The James Webb Space Telescope: The first six months
Megan Reiter, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy who is leading the study of the Carina Nebula’s Cosmic Cliffs with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, was interviewed about her work by the BBC World Service’s “Science in Action” show, and she was also quoted in The New York Times. Reiter’s segment with the BBC aired on more than 1,300 radio stations around the world.
Douglas Brinkley, the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Professor in Humanities, discussed his newest book, “Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening,” with a range of outlets, including The New York Times, the Boston Globe, CNN, MSNBC and CBS “Sunday Morning.” His interview with WAMU’s “1A” show aired on more than 475 National Public Radio-affiliated stations across the U.S. He also was quoted in an Associated Press article about then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her future, which appeared in more than 450 other media outlets.
Peter Hartley, the George A. Peterkin Professor of Economics, spoke with Public Radio International’s “The World” about ships carrying liquefied natural gas that were sitting off the coast of Europe, holding onto their cargo because of an economic condition called contango. The segment also aired on 300 affiliate stations around the world, and it aired on more than 500 CBC Radio One affiliate stations.
For a full list of November and December media stars,
please see the last section of this report.
Government Relations
Government Relations focuses on private university endowments
Throughout November, Government Relations spent a great deal of time focusing on federal policies implicating private university endowments. We planned and implemented a strategy to convene and mobilize a sizeable group of large and endowment tax-paying private, nonprofit universities across Texas to increase legislative support for private university endowments throughout the Texas congressional delegation. This was in response to a number of bills introduced over the summer and ahead of the midterm elections linking increased public concern about student debt and the value of higher education with large university endowments — some bills proposing to do so by modifying the existing private university endowment excise tax to “hold universities accountable” to various student outcomes, while others proposed to use increased endowment tax revenues to pay for additional federal education and workforce programs.
Also in November, Government Relations supported a Washington, D.C., trip by David Satterfield, director of Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, by assisting with scheduling and attending certain meetings and coordinating additional support from Rice’s federal consultants.
Government Relations finished the year strong with continued efforts in Washington and Austin. In Washington, we participated in two federal strategy-focused association meetings and more than one trip to Capitol Hill in support of Rice’s research and policy priorities. In Austin, ahead of the start of the 88th Texas Legislature, we engaged state legislators, allied institutions and our consultants in efforts to build support for Rice’s legislative priorities.
University Relations
Rice United Way Campaign tops a quarter million dollars for ninth straight year
The Rice United Way Campaign, organized annually by the University Relations team and a committee of campus volunteers, has once again reached and exceeded its goal of a quarter of a million dollars, placing the Rice campaign in United Way of Greater Houston’s top-tier Chairman’s Division, among the 50 most generous institutional campaigns in our region.
Rice Board of Trustees Chairman Rob Ladd’s generous matching fund encourages new and increased contributions by matching those amounts. So far, this has resulted in more than $45,000 in new and increased donations; campuswide, more than half of Rice campaign donors increased the amount of their contributions over their previous year’s giving levels. In the past 10 years, the Rice United Way Campaign has contributed more than $2.7 million to the improvement of our community by funding United Way programs.
The campaign officially concludes during the week of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so additional donations are still possible by visiting unitedway.rice.edu. Current campuswide campaign results are:
Lead Donors contribute at $1,000 or more; Club 21 donations begin at $500 (about $21 per paycheck when spread over an entire calendar year by payroll pledge); Power of 10 contributors give $250 or more (about $10 per paycheck by payroll pledge); Century Club donors contribute $100 or more.
Creative Services
Holiday card
Rounding out 2022 with more than 300 design and editorial jobs, the Creative Services team designed and edited President DesRoches’ holiday card, which featured a cover illustration by undergraduate student Hannah Ngo Usadi ’23. A holiday e-card was also produced by videography manager Brandon Martin and included campus scenes and thoughts from students attending a Rice University Ice Skating Club event at the Galleria.
