People, Papers and Presentations

Several Rice faculty members played important roles at the annual joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America in San Antonio:

Liliana Borcea, associate professor of computational and applied mathematics, presented “Adaptive Coherent Interferometric Imaging in Cluttered Media.” She is co-author of “Adaptive Coherent Interferometric Imaging,” which was also presented.

Steven Cox, professor of computational and applied mathematics, presented a paper, “Inferring Calcium Channel Distribution from Calcium Fluorescence Data,” which he co-wrote with graduate student Jane Hartsfield.

Cox and Bradford Peercy, the Pfeiffer-VIGRE Instructor of Computational and Applied Mathematics, co-authored “Marrying Form and Function: Mathematics as Motivation in an Introductory Programming Course for Engineers and Applied Mathematicians,” which was presented at the meeting. Peercy also presented “Calcium Wave Initiation and Evolution in a Neuron.”

Matthias Heinkenschloss, professor of computational and applied mathematics, presented “Spatial Domain Decomposition and Model Reduction for Parabolic Parameter Identification Problems.”

Petr Kloucek, adjunct assistant professor of computational and applied mathematics, and Danny Sorensen, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics, co-authored “Using the Finite Element Approximation of Steklov Eigenfunctions to Solve the Laplace Equation Efficiently with Multiple Boundary Data,” which was presented at the meeting.

David Lane, associate professor of psychology and statistics, presented “Online Statistics Education: An Interactive Multimedia Course of Study.”

Christopher Rasmussen, the G.C. Evans Instructor of Mathematics, presented “A Finiteness Conjecture for Abelian Varieties Over Number Fields.” He was also a panelist in the research in undergraduate mathematics education panel discussion.

Richard Tapia, University Professor and the Maxfield and Oshman Professor of Engineering, Computational and Applied Mathematics, presented “The Center for Excellence and Equity in Education at Rice University: Successes in the Recruitment, Retention and Matriculation of Minority Scholars.”

Yue Wu, graduate student in mathematics, presented “Whirly Transformations.”

An article by Shannon Anderson, associate professor of management at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, was chosen as Management Science’s December featured article. The article is titled “Management Control for Market Transition: The Relation Between Transaction Characteristics, Incomplete Contract Design and Subsequent Performance.”

Marc Epstein, distinguished research professor of management at the Jones School, had the sixth most frequently downloaded article — “The Drivers of Success in Post-merger Integration” — in the journal Organizational Dynamics from 2003 to 2005.

Epstein’s book “Making Innovation Work” has been selected for the Innovation Book Club, a group of senior innovation leaders that selected 12 books from a field of more than 90 candidates for the first global book club focused on innovation.

Associate Provost Roland Smith attended the Mellon Foundation’s coordinators meeting as a panelist representing the U.S. perspective on “Affirmative Action in South Africa and the United States.”

Jing Zhou, associate professor of management at the Jones School, has been elected vice president and program chair for the 2008 meeting of the International Association for Chinese Management Research. Zhou will share the positions with Jialin Xie from University of Toronto.

Entries for “People, Papers, Presentations” should be submitted to the Office of News and Media Relations by e-mail, <ricenews@rice.edu>; fax, 713-348-6380; or campus mail, MS 300. Entries will run on a space-available basis.