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11/13/1997 CONTACT: Lia Unrau
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) named Rice Professor Richard Tapia as the recipient of its Lifetime Mentor Award for 1997. This annual award honors individuals who, during their careers, demonstrate extraordinary leadership to increase the participation in science and engineering fields and careers of underrepresented groups, including women of all racial and ethnic groups; African-American, American Indian and Hispanic men; and people with disabilities. Tapia, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics, spends summers bringing math and science programs to elementary and secondary school teachers and students. He is also director of education and human resources for the Center for Research on Parallel Computation at Rice. He has been a member of the Rice faculty since 1970. His outreach efforts include: € Spend a Summer with a Scientist program sponsored by the Rice Center for Research on Parallel Computation, which brings minority students to the university campus as research assistants for Rice faculty. It is designed to expose young people to research, stimulating their interest in pursuing careers in scientific research. € The Mathematical and Computational Science Awareness Workshops, bringing elementary and secondary school teachers from Houston-area schools to campus for five days for meetings with scientists, business professionals and science educators. The workshops show the teachers that there are many career opportunities available to minorities in math and science at the university level and in private industry. The AAAS award "recognizes an individual who has mentored and guided significant numbers of students from these underrepresented groups to the completion of doctoral studies, and who has affected the climate of a department, college or institution in such a manner as to significantly increase the diversity of students pursuing and completing doctoral studies," according to information from the association concerning its award to Tapia. Last year, Tapia was appointed by President Clinton to the National Science Board, received the Presidential Award for Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring, and was named Engineer of the Year by Hispanic Engineer Magazine. ###
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