Fred Oswald, a professor of psychological sciences, is one of 27 experts recently appointed to the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, which will advise President Joe Biden and the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office.
Matthew McCary, an assistant professor of biosciences who joined Rice in 2021, has been elected as an early career fellow of the Ecological Society of America. McCary was elected “for his work examining how global change affects the structure of below- and above-ground food webs and their ecosystem function using experiments, observational studies, meta-analyses and mathematical models.” ESA noted McCary “is a leader in community and ecosystem ecology and a champion of diversity in ecology.” The society chooses early career fellows who are within eight years of earning a Ph.D. and show promise for making contributions to ecological knowledge. The fellowship is for five years, and McCary will be recognized at the society’s annual meeting this August in Montreal.
NASA has extended a multi-institution grant to advance a computer model that will enhance the ability to understand geomagnetic storms and forecast potentially damaging space weather. The Rice team led by space plasma physicist Frank Toffoletto is part of a NASA science center established two years ago to develop the Multiscale Atmosphere-Geospace Environment model that couples the magnetosphere, ionosphere and upper and lower atmospheres into the first global model of geospace. The new grant extends the Center for Geospace Storms based at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory for five years.
