People, papers and presentations for July 26, 2021

Rice alumnus Ryan Udell ’21 has been named to the Aviation Week Network’s 20 Twenties Class of 2021, which honors exceptional students seen as the future of the aerospace and defense industries. Joining the Eclipse student rocketry club as a freshman, he later became president of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space within the Rice Space Institute and played a part in developing the OwlSat scheduled for launch by NASA. Udell is a systems engineer with the Boeing Satellite Systems Engineering Rotation Program and works at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, helping coordinate the design and construction of the Space Launch System.

M. Rafael Salaberry, the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures and director of research for Rice’s Center for Languages and Intercultural Communication, is the co-editor of a new book with fellow researcher Alfred Rue Burch, associate professor at Japan’s Kobe University. Their book, “Assessing Speaking in Context: Expanding the Construct and its Applications,” investigates the nature and possible applications of an expanded and reconceptualized theoretical construct of speaking as a dynamic socially constructed endeavor.