People, papers and presentations

George Bennett, the E. Dell Butcher Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, and Alvin Orbaek ’10, who recently earned his Rice doctorate, were honored by the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Greater Houston Section. Bennett was given the Section Award and Orbaek the Younger Chemists Committee Section Award at the ACS awards ceremony Nov. 21.

Orbaek is also co-author of “Inorganic Chemistry for Dummies,” which he will be signing copies of Dec. 5 at 4 p.m. at the Rice Bookstore.

Moramay Lopez-Alsonso, an assistant professor of history and a Baker Institute Rice Scholar, has been selected to receive the Conference on Latin American History’s 2013 Mexican History Book Prize for her book “Measuring Up: A History of Living Standards in Mexico, 1850–1950.” The prize will be presented at the Conference on Latin American History’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Jan. 3.

Patricia Reiff, professor of physics and astronomy, won the 2013 SPA Richard Carrington (SPARC) Education and Public Outreach Award from the American Geophyisical Union’s Space Physics and Aeronomy (SPA) Section. The award is presented annually to an individual who has had a significant and outstanding impact on students’ and the public’s understanding of science through their education and/or outreach activities. Reiff will receive the award Dec. 10 at the SPA Section Banquet at the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

Diana Strassmann, the Carolyn and Fred McManis Distinguished Professor in the Practice of the Humanities and director of Rice’s Program on Poverty, Justice and Human Capabilities (PJHC) based in the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, has been recognized with the Wikipedia WikiProject Human Rights’ “Human Rights Barnstar.” The award was granted “in deep appreciation” for the “massive contribution” Strassmann and students in PJHC’s core courses have made for several years to Wikipedia’s coverage of human rights issues. Strassmann is also founding editor of the journal Feminist Economics.

A team representing Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology (K2I) made it to the semifinals in the Parallel Universe Computing Challenge, a game-show style event that was one of the highlights of last week’s SC13 conference in Denver. Sponsored by Intel, the competition featured eight teams that faced off live, onstage in a single-elimination tournament. Each match featured two rounds: a rapid-fire trivia challenge consisting of technical questions about parallel computing, supercomputing history and the high-performance computing industry; and a parallel code optimization challenge in which contestants were given 10 minutes to examine a piece of software code and make changes to improve its performance. Rice’s team, K2I^18 (shorthand for K2I Exascale Team), included team captain Vivek Sarkar, department chair and the E.D. Butcher Professor of Computer Science and professor of electrical and computer engineering; John Mellor-Crummey, professor of computer science and of electrical and computer engineering; computer science research scientists Zoran Budimlic and Mike Fagan; and computer science graduate students Karthik Murthy, Milind Chabbi, Shams Imam and Xu Liu. Each round could only have four team members participate and K2I^18 dispatched a team from Argonne National Laboratory in the first round and was edged out in the semifinals by a squad from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The winning team, Germany’s Gaussian Elimination Squad, designated its $25,000 prize to the Red Cross for Philippines typhoon relief.