The Big Read

Spring 2024
By Lynn Gosnell
 

When we began planning our 2024 research issue, we could not have imagined the ambitious and beautiful issue you hold in your hands. Coming in at a record-breaking 88 pages, Rice Magazine’s spring issue is our most comprehensive, timely and engaging (we hope!) research roundup to date. Here are a few highlights.

Fittingly, we begin with a portrait of leadership. We invited the heads of Rice’s research institutes to join us in the stately Gibbs Convocation Center to be photographed for this issue’s cover. It was a rare and rewarding opportunity to convene lauded scholars who are seeking solutions to research challenges in science, the humanities, engineering, religion, public health, social policy and, especially, the environment. Each of the institutes has a full page in our special “Meet the Institutes” feature. But first, we share a story about Rice’s success in growing research opportunities for undergraduates, then reveal a few of Rice’s unique research and creative spaces — including a special illustration of the brand-new Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering and Science. 

Elsewhere in our features, we explore Rice’s AI research portfolio and the debates swirling around the use of generative AI in the classroom. In a fascinating feature about the April 8 total eclipse, we introduce readers to Citizen CATE — a citizen science project to gather images of the sun’s corona, led by Rice space physicist Pat Reiff ’74, ’75. With the help of historians and archivists from the Woodson Research Center, we created a historical timeline of Rice’s research through the years — look back at where we’ve been! Then, for a peek at the astonishing variety of research projects happening within each of Rice’s academic schools, check out our “research roundup” of news briefs, Q&As, faculty publications and milestones. Finally, to round out the issue, we feature profiles of accomplished alumni, including a Nobel Prize winner, an innovative entrepreneur and a beloved architect. 

Capturing the dynamic story of research at Rice is both a challenge and a pleasure — in any number of pages or pixels. We hope you come away with a new appreciation for research as a catalyst for curiosity, learning and discovery, across campus and far beyond. 

Curious to know who’s who in Rice research? We named over 140 researchers in this issue. Go to magazine.rice.edu/titles for the complete list.