Rice University VIP Program

6100 Main StreetSouth Central Houston
Houston, Texas 77005, United States
Website

Rice University

6100 Main Street South Central Houston
HoustonTexas 77005
United States
Phone713-348-4020
Latitude: 29.717394
Longitude: -95.401831

The Institution


Set in the heart of Houston, Texas, the nation’s fourth-largest city, Rice is a comprehensive research university that fosters diversity and an intellectual environment that produces the next generation of leaders and advances tomorrow’s thinking.

The Program


The Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program at Rice unites undergraduate education and faculty research in a team-based context. Undergraduate Rice VIP students earn academic credits, while faculty and graduate students benefit from the design/discovery efforts of their teams. VIP at Rice extends the academic design experience beyond a single semester. It provides the time and context to learn and practice professional skills, to make substantial contributions, and experience different roles on large multidisciplinary design/discovery teams. The long-term nature of VIP creates an environment of mentorship, with faculty and graduate students mentoring teams, experienced students mentoring new members, and students moving into leadership roles as others graduate. Rice VIP teams are comprised of students from freshmen to seniors, with a variety of majors and backgrounds. Rice’s VIP program in its Engineering School seeks to involve undergraduates in ongoing research. The implementing faculty members are all in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). A team run by Mechanical Engineering faculty will be starting this year. Rice is a small, private research institution where undergraduate research is common. Undergraduate interdisciplinary design projects are also common, partly due to the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, a design and fabrication facility open to all undergraduate engineers. We expect VIP to combine the best features of our cultures of research and design. We are open to developing tools to assess program effectiveness and collaboration among VIP institutions.

Directors


Joseph Cavallaro
Behnaam Aazhang

Evaluators


Gary Woods

Coordinators


Norma Santamaria

VIP Teams

  • By predicting seizure before its onset, doctors could act preventively with actions that include stimulation treatment recently proposed. To facilitate that, scientists at Rice University and the University of Texas Health Science Center will work together to develop algorithms that will optimize the development of an implantable device. The device will deliver low-frequency electrical...
  • The game of golf has existed in its modern form since the 15th century…and one club stands alone: the putter. About half of the shots in golf are made with the putter. Putting is not easy – the putter swings slowly, and with a very light force. It is incredibly challenging and frustrating. Even professional golfers often miss short putts. The DISSECT team aims to provide feedback to the golfer,...
  • Recent advances in VLSI technology are enabling fast computing systems with tens and hundreds of processing units. These range from field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) to graphics processing units (GPU) to multi-core processors, such as the Intel Xeon Phi. These parallel systems can be used to accelerate applications in wireless communications, image processing, and data science. Current...