Rice Lands $2.5 Million NSF Grant

CONTACT: Mike Cinelli

PHONE: (713)
831-4794

E-MAIL: mcinelli@rice.edu

ACADEMIC RECRUITMENT EFFORTS HELP RICE LAND $2.5 MILLION MINORITY
EDUCATION GRANT FROM NSF

Programs that encourage minority
students to pursue advanced degrees in science, math and engineering helped Rice
University earn a $2.5 million Minority Graduate Education (MGE) grant from the
National Science Foundation (NSF).

Rice is the only university in the Southwest, and one of only
eight institutions in the nation, to receive a portion of $20 million the NSF
earmarked for launching its MGE program, which is aimed at significantly
increasing the number of minority students receiving doctoral degrees in the
sciences, mathematics and engineering.

The eight universities will each receive awards of up to
$500,000 per year for five years depending on numbers of students served and
factors related to project design.

In its application to the NSF, Rice highlighted the success of
its Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM) department to recruit and
retain minority students in graduate degree programs. Principles learned in CAAM
will provide a strong foundation for the university’s MGE effort. In addition,
Rice proposes an experiment to develop and implement admissions criteria that
more effectively predict success in graduate research programs and subsequent
career positions.

“For many years, Texas was adversely affected by a drain of
some of our best minority talent to graduate programs on the East and West
coasts,” said Rice President Malcolm Gillis. “Having once left, these
individuals tended strongly not to return to Texas. Rice and other universities
in Texas have sought to counter this ‘brain drain’ through resourceful
recruiting of budding minority scientists and engineers.

“This new NSF grant will materially strengthen our ability to
attract and retain these valuable individuals.”

The Rice MGE project will operate under the direction of a
leadership team which includes Provost David Auston; Kathleen Matthews, dean of
the Wiess School of Natural Sciences; Sidney Burrus, dean of the George R. Brown
School of Engineering; Jordan Konisky, vice provost; and Professor Richard
Tapia, a member of the National Science Board.

Tapia’s outreach programs, funded through the NSF’s Center for
Research on Parallel Computation, have been honored for their
successes.

“We are proud that we have won this highly competitive award
from the NSF, largely based on the things we have done here at Rice to address
inclusiveness,” Tapia said. “We are very much aware at the national level that
under&endash;representation of minorities in these disciplines is of
critical importance and endangers the health of the nation.”

The 1996 Hopwood case in Texas, which removed the use of race
as a determining factor in admissions and financial aid decisions, presented
another challenge that Rice has worked through, Tapia added.

“We have acknowledged that Hopwood presented us with
constraints in which we had to work, but we still have been successful,” he
said. “Now we are prepared to implement a program that universities around the
nation can emulate.”

Included in the Rice MGE program is the University of
Wisconsin-Madison.

“UW-Madison will not only help us evaluate components of our
program, but will establish programs based on the Rice model to its College of
Engineering, which has already been very active in promoting and supporting
programs intended to increase the number of minority graduate programs on the
Madison campus,” said Konisky.

The seven other universities receiving MGE grants are the
Georgia Institute of Technology, Howard University, The University of Alabama at
Birmingham, the University of Florida, the University of Missouri at Columbia,
the University of Michigan, and the University of Puerto Rico at Rio
Piedras.

Rice University is a leading American research
university–small, private and highly selective–distinguished by its superior
teaching, commitment to undergraduate education, outstanding graduate and
professional programs, residential college system, collaborative and
interdisciplinary culture, and global perspective.

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