Ike Akinwande

Oklahoma City, OK

Dr. Satish Nagarajaiah

Ike is entering his final semester at Rice University and will be acquiring a B.S. in Civil Engineering. This summer he investigated the effects of temperature on strain sensing characteristics of carbon nanotubes.

David Alvarado

San Angelo, TX

Dr. Anthony Chan

David is going to be a first-year graduate student in the Physics and Astronomy department this fall and he is spending the summer studying the diffusion equation for electrons in the outer zone radiation belts.

Lauren Bailey

Corpus Christi, TX

Advisor: Dr. Marcia O’Malley

Lauren will be a junior in the Mechanical Engineering department. This summer, she is working with a haptic joystick and running a series of experiments to determine how force feedback enables a user to learn and execute a task better.

Rosa Bañuelos

Bakersfield, CA

Advisor: Dr. Rudy Guerra

Rosa will be starting the PhD program in Statistics at Rice University in Fall 2005.  She received her M.S. in Statistics from the University of New Mexico this past May.  This summer, she has been writing code to correct for multiple testing using various methods and will soon explore its relationship with meta-analysis.

Jeremy Beasley

Marrero, LA

Advisor: Dr. Edward Knightly

Jeremy worked under Dr. Knight (Networks Group, ECE) focusing his research on developing high performance wireless mesh networks for deployment in municipal usage in Houston.  Areas of focus were node placement optimization, maximizing bandwidth in variable channel, and security through intrusion detection systems.  Jeremy is a fourth year Electrical & Computer Engineering major at Rice University.

Alex Brewer III

Spring, TX

Advisor: Dr. Robert Raphael

Alex is working with giant unilamellar vesicles, which are very important to the study of membrane mechanics. Currently he and his advisor are investigating whether or not their method of producing vesicles, electroformation, may be oxidizing the lipids.

Natalie Capiro

Advisor: Philip Bedient

Natalie is in her sixth and final year in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at Rice University. Her research concentration is within the broad area of fate and transport of organic contaminants in groundwater systems. On this topic she has worked at several scales, from the microbial to the near field-scale. Her doctoral research has been conducted in large-scale controlled release artificial aquifer tanks, and has involved the evaluation of groundwater and soils samples to characterize source zone issues surrounding the increased use of ethanol-gasoline fuel mixtures. The intensive field sampling has focused on understanding the microbial ecology dynamics, which was assessed using real-time quantitative molecular techniques, and the transport pathways, from source generation to the cosolvency enhancement and capillary/vadose zone migration.

Edward Castillo

Advisor: Dr. Yin Zhang

Ed is a fifth-year graduate student in the CAAM department at Rice. He is doing research in the field of medical image registration. He is currently writing his dissertation.

Jamie Chatman

Advisor: Dr. Katherine Donato

In the fall, Jamie will begin her third-year in the Department of Statistics at Rice. She is working in collaboration with the Sociology Department. She spent her summer completing a research project studying the race, ethnic, and nativity differences in asthma. She also began a Meta-analysis on the Hispanic Paradox, specifically focusing on mortality, low birth weight, diabetes, obesity, and heart conditions (e.g. hypertension).

Candice Claunch

McAllen, TX

Advisor: Dr. Andrew Meade

Candice is going to be a junior undergraduate student at Rice University majoring in Mechanical Engineering.  She is spending her summer working on the cavity flow problem in military aircraft.

Michael Contreras

Anaheim, CA

Advisor: Dr. Satish Nagarajaiah

Daniel Covarrubias

Advisor: Dr. Katherine Ensor

This Fall Daniel will be a fourth-year graduate student in the Statistics Department. His current research involves non-parametrically estimating the dose-response surface and identifying synergistic, antagonistic and additive behavior of the surface. This summer he mentored 17 undergraduate students, providing direction with statistical computing and concepts.

Paris Cox

Grand Prairie, TX

Advisor: Dr. Enrique Barrera

Paris received his BS in Materials Engineering at Carnegie Mellon and is now a first-year graduate student in the Mechanical and Materials Science Department at Rice. His research currently involves nanomaterial composites.

