Established in 1991

ECE Gene Brice Colloquium Series

William E. (Gene) Brice, 1913-1991, grew up in a succession of small east Texas towns. He matriculated to Rice in 1933, where he was elected to Tau Beta Pi and worked as a teaching assistant, graduating in 1937 with a B.S. degree in electrical engineering. General Electric and Houston Lighting and Power employed him before he served as a U.S. naval officer in World War II. Gene married Marguerite Ayres Robins and had four children, two of whom are Rice alumni.

In 1948, Gene founded the W.E. Brice Company, a Houston-based company active in manufacturer's representation, fabrication, and distribution of switch-gear, industrial instrumentation, and controls. Today the business continues as BriceBarclay, under the direction of one of his sons and a grandson.

Gene Brice was a member of the Texas and National Societies of Professional Engineers, a life member of the Houston Engineering and Scientific Society and IEEE.

Upcoming Lecture

Dr. Richard Andersen

Speaker: Dr. Richard Andersen, James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience
and the T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center Leadership Chair
California Institute of Technology

Talk Title: Unlocking Movement: Helping paralyzed people with brain-machine interfaces
Abstract & Bio

Co-Hosts: Lan Luan, Edward Knightly and Ashutosh Sabharwal

March 28, 2024 - McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall Room 1055
Seminar: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
Reception to follow in Martel Hall, Duncan Hall, Room 1057


Past Lectures

August 24, 2023 - “Towards Opening Up the Next Generations of Communications - Modularization for Innovation”


January 28, 2020 - "How Affective Computing can Change our Future Health"


January 16, 2019 - "The Future of Computing: Domain-Specific Accelerators"


April 10, 2019 - "What’s Beyond 5G?"


November 14, 2019 - "The Invention of CMOS Image Sensors: A Camera in Every Pocket"


May 1, 2018 - "Mentoring Technical Innovation"


April 18, 2017 - "Novel Materials for Next Generation Photonic Devices"


March 9, 2016 - "On Computational Thinking, Inferential Thinking and Data Science"


February 5, 2015 - "The Internet Trajectory and Technology"


January 23, 2013 - "Optics at the Nanoscale: Shedding new light on cross-cutting science and technologies"


April 19, 2012 - "Challenges in Cyberphysical Systems"


April 1, 2011 - "Statistical methods in cancer biology"


April 9, 2009 - "The Communication Cost of Distributed Computing"


March 12, 2009 - "Forces out of Nothing: Vacuum Fluctuations, Quantum Levitation and the Future of Nanomachines"


January 26, 2006 - "Feedback, Erasures, Zero-Errors, and More"


September 19, 2002 - " Signal Representations: From Fourier to Wavelets and Beyond"

  • Martin Vetterli, Department of Communications, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland

February 8, 2001 - "Not-So-Secret Secrets of Successful Entrepreneurship"


April 29, 1999 - "The automation of computer architecture: Yet another consequence of Moore's Law"


March 10, 1998 - "DSPs, Gigachips & Internet Made for Each Other"


September 19, 1996 - "Approaching the Shannon Limit: Theorist's Dream and Practitioner's Challenge"


April 12, 1994 - "Professor Katz Goes to Washington"


April 6, 1993 - "The Photonics Revolution in Telecommunications"