People, papers and presentations

Anthony Pinn, the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities, professor of religion and fellow at Rice’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, has received a grant from the Yale Divinity School’s Yale Center for Faith and Culture for comparative research in ethics and religion on the subject “Humanism and the Good Life.” As part of the grant, Pinn and two collaborators will prepare a paper to be delivered at Yale in 2018. Pinn and his collaborators will also partner on a larger book project related to humanism and the good life. Both projects are connected to the Institute for Humanist Studies, for which Pinn serves as director of research.

Two Rice graduate students, Elisabeth Bianco and Dayne Swearer, will attend the 67th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting June 25-29 in Germany. They will be among 400 young chemists from 76 countries invited to learn from and interact with the 31 Nobel laureates in attendance. Bianco works in the Rice labs of materials scientists Emilie Ringe and Pulickel Ajayan, where she uses high-vacuum deposition techniques to grow metastable crystalline phases and studies their structures. Swearer, a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow, works with Ringe and materials scientist Naomi Halas. He studies the synthesis and properties of multicomponent plasmonic nanostructures that interact with light and drive chemical reactions.