Chantal Edwards

Advisor: Dr. Daniel Sorensen

Chantal Edwards is a second-year student in the Computational and Applied Mathematics Department. She has not yet begun research, but hopes to work with Dr. Yin Zhang in the area of optimization.

Devon Fanfair

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. Michael Carroll

Phillip Graves

Midland, TX

Advisor: Dr. John Olson

Phillip is a third-year graduate student in the Cell Biology and Biochemistry department.  He graduated cum laude from University of Texas - Permian Basin in 2002 with a B.S. in Chemistry. His thesis research focuses on increasing the expression of recombinant human hemoglobin in E. coli, in search of a more cost-effcient blood substitute.

Kary Green

Texarkana, AR

Advisor: Dr. Matthias Heikenschloss

Kary is a third-year graduate student in the Computational and Applied Mathematics department at Rice.  This summer Kary’s research is on “Optimal Sensor Placement for Parameter Identification”. This is the topic that he is writing his thesis on.

Jason Guerrero

Portland, TX

Advisor: Dr. Jim Tour

Jason is currently working on the synthesis and development of nanoscale machines. One current problem associated with the development of new nanoscale machines is the ability to, not only give the machines some mechanism, but to make them individually accessible as well.  In his current research, he is developing a nanoscale car that will be light-powered and individually accessible through scanning tunneling microscopy (STM).  This research will also give him insight into the development of various machine “pieces”, so that eventual modular construction of nanodevices will be possible. He is entering his third year as a graduate student at Rice.

Rosa Gutierrez

Roma, TX

Advisor: Dr. Yin Zhang

Rosa is a graduate student in Applied Mathematics from the University of Texas Pan American.  This summer she worked on comparing the properties and behavior of orthogonal matching pursuit and basis pursuit.

Marcos Huerta

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. Patrick Hartigan

Marcos Huerta is a graduate student with the Physics and Astronomy Department at Rice University.  He spent his summer teaching ASTR 201 through Rice Summer School for College Students, and working on his Ph. D. thesis.  Research that will be included in his thesis includes a new method for determining stellar temperature and an ongoing search for low mass companions around pre-main-sequence stars.

Priscilla James

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. Naomi Halas

Priscilla is a Chemistry major at the University of Houston. Her summer research is titled “Plasmonic Copper Nanostuctures.” Plasmonic Copper Nanostructures are an important product in the semiconductor industry as sensors for electromagnetic radiation, normal biological molecules, abnormal molecules and has many more applications. Her lab group developed a wet chemistry method for the fabrication of copper nanostructures with controllable morphologies.

Regis A. James

Newell, NC

Advisor: Dr. Kyriacos Athanasiou

Regis is an undergraduate student majoring in bioengineering here at Rice University.  He is currently studying the short-term effects of harvest and passage techniques for articular and meniscal chondrocyte adhesion and aggregation.  This is his first year in AGEP.

Jennifer Jamison

Austin, TX

Advisor: Vicki Colvin

Jennifer is beginning her third year in the Chemistry department.  She was recently accepted into the NIH Nanobiology Training Program and spent her summer learning to purify and handle proteins.  She also continued to apply analytical ultracentrifugation to the characterization of solution-phase nanoparticles, including aqueous and non-aqueous systems.

Syrine Joubert

Elton, LA

Advisor: Dr. Chuck Koelbel

Syrine is a senior at McNeese State University studying Mathematics and Computer Information Technology. She is currently working with the VGrADS (Virtual Grid Application Design Software) Project. Her research consists of scheduling workflows on the Grid given inconsistent information. She will be computing the makespans of varying workflows on the grid. Finally, she will statistically evaluate the results using Excel.

