People, papers and presentations

Rice alumna Zhiyi Chen ’19 won the Laureate of Silver Prize in the international Laka Competition with her master’s thesis, “Church of the Otakus.” Chen, who was mentored at Rice by Troy Schaum, an associate professor of architecture, is now a junior architect at his firm, Schaum/Shieh. For her thesis, she designed a church for an imaginary religion derived from the Japanese anime subculture known as otaku.