Browse objectives

Target faculty growth and hiring in key research areas, where Rice has the potential, vision, and strategy to make a lasting impact and to be a world leader.

• Significantly grow the faculty (currently approximately 850), strategically hiring 200 faculty across a range of disciplines with a focus on where Rice has the potential to be a premier program or department, lead discovery and advance key areas, and ensure an ecosystem of diverse scholars.
• Accelerate recruiting to attract several national leading faculty members annually to ensure the faculty hiring initiative is raising the research profile of our faculty at all levels, signaling a commitment to excellence and deploying flexible hiring practices to take advantage of and create opportunities.
• Enhance research and add faculty in areas of strategic strengths, including foundational science such as such as chemistry, core social science disciplines, core social science disciplines like economics, and the humanities. 
• Deploy cross-disciplinary cluster hiring to ensure depth and breadth in areas that are vital to the study of Sustainable Futures, Innovations in Health, Thriving Urban Communities, and Responsible AI, recognizing the symbiotic relationship between foundational, applied, and humanistic research in leading to lasting, disruptive advancement.
• Nurture and provide resources and professional development for faculty at all career levels, with a focus on assistant professors who are rising stars and key to future research.
• Attract and retain the highest caliber faculty and encourage innovation by offering highly competitive compensation, funds to enhance new and existing faculty’s labs, and incentives that make Rice the most appealing place to work.
• Celebrate, promote, and reward research excellence at its highest levels with internal awards, communications, and external promotions and events.
• Increase the number of endowed chairs and professorships for every major research effort across all disciplines.
• Strengthen Rice’s graduate programs to attract and retain the most competitive candidates from top-tier universities around the world.
• Ensure faculty are supported and promoted externally to be recognized by awards, grants, and international recognition.

Ensure that Rice has sufficient staffing, information technology, and physical infrastructure necessary to support foundational and translational research of the growing faculty population.

• Assess the staffing needs across the organization to ensure adequate research support staff with the needed professional development to be best in class at their role.
• Prioritize investments in physical infrastructure (e.g., faculty labs), including state-of-the-art facilities and collaboration spaces on campus and in/near the Texas Medical Center.
• Provide awareness, education and training, supported by robust policies, to ensure research security while maintaining an open and collaborative partnership with the international community.
• Enhance seed funding programs and allocation of resources strategically across disciplines, ensuring centralized support that meets the disparate needs of faculty in humanities, social science, foundational and applied science and engineering, business, arts, and architecture while recognizing and incentivizing excellence in these areas.
• Build Rice’s technological infrastructure to ensure adaptable, secure, and efficient access to technology that will drive basic and translational research efforts, including broad strength in data, analytics, AI, and the impact of science and technology on the common good.
• Develop stronger institutional policies, processes, tools, and systems that promote efficiency and support faculty and staff research efforts.
• Promote a culture of transparency and continual improvement throughout the organization, while emphasizing a balance between collaboration and competitive ambition.

Forge dynamic collaborations with strategic partners to significantly enhance and elevate the impact of our research outcomes while incentivizing ambition, entrepreneurship, and innovation in research.

• Cultivate partnerships with institutions and industries that align with the overarching goals of Sustainable Futures, Innovations in Health, and Thriving Urban Communities.
• Harness the full potential of Rice’s institutes and centers, maximizing their impact on the university’s research efforts and enhancing interdisciplinary, impactful discovery.
• Advance innovation and commercialization to attract early stage venture funding to create a funding ecosystem in the Houston area.
• Develop the full potential of the ION and Helix Park as a magnet for multidisciplinary collaboration, discovery, and translational research that connects with industry and organizational partners.
• Promote the ION as a place for innovative collaborations in all disciplines, developing an innovation district and positioning Rice as the convener for groundbreaking advancements.
• Develop global partnerships with strong research institutions in key geographic areas, including Europe through the Rice Paris campus, India, and Latin America.
• Enhance research capabilities with formal partnerships with one or more national laboratories.
• Facilitate the commercialization and translation of research findings into practical applications and partnerships with industry through institutionalized technology transfer efforts.
• Enhance support for programs that emphasize entrepreneurship and translational research.