Default | NEWS

5/8/2008

Presidential Mentoring Award goes to Cox, Drezek

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Special to the Rice News

Dennis Cox, professor of statistics, and Rebekah Drezek, associate professor in bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering, are this year's winners of the Presidential Mentoring Award, given annually to Rice faculty members who demonstrate a strong commitment to mentoring graduate or undergraduate students.

DENNIS COX	REBEKAH DREZEK

Cox's research leads him, as he explains in his online bio, “to test (statistical) theories against experimental data when computational complexity limits the number of theoretical predictions.” More specifically, his work addresses problems in electrical engineering, neurophysiology, oncology and economics.

An avid hiker and mountain climber who joined Rice in 1993, Cox places a premium on ethics when teaching.

“I place a high value on intellectually honesty in the pursuit of knowledge, and one of the most important roles of statistics is to be sure that the data actually support any conclusions drawn from them,” he said. “There are a lot of negative impressions of statistics — one being that you can manipulate the statistical analysis to prove almost anything, and it is important for us in the field to abide by the highest ethical standards so that we overcome such impressions.”

To Drezek, the honor reflects her team's collective commitment to enhance the way doctors diagnose and treat disease.

Having received a $3 million grant last year from the Department of Defense to develop miniaturized molecular imaging technologies for screening, diagnosing and monitoring breast cancer, the team is capitalizing on Rice's joint strengths in optics and nanotechnology research to create tools for in vivo detection of cancer's molecular signatures — in effect, replacing the knife with a needle.

“We’ll be in the clinic beginning an optical imaging breast cancer patient trial this summer ... and are extremely excited to get our first in vivo trial of this technology under way,” Drezek said. “Because Rice is across the street from such a great cancer center (the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center), we can readily test our technologies in the best medical test bed on the planet — the clinic itself.”