Engineers can save the world
Benefactors John and Ann Doerr return to inaugurate Rice Center for Engineering Leadership

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

The Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL) will hold an inaugural celebration at the George R. Brown School for Engineering Nov. 5 with a daylong event featuring its benefactors, Rice alumni John and Ann Doerr.

The center was established two years ago as a means to transform the way engineers are educated. RCEL aims to help them become leaders capable of tackling complex problems that require both technological innovation and an understanding of the process of change.

The Doerrs, whose Beneficus Foundation made a $15 million gift for the center to Rice’s Centennial Campaign, will join faculty, staff and students on campus. They will meet with RCEL allies, including Rice’s Beyond Traditional Borders and Learning Machines, have lunch with junior faculty and take part in a workshop with students on the “big problems” the center encourages Rice students to address.

John Doerr ’73, a leading venture capitalist and early champion of Google and Amazon, among other companies, will headline the RCEL inauguration with a public talk (RSVP requested) at Duncan Hall’s McMurtry Auditorium at 4 p.m. Rice President David Leebron will introduce Doerr, and a reception will follow the event. (Tune in to the live webcast here.)

Doerr’s interests as an entrepreneur and philanthropist extend to innovative green technology, urban public education, fighting “stupid” poverty and the advancement of women as leaders.

Ann Doerr ’75, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at Rice, is an environmental activist and a trustee of the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund.

Mark Embree, Rice’s John and Ann Doerr Professor and a professor of computational and applied mathematics, hit the ground running when he was appointed RCEL director. In May he led a group of students on a road trip to establish connections with other university-based engineering leadership innovators.

The trip inspired a new program in which junior students will develop leadership skills by shaping semesterlong design projects for Rice freshmen.

Embree said the initiative, to debut in the spring, will “cultivate a culture in which engineering students hunger to solve our world’s most pressing problems. We must complement Rice’s excellent technical education with a greater emphasis on creative design and a desire to understand all aspects of a problem beyond disciplinary boundaries. We aim to make our students less comfortable.”

With the same goal, Embree organized a fall seminar called “Short Talks on Big Problems,” in which students debate looming international challenges and discuss potential engineering solutions. He said the most frequent topics — energy, water, education and the role of government — would form the core of the students’ workshop with the Doerrs.

RCEL will oversee Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK), the wildly successful design workshop opened at a former campus kitchen two years ago. The OEDK gives Rice students the space and tools to build projects for classes, clubs and more. Embree hoped the new initiatives would bring younger students into the mix.

Graduate students form an important component of RCEL, Embree said. ”Many of our grad students recognize that their rarefied skills will place them in positions of technical leadership and they seek opportunities for more intentional formation,” he said. RCEL graduate advisers have developed a popular program of minicourses to provide their peers with succinct preparation in targeted areas. Topics have ranged from presentation skills and data visualization to wavelets, MATLAB and microscopy. Courses on website design, entrepreneurship and surveying are in the works. RCEL also plans a visiting scholar program to bring deep thinkers about engineering leadership to Rice.

Embree said that while RCEL’s focus is on engineering, collaborators from all of Rice’s schools are welcome. The RCEL advisory board includes representatives from across campus, including the School of Architecture, the Rice Alliance for Entrepreneurship and Technology, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and the School of Humanities.

“I hope the center gets some of the most tuned-in student minds on campus to collide and spark off one another,” he said.

Embree also wants the engineering school’s best students — “the 4.2 students, who have more A-plusses than As” — to reach a little higher. “They make excellent grades, but sometimes that comes at a cost,” he said. “They can miss the kinds of formative experiences that will make them realize, ‘OK, it’s not about doing a sterling job on this problem set for its own sake, it’s about how my life is going to alter this world. What experiences will prepare me for a career of real significance?'”