Pasquali honored for service to grad students

The Rice Graduate Student Association honored chemical engineering’s Matteo Pasquali with the 2009 Faculty Teaching/Mentoring Award. Pasquali received the honor,which goes to Rice faculty who demonstrate outstanding service to graduate student education, along with co-recipient Dennis Huston, an English professor.

Pasquali said the award is a reflection of what he considers the most important and satisfying part of his job—helping his students become confident and mature scientists. He said it also reflects the emphasis he places on recognizing and responding to the individual needs of students as they hone their abilities.

“It’s sort of like a balancing act,” he said. “You don’t want to be too hands-on, too directive, but you don’t want to be too detached. If you’re too directive, you stifle creativity, and if you’re too detached, you may end up with students who spend a lot of time on dead-ends, so they don’t grow as fast as they could grow.”

Pasquali said finding that balance is extremely important in working in the sciences, which involves so much trial and error.

“An important part of research is that we go into unexplored areas, so we’re trying to do, understand or explain something that hasn’t been done, understood or explained before,” he said. “And so most of the time, we’re going to be unsuccessful. And what’s important is that every time we’re unsuccessful, we need to learn something, and then change what we’re doing, change our approach so that the next time, we’re a little less unsuccessful.”

Pasquali gives much of the credit for his effective mentoring to those who have mentored him over the years: his Ph.D. adviser, Skip Scriven, and others at the University of Minnesota; the late Rick Smalley and others at Rice, like Kathleen Matthews and Howard Schmidt. In addition, he said he wouldn’t be nearly as effective without the organizational support of his assistant, Hazel Cole, and the advice of his wife, Marie-Nathalie Contou-Carrere.

Pasquali said he and Contou-Carrere are looking forward to mentoring on a new scale, as they begin their five-year appointment as masters of Lovett College this summer.

Ken Fountain, Rice News