De Lange Conference materials
A web graphic, flyer, poster, program, Thresher web banner and ad, Ion newsletter ad and signage material for the 12th De Lange Conference were produced by Creative Services for the Dec. 5–6, 2022, conference held at Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative and Ion. Sponsored by the Scientia Institute, this year’s conference, “Technology, Culture and Society,” addressed the challenges of information technology, health and medicine, and climate change from these three perspectives.
Rice Magazine feature: ‘The Chronicler’
To commemorate more than 30 years of photography work by Rice photographer Tommy LaVergne, Rice Magazine featured a series of photos taken by LaVergne and reflections of his time at Rice in the Winter 2023 issue. For an expanded version of the story, including additional photographs, visit magazine.rice.edu.
Multicultural Community Relations
HACER celebrates its 50th anniversary with a spectacular gala
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Hispanic Association for Cultural Enrichment at Rice (HACER), the Society of Latino Alumni of Rice (SOLAR) hosted a gala at the River Oaks Country Club. More than 300 alumni, students, professors, staff, board members and community leaders joined the festive event, which took place Nov. 5, 2022. Highlights of the gala included a video featuring President Reginald DesRoches, performances by Rice’s Mariachi Luna Llena, two poets and two Shepherd School of Music students, who led the audience in singing “Rice’s Honor.” Adding to the celebration were two inspiring talks — one by University Professor Richard Tapia, who was honored for creating the first Hispanic student group at Rice, and another by keynote speaker Germaine Franco ’84, a Rice alumna who was nominated for an Oscar for her music in the movie “Encanto.” The gala, co-chaired by alumni Sofia Adrogué ’88 and David Medina ’83, raised $50,000, which will go toward creating an endowment for HACER. Two days before the gala, on Nov. 3, MCR helped organize Latino night at the Rice football game, where various Rice alumni and student groups were honored.
Festival celebrates international literature
Casa Cultural de las Americas sponsored a two-day international literature festival at Rice University, featuring writing from several Spanish-speaking countries, including Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba and Spain. Multicultural Community Relations was instrumental in organizing the event, held Nov. 2 and 3.
Carla Harris offers career development advice
On Nov. 10, Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business and Multicultural Community Relations hosted more than 200 Rice MBA graduate students, alumni, and other members of the Rice and Greater Houston community at a presentation and book signing for Carla Harris in McNair Hall’s Anderson Family Commons. Harris, a senior client advisor with Morgan Stanley, shared strategies from her latest book, “Lead to Win.” At the reception following the talk, guests from diverse backgrounds networked and reflected on the information shared by Harris.
Mayor’s Hispanic Advisory Board celebrates holiday at Rice
The Mayor’s Hispanic Advisory Board held its annual holiday reception at the Cohen House of Rice University, where Mayor Sylvester Turner and winners of the Mayor’s Hispanic Heritage Awards were honored. More than 40 Hispanic leaders attended the lively event, hosted by President Reginald DesRoches and his wife, Paula, and organized by MCR. A stellar performance by Rice’s mariachi band, Mariachi Luna Llena, rounded out the evening.
Rice At Large
In the Fall 2022 issue of Rice At Large, the newsletter that highlights Rice’s engagement with the Houston community, the feature story showcases Rice engineering alum and professional football player Emmanuel Ellerbee ’18. In his zeal to inspire underserved students, Ellerbee created Bee’s Believers, a nonprofit to help them discover their passions and achieve their goals by excelling in STEAM and athletics.
Marketing and Digital Communications
Marketing
U.S. News Peer Influencer Campaign — Fall 2022
The planned fall media campaign included placement in the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE), Inside Higher Ed and NPR.org. The digital assets ranged from high-impact banners on the publication websites to desktop and mobile display banners to the CHE newsletter Academe Today. There was also placement of sponsored content that focused on research and innovation at Rice.
