People, papers and presentations

Darrius Hill, a doctoral candidate in the Religious Studies Department, was awarded a Louisville Institute Dissertation Fellowship. Based at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary in Louisville, Ky., the institute annually awards $22,000 fellowships to “support the final year of dissertation writing for outstanding Ph.D. or Th.D. students whose research will advance American religious and theological scholarship.” Hill’s dissertation topic is “Toward a Theory of Reciprocity: Constructing a Hermeneutic of Relationality for Black Theological Discourse.”

A paper by four members of Rice’s Center for Digital Learning and Scholarship (RDLS) has won the Outstanding Publication Award in Program Evaluation presented at this year’s American Educational Research Association annual meeting in Philadelphia in April. The paper, “Results from Years One and Two of the STEMscopes Evaluation,” analyzed the implementation and early impact of Rice’s STEMscopes, an online science curriculum program for K-12 students. The paper’s authors are Virginia Snodgrass Rangel, associate director for research; Elizabeth Bell, research associate; Carlos Monroy, data scientist; and Reid Whitaker, RDLS executive director.