Awarded Fellowships

At the close of the 1990s, the Smalley-Curl Institute (then the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology) was bequeathed three endowed funds to support postdoctoral researchers: the Carl and Lillian Illig, the Evans Attwell-Welch and the Peter and Ruth Nicholas fellowships. The goal of the SCI Postdoctoral Fellowships has always been to bring world-leading talent to Rice: postdocs with unique abilities and perspectives, who would add new approaches to the university’s research at the nanoscale and – since Smalley Institute and the Rice Quantum Institute merged to form the Smalley-Curl Institute in 2015 – in the quantum regime.

The selection criteria require these researchers to be early in their careers – no more than three years post-Ph.D. – and the selection committee also looks for people whose talents would potentially make them great faculty members, whether at Rice or elsewhere.

Since the first hire in 2003, this program has brought 30 fellows to Rice, where they have thrived in departments across the Schools of Natural Science and Engineering: Chemistry, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Materials Science and NanoEngineering, and Physics and Astronomy. 15 SCI Postdoc alumni are in Tenured or Tenure-Track faculty positions at such institutions as IIT Kharagpur, University of Tokyo, Fudan University, University of Central Florida, U-Mass Dartmouth, Chonnam National University, University of Colorado at Boulder, Tulane, University of Connecticut, West Virginia University, Texas A&M University, the Spanish National Research Council, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and Purdue University. Other alumni are working at companies and agencies like Intel, Absci, Aselsan, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Olin, Mitutoyo, Millennial Scientific and Nanospectra Biosciences.

The SCI Postdoctoral Fellowship program has not just brought talent to Rice: it has enriched the research within the university and has enhanced our network of collaborators globally. Rice is building on this success in recruiting a new cohort of Fellows, who will start as early as Summer 2024, continuing a tradition launched over 20 years ago.

J Evans Attwell-Welch Postdoctoral Fellows at Rice University