People, Papers, Presentations

Entries for “People, Papers,
Presentations” should be submitted to the Office of News and Media
Relations by e-mail, <ricenews@rice.edu>;
fax, 713-348-6380; or campus mail, MS 300. Entries will run on a space-available
basis.

Kevin Foster,
the Huxley Instructor in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology,
presented a paper titled “Cooperation and Conflict
in the Slime Mold Dictyostellium discoideum” at the
U. of California–Irvine Dec. 6.

Angelo Miele,
research professor and the Foyt Professor Emeritus in Mechanical
Engineering and Materials Science, presented the paper “Multiple-Subarc
Sequential Gradient-Restoration Algorithm and Application
to Launch Vehicle Design” at the sixth SIMAI National
Congress, Chia Lagune, Cagliary, Italy, May 27-31. SIMAI
is the Italian society for Applied and Industrial Mathematics.
Subsequently, Miele presented the paper “Feasibility
of Launch Vehicle Designs” at the 12th International
Workshop on Dynamics and Control, Los Angeles, Aug. 19-21,
and the paper “Computation of Optimal Mars Trajectories
via Combined Chemical/Electrical Propulsion, Part1: Baseline
Solutions for Deep Interplanetary Space” at the 53rd
International Astronautical Congress, The World Space Congress,
Houston, Oct. 10-19. These papers were co-authored by Tong
Wang, senior research scientist, and Powtawche N.
Williams, graduate student, mechanical engineering and
materials science.

Ronald Sass,
the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Natural Sciences,
was one of the five American scientists and economists invited
to participate in the International Agriculture Greenhouse
Gas Mitigation Project held in Washington, D.C., Dec. 2-3.
This project is conducted under the Non-CO2 Greenhouse Gas
Network, which was established by the Internatinal Energy
Agency’s Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency and the European Commission
Environment Directorate-General to facilitate dialogue between
experts working on non-CO2 greenhouse gas, including emissions,
abatement and modeling. The objective of the meeting was
to develop estimates of the feasibility and cost of the
potential mitigation of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions,
especially those related to rice, ruminants and soils.