Aaron Martinez

San Antonio, TX

Advisor: Dr. Victor Behar

Aaron is beginning his fourth year in the Chemistry department. He graduated from Our Lady of the Lake University in 2002 with a B.S. in Chemistry and a B.A. in Biology.  His research at Rice focuses on the total synthesis of natural products, in particular Lactonamycin and its related polyketides, which serve as targets for synthetic efforts given the bioactivity of their natural products. The interesting structural features of the related polyketides provide further impetus for the total synthesis of Lactonamycin and the synthetic challenges associated with their features. Lactonamycin exhibits a variety of potentially valuable biological activities. His research entails a plan and progress toward lactonamycin that will allow for the synthesis of a unique substrate where these methodologies may be utilized so as to complete the first total synthesis of lactonamycin.

Aramis Martinez

El Paso, TX

Advisor: Dr. Patricia Reiff

Aramis attended the Geospace Environment Modeling 2005 Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His summer project is to continue his thesis research, adding the Tsygananko 2004 magnetic field model to work done by Vance Henize in 2001-02 to determine electron density altitude profiles in the earth’s magnetic polar cap using data from Radio Plasma Imager on NASA’s IMAGE satellite. He is a Ph.D. student in Rice’s Physics and Astronomy department.

Casey Martinez

San Marcos, TX

Advisor: Dr. Naomi Halas

Casey is a graduating senior from Texas State University.  He is involved in active research with an applied physics research program headed by Dr. Naomi Halas.  This group specializes in the production and development of nanoshells which have huge applications to the medical and electrical fields.

Jonathan Martinez

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. Jennifer West

Jonathan is a rising junior enrolled in the Bioengineering department at Rice University.  He is researching the effects of certain spatial gradients of integrin and selectin binding ligand concentrations and how JURKAT cells, T4 lymphocytes, affect cell rolling and adhesion at a particular flow rate.

Liliana Martinez

Marion, TX

Advisor: Dr. Yin Zhang

Liliana is an undergraduate Mathematics major from the University of Texas at San Antonio.  This summer she worked on comparing the properties and behavior of orthogonal matching pursuit and basis pursuit.

Maria Martinez

Brackettville, TX

Advisor: Dr. Enrique Barrera

Maria will be a third-year Mechanical Engineering major in the Fall at Rice University.  She is currently working in the Hypervelocity Impact Facility in Ryon Lab to test nanotube polymer composites for Spacecraft shielding applications.

Naxhiely Martinez

San Antonio, TX

Advisor: Dr. Bonnie Bartel

Yenny Martinez

Altadena, CA

Advisor: Dr. Thomas Killian

Yenny Natali is a fourth year Ph. D. student studying atomic physics.  This summer, she was involved in developing a newly-built high vacuum chamber for laser cooling and trapping neutral strontium atoms.  With this chamber, Yenny and her lab partners plan to perform ultracold collision studies and create quantum degenerate gases with strontium.

Jarret Mathwig

Stafford, TX

Advisor: Dr. Angelo Miele

This summer, Jarret studied for his qualifying exams, while simultaneously programming the single-subarc sequential gradient restoration algorithm used for his research in optimizing trajectories of a rocket from Earth to Mars.

Daneesh McIntosh

Kingston, Jamaica

Advisor: Dr. Enrique Barrera

Daneesh is a graduate student in the department of Mechanical Engineering and Material Science who received her M.S. in May 2005. Her research has focused on analyzing the mechanical properties of fibers made from single-walled carbon nanotube reinforced thermoplastic polymer composites, utilizing both functionalized and unfunctionalized carbon nanotubes for these systems. This is her first year of being associated with the Rice AGEP program.

Travis McPhail

Dallas, TX

Advisor: Dr. Joe Warren

Travis is a second-year graduate student in Rice's Computer Science Department. His research focused on deformation methods. Travis participated in the AGEP Summer Program as an undergraduate and continued on for his doctorate degree in computer graphics.

Sheila Moore

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. A.G. Mikos

Sheila is a third-year graduate student in the Bioengineering department at Rice University. The objective of her summer was to obtain the knowledge and materials necessary to encapsulate cells within an oligo (poly(ethylene glycol)-fumarate), OPF, hydrogel crosslinked with a MMP sensitive peptide.

