Good to grow
Perseverance carried chemist Noe Alvarez from Bolivian farm to Rice doctorate

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Maybe Noe Alvarez was destined to grow crops no matter how far he strayed from home.

Rice is not his father’s farm, but here the newly minted doctor has been raising nanotubes and planting the seeds of our future as well as his own.

	Noe Alvarez, who has earned his doctorate at Rice, displayed this photo of his family in Bolivia while defending his dissertation this week. The photo was taken while he was serving a mandatory year in the Bolivian military. Alvarez, in uniform, is standing between his father, Ricardo, and mother, Flora.

Alvarez, a fifth-year graduate student in chemistry working in the labs of Rice’s Robert Hauge and James Tour, defended his dissertation, “Toward Large Scale Production and Separation of Carbon Nanotubes,” this week. A day later he was still feeling the rush of emotions that accompany the completion of a quest the Bolivian man began decades ago.

Though his parents weren’t able to come to Houston for the event, they attended their son’s dissertation via videoconference; they gathered with members of Alvarez’s extended family and friends at a conference center near their town, Pilikocha of Cliza, in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Explaining to his mother, Flora Torrico, that he would now be farming on a nano scale brought the 38-year-old Alvarez full circle. His parents once expected their only son to take over the family farm, but they accepted his decision as a teen to follow a different calling. “They were very hesitant when I told them I wanted to study engineering,” he recalled. “When I told my mother it takes five years to graduate in engineering, she said, ‘Don’t expect too much from me; we can’t afford it.’ People were telling her, ‘Your son is wasting his time and wasting your money.’ It was hard for them.”

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But they understood his motivation, Alvarez said. “My mother always told me and my four sisters, ‘I want to be the last person in this family that does not know how to read, to write and to speak Spanish. I do not want you to do what I do for living.'”

Alvarez had hoped to bring his mother, who speaks only the native Bolivian language of Quechua, to Houston this week but she was unwilling to make the solo journey. At Alvarez’s prompting, his father, Ricardo, who still runs the family farm at 63, found the conference center that could access a video feed from Rice.

Alvarez’s sheer perseverance is impressive.

“He’s one of these guys who is going to succeed no matter what he encounters,” said Hauge, a distinguished faculty fellow in chemistry at Rice. “He’s very focused. Once he starts on a problem, he insists it be done to perfection, with a defensible outcome.”

“It’s truly amazing what a sound mind, persistence and respect for others can get you,” said Tour, Rice’s Chao Professor of Chemistry, who remains impressed by his student’s facility with all aspects of nanotechnology. For his dissertation, Alvarez detailed “wet” methods of catalyst deposition that can simplify the large-scale production of carbon nanotubes.

NOE ALVAREZ

Alvarez’s journey to Rice took a number of detours that led him through a required year in the Bolivian Army and five years earning his undergraduate degree in industrial engineering in Bolivia. There, he recalled, one physics professor announced only 12 of his 200 students – his “apostles” – would pass his course. “He said, ‘If you want to learn physics, go and study every day for three hours. If you don’t, don’t come to me and ask me questions, expecting me to help you.'” Alvarez and his study partner Edson Perez, now a postdoctoral student at the University of Texas, were among the chosen few. “Twelve of us thought he was a great professor,” Alvarez said. “Everybody else hated him.”

Alvarez moved to Chicago in 1999 to learn English and study computer science, then enrolled at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, La. — but almost didn’t get there. McNeese offered him a scholarship, but Alvarez’s visa ran out while the university awaited transcripts from Bolivia that Federal Express had, by mistake, sent to Kenya.

Alvarez didn’t want to risk being in the United States illegally, so by the time his papers arrived in Louisiana he was back in Bolivia — where the U.S. Embassy summarily refused to issue him a student visa. The bureaucratic roadblock took months to clear up and cost him a semester of study.

Once at McNeese, he decided to focus on chemistry under the supervision of Ron Darbeau and took undergraduate courses to catch up. “He basically taught himself chemistry,” Hauge said.

After earning his master’s and becoming a father, Alvarez nearly ended up at the University of Arizona. “I applied to Rice and didn’t hear from them until late,” he said. “I was in Chicago for the summer to earn some money, and a friend in Lake Charles was checking my mail. He called me and said, ‘You got a letter from Rice.’ I had to ask Arizona to let me go.”

Alvarez had intended to study with Nobel Prize-winner Richard Smalley, but Smalley died a month after the student’s arrival. “They never met,” said Tour, though Alvarez noted he did speak to Smalley once by phone. Tour and Hauge welcomed Alvarez to their labs, where his typical workday lasted from 8 a.m. to nearly midnight.

Alvarez has a few papers to finish before he departs Rice next month with his fiancée, Carmen Triveño, and their son, Aaron, now 5. He’d like to find work in industry and help support his parents, though his immediate path may take him to Japan to continue his nanotech work as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Research.

His mentors here remain more than a little awed by his accomplishment.

Hauge recalled, “After Noe’s thesis defense, Tour said, ‘You know, my sons have had everything handed to them. What he did is what my immigrant father did — he made a career for himself.’ He did what our grandparents might have done, coming to this country. It’s every bit as impressive.”