The Year in Research

NEST360 is an international partnership of engineers, doctors and global health experts that aims to “end preventable newborn deaths in African hospitals.” It is founded and co-directed by Rice bioengineers Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Maria Oden. Their mission centers around the creation and implementation of affordable technologies for newborn care in low-resource settings.



In 2022, Rice bioscientists James Chappell and Jonathan “Joff” Silberg won a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the Kleberg Foundation to create RNA programs that will act as “genetically encoded antibiotics” selected for pathogen-specific biomarkers. “RNA is a very versatile molecule in terms of functionality,” Chappell says.

Chemical and biomolecular engineer Matteo Pasquali directs the Carbon Hub, a research partnership that aims to “advance technology that provides clean hydrogen energy and valuable widespread carbon materials by fundamentally changing the way the world uses fossil hydrocarbons.”

In 2022, bioengineer Gang Bao won a 3-year, $1 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute to develop a strategy that adds magnetic nanoparticles and free radical generation to existing immune checkpoint blockade therapy to kill cancer cells.



In 2022, Richard Baraniuk, the C. Sidney Burrus Professor at Rice and a professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science, was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. The election recognized his “development and broad dissemination of open educational resources and ... foundational contributions to compressive sensing.”

More recently, bioengineer Lydia Kavraki and President Reginald DesRoches — a highly regarded civil and environmental engineer — were both elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Kavraki works in artificial intelligence with an emphasis on applications in robotics and biomedicine. DesRoches has focused on resilient infrastructure design from an interdisciplinary standpoint. 



Moshe Vardi, one of the world’s leading computer scientists, was elected a Foreign Member of the United Kingdom’s Royal Society, founded in 1660 and the oldest continuously existing scientific academy in the world. Vardi was recognized for his “seminal contributions to the development of logic as a unifying foundational framework and a tool for modeling computational systems.”


A team led by chemical and biomolecular engineer Rafael Verduzco ’01 won a four-year, $2 million grant to develop bioelectric sensors that can analyze wastewater and provide immediate notice about the presence of viruses like the one that causes COVID-19. Co-principal investigators are Rice bioscientists Jonathan “Joff” Silberg and Caroline Ajo-Franklin.

Psychologist Bryan Denny won funding for a five-year study to design and test smartphone-delivered interventions to help caregivers regulate their emotions, manage their stress levels and maintain their overall health while supporting family members with dementia.

Bioengineer Jerzy Szablowski received a Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to identify drugs that could quickly boost the human body’s resilience when faced with extreme cold.

Geophysicist Jonathan Ajo-Franklin was tapped for two projects totaling over $6 million, both involving the development and deployment of fiber optic sensors underground. One project will provide data to guide the development of geothermal wells; the other will detect and evaluate small faults that could allow the leakage of CO2 from storage sites.

Planetary scientist Kirsten Siebach, a mission specialist on NASA’s Curiosity rover team, co-authored research about the surprising detection of a mineral called tridymite at the bottom of a former lake on Mars. These findings suggest that 3 or 4 billion years ago, a volcano erupted explosively under the lake — a more evolved form of volcanism than Mars was previously thought to possess.

Mathematician Jo Nelson won a five-year grant for $435,000 to support her research into mathematical structures which describe the movements of physical systems such as springs, planets and waves. “My field has applications, for example, to low-energy space travel — finding trajectories for satellites that may not be time-efficient but are energy-efficient,” Nelson says.

Mechanical engineer Daniel Preston received a grant to study textile-based wearable robots. Some 85 million adults in the U.S. who live with physical and functional limitations could benefit from his work.

Biomolecular engineer Xue “Sherry” Gao received a grant to create versatile toolkits for controlling gene expression. The ability to turn specific genes on or off at precise times and places in the body would open new doors for studying gene functions and treating disease. Gao is aiming for tools that grant that level of control and build in safety features to prevent inappropriate gene expression.

Kiese Laymon, acclaimed writer and creative writing professor, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the honor popularly known as the “genius grant.” He is the author of the novel “Long Division,” the essay collection “How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America,” and the bestselling “Heavy: An American Memoir.”

Civil and environmental engineer Jamie Padgett is one of five U.S. researchers to be named a fellow in a National Science Foundation program called Boosting Research Ideas for Transformative and Equitable Advances in Engineering. Padgett will receive a five-year, $1 million grant to “rethink the way we approach disaster resilience modeling, particularly as it pertains to the performance of critical infrastructure in communities,” she says.

Tomás Q. Morin, poet and assistant professor of creative writing at Rice, won a Guggenheim Fellowship, an honor bestowed annually by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation upon a slate of the world’s top scholars, artists, writers and scientists. He is the author of several poetry collections, including “Machete,” and the memoir “Let Me Count the Ways.”

Anthropologist Cymene Howe has been named a Berlin Prize Fellow by the American Academy in Berlin. During the semester-long residence in Berlin, she will work with policy experts, scientists and climate modelers on “hydrological globalization,” which is the process by which melting glaciers and ice sheets in the Arctic raise sea levels for coastal cities worldwide.

As just one example, civil and environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez, who directs the Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment, was cited more than 32,000 times for his published research.