Martian geologist Kirsten Siebach was one of 13 scientists selected in December 2020 by NASA to help operate the Mars rover Perseverance. Siebach is helping scout for samples that will eventually be returned to Earth.  Learn more

In December 2020, the Pumani, a low-cost CPAP, and its creators at the Rice 360° Institute for Global Health were named to the Global Innovation Exchange’s Million Lives Club, a development initiative that celebrates innovations and social entrepreneurs whose inventions have directly or indirectly impacted the lives of 1 million or more people who live on less than $5 a day.  Learn more about the Pumani low-cost CPAP.

A team of Rice University researchers is studying forgotten and newly uncovered artifacts and records related to slavery thanks to a grant it received in November 2020 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The title of the project is “Diasporic Cultures of Slavery: Engaging Disciplines, Engaging Communities.” Learn More

Testing for malaria could become as simple as putting on a bandage. That’s the idea behind a platform developed by Rice University engineers who introduced a microneedle patch for rapid diagnostic testing that does not require extracting blood. The device detailed in the November 2020 issue of the Nature journal Microsystems and Nanoengineering draws upon protein biomarkers contained in dermal interstitial fluid, what people generally recognize as the fluid inside blisters but surrounds all of the cells in skin. Learn More

In October 2020, the Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment Center (NEWT), a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center with its headquarters at Rice University, earned a five-year renewal to continue its work on next-generation water treatment systems. The multi-institution, multidisciplinary center under the direction of Rice environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez is a partnership between academia, industry and government to produce transformational technology as well as engineers primed to lead the global economy. The NSF award is for $16.5 million. Learn More

The formation of relationships — everything from business to romantic partnerships — and how they impact the world is the focus of a new Rice University research project funded in September 2020 by the National Science Foundation (NSF). "Repeated Matching Games: An Empirical Framework” received a $264,000 grant from the NSF. Jeremy Fox, the Shatto Endowed Chair of Economics at Rice, is the principal investigator for the three-year research project. Learn More

Rice University researchers will contribute to a new project to make better batteries for electric vehicles. Rice materials scientist Ming Tang and his colleagues announced in July 2020 they will receive part of a $2.4 million grant from the United States Advanced Battery Consortium to develop low-cost, fast-charging batteries for vehicles. Learn More

In July 2020, Rice physicists received a $1.3 million grant from the Department of Energy to bolster the university’s ongoing research at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The grant to Paul Padley and Karl Ecklund, both professors of physics and astronomy and longtime core members of the LHC team, is a continuation of funding (now totaling $4.5 million) to Rice researchers who helped build one of the collider’s key components and study the resulting data about the elementary particles it finds. Learn More

A new subfield of sociological research examining how identities and beliefs are related to attitudes about science and religion is being advanced by a $2.9 million grant awarded in June 2020 to Elaine Howard Ecklund, the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences at Rice, and John Evans, the Tata Chancellor’s Chair in Social Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. The grant, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust and coordinated by The Issachar Fund, is the first comprehensive initiative to fund new scholarship in the sociology of science and religion. Learn More

A trio of Rice University professors and their labs are taking part in a five-year, $10 million Superfund Research Program grant awarded in May 2020 by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to study how toxic chemicals emanating from Superfund sites impact preterm births. Naomi Halas, Kyriacos Zygourakis and Pedro Alvarez are bringing their labs’ expertise to the Baylor College of Medicine-based Multiproject Research Center that also includes collaborators from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Alvarez is the Rice lead, co-principal investigator and co-director of the center. Learn More

Rice University lab won a prestigious National Institutes of Health grant in April 2020 to pursue gene-editing research it hopes will lead to a cure for sickle cell disease. The four-year R01 grant to Gang Bao, Rice’s Foyt Family Professor of Bioengineering and a professor of chemistry and of materials science and nanoengineering, is worth $2.45 million. The grant will be administered by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Learn more

Scientists at Rice University, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) announced in 2020 they are using a very small visible beam to burn laser-induced graphene (LIG) into microscopic patterns. The labs of Rice chemist James Tour, which discovered the original method to turn a common polymer into graphene in 2014, and Tennessee/ORNL materials scientist Philip Rack revealed they can now watch the conductive material form as it makes small traces of LIG in a scanning electron microscope. Learn More