People, papers and presentations

Lisa Basgall, director of Rice Emergency Medical Services (REMS) and an adjunct lecturer in the Kinesiology Department, and Samantha Leonard, REMS’ senior lieutenant and a Wiess College senior, delivered a talk on undergraduate EMS research at the National Collegiate EMS Conference in Baltimore Feb. 25. Rice alumnus Cameron Decker, REMS’ medical director, presented a talk titled “‘Just Syncope,’ or Is Death Knocking?”

Two Rice University kinesiology students were honored for posters and abstracts presented at the Texas chapter of the American College of Sports Medicine’s annual meeting this month in Waco, Texas. Newsha Nikzad, a Wiess College sophomore, won the Major of the Year award, which recognizes an outstanding undergraduate student in exercise science from each degree-granting institution in Texas; and a poster by Akash Gupta, a Sid Richardson College junior, on calf muscle strain injuries was named the Best Clinical Teaching Abstract.

Rafael Salaberry, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Humanities, professor of Spanish and director of the Center for Languages and Intercultural Communication, co-presented “Diffusing the Innovation of Interactional Competence Among Teachers: A Case Study” at the Interactional Competences and Practices in a Second Language (ICOP-L2) Conference at the Université de Neuchâtel in Switzerland Jan. 20. He also presented “Bridging Research and Practice in Second Language Teacher Education” with Maryam Emami and Luziris Pineda Turi, both associate directors and program lecturers of the Center for Languages and Intercultural Communications, at the National Heritage Language Resources Center’s 10th International Conference on Language Teacher Education, “Language Teacher Education for a World on the Move: Meeting the Needs of Diverse Student Populations,” at UCLA Feb. 4.