Tapia honored with mayor’s lifetime achievement award

Rice Professor Richard Tapia has received the 2014 Mayor’s Hispanic Heritage Lifetime Achievement Award for his commitment to helping minorities and women prepare for higher education and to increase participation of underrepresented students in the sciences.

Richard Tapia

The distinction reflects the outstanding contributions Tapia has made toward enhancing the quality of life of the Hispanic community, said Houston Mayor Annise Parker ’78. Each recipient of the Mayor’s Hispanic Heritage Award “has displayed leadership and dedication to advancing our Hispanic community,” she said. “Houston is enriched by their volunteerism, activism and public service.”

Tapia, the son of Mexican immigrants, was the first member of his family to attend college. He joined the Rice faculty in 1970 and is now University Professor, the Maxfield-Oshman Professor in Engineering and a professor of computational and applied mathematics.

Due to Tapia’s efforts, the Rice Computational and Applied Mathematics Department has become a national leader in producing women and underrepresented minority Ph.D. recipients in the mathematical sciences. Thirty-five mathematics students have received or are currently working on a Ph.D. degree under Tapia’s direction or co-direction; 15 have been women and eight have been underrepresented minorities. Tapia also directs the National Science Foundation-funded Empowering Leadership Alliance, which engages underrepresented minority students in computing disciplines at research institutions nationwide.

Among the many honors Tapia has received are the National Medal of Science, election as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow and receipt of the AAAS Lifetime Mentor Award, membership in the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Distinguished Public Service Award from the American Mathematical Society, the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science and the National Science Board’s Vannevar Bush Award.