Smalley-Curl hosts 40th annual colloquium to ‘encapsulate Rice’s interdisciplinary drive’
Rice University’s Smalley-Curl Institute recently hosted its 40th annual summer colloquium. Participants, who ranged from high school students presenting their first summer research experience to postdoctoral fellows drawing on years of experience, shared their findings in a wide variety of STEM fields.
“Cross-disciplinary meetings are incredibly important for our students and trainees,” said David Sholl, executive vice president for research, who gave a talk on reproducibility across different fields. “Talking to people outside of one’s field opens the door to unexpected and insightful questions, potentially leading to productive new collaborations.”
Over 260 people registered for the event, which included 84 posters presented by undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students, as well as numerous talks given by graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty.
“This event has come to encapsulate Rice’s interdisciplinary drive,” said Alesandro Alabastri, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and the colloquium’s program chair. “During our day-to-day activity in research, we interact mostly within our research groups and with close collaborators. Here, everybody gathers, and the students really have an opportunity to communicate their work to a broad audience.”
In the busy poster sessions, students could be answering detailed technical questions to an experienced professor one minute then describing their work in general terms to an undergraduate student studying in an entirely different field.
“The people who come and ask you questions are just as curious about your research as you are about sharing it with them,” said Dyana De Leon, a rising senior at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who presented her summer research project completed in the lab of Rice engineer Karen Lozano. “I’ve been able to talk to people from industry to academia and share my research.”
“I was so amazed to see this vibrant environment and hear the research seminars. All the posters are so amazing,” said Gyu-Boong Jo, a professor in physics and astronomy at Rice who was attending his first Smalley-Curl colloquium. “It’s really important to present what you’ve done to nonspecialists and make sure you make an impact to the whole community.”
“I’m just here having fun,” said Horia Sandu, a rising senior at Glenda Dawson High School who presented at the event. “That’s the thing. It’s actually really fun to be here. I like talking to people, and I like learning about other people’s research. I’m learning so many new things very quickly.”