Richard Baraniuk, Richard Stong Win Duncan Award

Richard Baraniuk, Richard Stong Win Duncan Award

BY DANA BENSON
Rice News Staff

Teaching and research are vital functions of a Rice faculty member, and the

Charles W. Duncan Jr. Achievement Award for Outstanding Faculty

recognizes both.

This year’s recipients of the Duncan award are Richard Baraniuk, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Richard Stong, professor of mathematics. The honor is awarded to tenure-track or tenured members of the faculty with 10 or fewer years of experience for outstanding performance in scholarship and teaching. Recipients are determined by President Malcolm Gillis upon recommendations of the Deans’ Council.

Baraniuk, who came to Rice in 1993 as an assistant professor and was named an associate professor in 1996, commented on the teaching side of the award when he said, "It is rewarding to be at a place where excellent teaching is encouraged and expected. It makes for a much more positive atmosphere."

The most important part of teaching, Baraniuk said, is instilling in students a sense of the "big picture of the field and how it connects both to the other subjects they are studying and to the outside world."

Baraniuk’s research is in the area of digital signal processing, the theory of transforming signals, images and other data to extract, manipulate or transmit information.

Don Johnson, professor of electrical and computer engineering and chair of the department, wrote a letter of recommendation for Baraniuk stating, "I consider him a model Rice faculty member. He loves working with students, both graduate and undergraduate; he performs leading edge, innovative research spanning a broad range of applications; and he collaborates with faculty outside as well as inside the department."

Stong, who has a bachelor’s degree from Washington University and a doctorate from Harvard University, said he was "pleased and somewhat amazed by this honor."

Frank Jones, chair of the mathematics department, nominated Stong for the award. "Richard exemplifies the criteria this award seeks to honor: outstanding performance in both scholarship and teaching. In fact, I would say that to a great extent Richard unifies the qualities."

Stong is a mathematician with a diversity of knowledge and a genius for problem solving, Jones said. " He has the ability to impart an understanding of mathematics that wins praises from his students," Jones said.

Stong’s research interest is in the topology of four-dimensional manifolds, the goal of which is to understand the global structure of a four-dimensional space.