May 1, 2019

Owl right, owl right, owl right.
Updates and opportunities from Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies.

Funding & Fellowships  |  Opportunities @ Rice  |  Events @ Rice
Beyond the Rice Hedges  |  Take a Break  |  News

May 9: DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Program
Award amounts vary
This program provides supplemental awards to outstanding U.S. graduate students to pursue part of their graduate thesis research at a DOE laboratory/facility in areas that address scientific challenges central to the Office of Science mission. More.

May 21: Doerr Innovation Award
Award amounts vary, max $60,000
This program seeks to support faculty contributions to the development of students’ capacity to lead across the University, through innovative teaching, curricular innovations, and relevant research. Graduate students in doctoral programs may apply as Principal Investigator with a full-time faculty co-PI. More.

May 24: NASA Fellowship Activity 2019
Up to $55,000
NASA is seeking research or senior design projects/proposals that are independently conceived and pose significant contribution to a NASA Research Opportunity. The 2019 NASA Fellowship Activity is designed to support OSE mission objectives and offers academic institutions the ability to enhance graduate-level learning and development. More.

Bayou Greenways 2020 Brown Bag
May 2, noon, COB 112
Come learn about the latest updates with the Bayou Greenways 2020 project, which is transforming 3,000 underutilized acres of land along the bayous into linear parks and connecting 150 miles of hike-and-bike trails to parks and communities like never before. Limited seating. RSVP to Lisa Lin, lisa.lin@rice.edu.

Bike to Rice Day
May 7, 7-10 a.m.
Celebrate Rice Bike Month at the Rec Center! After your bike commute to Rice, enjoy coffee, breakfast tacos and prizes! Register your bike with RUPD and pick up the new bike map.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos
May 7, 6 p.m.
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The Baker Institute hosts Washington Post journalist Christian Davenport for a discussion on the birth of a new Space Age, the personal clashes of the innovators behind it, and the struggle to end governments’ monopoly on space exploration. Free. Registration required. More.

Deep Learning & Parallel Computing with MATLAB
May 15, 10 a.m. - 2:30 p.m.
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Please join MathWorks Engineers as they demonstrate strategies and techniques for Machine Learning & Parallel Computing in MATLAB. Free. Registration required. More.

CAPC Dissertation Camps 2019
June 3 - 24; sessions vary
These week-long workshops will provide quiet writing time, individual support from trained communication consultants, short lessons from writing specialists, and wellness activities.  To apply, students must be actively writing a Ph.D. dissertation or thesis. More.

June 3-7: Science and Engineering Camp
June 10-14: Social Sciences Camp
June 24-28: Humanities Camp

Beyond the Professoriate Conference
Conference on May 4 and continues May 11
An annual online career conference for Ph.D.'s, students can work through the emotional aspects of leaving academia, leverage their education and experience to find the perfect career fit, and develop a strategy to get a job in the current job market. Ph.D. students who participated in all three GRADitude Week challenges can get a free ticket to the conference - email klg1@rice.edu!

Rice Science Cafe: The Chemistry of Chocolate
May 7, 6:30 p.m., Black Labrador Cafe
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Chocolate is one of the most enticing confections in the modern world. This talk by Prof. Ken Whitmire will give a brief overview of the cultivation, harvesting and production of cacao and how it is used to make chocolate along with the chemistry of chocolate. More.

Join our social circle!
Did you know the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies is on Instagram? Join our social circle - follow us for the latest news and updates from our office on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter!

Coal could yield treatment for traumatic injuries
Graphene quantum dots drawn from common coal may be the basis for an effective antioxidant for people who suffer traumatic brain injuries, strokes or heart attacks. Scientists at Texas A&M, UTHealth and the Tour lab at Rice have discovered that replacing earlier nanoparticles with these coal-derived quantum dots makes it simpler and less expensive to produce potentially therapeutic materials. “Working on this project has been quite the eye opening experience, especially to see it come so far during my graduate career,” said Rice M.D./Ph.D. student and co-lead author Kimberly Mendoza. Rice graduate student Lizanne Nilewski and postdoctoral researcher Almaz Jalilov are co-lead authors of the paper! Read more.

GRADitude Week recap and THANK YOU!
Thank you to all who participated in GRADitude Week and Cake Walk! The Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies knows how hard our graduate students work, and the extent of their contributions to Rice, Houston and the world - thank you for all that you do, and we hope you enjoyed the week. See photos.

Also, in all the excitement we forgot to announce the winner of #MusicalThesis! Congratulations to Liz Windham Li for her submission, "Party in the L-A-B!" See it here. She'll get a degree frame from Grad & Postdoc Studies! Thanks to all for participating!