People, Papers and Presentations for June 2007

People, Papers and Presentations for June 2007

Leah Benard-Boggs, administrator for the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, won the Hardy Bourland Award for Distinguished Service to the George R. Brown School of Engineering.

Richard Johnson, sustainability planner for Facilities, Engineering and Planning, had a paper proposal accepted for the Greening of the Campus conference, Sept. 6-8. The title of Johnson’s presentation and paper is ”Connecting Campus Greening with the Classroom.”

David Lane‘s learning module, ”Rice Virtual Lab Sampling Distribution,” won the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) Award for Exemplary Online Learning Resources in the 2007 Statistics Editorial Board Classic. Lane, associate professor of psychology and statistics, will showcase his module at the MERLOT International Conference, August 7-10.

Antonios Mikos, the John W. Cox Professor in Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, will receive this year’s Alpha Chi Sigma Award for Chemical Engineering Research from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in November. The award recognizes individual accomplishments in fundamental or applied chemical engineering research. Read more about his award at http://cohesion.rice.edu/engineering/bioe/bioe.cfm?doc_id=11130.

Members of the Lane and Wagner Labs attended the Fourth Texas and Southern Plains Zebrafish Conference at College Station June 1-3. Damian Dalle Nogare, research assistant in Mary Ellen Lane’s lab, was recognized with second place for best presentation for ”Phosphoinhibition of cdk1 underlies cell cycle lengthening at the zebrafish midblastula transition.” Celine Santiago, an undergraduate in Daniel Wagner’s lab, was received best undergraduate poster for ”The Development of an Apoptosis Assay in Zebrafish Embryos.”

An article cowritten by economics professor Robin Sickles, ”The Policy Environment and Relative Price Efficiency of Egyptian Private-Sector  Manufacturing: 1987/88-1995/96,” was published in InterScience.

Moshe Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering, was re-elected to a three-year term on the Computing Research Association Board of Directors. This election by his peers is a strong acknowledgment of his leadership ability and his colleagues’ regard for his work in the field. Vardi has also been invited to be a foreign member of the Academia Europaea, a nongovernmental association that promotes learning, education and research. Vardi is director of the Computer & Information Technology Institute.