Rice University, located in Houston, Texas, is a private, coeducational, nonsectarian university that aspires to path-breaking research, unsurpassed teaching, and contributions to the betterment of our world. Rice fulfills this mission by cultivating a diverse community of learning and discovery that produces leaders across the spectrum of human endeavor. From its beginning in 1912, Rice has been dedicated to excellence in all regards.
The Rice community consists of roughly 600 tenure-track faculty members, 300 teaching-track faculty members, 3,800 undergraduates, and 2,800 graduate students. The academic enterprise is organized in seven academic schools: Architecture, Business, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences.
Rice’s distinctively small size has created a legacy of interdisciplinary collaboration in both teaching and research. Its institutes and centers span departments and schools and create frameworks where faculty with similar interests interact. The major institutes and centers include: Baker Institute for Public Policy, Humanities Research Center, Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology, Kinder Institute for Urban Research, Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment Center, Rice 360: Institute for Global Health, and the Smalley-Curl Institute. These organizations span disciplines or schools; in addition, Rice has numerous research centers and smaller groups that are more narrowly focused.
Rice’s location, in the heart of the fourth largest city in the United States, creates opportunities for collaboration outside of the campus. Rice is located across Main Street from the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical center in the world. 24 Fortune 500 companies have their headquarters in Houston; many others have sizeable installations in Houston and the surrounding eight-county area. Rice’s strong relationship with local government has led to innovative data-driven projects on education, health, air quality, emergency resource utilization, hurricane storm risks, and urban flooding, to name a few.
