Maria Akopyan joins Rice as an assistant professor of biosciences and CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research. As an evolutionary genomicist, her research is centered on understanding the causes and consequences of genomic change — how it shapes the capacity of organisms to adapt to a rapidly changing world, and how genomic instability, over the course of a lifetime, can drive the evolution of cancer. Akopyan earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Riverside prior to joining Rice.

Andrew Hoffman joins Rice as an assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences. He studies how ice sheets, oceans and the solid Earth interact to shape sea-level rise and coastal change. Hoffman earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral research scientist in marine and polar geophysics at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO).

Ian McBrearty joins Rice as an assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences. He received his Ph.D. in geophysics at Stanford University where he developed novel machine learning algorithms to process seismic networks for detecting, locating and characterizing earthquakes with greater detail and accuracy than traditional methods.

Patricia Nano earned her undergraduate degree at Rice and rejoins the university as an assistant professor of biosciences. Shaped by her Ph.D. work at Stanford University and postdoctoral work at the University of California, Los Angeles, her lab studies the molecular cues that form the human brain. Her work tests how gene networks give rise to the specialized brain areas that drive our human capacity to sense, feel and make decisions.

Christian Reece has joined the Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor and Norman Hackerman Welsh Young Investigator. His research centers on understanding and controlling heterogeneous catalyst behavior by obtaining fundamental insight into how catalytic surfaces behave in response to stimuli. He earned his Ph.D. at Cardiff University and was as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Prior to joining Rice, he was a Group Leader and Rowland Fellow at the Rowland Institute at Harvard and spent the past year as a visiting scholar at Chalmers University.

David Urbanik is joining Rice University as an assistant professor in the Mathematics Department. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Jacob Tsimerman, and held postdoctoral positions at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques and Institute for Advanced Study. He specializes in algebraic and arithmetic geometry, with a focus on special moduli. Roughly this means that, given a collection of polynomial equations with parameters as coefficients, he studies which choices of parameter values give rise to solutions with extra symmetry. He also has broad interests in computer science and did academic work in cryptography as an undergraduate.

Hao Wu joins Rice as an assistant professor of biosciences and a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research. He earned his Ph.D. from Tsinghua University and completed his postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco, under Yifan Cheng, where he developed cutting-edge cryo-EM approaches to dissect the dynamic mechanisms of chromatin remodeling. The Wu lab will advance cryo-EM approaches and integrate them with functional studies to investigate chromatin remodeling in native cellular contexts. This work aims to deepen our fundamental understanding of gene regulation while uncovering potential therapeutic opportunities for diseases, including cancer.