Distinguished Alumni Honored

Distinguished Alumni Honored

BY DAVID D. MEDINA
Special to the Rice News Staff
May 7, 1998

The Association of Rice Alumni has selected the 1998 recipients of the Rice
Distinguished Alumni award. Each year, the honor is given to a small number
of alumni whose professional or volunteer activities reflect and forward the
high standards and ideals of Rice University. The 1998 Distinguished Alumni
are Jim Kinsey ’56, Elizabeth Lodal ’66 and Jan Lodal ’64, Wylie Bernard Pieper
’53, and Tom Tombrello ’58.

James Kinsey

James Kinsey will retire this summer as dean of the Wiess School of Natural
Sciences after having led the school through a series of major accomplishments.

During his 10-year tenure, the George R. Brown Hall and Dell Butcher Hall were
built. Kinsey also directed a number of changes in the natural science curriculum,
established a system of external visiting committees for the school, recruited
brilliant professors, and caused the creation of a strategic plan for the division.
He also managed to retain many of Rice’s most outstanding faculty members, among
them Rick Smalley, the 1996 Noble Prize winner in chemistry, against outside
offers.

"In my opinion," says Robert Curl, another Nobel Prize winner in
chemistry, "Kinsey’s performance in this role has been wonderful. He has
always had a vision of Rice in the forefront of world universities, and through
his efforts the Wiess School of Natural Sciences has improved steadily."

Kinsey also made his mark as a scientist and teacher. Kinsey is known for developing
methods for studying the dynamics of chemical reactions and applications of
these techniques to elementary binary collisions and photochemicals processes.

He was elected to the National Academy of Science and earned the E.O. Lawrence
Award of the Department of Energy and the Earle K. Plyler Prize of the American
Physical Society. Kinsey is also a fellow of the American Physical Society and
of the American Academy of Arts and Science.

Kinsey was at the end of his junior year at Rice, majoring in chemical engineering,
when he realized he liked pure science better and switched his major to chemistry.
He credits two Rice chemistry professors, the late Zevi Salzburg and Edward
S. Lewis, now professor emeritus of chemistry, for putting him on the right
path.

Kinsey graduated in 1956 and remained to earn his doctorate in physics. After
completing his doctorate in 1959, he received a fellowship from the National
Science Foundation to study with Per Olov Löwdin in Sweden. Kinsey was
then named a Miller Research Fellow the University of California at Berkeley,
where he studied two years with Dudley Herschbach, who eventually won a Nobel
Prize in chemistry in 1986.

Kinsey joined the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962
and stayed there for 26 years, eventually chairing the department of chemistry.
He was recruited in 1988 to serve as dean of the Wiess School of Natural Science.

Elizabeth and Jan Lodal

Jan and Elizabeth Lodal are a husband-and-wife team whose idealistic notion
of contributing to society has led them to excel in their public service careers.

Elizabeth has been a leader in secondary education for the past 30 years. Jan
is Clinton’s Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and has worked
in the Johnson, Nixon and Ford administrations.

When Elizabeth retired from McLean High School in McLean, Va., where she was
principal from 1985 to 1995, she was honored by school, community, local and
state officials. The Virginia General Assembly passed a resolution commending
her for rekindling community interest in education and earning the respect and
admiration of students, faculty and parents.

The McLean Providence Journal voted her favorite principal two years in a row,
and she received the 1993 Rabbi Richard Sternberger Social Justice Award for
her efforts in combating racism, bigotry and prejudice.

"She led by example, taught as an administrator when she did not have
to teach, set the highest academic standards for her students, and, above all,
testified that the ultimate purpose of an education was the ethical life,"
says Allen Matusow, Rice history professor.

At Rice, Elizabeth received her bachelor’s degree in history in 1966. Shortly
after her graduation, she married Jan. Elizabeth taught English in schools in
New Jersey and Virginia before she received a master’s in secondary administration
in 1973 from George Washington University.

Jan received his bachelor’s in civil engineering in 1965 and went on to earn
two master’s degrees.

Since 1967, Jan has worked in business and in government. He founded two computer
software companies, Intelus and American Management Systems. The latter helped
reform the financial systems of New York City and other major cities. Jan also
designed and developed computer systems for numerous major hospitals.

In 1994, Jan was recruited by then-Secretary of Defense William Perry to return
to public life. In his current position, Jan advises Perry on national security
and defense policies. Jan has written more than 20 articles about national defense
and foreign policy in such publications as the Washington Post, the New York
Times and Foreign Affairs.

Elizabeth and Jan raised two children. Their son, Eric, is graduating from
Yale University and will attend Juilliard. Their daughter, Kristen, is a freshman
at Yale.

Wylie Bernard Pieper

Wylie Bernard (Ber) Pieper grew up in Beeville, Texas, but his hard work and
engineering talents took him around the world and to the top of a major energy
service company.

Until two years ago, when Pieper retired, he was vice chairman and chief operating
officer of Halliburton Co. He was in charge of the company’s three operating
units: Brown & Root, Inc., Halliburton Energy Services, and Highlands Insurance
Co.

Pieper’s long climb up the corporate ladder is due, in part, to his unwavering
determination to be an engineer. As a youth, he worked with his father, a general
contractor, building commercial and residential structures in South Texas. He
received bachelor of arts and bachelor of science degrees in civil engineering
in 1954.

At Brown & Root, Pieper embarked on a long road trip that took him to Brazil,
Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Turkey and a host of other countries.

In 1972, Pieper was named vice president of marine engineering. He was appointed
president of Brown & Root in 1989, and in 1991 he rose to president and
chief executive officer. A year later, he was promoted to vice chairman of Brown
& Root’s parent company Halliburton. There, he was responsible for all corporate
support functions as well as quality improvement programs, strategic planning
and organizational development activities for the whole company. He assumed
the additional title of chief operating officer in 1994.

Pieper is a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and a member
of Sigma Tau and Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society. He is on the Rice University
Board of Governors, the George R. Brown School of Engineering Advisory Board
and the Jones Graduate School of Management’s Council of Overseers. He currently
chairs the engineering advisory board.

Tom Tombrello

Tom Tombrello is a physicist and Caltech professor who continues to have a
childlike fascination for his work. "My youngest daughter likes to tell
people that I will always be 9 years old and that I will never get tired of
playing with toys."

The games he likes to play include applying nuclear and ion beam physics to
problems in material science, geochemistry and technology. Tombrello has done
analysis of meteorites and lunar samples, which required inventing new analytical
techniques.

The new techniques, in turn, allowed him to move into surface physics/chemistry
and radiation damage studies. Tombrello also helped develop new techniques for
earthquake prediction. His current research focuses on phenomena caused by atom
or molecule impact on surfaces.

During the George Bush administration, Tombrello served on the Space Policy
Advisory Board that reported to the vice president. Currently, he is working
on several review activities for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
He chairs the advisory committees for chemistry and for materials science at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At Rice, he is on the advisory board
of the new nanotechnology center.

Since 1981, he has been a consultant to Schlumberger, Ltd., a company for which
he served as vice president and research director from 1987 to 1989, when he
took a leave of absence from Caltech.

Tombrello graduated from Rice with a bachelor’s degree in 1958, a master’s
in 1960, and a doctorate in 1961. He then went to teach at the California Institute
of Technology, spent a year at Yale University as an assistant professor of
physics, and then returned to Caltech, where he remains today. In 1983, he received
a Von Humboldt Award, in 1971, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship
in physics, and in 1997, he received an honorary degree from Uppsala University
in Sweden.

Tombrello has also earned the Feynman Prize for creative teaching at Caltech
and is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor.