Rice University to Honor 1997 Distinguished Alums

CONTACT: Michael Cinelli
PHONE:
(713) 831-4794
EMAIL: mincelli@rice.edu

RICE UNIVERSITY TO HONOR 1997 DISTINGUISHED ALUMS
J. Evans Attwell to Receive Association’s Gold Medal Award at Annual
Dinner

The Association of Rice Alumni will hold its annual
awards dinner, paying tribute to a group of alumni whose professional or
volunteer activities reflect and forward the ideals of the university, on
Saturday, May 10, starting at 6:30 p.m. at the Doubletree Post Oak Hotel.

For 1997, J. Evans Attwell ’53 was selected to receive the association’s Gold
Medal award, while Nancy Stooksberry Cole ’64, Robert F. Curl ’54, L. John Doerr
’73, and William S. Mackey Jr. ’43 have been named Rice Distinguished Alumni.

During the last dozen years, Attwell helped Rice choose a president and steer
a course for the 21st century. He served on the university’s board of governors
from 1982 to 1996. He was a member of the search committee that selected Malcolm
Gillis as university president after former Rice president George Rupp accepted
the president’s post at Columbia University. Attwell, former managing partner of
Houston law firm Vinson and Elkins, also was awarded the coveted Owl Club Award
in 1990. The award, established in 1984, is given every other year and the
presentation ceremony has raised more than $1.25 million for Rice athletics.

Attwell, who lived in Baker College while a student, is a member of the
William Marsh Rice Society and was a major individual donor during Rice’s
record-breaking 1989-90 private-giving campaign. Individual gifts exceeded $13
million that year, a record for the school.

This year’s Rice Distinguished Alumni include a Nobel Prize recipient, the
president of the country’s largest educational testing system, a venture
capitalist in the high tech industry, and a retired businessman and university
professor.

Robert F. Curl was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in October 1996 for
his work discovering fullerenes, a new class of carbon molecules, including
“buckyballs.” Curl, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1954,
shared the honor with fellow Rice chemist Richard E. Smalley and Harold W. Kroto
of the University of Sussex, England.

Nancy Stooksberry Cole’s personal crusade is to battle bias in standardized
tests and to help improve the country’s educational system. As president of the
largest private educational testing company in the world, she’s in an uncommonly
good position to do battle. Cole, who earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology
in 1964, took over the top spot at Educational Testing Service, or ETS, in 1994.
The ETS is perhaps best known for administering the Scholastic Assessment Test,
or SAT, to more than 1.8 million high school students each year.

Think of L. John Doerr as venture capital’s Bill Gates. It’s how his peers
describe the Rice grad, one of the country’s most successful