Highlights:
Total impressions: 6,324,037
Total clicks: 10,012
Total views: 2,830,969
Takeaways:
The ad placements exceeded estimated impressions overall by 108%.
The CHE newsletters, high-impact display banners and the NPR.org display banners received the highest click-through rates (CTR) for November and December.
The 970x250 9/6 Academe Today ad received the highest clicks — 2,765 — from a newsletter by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The previous total high was 1,200 (ad included below).
To date, the sponsor content has exceeded estimated impressions of 1 million by reaching 1,149,147. The CTR is also higher than expected at 0.24%. And, in the first month the content was posted, readers averaged 10:39 reading/watching (included a video) the content. This is above the average spend of approximately two minutes for other content posted by CHE.
Rice.edu
Visits to the homepage decreased by 11% during November and December from the previous two months, accounting for the Thanksgiving holiday and winter break. Total page views were 452,824, with visitors spending an average time of 3 minutes, 19 seconds on the site, which continues to show that they are finding the information they need.
November/December Page views: 452,824 Average time on page: 3 minutes, 19 seconds Bounce rate: 69.24%
As of Dec. 31, Public Affairs and the Office of Information Technology have successfully launched 292 Drupal 9 websites. On Nov. 2, 2022, the RUSMP Math Circle website (mathcircle.rice.edu) launched in the Rice-branded Drupal theme. Also, on Dec. 13, the AGEP PRIMED Alliance launched their website (primed.rice.edu), which focuses on postdoctoral scholars and early career faculty in engineering. Finally, on Dec. 8, the Rice Holiday Card launched online as well as on the Rice YouTube channel.
The two departments are also collaborating on an additional 31 new websites that have come into the Rice-branded theme. Some of the websites currently under development are:
Adrian Lenardic Lab
Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems (CoFES)
Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning (CERCL)
Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE)
Curriculum Management (Office of the Registrar)
Energy and Environment Initiative
Environmental Science
Events **
Geofluids Lab | Helge Gonnermann
Innovation at Rice (VP of Innovation)
Mathematics (Site revamp)
Moody eXpErIeNcE (DAR)
National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP)
Office of Faculty Development (OFD)
Organization & Workforce Laboratory (OWL)
RICE 360°
The Chemistry of Art
** Website restructure/content update as well as the calendar system (LiveWhale) version update
All Drupal 9 websites have the new Google Analytics 4 set up and are tracking through the Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager. We are currently working on upgrading the reporting system that displays the vast amount of data from these systems and should have that in place before the EOL (End of Life) of Google Analytics 3 (aka Universal Analytics) at the end of June 2023.
Social media
Impressions: the number of times the content was seen. Total Audience: the number of people who follow or like the main Rice accounts. Engagements: the number of interactions (likes, loves, shares, comments, clicks, etc.) on a post.
Social media channel overview for November and December:
Total net audience growth: 4,781 followers
Total impressions: 4,497,554
Total engagements: 239,638
Engagement rate per impression: 6.9%
Post link clicks: 13,442
Total audience across platforms: 270,944
Performance summary overview:
Impressions were down 30.2% for the period of 11/1/2022–12/31/2022 as compared to the previous reporting period. Engagements also showed a loss of 27.2% over the same period. The loss in impressions and engagements were in part due to the end of the fall semester and the holidays, which typically show less engagement from all audiences. Despite the loss in impressions and engagements, audience showed slight growth of 1.4%.
Twitter:
Total followers: 44,419 Gained: 0.6% Engagement rate per impression: 2.2% Total published posts: 72 Top post: Rice synthetic biologists have engineered bacteria to function as living biometric sensors. Second highest: Video — Rice undergraduate archer Katherine Wu hits the mark training for the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Facebook:
Total fans: 63,545 Gained: 0.7% Engagement rate per impression: 6.9% Total published posts: 79 Top post: Congratulations to our December graduates. Second highest: The Shepherd School of Music Opera fall performance.
