Chris Stipes

Rice cracks top 10 for first time on Forbes’ top colleges list

This achievement marks the first time the university has landed in a top 10 spot on the list.

New Rice research center takes on challenge to break down, replace ‘forever chemicals’

Rice inaugurated a new research center dedicated to ‘forever chemicals’ on Wednesday during a visit to campus by representatives of the United States Army Engineer Research and Development Center.

‘Brilliant and brave’: Rice remembers, mourns student Andrea Rodriguez Avila

The Rice community is mourning the tragic, violent loss of Andrea Rodriguez Avila, a Jones College junior remembered as a bright and dedicated young scholar with a promising future.

Interdisciplinary Rice graduate program earns $3M NSF grant

A research traineeship program developed by a team of Rice faculty led by Junichiro Kono has received an award of $3 million over five years from the National Science Foundation to equip a new generation of scientists and engineers with the skills needed to serve as leaders in quantum technology innovation.

Annual Rice event explores AI innovation in health care

Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute is hosting the third annual AI in Health Conference Sept. 9-12 with themes this year including foundation models in medicine, LLM applications, AI in neuroscience and neurotechnology, digital twins in health care and patient engagement and equity in health AI.

OpenStax partners with Google’s Gemini Apps

OpenStax, the world’s largest nonprofit publisher of open educational resources (OER) based at Rice, announces a partnership with Google to expand access to relevant, trustworthy educational content. This partnership will enable the OpenStax library of more than 70 openly licensed, peer-reviewed textbooks to be discovered, searched and referenced within Google Gemini. These materials will be available to Gemini users 18 and older in the United States starting in August 2024. 

Thermochromic material could make indoor temperature control more energy-efficient

Rice engineers have developed a smart material that could significantly enhance energy efficiency for indoor space cooling. The new thermochromic polymer blend has an estimated lifespan of 60 years and is lower cost than existing thermochromics.

Rice’s Baker Institute Center for Energy Studies unveils first annual Energy Insights

Texas’ energy reliability and the future of global energy supply chains are just a few of the topics addressed in the first annual Energy Insights – a collection of articles from fellows and scholars at the Center for Energy Studies (CES) from Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy that provides expert data and analysis on some of the most pressing policy issues affecting national and global energy markets.

Activate fellows ‘embody the best of Rice entrepreneurship’

Four Rice fellows and three Rice-affiliated startup ventures were selected to be a part of the inaugural Houston cohort of The Activate Fellowship for 2024. Activate is widely recognized as one of the flagship entrepreneurship programs that support startups focused on deep tech, and these four founders are the only representatives of Texas academia in the cohort.

New Rice center to address impact of climate change on coastal economic powerhouses

Globally, 800 million people living in hundreds of urban areas will face grave social and economic risks from sea level rise and routine coastal flooding by 2050.

Rice bioengineers develop lotus leaf-inspired system to advance study of cancer cell clusters

Rice bioengineers have harnessed the lotus effect to develop a system for culturing cancer cell clusters that can shed light on hard-to-study tumor properties. The new zinc oxide-based culturing surface mimics the lotus leaf surface structure, providing a highly tunable platform for the high-throughput generation of three-dimensional nanoscale tumor models.

Rice Kinder Institute survey: More than 75% of HISD residents support bond, majority want focus on campus safety

More than 75% of in-district respondents signaled their support for a bond that does not result in a tax increase.

Sanjoy Paul appointed executive director of the Rice Nexus, aims to ‘shape the future of technology’

Rice has appointed Sanjoy Paul as executive director of the Rice Nexus, the university’s premier innovation factory in the Ion that will offer state-of-the-art facilities for prototyping, testing and launching new ventures by Rice faculty and students.

ChatGPT could help people with creativity in everyday tasks, study says

ChatGPT, the generative artificial intelligence technology developed by OpenAI, could help humans with daily, creative tasks — even tasks typically thought to require the human ability to “read between the lines,” according to new research by the University of Houston and Rice University. Its capability has proven to be superior compared to traditional Google search or even human brainstorming without any technical assistance, the study authors argue.

Rice Innovation awards second cycle of One Small Step Grants

Rice Innovation announced its two most recent awardees of the One Small Step Grant , marking a significant milestone in accelerating the transition from lab to market for these Rice-developed technologies. Launched in September 2023, the grant aims to support lab-stage projects across campus, providing crucial capital for projects to spin out of the university and successfully attract investment from angel investors and venture capital.