People, papers and presentations

Rice bioengineering graduate student Mohit Kumar Jolly is one of four students to win a place in this year’s iBiology Young Scientist Seminar Series, a competitive program to teach life sciences students to communicate their work to peers, the public and science enthusiasts. Jolly will train for a week in May in San Francisco with experts from the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. He is a student of Herbert Levine, the Hasselmann Professor of Bioengineering and director of the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics. Jolly also leads a workshop, Communicating Science to Non-Experts, for Rice’s Center for Written, Oral and Visual Communication.

Kuldeep Meel, a fourth-year graduate student in computer science, was awarded an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship for his work in constrained sampling and counting, two fundamental problems in artificial intelligence with applications to probabilistic reasoning and computer-aided verification.

Qimiao Si, the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Physics and Astronomy and director the Rice Center for Quantum Materials, has been invited by the newly launched Nature Reviews Materials, the first physical sciences journal in the Nature Reviews family, to co-author a comprehensive account of what physicists have learned since 2008 about the unique electromagnetic and material properties of iron-based superconductors. Si’s review article, “High Temperature Superconductivity in Iron Pnictides and Chalcogenides,” is available free online through April. Si also was invited to present a similar review at this month’s meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore.