Vice President Mike Pence speaks at Baker Institute
Vice President Mike Pence’s staff gave only 10 days’ notice of his plan to deliver a major foreign policy address on Venezuela at Rice. Working with the Baker Institute, the Public Affairs staff quickly coordinated with the vice president’s advance team on media credentialing and other preparations for a speech that would be carried live on cable news networks. The appearance generated more than 1,200 mentions of Rice by hundreds of media outlets, including the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, NBC and NPR, as well as all Houston television news stations.
As flames engulfed the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, reporters contacted Rice for interviews with witnesses and experts. Architecture Professor John Casbarian was interviewed by USA Today for four articles that were picked up by more than 300 newspapers and other media outlets and also appeared on local television. The Public Affairs team also connected reporters with a Rice student who was visiting Notre Dame the day the fire erupted. Rice sociologist Craig Considine wrote an op-ed piece for Newsweek.
On the cover of Science: Rice bioengineering breakthrough
Science magazine, one of the world’s most prestigious peer-reviewed academic journals, dedicated its cover story to Rice bioengineers who have leaped over a major hurdle on the path to replacing human organs with 3D-printed tissue. Photographer Jeff Fitlow shot the cover photograph, a complex process that took days. The story also ran in Scientific American, Forbes, Fortune, NPR and more than 500 other media outlets in English, Spanish, Chinese, German and Hungarian.
For a list of March and April media stars,
please see the last section of this report.
Government Relations
Rice is active in Washington, D.C., and Austin
In April, Government Relations was involved in high-level visits to campus from several federal officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine ’97 and the commanding general of Army Futures Command. The team also accompanied Skylark Wireless, a Rice-affiliated startup company, to Washington for a series of congressional office visits, followed by participation in the University Innovation and Entrepreneurship Showcase on Capitol Hill.
Rice has stayed active as the legislative session continues in Austin. Government Relations organized a day in the Texas Capitol for President David Leebron that included four meetings with important senators, coffee with Rice students interning at the Legislature and a dinner with the chairmen of the House Committees on Appropriations and Higher Education.
Government Relations continued advocating on many issues, which included renewing the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, supporting more pay for success contracts, increasing funding for the Texas Equalization Grant program and both funding and encouraging the adoption of more open educational resources for the state’s K-12 students. In addition working with Rep. Sarah Davis, the team arranged for House floor recognition of the Baker Institute’s 25th anniversary, with fellows Mark Jones and Jennifer Rabb on hand to receive the honor.
Creative Services
Big Questions poster series
Creative Services designed and edited a poster series to promote the School of Humanities’ Big Questions course series, which will launch in the 2019–20 academic year. The posters were displayed in the humanities building and residential colleges to interest students in the thought-provoking courses.
Ken Kennedy Institute oil and gas conference programs
In March, the Ken Kennedy Institute hosted the Oil and Gas High Performance Computing Conference at the BRC. This year, the conference addressed challenges in meeting computing-capacity demand in the energy industry for the next decade. Creative Services designed and printed 700 programs for the event.
Shepherd on Stage invitations
Creative Services designed and edited invitations for Shepherd on Stage, a special Shepherd Society event that allowed guests to sit among chamber orchestra musicians as they rehearsed for an upcoming performance. Six hundred invitations were printed and mailed to Shepherd Society members.
Multicultural Community Relations
Rice’s Mariachi Luna Llena entertains students from Third Ward
At the invitation of Multicultural Community Relations (MCR), Mariachi Luna Llena brought a new cultural experience to first- and second-graders at Blackshear Elementary in Houston’s Third Ward. The mariachi group played several songs, talked about their music and instruments and taught the students how to do the “Mexican yell.”
Academy Award-winning movie ‘Roma’ charms audience
In conjunction with the Mexican Consulate in Houston and other sponsors, MCR co-hosted a free screening of “Roma,” which won three Academy Awards this year. Nearly 200 attendees gathered at the Rice Media Center for the film and panel discussion that followed.
Journalist honors Spanish hero of the American Revolution
MCR worked with several Houston-area organizations to feature journalist Francisco Reyero, who discussed his book “Y Bernardo de Gálvez Entró en Washington.” The author spoke to a crowd of more than 100 people. The event was part of an ongoing effort to highlight the role that Spain played in supporting colonists during the American Revolution.
MCR supports annual diversity summit
MCR served as a major sponsor for the 19th annual Association of Chinese American Professionals Diversity Summit. A longtime member of the summit’s planning committee, MCR was instrumental in securing Juliet Stipeche ’96, director of education for the city of Houston, as the keynote luncheon speaker. About 400 people attended the event.
Marketing and Digital Communications
The 'interwebs' dashboard
Engagements
This reflects the number of interactions (likes, shares, comments, clicks, etc.) on a post for March and April: 578,083
Impressions
This reflects the number of times the content was seen by others in March and April: 2,088,379
Followers
This reflects the number of people who follow Rice on all social platforms: 209,834
In March and April, Rice social media channels received more than 2 million impressions and close to 600,000 engagements.
Twitter’s top post was a collection of four azalea photos with a 12% engagement rate.
Facebook’s top post was Alex Hwang’s Unconventional Student profile. The video was viewed more than 9,000 times and the post received more than 60,000 impressions.
Alex Hwang is one of 16 graduating seniors profiled as a part of the annual Unconventional Students at Rice series. To view a montage of our seniors, click the picture below.
LinkedIn’s top post was a video profiling Rice’s student-designed flood sensors. The video was viewed more than 4,600 times and received nearly 16,000 impressions.
Instagram’s top post was a drone shot of the water balloon fight during Beer Bike with the event’s new nickname, Beverage Bicycle. It received 2,821 likes, 37 comments, 74 shares and 25,605 impressions. In addition, Lance Armstrong commented that he wants to participate next year. The total engagement rate for this post was more than 11%.
Rice.edu
The hero slider received 9,122 clicks in March and April. During these two months, the slider featured Unconventional Student profiles, a beautiful photo of an owl on campus and a research story about how cells in developing embryos communicate.
March’s most-clicked slider was the U.S. News & World Report rankings for graduate programs with 1,196. April’s most-clicked slider linked to the Unconventional Student story featuring Miranda Morris, which received 1,189.
Media Stars
Douglas Brinkley is March and April media star
Douglas Brinkley, the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Professor in Humanities, had the highest number of media mentions — 1,813 — during March and April, mainly for comments about his new book. Below are members of the Rice community who were mentioned in the media 10 or more times during March and April.
Douglas Brinkley
1,813
Vivian Ho
1,494
Jim Blackburn
1,139
Jim Elliott
1,134
Bill Fulton
1,134
Mark Jones
1,035
Tina Langley
536
Tony Payan
458
Matt Bragga
187
Ako Adams
144
Drew Peterson
144
Sylvia Dee
142
Francisco Monaldi
141
John Casbarian
135
Antonios Mikos
134
Daniel Cohan
133
Quentin Millora-Brown
116
Nicole Iademarco
108
Sean Bittner
106
Dylan Jones
106
Melissa Kean
105
Lauren Grigsby
101
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen
95
Richard Lopez
90
Jim Krane
87
Allison Thacker
65
Jeff Lowe
62
Christine Dobbyn
60
Luay Nakhleh
60
Johann Pally
60
Bob Stein
57
Justin Tang
56
George Abbey
54
Pulickel Ajayan
45
Kimmai Tran
45
Kenneth Medlock
43
Dan Wallach
39
Ed Emmett
38
Victoria Smirnova
38
Marco Rodrigues
37
James Tour
37
Moshe Vardi
37
Alex Li
36
Linda Huang
35
Anson Fung
33
Brian Lee
33
Noah Mengisteab
33
Nick Silber
33
Steven Morris
32
Michaela Haet
31
Joe Karlgaard
31
Chris Kreider
31
Anastasia Smirnova
31
Austin Escamilla
29
Steven Lewis
29
Jefferson Ren
29
Sarah Whiting
28
Boris Yakobson
27
Anatoly Kolomeisky
24
Hamid Teimouri
24
Peter Hartley
22
Natasha Kirienko
22
Gerry Koons
22
Ryan Lee
22
Alexey Revtovich
22
David Leebron
21
Sabia Abidi
19
Takanori Iida
19
Byung-UK Kang
19
Babs Ogunbanwo
19
William Martin
18
Petr Chaguine
17
Rachel Meidl
17
Kyle Shelton
17
Jake Benson
16
Anna Rhodes
16
Phil Bedient
15
Mikki Hebl
15
Randy Hulet
15
Jason Nguyen
15
Caleb Bashor
14
Edward Billups
14
Katharine Neill Harris
14
Angel Martí
14
Gabriel Collins
13
Michael Maher
13
Jacob Mattia
13
Helena Michie
13
Lauren Stadler
13
Michael Wong
13
Craig Considine
12
James DeNicco
12
Peter Wolynes
12
Mike Bloomgren
11
Elaine Howard Ecklund
11
Aryeh Warmflash
11
Lydia Beaudrot
10
Seth Davis
10
Pat DeLucia
10
Matthew Foster
10
Jamie Padgett
10
The chart below shows Rice’s media mentions since 2007. The red column reflects the number of Rice media mentions so far this year as of April 30.