Kenie Moses

Shreveport, LA

Advisor: Dr. Marcia O’Malley

Kenie’s research focused on the development of a linear one degree of freedom haptic device for interaction with virtual walls and remote environments. Along with the development of this device, various real-time platforms where this hardware can be tested were also implemented. With the utilization of this device and associated software platforms, hopes of overall performance in real-time applications can be achieved.

Josue Noyola-Martinez

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. Rudy Guerra

Josué is a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Statistics. He spent this summer working with Dr. Guerrero of the Department of Radiation Oncology, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Dr. Guerra Professor of Statistics Rice University.  Josué and Dr. Guerrero submitted a paper that was accepted for presentation at the International Conference of Visualization, Imaging, and Image Processing (IASTED).  The paper describes a new use of rigid body registration to obtain a mapping between inhale and exhale CT scan images.  Moreover, Josué and Dr. Guerra are presently pursuing new ways of identifying interactions between genes which could explain the genetic origins of complex diseases like Diabetes, Hypertension, and others.

Barbara Nsiah

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. Jennifer West

Barbara performed research in the Bioengineering Department in the West Lab.  She will be graduating in May 2006 from Iowa State University with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and hopes to pursue a Ph.D. program in Bioengineering.

Christian Omidiran

Sugar Land, TX

Advisor: Dr. Richard Baraniuk

Chris spent his summer completing a boosting algorithm for Neyman-Pearson classification. He will be a fourth-year undergraduate at Rice in the fall.

Paul Ontiveros

El Paso, TX

Advisor: Dr. Frank Toffoleto

Paul’s summer was spent on developing a computational model that represents the magnetosphere’s large-scale current systems and their magnetic field effects.  This work included novel methods of modeling the field aligned current system, the partial ring current, and the magnetopause currents.  These new improvements were added to the Rice Field Model, a magnetic field model that has seen over two decades of development at Rice.

Joanna Papakonstantinou

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. Richard Tapia

Joanna is a fourth-year graduate student in the Computational and Applied Mathematics Department. She spent her summer working on her Master’s thesis: A Historical Development of the BFGS Secant Method and Its Characterization Properties. This is Joanna’s third summer participating in the Rice AGEP Program.

Nicholas Parra-Vasquez

Oxnard, CA

Advisor: Dr. Matteo Pasquali

Nicholas Parra-Vasquez, a forth-year graduate student in the chemical engineering department, worked on obtaining fibers comprised of functionalized single-walled carbon nanotubes (f-SWNTs). Nick is also in the process of writing a journal article on measuring the length of SWNTs by viscosity measurements as well as working on using theory to determine the length distribution of SWNTs via rheological techniques.

Aisha Pinto

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. Mary Ellen Lane

Aisha is an undergraduate biochemistry/pre-med student at Rice University.  Her summer research focused on the construction of a heat-inducible TOL2-MCS2 plasmid as well as identifying Cyclops and Smu mutant zebrafish.  She also worked to identify the phenotypic alterations of ccna and ccnb mutant fish.

Naomi Reed

Missouri City, TX

Advisor: Dr. Brad Peercy and Dr. Richard Tapia

Naomi’s project for the summer was to further her research for her Master’s thesis where she hopes to combine a social science approach to issues of social justice, race, and education with Juan Gilbert’s computational method for computing diversity through Cluster Analysis. She hopes to combine the qualitative research that she conducted at the University of Chicago with mathematical modeling.

John-David Rocha

Mesquite, TX

Advisor: Dr. Bruce Weisman

Entering his third year of doctoral study in Chemisty, John-David focused on improving system design and software analysis for a novel spectrofluorimetric analyzer of single-walled carbon nanotube bulk samples.

Betty Rostro

Dallas, TX

Advisor: Dr. Enrique Barrera

Betty spent the summer working on carbon nanotube heat transfer fluids (nHTFs). Efficient heat transfer is needed in engines, radiators, heat pumps, etc., these use traditional HTFs such as oil, ethylene glycol, and water with low thermal conductivities. Incorporating carbon nanotubes into HTFS, n-HTFs, would result in more efficient heat transfer, leading to improved engine-pump performance, longer operation times, down sizing of engines, and lower operation costs. We have increased the thermal conductivity of n-HTFs by 65-80%. Additionally we used 2 new thermal conductivity instruments to provide accurate and reproducible thermal conductivity data.  She is currently about to defend her masters.

