15 new faculty members — including eight tenure-track faculty — have joined the Wiess School of Natural Sciences this year. Welcome to Rice!

Tenured/Tenure track:

Harini Iyer, assistant professor of biosciences, seeks to illuminate the complex interplay between the nervous and immune systems during development, homeostasis and in neurodegeneration from the perspective of microglia — the primary immune cells of the central nervous system that govern multiple aspects of brain architecture and function. Using the vertebrate model organism zebrafish, she seeks to uncover fundamental processes in neuroimmunology that will reveal strategies to prevent or cure neurodegenerative diseases.
Iyer received a Ph.D. in cell and developmental biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is completing postdoctoral training at Stanford University. She will start her position at Rice in Jan. 2024.

André Izidoro, assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences, is a planetary scientist who uses computer simulations to understand how planets, asteroids and comets form and evolve in our solar system and beyond. His research addresses fundamental questions such as How did the Earth form?, How did our own Solar System form?, Why is our solar system so different from others?, and Are Earth-like planets common in our Galaxy?
Izidoro earned his Ph.D. from the São Paulo State University in Brazil and held postdoctoral positions at the Observatoire de la Côte D'Azur and at the Université de Bordeaux, both in France. In 2016 he joined the São Paulo State University as a junior faculty member. Izidoro first came to Rice in 2020, as a member of the Clever Planets Consortium.

Nets Katz joins the Department of Mathematics as the W. L. Moody Chair holder and Professor of Mathematics. Prior to joining Rice, Katz was most recently the IBM Professor at CalTech. This is something of a homecoming for Katz as he received his BA in 1990 from Rice University (Wiess College) graduating after three years. He received his Ph.D in 1993 from the University of Pennsylvania.
Katz's main research interests lie in the area of harmonic analysis and combinatorics, and a great deal of his work has been focused on the so-called Kakeya problem. Because this problem has such broad connections with different parts of mathematics, it has led Katz to work in other areas, such as incidence geometry and additive combinatorics. Most spectacularly in joint work with Larry Guth (MIT), he solved the Erdos distinct distances problem.
His work has been recognized with an invitation to speak at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Seoul, a 2015 Clay Research Award and a current Simons Investigator Award.

Sven Kranz, associate professor of biosciences, focuses on the study of phytoplankton ecology and biogeochemistry. Kranz specifically is interested in how different phytoplankton groups respond to environmental perturbations such as changes in CO2, light intensity and nutrient availability. He aims not only to characterize the responses of phytoplankton to a multitude of environmental factors, but also to understand the underlying processes of the measured responses, such as photosynthetic pathways, carbon acquisition processes and protein regulation.
Kranz received his Ph.D. in marine biogeochemistry and phytoplankton ecophysiology from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI)’s Center for Polar and Marine Research at the University of Bremen. He completed postdoctoral training in biogeochemistry at the Alfred Wegener Institute before moving to Princeton University in 2011. In 2014, he started a faculty position in the Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science at Florida State University, and he joined the Rice faculty in 2023.

Theresa Loveless, assistant professor of biosciences, is a synthetic biologist whose research focuses on developing synthetic biology tools that enable cells to make a durable DNA record of ephemeral events in their history, in principle enabling biologists to correlate any type of cellular event to long term changes in the cell’s phenotype. One application of particular interest is long-term genotoxic stress and its consequences for cell fate.
Loveless received her Ph.D. in cell biology from the University of California, San Francisco. She completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, Irvine, where she created DNA recorders in mammalian cells. In 2021, the National Institute of Health (NIH) granted Loveless a Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers (MOSAIC) Postdoctoral Career Transition Award to support her creation of DNA recorders.

Andrea Rummel, assistant professor of biosciences, is a comparative physiologist, broadly interested in the physiology and mechanics of animal movement. Her research explores how locomotor physiology, thermal physiology and biomechanics interact to determine an animal’s response to changing environmental conditions on short and long timescales.
Rummel received her Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Brown University. She completed postdoctoral training at Brown University before joining Princeton University as a National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Fellow.

