Rebecca Richards-Kortum

RICHARDS-KORTUM

Richards-Kortum, the Stanley C. Moore Professor, will build an international consortium of researchers and educators devoted to developing point-of-care diagnostic technologies appropriate for use in developing countries.

“Our first project will create new diagnostic tools for malaria that are battery powered and don’t require replaceable parts,” said Richards-Kortum. “It really requires a new way of thinking about how you design devices and those aren’t normally constraints you’d consider. It is works out, the devices could have considerable benefits in this country too.”

Participating institutions include: Rice, Baylor College of Medicine, Howard University, MD Anderson Cancer Center, University of Arizona, University of Botswana, University of British Columbia, University of Ibadan, University of Malawi, The University of Texas-Austin and University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston.

Qimiao Si and Douglas Natelson

SI

Si, professor of physics and astronomy, and Natelson, associate professor of physics and astronomy and electrical and computer engineering, will use their funding to transform Rice into a major hub of research and education for magnetism and quantum materials.

NATELSON

The team will establish a distinguished speaker program, a short-term visitors program, develop new graduate courses and establish sister-institute collaborations with several leading Chinese organizations.

”The FIF award will enable the Rice Quantum Magnetism Laboratory to bring in both distinguished and up-and-coming scientists on a short-term basis, and to interact with our international partners,” said Si. ”Such activities will be enormously important as we move forward to realize our aspirations in this diverse area of materials research.”

Franz Brotzen, Jessica Johns Pool and Jessica Stark contributed to this story.