People, papers and presentations

The American Geophysical Union has honored Rice geologist Rajdeep Dasgupta with the James B. Macelwane Medal, awarded this year to five scientists for significant contributions to the geophysical sciences by an outstanding early career scientist. Dasgupta’s lab studies chemical differentiation of Earth and other rocky planets through high pressure-temperature laboratory experiments. He will be recognized at the organization’s fall meeting in San Francisco Dec. 17.

Lilibeth Andre, associate director of the Shell Center for Sustainability, won first place for the Best Educational Young Adult Book at Latino Literacy Now’s International Latino Book Awards in Las Vegas June 28. Andre won for her book, “The Lady of the Turquoise Pendant,” a story of an Aztec princess who must fight for her father’s kingdom.

Rice’s Humanities Research Center (HRC) has received a $175,000 award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to host a John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures, “Platforms of Knowledge in a Wide Web of Worlds: Production, Participation and Politics.” The seminar will take place during the 2015-16 academic year and examine the proliferation of digital knowledge platforms to understand their impact on culture and academia. It will be led by HRC Director and Professor of Humanities Farès el-Dahdah, HRC Associate Director and Professor in the Practice of Humanities Melissa Bailar and Fondren Library Executive Director of Digital Scholarship Services Lisa Spiro.

Jingyi Geng, a graduate student in psychology, received a William Orr Dingwall Foundation Neurolinguistics Dissertation Fellowship in the amount of $30,000 to support the completion of her dissertation research on the role of classification when understanding words.