Editor’s Note: Brain Power

By Sarah Rufca Nielsen

When we started imagining a feature about studying the brain at Rice, we ran into a problem: How can you separate anything studied at Rice from the brain?

Architects figuring out how spaces shape our mood? That’s definitely about the brain. Education researchers looking at what classroom factors support learning? Extremely brain. What about computer classes about UX? Economists discussing consumer behavior? Artists exploring color theory?

You get the gist. The brain is everywhere.

That lens is clearly visible in our cover story, where we somehow drilled down to a handful of the most interesting and most important questions about the brain being explored by scholars across campus, from learning to predict which brain cells are at risk of Alzheimer’s to what linguists are learning from AI about how we process language.

This interdisciplinary approach also mirrors the structure of the new Rice Brain Institute, where researchers across engineering, natural sciences and social sciences are studying the brain from every angle. At the Baker Institute’s Neuro-Policy Program, those connections extend beyond the lab, linking brain science to the systems that shape how people live and make decisions. And through Rice collaborations like the Global Brain Economy Initiative — launched earlier this year at Davos by Rice and UTMB — that work is scaling outward, connecting research to broader questions of public health, economic growth and quality of life.

Across this issue, Rice research shows up in ways that have nothing to do with staying in a single discipline, and everything to do with what happens when ideas are put to use.

For example, students producing documentaries about potential wrongful convictions are poring over hundreds of pages of case files, going beyond coursework to contribute to real cases that could change lives. Scientists at Rice’s SSPEED Center are building data models to prevent future flooding disasters in the Texas Hill Country. One student’s deep dive into a museum acquisition has become an exhibition tracing Houston’s 1970s art scene, while another’s quest to recreate a 170-year-old Thomas Edison experiment could lead to more affordable methods of producing graphene.

These stories span disciplines, but they share a common pattern. Ideas move — from one field into another, from theory into practice, from campus into the world. They begin to matter in ways that are harder to measure, but easier to recognize. The throughline is not just inquiry, but impact — the recognition that understanding how we think, learn and behave carries its greatest weight when it shapes the world around us.

Which is to say: The brain may be everywhere, but at Rice, so is what we do with it.

From the Spring 2026 issue of Rice Magazine