James Shee, assistant professor of chemistry, develops and applies ab initio computational methods to accurately model chemical systems exhibiting both weak and strong correlations.
Shee joins Rice University as the Norman Hackerman-Welch Young Investigator. Prior to this appointment, he received his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from Columbia University in 2019 and was a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Berkeley.

Yonglong Xie, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, seeks to understand how interactions between constituent electrons in solids lead to the emergence of new and unusual materials properties, some of which may be useful for next-generation quantum technological applications.
Prior to joining the Rice faculty, Xie was a Harvard Quantum Initiative Prize Postdoctoral Fellow working in Amir Yacoby’s group at Harvard in close collaboration with Pablo Jarillo-Herrero’s group at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in physics in 2019 under the supervision of Ali Yazdani at Princeton University and holds an M.S. from Ecole Normale Supéreure in Paris.

Non-Tenure track:

Nadia Agha, lecturer of kinesiology, joined the Rice faculty in Jan. 2023. Her research focuses on the effects of exercise for patients with varying diseases including, cancer, neuromuscular diseases, and diabetes. She is specifically interested in if and how exercise training can contribute to improved patient survival and quality of life in various disease models and populations. Agha received her Ph.D. in kinesiology with an emphasis in exercise physiology from the University of Houston and completed postdoctoral training in muscle physiology at Baylor College of Medicine.

Melia Bonomo joins the Physics and Astronomy Department as a lecturer, bolstering the Wiess School of Natural Sciences Learning Communities efforts to support students in natural sciences foundational courses. Bonomo received a Ph.D. in applied physics from Rice and followed that with a postdoctoral appointment in the Department of Bioengineering at Rice as well as a fellowship with the NIH National Library of Medicine Biomedical Informatics and Data Science. Her research interests lie at the intersection of the creative arts, science and healthcare. She has developed computational and theoretical methods to quantify brain activity, with application to studying the impact of music engagement on cognitive health in older adults, and to model sound encoding in the inner ear, with application to improving music processing in cochlear implants.

Tim Diedesch, lecturer of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, is a structural geologist who studies the interactions between deformation, metamorphism and crustal melting in continent-continent collision zones. He integrates field mapping with structural analysis, geochemistry and geochronology to constrain the conditions and timing of shear zones and faults that accommodate the building of large mountain belts like the Himalaya and the Appalachians. Diedesch completed his Ph.D. at University of Tennessee, Knoxville and worked for five years as a lecturer and assistant professor at Georgia Southern University prior to joining Rice. As faculty, he has developed an emphasis on undergraduate learning experiences in the classroom as well as in the field.

Ethan Gwaltney, lecturer of mathematics, is a mathematician studying spectral properties of one-dimensional Schrödinger and Dirac operators. He received his Ph.D. from Rice under the advisement of Milivoje Lukić and his Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning from the Rice Center for Teaching Excellence. He continues to engage the scholarship of teaching and learning in his instruction of undergraduates and is especially interested in the effects of summative assessment on student engagement and learning.

Tal Malinovitch joins the Rice faculty as a Lovett instructor and works with the group of David Damanik in the field of mathematics. His research focuses on the scattering theory of Schrödinger operators or the study of the long-term behavior of quantum particles. In particular, he studies systems where the potential decays only in some, but not all, directions. His research aims to shed more light on the behavior of such potentials in a periodic or quasiperiodic setting. Prior to joining the Rice faculty, Malinovitch completed his Ph.D. in mathematics at Yale University.

Jose Luis (Joey) Olmos, Jr., lecturer of biosciences, received his Ph.D. in biochemistry and cell biology from Rice University with a research focus in structural biology and biophysics, including the development of time-resolved X-ray crystallography methods using X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs). During his time as a graduate student, he served as co-director and mentor for the BioXFEL summer undergraduate program for four years and helped to develop projects for both NSCI 120 and BIOS 211. Prior to returning to Rice, he completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco.

Jize (David) Yu joins the Rice faculty as a G.C. Evans Instructor of Mathematics. His research focuses on geometric representation theory and its applications to various forms of the Langlands program and number theory. Yu received a Ph.D. in pure mathematics from the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Xinwen Zhu. Prior to joining Rice University, he completed an eight-month research visit to the Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. During the academic year 2020-2021, he was a Zurich Insurance Company Member at the Institute of Advanced Study.