What is the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education?
It’s a brand new center that we’re developing at Rice University. It will become an umbrella organization for several projects that predated the CEEE. Our mission is to promote greater participation of under-represented groups in the sciences and to encourage academic excellence for all. We have rich diversity in our city, and we want the highest levels of our educational system to reflect this diversity. We want to encourage more and more women and minorities to participate in science. We work with local school districts, and we also work on our mission on a national level. We write papers and are working on a book that addresses how to increase the participation of under-represented groups. Why do we need diversity in these fields? There are several points that I would make. One is the health of the nation. It’s extremely unhealthy for the nation to have such a large part of its population outside science, engineering and technology. The minority population is growing rapidly and bec
