Rice University
AC-10: Support for Research

(1) The annual Rice Undergraduate Research Symposium (RURS) enables Rice undergraduate students in all disciplines to share their research and design projects with the broader Rice and Houston community. Monetary prizes are awarded to students, and are determined by faculty, graduate student, and community judges. Specific prizes are awarded to students whose research focuses on sustainability and the environment through the Center for the Study of Environment and Society Prize as well as The Shell Center for Sustainability Awards: -The Center for the Study of Environment and Society Prize “recognizes an outstanding project that seeks to promote a deeper and broader understanding of environmental issues through interdisciplinary approaches and/or improvement of the sustainability of the community.” -The Shell Center for Sustainability Awards “recognize outstanding, multidisciplinary research projects that consider long-term sustainable development in the Houston region and/or Gulf Coast.” (2) Rice’s Envision Grant provides up to $2,500 in support of student projects that promote service or create awareness, foster leadership development, demonstrate ingenuity, and plan for sustainability. The Envision Grant provides start-up funding for individuals or group projects that generate a positive impact at the Rice, Houston, or global community. (3) The Shell Center for Sustainability supports educational opportunities in the area of sustainability by funding student internships in the area of sustainable development, thereby linking Rice students to opportunities both within and beyond the university. (4) The Greene Prize Competition was established in the 1990s to encourage undergraduate students to submit original environmental work so as to reach and educate a wider audience regarding important environmental issues. The submissions range from research and policy oriented papers to creative writing stories regarding sustainability and the environment. Past winners have written papers about “Alternative Fuel Vehicles in Urban Settings: A Case Study of the City of Houston Municipal Fleet”, and “Greenhouse gas production in oiled and unoiled S. alterniflora and A. germinans soils in tidal salt marshes Barataria Bay, Louisiana.”

The Shell Center for Sustainability seeks to create an interdisciplinary program of research, education, and outreach to identify and address potential threats to the sustainable development of living standards. The Shell Center for sustainability calls for proposals to fund significant faculty research during the current academic year in the broad area of sustainable development.

Although there are no formally adopted policies, Rice’s vision for the second century explicitly highlights the need to increase its interdisciplinary endeavors. Specifically, the vision states that as a university, “We must invest in a select number of interdisciplinary endeavors that will enable us to leverage our own strengths as well as the strengths of potential collaborators. These interdisciplinary endeavors should include some efforts to which we have already made substantial commitments and new areas that will emerge as we develop our strategic priorities and research vision for the future.” The vision also explains that resources will be made available to support faculty and departments seeking collaborative opportunities as such help is often needed to overcome the significant barriers to interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration that continue to exist. There are currently a number of competitive grants, fellowships and programs to foster interdisciplinary research and teaching: -The Arts Initiatives Fund aims to stimulate experimentation and collaboration in creativity and the arts across the entire campus. Selection criteria for the grants included contributions to developing arts experimentation, collaboration and innovation across the campus and/or within Houston; quality, significance and potential impact of the project; and enrichment of opportunities for students and faculty to integrate arts making and experimentation into university life. -The Faculty Initiatives Fund s an internal funding mechanism that awards competitive grants of between $5,000-$50,000 to Rice faculty. These grants are intended to help faculty members develop adventurous projects that might enhance the university and that might lead to larger endeavors, research breakthroughs, external funding opportunities, or unusually creative work. Proposals are evaluated on their contribution to furthering the Vision for the Second Century including fostering interdisciplinary endeavors. -The Humanities Research Center awards up to three postdoctoral fellowships for two-year appointments. The fellowships are designed to encourage interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching. -Since 2007, the Humanities Research Center has awarded over 100 undergraduate fellowships to outstanding students interested in working on interdisciplinary research projects grounded in the humanities. -The Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Engineering (IRISE) program provides the support for highly motivated graduate students to conduct interdisciplinary research focused on addressing issues critical to our nation and the world.

The library supports sustainability research by providing resources on the subject in the form of print and electronic books, journals, databases, government documents, and visual media. Because the subject of sustainability is related to a number of academic disciplines (architecture, environmental engineering, ecology, etc.), those departments use their library budgets to order materials on sustainability. Collection Development Librarians also order materials related to sustainability with general library funds. The most important way that the library supports sustainability research is by providing online access to the journal literature via online databases. Some of the most comprehensive databases such as Web of Science, Compendex for Engineering Literature, Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, and other databases are available to Rice students and faculty. Without these databases, research could not be done. The library also provides access to major e-journal collections such as JSTOR, Science Direct, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford, Springer, and Project Muse. Furthermore, if a journal article cannot be found in the Rice Library or in one of these collections, then it will be ordered from some other library (worldwide if necessary) via Interlibrary Loan. This service is funded by the library, and is free to Rice students and faculty. Additionally, a library guide on sustainability is in the process of being developed, and should be available by the start of the fall 2014 semester.