Natural science

Natural science’s Smalley leaves living legacy at Rice

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Richard Smalley’s untimely death is a great loss to Rice, but leaders in the university’s scientific community say his legacy at Rice, which is embodied in dozens of laboratories conducting nanoscience and nanotechnology research across campus, is a living testament that will carry his stamp for decades to come.

Photo by Tommy LaVergne

Richard Smalley, left, University Professor, the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry and professor of physics, holds a buckyball with Robert Curl, University Professor Emeritus and the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor Emeritus of Natural Sciences. The two won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1996 for the discovery.

“We are going to miss Rick terribly, but he knew that Rice was well-positioned to carry on without him because the university has attracted so many great people,” said Wade Adams, director of Rice’s Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST), an organization that Smalley founded more than a decade ago. “He inspired a wide and deep research program.”
Indeed, CNST today boasts more than 110 faculty members — more than 20 percent of all Rice faculty — from 14 departments. Rice’s nanotech research ranges from studies of the chemical and physical properties of nanomaterials to enhanced modes of nanomaterial production, the use of nanomaterials in solving technological problems and the societal and economic implications of nanotechnology.

That change in focus began shortly after the 1985 discovery of buckyballs at Rice. But while the buckyball discovery and the winning of the Nobel Prize helped establish Rice and Houston as one of the pre-eminent global centers of nanotechnology research, Smalley’s leadership in growing Rice’s nanotechnology program is largely what kept the city at the fore of the burgeoning new discipline.

Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology

Rice established CNST in 1993. It provides a venue where researchers from all disciplines can meet, share ideas and collaborate on revolutionary new directions in the fields of basic nanoscience, nanoengineering and applied nanotechnology.

Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN)

In September 2001, Rice received $10.5 million from the National Science Foundation to establish CBEN, the only academic research center in the world that is dedicated to studying the interaction between nanomaterials and living organisms, be they individuals or entire ecosystems.

Nanotechnology Entrepreneurship

The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship works with faculty and Rice’s Office of Technology Transfer to foster commercialization of nanotech innovations at Rice.