People, papers and presentations

Rafael Verduzco, the Louis Owen Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, received the 2015 Most Promising Engineer/Scientist Award at the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference’s 27th annual Great Minds in STEM Conference Oct. 14-18 in Pasadena, Calif. The award recognized his service as a “STEM role model and involvement with the Hispanic community nationally and/or internationally.” Verduzco has worked in the student-mentoring program begun by Richard Tapia, University Professor and the Maxfield-Oshman Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics, and also serves as faculty mentor for both Rice’s chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and the Rice Emerging Scholars Program.

Rice undergraduates Lucrecia Aguilar, Melissa Cespedes, Kira Clingen, Kevin Czachura, Brian Dang, Elliot Ghorayeb, Jodie Nghiem, Lizzy Sartain, Charlene Thomas and Dixita Viswanath presented their research, “Biodiversity of Urban Pocket Prairies,” Nov. 13 at the Southern Plains and Prairie Conference at the Houston Zoo. The semester-long research project, which was completed as part of BioSciences Lecturer Cassidy Johnson‘s Conservation Biology Lab course EBIO 324, investigated plant and pollinator diversity at three urban prairie sites: the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Prairie, the Whistlestop Prairie at Hermann Park and the Harris Gully natural area on Rice’s campus.

Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, was recently named executive director of the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers, which represents more than 225 university entrepreneurship programs. Founded in 1996, the consortium is now housed at Rice.