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 found 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 Brice Company, under the direction of one of his sons.
Gene Brice was a member of the Texas and National Societies of Professional Engineers, and a life member of the Houston Engineering and Scientific Society and IEEE.
Upcoming Lecture
August 24,2023 - "TBD"
Dr. Muriel Medard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Muriel Médard is the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering at MIT and a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department at MIT. She leads the Network Coding and Reliable Communications Group in the Research Laboratory for Electronics at MIT and Chief Scientist for Steinwurf, which she has co-founded. She obtained three Bachelors degrees, as well as her M.S. and Sc.D, all from MIT. Muriel is a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering (elected 2020), a Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (elected 2022), a Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors (elected 2018), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2021), and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (elected 2008). She holds Honorary Doctorates from the Technical University of Munich (2020) and from The University of Aalborg (2022).
Muriel was awarded the 2022 IEEE Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award. She received the 2017 IEEE Communications Society Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award and the 2016 IEEE Vehicular Technology James Evans Avant Garde Award. Muriel was co-winner of the MIT 2004 Harold E. Egerton Faculty Achievement Award and was named a Gilbreth Lecturer by the US National Academy of Engineering in 2007.
She received the 2019 Best Paper award for IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, the 2018 ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Paper Award, the 2009 IEEE Communication Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, the 2009 William R. Bennett Prize in the Field of Communications Networking, the 2002 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Prize Paper Award, as well as nine conference paper awards. Most of her prize papers are co-authored with students from her group.
Muriel currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and served previously as Editor in Chief of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. Muriel was elected president of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 2012, and serves on its board of governors, having previously served for eleven years.
Muriel received the inaugural MIT Postdoctoral Association Mentoring Award in 2022, the inaugural MIT EECS Graduate Student Association Mentor Award, voted by the students in 2013. She set up the Women in the Information Theory Society (WithITS) and Information Theory Society Mentoring Program, for which she was recognized with the 2017 Aaron Wyner Distinguished Service Award.
Muriel has over sixty US and international patents awarded, the vast majority of which have been licensed or acquired. For technology transfer, she has co-founded CodeOn, for intellectual property licensing. and Steinwurf, for reliable and low-latency networking. She serves on the Nokia Bell Labs Technical Advisory Board.
Past Lectures
January 28, 2020 - "How Affective Computing can Change our Future Health"
- Dr. Rosalind W. Picard MIT Media Laboratory
January 16, 2019 - "The Future of Computing: Domain-Specific Accelerators"
- William Dally, Stanford University and NVIDIA Corporation
April 10, 2019 - "What’s Beyond 5G?"
- Andrea Goldsmith, Stanford University
November 14, 2019 - "The Invention of CMOS Image Sensors: A Camera in Every Pocket"
- Eric Fossum, Dartmouth College
May 1, 2018 - "Mentoring Technical Innovation"
- James Truchard, National Instruments
April 18, 2017 - "Novel Materials for Next Generation Photonic Devices"
- Michal Lipson, Columbia University
March 9, 2016 - "On Computational Thinking, Inferential Thinking and Data Science"
- Michael Jordan, UC Berkeley
February 5, 2015 - "The Internet Trajectory and Technology"
- Leonard Kleinrock, UCLA
January 23, 2013 - "Optics at the Nanoscale: Shedding new light on cross-cutting science and technologies"
- Naomi J. Halas, Rice University
April 19, 2012 - "Challenges in Cyberphysical Systems"
- P.R. Kumar, Texas A&M University
April 1, 2011 - "Statistical methods in cancer biology"
- Mathukumalli Vidyasagar, The University of Texas at Dallas
April 9, 2009 - "The Communication Cost of Distributed Computing"
- Abbas El Gamal, Stanford University
March 12, 2009 - "Forces out of Nothing: Vacuum Fluctuations, Quantum Levitation and the Future of Nanomachines"
- Federico Capasso, Harvard University
January 26, 2006 - "Feedback, Erasures, Zero-Errors, and More"
- James L. Massey, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland
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"
- Milton Chang, New Focus, Inc. and iNCUBiC LLP
April 29, 1999 - "The automation of computer architecture: Yet another consequence of Moore's Law"
- B. Ramakrishna Rau, Hewlett-Packard Labs
March 10, 1998 - "DSPs, Gigachips & Internet Made for Each Other"
- Pallab Chatterjee, Texas Instruments, Inc.
September 19, 1996 - "Approaching the Shannon Limit: Theorist's Dream and Practitioner's Challenge"
- Andrew Viterbi, QUALCOMM Incorporated
April 12, 1994 - "Professor Katz Goes to Washington"
- Professor Randy H. Katz, Computer Science Division, EECS Dept., UC-Berkeley
April 6, 1993 - "The Photonics Revolution in Telecommunications"
- Dr. Herwig Kogelnik, Director, Photonics Laboratory, AT&T Laboratory