Wiess School of Natural Sciences

The Wiess School of Natural Sciences is an academic school at Rice University in Houston, Texas. It comprises the departments of BioSciences (a merging of Biochemistry and Cell Biology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology); Chemistry; Earth, Environment and Planetary Sciences; Kinesiology; Mathematics; and Physics and Astronomy. Rice is well known for its groundbreaking research in nanotechnology. As well as undergraduate in instruction, the school also supports a professional science master's program. One of Rice's greatest minds and pioneers of the field was Richard Smalley, the Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics and Astronomy. Smalley received the Nobel Prize (along with chemist Robert Curl) in 1996 for the discovery buckminsterfullerene, an allotrope of carbon commonly referred to as "buckyballs".