Public school enrollments will continue to decline unless they become customer-focused, Rice study suggests
February 28, 2024
In September 2023, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona issued a warning call stating “Public schools are approaching a ‘make or break moment.’” This week, several North Texas schools announced potential school closures and staff position eliminations. Nationally, public schools lost over 1.2 million students to private and charter schools over the first two school years of the COVID-19 pandemic with Texas witnessing a 2.2% decline.
Rice’s Office of Innovation awards inaugural One Small Step Grants
February 27, 2024
The Office of Innovation at Rice announced four awardees of the inaugural One Small Step Grants, marking a significant milestone in accelerating the transition from lab to market for Rice-developed technologies. Launched in September 2023 the grant aims to support lab-stage projects across Rice, providing crucial capital for projects to spin out of the university and successfully attract investment from angel investors and venture capital.
Live from the brain: Visual cues inform decision to cooperate
February 14, 2024
By combining behavioral and wireless eye tracking and neural monitoring, a team of Rice scientists and collaborators studied how pairs of freely moving macaques interacting in a naturalistic setting use visual cues to guide complex, cooperative behavior.
New Rice report offers options to improve ERCOT reliability
February 7, 2024
The reliability of electricity service in ERCOT has come under increased scrutiny since Winter Storm Uri in February 2021. Increasing demand will create issues, but there are several available “insurance” actions that will likely need to be called upon to ensure long-term reliability, according to a new report from Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Rice’s Santiago Segarra wins NSF CAREER Award
February 7, 2024
Rice’s Santiago Segarra has won an NSF CAREER Award for his research on leveraging the structural properties of real-world data in order to boost AI effectiveness and utility.