People, papers and presentations

Two teams of Rice University engineering students have won prizes in the annual National Institutes of Health Design by Undergraduate Biomedical Teams (DEBUT) Challenge. The NutriFlow team of 2014 alumni Mika Tabata, Denizen Kocak, Nathan Liu, Alexa Juarez and Jane Jarjour won third place and a $10,000 prize, while the R-ARM team of seniors Nimish Mittal, Matt Nojoomi and Sergio Gonzalez earned an honorable mention. The winning teams will be honored in October at the annual meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society in San Antonio. Rice teams have won at least an honorable mention in each of the three DEBUT competitions.

Shepherd School of Music students Anthony Bellino (trumpet), Sean Krissman (clarinet), Jennifer Zhou (flute) and alumnus Michael Severance ‘14 (bassoon) have been selected by Music Academy of the West as Global Academy Initiative fellows, a partnership in which they will study and perform with the New York Philharmonic in January 2015.

Brazilian and French mathematician Artur Avila received the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul based partly on work he did with Rice’s David Damanik, professor and chair of mathematics. Their research involved the evolution of quantum states in physical systems that are regulated by “quasi-periodic Schrödinger operators.” The Fields Medal is given by the International Mathematical Union and is considered the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in mathematics. Avila is director of research at CNRS in Paris and a researcher at IMPA in Rio de Janeiro. He presented a week of M.B. Porter Lectures at Rice for the Mathematics Department in 2010.