People, papers and presentations

Two Rice alumni have been elected board members of Musiqa, Houston’s nationally recognized new music chamber group: Kathleen Boyd ’80, former centennial director, and David Medina ’83, director of multicultural community relations. Board member Barbara Ostdiek, associate dean for programs and associate professor of finance and statistics at the Jones Graduate School of Business, was elected secretary.

Executive Chef Ben Fonbuena was selected as one of 11 national finalists for the 2013 National Restaurant Association’s “Achieving the American Dream – Faces of Diversity” Awards, which honor employees in the restaurant industry who have realized the American dream through hard work, determination and enterprise.

Huifeng Qian, the J. Evans Attwell-Welch Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Michael Wong, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of chemistry, has been awarded the 2013 International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Prize for Young Chemists. The prize recognizes the best Ph.D. thesis in the chemical sciences as described in an essay. He will receive the award at the organization’s World Chemistry Congress in Istanbul this month.

Architect and urban designer Georgeen Theodore ’92 is the winner of the fifth annual Spotlight: The Rice Design Alliance Prize. The Rice School of Architecture graduate will receive a cash prize with the award that recognizes a gifted early career architect. Theodore is an associate professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture, director of the school’s Infrastructure Planning Program and a principal of Interboro Partners in New York. She will accept the honor at a public lecture Sept. 10 at 7 p.m. at Brown Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.