GSA Faculty Teaching/Mentoring Award goes to Hewitt, Link

GSA Faculty Teaching/Mentoring Award goes to Hewitt, Link

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Special to the Rice News

Janice Hewitt, instructor for the Cain Project, and Stephan Link, assistant professor of chemistry, share this year’s Graduate Student Association Faculty Teaching/Mentoring Award, presented to those who demonstrate outstanding service to graduate student education.

JANICE HEWITT	STEPHEN LINK

”The award means a great deal to me,” said Hewitt, who describes herself as passionate about teaching grad students in the Cain Project, a 10-year initiative to teach communication techniques that concludes this semester.

Her thesis-writing groups proved to be a hit, as what started as one class with eight students quickly grew to two classes with a waiting list. ”I started teaching thesis-writing groups shortly after beginning with the Cain Project because I found graduate students were most interested in improving their communication skills,” she said.

Hewitt, who earned a master’s in history and a Ph.D. in English at Rice, won’t be at loose ends for long, as she’s been asked to become senior lecturer in professional communication for the George R. Brown School of Engineering.  

An ardent environmentalist, Hewitt has worked with the Nature Conservancy in Texas and Ohio, where she aided a successful effort to preserve more than 200 acres of public wetlands, and worked with her husband to establish a 205-acre nature preserve on a mesa near Castle Rock, Colo. Hewitt is also a director of Houston’s St. Cecilia Chamber Music Society.

Link, who joined Rice in 2006, specializes in physical chemistry, ultrafast and single molecule spectroscopy and materials and nanoscale science and their applications to the fundamental technologies behind medical imaging, laser therapy, biosensors, optical communication, energy conversion and liquid crystal displays.

”I’m pretty happy my students nominated me,” said Link, who holds a master’s in physical chemistry from the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology. ”Most of them are second- and third-year students, so they’re just starting out.

”I hope, of course, they will become independent researchers, and my big thing is to train them how to interpret data, how to be ethical and how to be good leaders. Ultimately, I hope they all find the jobs they want.”