Covid-19

Rice offers flu and COVID-19 vaccines over four days at RMC

Rice will provide on-site flu vaccinations to all faculty, staff and students. The vaccines will be offered in the Rice Memorial Center.

Rice offers flu shots over four clinics at RMC

Rice will provide no-cost flu vaccinations to all faculty, staff and retirees over four clinics on campus.

Lab Notes for Jan. 30, 2023

STAT’s Hopkins co-authors National Academies report. CAREER Awards keep coming. DOE funds NEWT desalination research.

Daylong wastewater samples yield surprises

Rice engineers find snapshots lead to bias in testing wastewater for antibiotic-resistant genes.

Baker Institute event: COVID-19’s impact on Muslim world

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on religiosity and practices in the Muslim world will be discussed in a Nov. 29 event at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Bacterial sensors send a jolt of electricity when triggered

Rice researchers develop programmable bacteria that sense contaminants and release an electronic signal in real time.

COVID-19 amplified hardship for many Harvey victims

A study shows the economic and mental health consequences on victims of Hurricane Harvey and COVID-19 were cumulative.

People, papers and presentations for Sept. 12, 2022

Rice statisticians Katherine Ensor and Loren Hopkins and civil and environmental engineer Lauren Stadler are co-authors of a commentary in Nature Medicine that issues an urgent call to scale up wastewater monitoring to detect early signs of disease.

CDC names Houston Health Department, Rice a wastewater epidemiology Center of Excellence

A system to track COVID-19 through Houston’s wastewater became the basis of an epidemiology center that has now earned special designation from the U.S. government and $1 million in its first year of federal funding.

SARS-Arena reveals hidden hooks in virus

SARS-Arena will help to find conserved parts in proteins from SARS-CoV-2 that could be a key for the development of wide-spectrum vaccines.

Schooling status during pandemic predicted parents’ resilience

A new study suggests parents accustomed to home schooling felt more resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic than those whose public-school children were suddenly housebound, especially when the latter parents did not meet recommendations for physical activity.

Houston birdwatcher turned to listening in the pandemic

A Rice geologist’s birding hobby branched out into citizen science during the pandemic.

COVID-19 variants can’t hide from Variabel

Rice computer scientists introduce Variabel, which uses sequencing data to identify “low-frequency variants” of SARS-CoV-2 in public data sets. The program has also been tested on data from patients with Ebola and norovirus.

Rice team’s mask strategy passes muster

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a team at Rice University went looking for and found a way to make standard surgical masks better at keeping out small airborne droplets that might contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Black and Hispanic communities bore disproportionate share of Texas’ early COVID-19 deaths

Texas state officials did not publish the race and ages of COVID-19 victims in early 2020, but a county-level statistical analysis spearheaded by Rice University undergraduates in collaboration with university faculty has found deaths statewide were disproportionately concentrated in Black and Hispanic communities.