Four Envision grants awarded
Newly awarded Envision grants will allow students to put up artwork in the Student Center, hold science competitions in the Middle East, expose inner-city high school students to research and make campus shuttles smell like fast food.
Leadership Rice awarded the first of three rounds of the grants Oct. 18 for proposals submitted by four teams of Rice students.
Will Rice College senior Guyton Durnin received $1,028 for the Rice University Biodiesel Initiative. Durnin worked with sustainability coordinators, the Facilities, Engineering and Planning department and several professors to develop biodiesel automobile fuel from used vegetable oil discarded by the residential colleges. Future sources of vegetable oil may include Sammy’s and Cohen House.
Durnin said the use of biodiesel could reduce pollution on campus.
“If [students] are behind the shuttle bus, they will no longer smell like diesel,” Durnin said. “They will smell like French fries.”
Student Center Visual Arts Coordinator Ying Shi was awarded $1,000 to develop a student art display in Farnsworth Pavilion. Shi, a Wiess College junior, said student artwork is usually displayed on the second floor of Sewall Hall.
“I wanted to give students a chance to exhibit their work in a visually prominent space,” Shi said.
Physics and astronomy graduate student Antoun Daou was awarded a $1,200 grant to start the Rice Science Tournament. The tournament will consist of a series of competitions for high school sophomores in Lebanon and is intended to promote an interest in science among Lebanese high school students. NASA, Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Lab and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut will also contribute to the tournament.
Daou said he also hopes to promote tolerance and peace and to increase U.S. involvement in Lebanon.
“We need more constant outreach projects there — a positive way of thinking, a more positive way of looking at [U.S.] involvement,” Daou said.
Computational and applied mathematics graduate students Jay Raol, Fernando Acosta and Jesse Turner, Baker College senior Nithin Rajan and Hanszen College junior Andy Bost will receive funding for “unWRAP the Potential,” a program that introduces high school students from low-income Worthing High School to scientific research. The unWRAP program was implemented in 2001 and now enrolls three high school seniors and two juniors.
Raol said students are exposed to research as juniors and return the following year to receive help on college applications.
Leadership Rice has not determined an award amount for Raol’s team, which plans to use the grant to continue paying for the program.
The Envision Grants, first awarded in 1995, were created by Adviser to the President Maryana Iskander (Wiess ‘97), who was then Student Association president. The Envision Grants provide funding for students with innovative service projects aimed at Rice or outside communities. Past grants have funded projects such as the student-run Coffeehouse and an after-school arts program in Nicaragua.
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