Delia Shelton

Brenham, TX

Advisor: Dr. Lisa Meffert

Delia Shelton is a 2005 graduate of the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science (TAMS) at the University of North Texas. Dr. Meffert guides her research based at the Houston Zoo. This research involves studying the effects of a feeding plan with fasting incorporated in the captive Indochinese tiger (Panthera tigris corbetti). The hypothesis is that induced fasting downplays the stereotypical behavior exhibited in this endangered species and may ultimately lead to increased breeding and species propagation.

Josef Sifuentes

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. Mckay Hyde

This summer Josef is researching methods of efficiently computing numerical approximations to solutions of the wave equation using an integral method. He will be a second-year student in the Computational and Applied Mathematics department this fall.

Clayton Simien

Port Arthur, TX

Advisor: Dr. Thomas Killian

Clayton is a Physics and Astronomy Graduate Student, and his summer research focused on helping to construct and use a laser at a wavelength of 422 nm to image and study ion dynamics in an ultracold neutral strontium plasma.

Lakeshia Taite

Grove Hill, AL

Advisor: Dr. Jennifer West

Andres Thomas-Stivalet

McAllen, TX

Advisor: Dr. Dan Wallach

Andres is an undergrad student in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. His summer project is on currently tracking and developing solutions for weblog spam.

Jesse Turner

Memphis, TN

Advisor: Dr. Dennis Cox and Dr. Steven Cox

Jesse is a graduate student in the department of Computational and Applied Mathematics. His summer project consists of fixing a model that estimated synaptic conductances from white noise in neural cells.  Jesse also plans to continue his study of Markov processes to gain a better understanding of the mathematics involved in the model.

Jesus (Jerry) Vera

Kingsville, TX

Advisor: Dr. Yildiz Bayazitoglu

Jerry, a second year Mechanical Engineering graduate student is working as a Mechanical Engineer and student researcher at Ad Astra Technologies, Inc, formerly known as the Advanced Space Propulsion Laboratory (ASPL) at the NASA Johnson Space Center.  His project includes work on thermal management for the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket.  Jerry was an undergrad at Rice and worked under Dr. Enrique Barerra on various NASA-related studies on carbon nanocomposites.

Davaine Williams

Memphis, TN

Advisor: Dr. Chuck Koelbel

Davaine is a current student at Texas Southern University majoring in Computer Science. This summer she is working on the VGrADS program: Virtual Grid Application Development Software. The main objective of her research is to determine whether or not the results of the workflow schedule reflect inconsistencies if the schedule were given bad information.

Talithia Williams

Columbus, GA

Advisor: Dr. Katherine Ensor

Talithia’s research is in the area of environmental statistics. She is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Statistics department at Rice.

Kevin Wilson

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. Andrew Meade

Kevin is a second-year undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department. His summer project involved the use of Matlab to develop and test codes that model experimental wind-tunnel data.

Nicole Wylie

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. Pol Spanos

Nicole is a graduate student in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department. She spent the summer working for Forensic Engineers, Inc., of Houston, investigating foundation and framing failures in residential and commercial structures, and teaching flute lessons for children ages 8-16.

Jose-Miguel Yamal

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. Dennis Cox

Jose-Miguel is a graduate student in the Statistics department and does joint work with UT-MD Anderson Cancer Center. His dissertation focus is on multi-level polytomous classification and is being applied to automate the process of detecting cervical cancer from quantitative measurements of cells.

Fernando Zumbado

Houston, TX

Advisor: Dr. Marcia O’MalleyFernando is a graduate student in the Mechanical Engineering Department. His research focuses on bilateral teleoperation and variable time communication delay. He is currently working towards his Master’s degree, which he hopes to complete this summer.