From post-human novels to augmented reality, Rice hires new faculty

By Aisha Khemani     9/2/25 9:28pm

Rice welcomed 97 new professors this fall across disciplines, including a posthumanist Harvard scholar, a husband-wife duo and a computer science professor who graduated from Rice thrice. 

This semester, there are 20 new hires in the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing alone. 

Robert LiKamWa earned his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and Ph.D. at Rice. Previously a professor at Arizona State University, his work specializes in mobile computing systems.

---

---

 “I’ve been diving really deep into virtual reality; augmented reality; how to build systems that make them happen efficiently; and how to build creative teams who can design content for education, workforce training and exploration,” LiKamWa said.

LiKamWa said that while he enjoyed his time at Arizona State, Rice offered a unique chance to scale his work with new collaborators. 

“When I got the call to come back, I visited, and it reminded me how I could bring together diverse, creative teams at Rice and lean into the university’s strengths to take on big, impactful projects,” LiKamWa said.

This semester, LiKamWa is teaching a course on real-time rendering systems, which introduces students to how central processing units — the “brains” of a computer — and graphics processing units — specialized chips that handle images and graphics — power virtual reality and augmented reality headsets and projection systems. His lab is also inviting students from different majors to contribute to projects.

“They can come from any background as long as they have the enthusiasm,” he said. “Some may focus on building virtual worlds with an artistic eye, while others dive into performance, efficiency and systems. All sides of the puzzle are needed.”

LiKamWa said he is already building partnerships with Rice Athletics and Houston Methodist to explore AR and VR applications in athletic training, rehabilitation and surgery.

“There’s a lot of appetite for these tools from our partners,” he said. “We’re already making connections to bring our research out of the lab and into facilities where it can make a real impact.”

Another new face is Trustee Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering Geoffroy Hautier. Hautier, faculty fellow of the Rice Advanced Materials Institute, previouslyhelped lead the Materials Project, one of the world’s largest open databases for inorganic materials, and his research has driven the discovery of Earth-abundant semiconductors for next-generation solar cells. This spring, he said he plans to launch a course on data science in materials research, giving students hands-on experience with computational discovery.

Nakul Garg joined Rice after completing his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Maryland. Garg studies intelligent mobile systems, focusing on wireless sensing and computation for small, resource-limited devices. His work is based in the Physical Intelligence Laboratory, where his team develops technologies that merge the physical and digital worlds.

One of the lab’s first projects looks at using radar instead of cameras to power smart glasses. 

“Our lab is new, but we already have Ph.D. students and undergrads working with us,” Garg said. “We’re actively looking for talent and open to brainstorming new ideas.”

Outside of engineering and computing, Guillermo Rosas has joined Rice as a professor and chair of the department of politial science after 22 years at Washington University in St. Louis. Originally from Mexico, Rosas has authored multiple books on comparative political economy, party politics and democratic institutions, with a particular focus on Latin America. 

Rosas said he and his wife, Tabea Linhard — who also joined Rice this year as a professor in the department of modern and classical languages, literatures and cultures — were drawn to the university’s collaborative environment and strong undergraduate focus. 

“When I visited Rice, I really liked the way the university felt,” Rosas said. “It’s similar in many ways to Washington University, but also offered the novelty of a beautiful campus in a vibrant city.”

“We have been very fortunate as we were able to solve what is commonly called the ‘two-body problem’ early in our careers,” Linhard wrote in an email to the Thresher. “One aspect that differs from our prior institution is that at WashU we were in the same school, Arts & Sciences, while here we are in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, respectively. Our experience has shown us that at Rice the different schools work well together, even though the fields represented in these different schools have very different methodologies and approaches.”

As department chair, Rosas said his goal is to help guide political science through its next phase of growth. The department now houses three majors: Political Science, Social Policy Analysis and the new Global Affairs major, which will launch in the spring.

This semester, Linhard is teaching a course on the Spanish Civil War. 

“[This is] a conflict that erupted 89 years ago that … remains relevant to understanding how civil wars begin, how they end and how they are remembered,” Linhard said. 

In the spring, she will teach a course on Spanish cinema and another on Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” After that, she plans to teach courses in other areas, such as global migration or the Holocaust. She also hopes to eventually develop a course related to her current book project, “Agents’ Secrets,” which looks at women who served as secret agents or were accused of espionage.

The department of modern and classical languages, literatures and cultures also welcomed another new professor, Nicole Sütterlin, who comes to Rice after more than a decade at Harvard and earlier teaching at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Her research explores the intersections of literature, science and medicine.

Her new project, “Monstrous Microbes? Multispecies Bodies in the Posthuman Novel,” examines how speculative fiction and contemporary literature help us rethink what it means to be human in light of microbiome research.

Sütterlin said Rice was a natural fit given the university’s history as a center for posthumanist thought. 

“Posthumanism asks us to rethink traditional humanism and see humans as part of larger ecological systems rather than at the top of a hierarchy,” she said. “Rice is kind of a birthplace of posthumanism, with pioneers like Cary Wolfe and Tim Morton.”

This spring, Sütterlin will teach a new course tentatively titled “Changing History, Healing Trauma,” which explores how nations reckon with historical traumas such as the Holocaust, apartheid in South Africa and slavery and segregation in the United States. 

Another new face in the School of Humanities is Sourav Chatterjee, who joined the department of transnational Asian studies after earning his Ph.D. at Columbia University. His research focuses on South Asian literature, colonial printing and cultural ephemera.

Chatterjee runs the Instagram page The Antilibrarian Project, a place where Chatterjee spotlights his favorite readings, which has more than 29,000 followers. 

“It started as a way to share what I was reading,” he said. “It’s an outreach project that connects my work in South Asian studies with a wider reading public.” 

Chatterjee said he was drawn to Rice’s interdisciplinary approach. 

“This is a relatively small department, but very much a humanities department,” Chatterjee said. “Coming here felt like coming home, where area studies and interdisciplinary conversations are the norm.”

---