Rice University

Rice University is housed in the Museum District of Houston, Texas. The goal of Rice has been to combine the intimate size and teaching emphasis of a liberal arts college with the scholarship of a major research university. It has recently become most known globally for its early groundbreaking research in nanotechnology, and its faculty are at the forefront of this rapidly expanding field. Much of the initial development of artificial hearts has also been conducted with the help of Rice faculty. Rice University established the world's first department of space science (now the Rice Space Institute) and donated the land that established the Johnson Space Center for NASA (which eventually led to "Houston" being the first word spoken by a human on the Moon). Fullerenes were discovered at Rice, leading to a Nobel Prize for two faculty members in 1996.