LinkedIn:
Total followers: 111,873 Gained: 1.9% Engagement rate per impression: 4.1% Total published posts: 56 Top post: Rice engineer, physicist and chemist Naomi Halas and Rice theoretical and computational physicist Peter Norlander have developed a way for petrochemical … Second highest: Rice professor receives $1 million grant to rethink disaster resilience modeling.
Instagram:
Total followers: 51,107 Gained: 1.6% Engagement rate per impression: 8.7% Total published posts: 66 Top post: Rice welcomed its most selective class of freshmen and transfer students in history this fall. Second highest: For the fourth year in a row, Rice Business is ranked the No. 1 graduate entrepreneurship program in the United States for 2023 by the Princeton Review.
Media Stars
Megan Reiter, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, had the highest number of media mentions — 1,593 — during November and December, mainly for comments about her study of the Carina Nebula’s Cosmic Cliffs with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Below are members of the Rice community who were mentioned in the media 10 or more times between November and December.
Megan Reiter
1,593
Douglas Brinkley
930
Peter Hartley
756
Anna Mikulska
748
Mark Jones
712
Mark Finley
662
Jeffrey Kripal
484
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen
259
Bob Stein
249
Francisco Monaldi
218
Daniel Cohan
208
Katharine Neill Harris
203
Peter Nordlander
172
Mike Bloomgren
139
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera
112
Naomi Halas
105
Andrea Isella
101
Rajdeep Dasgupta
95
André Izidoro
92
Kevin Wyss
87
James Tour
84
Dan Wallach
79
Jim Krane
77
David Brockman
73
Ken Medlock
59
Lauren Stadler
59
Scott Solomon
54
Scott Sonenshein
53
Michelle Michot Foss
51
Tony Payan
51
Helge Gonnermann
42
Sylvia Dee
41
Caroline Ajo-Franklin
39
Steve Sherman
39
Jonathan Silberg
38
Xu Zhang
38
Muhammad Rahman
37
Boris Yakobson
37
Reginald DesRoches
35
Luqing Wang
35
M.A.S.R. Saadi
34
Vivian Ho
33
Lydia Beaudrot
31
Andrea Vallejo-Vargas
31
Asunción Semper-Pascual
30
Priyanka Ali
29
Esther Lou
29
Prashant Kalvapalle
26
Karen Lu
26
Michael Wong
24
Walter Chapman
21
Thiago Pinheiro dos Santos
21
Philip Singer
21
Jordan Miller
17
Gabriel Collins
15
Gökçe Günel
14
Daniel Preston
14
Omid Veiseh
14
Kiese Laymon
13
Michael Diehl
12
Elaine Howard Ecklund
11
Dominic Boyer
10
Luis Guajardo
10
Cymene Howe
10
Frauke Josenhans
10
Timothy Morton
10
Mark Finley, fellow in energy and global oil at the Baker Institute for Public Policy’s Center for Energy Studies, had the highest number of media mentions — 8,883 — during 2022. Below are members of the Rice community who were mentioned in the media 500 or more times last year.
Mark Finley
8,883
Daniel Cohan
6,055
Anna Mikulska
4,779
Mark Jones
4,271
Francisco Monaldi
4,130
Douglas Brinkley
3,248
Evan Fricke
2,446
Jeffrey Kripal
2,414
Jim Krane
2,409
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen
2,212
Tony Payan
2,072
Ken Medlock
1,874
Vivian Ho
1,771
Reginald DesRoches
1,641
Megan Reiter
1,593
James Tour
1,492
Kiese Laymon
1,429
Steven Miles
1,065
Gabriel Collins
881
Daniel Preston
871
Grace Walters
869
Peter Hartley
770
Michelle Michot Foss
708
Rachel Meidl
613
Leila Peyravan
607
Faye Yap
592
Bob Stein
556
The chart below shows Rice’s media mentions since 2007. The green column reflects the number of mentions through Dec. 31, 2022.
