Dear Rice colleagues,
I’m writing to share the sad news that Ron Sass, the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the Wiess School of Natural Sciences, died last month at the age of 91, following a brief illness. He was also a fellow in global climate change at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Remarkably, Ron’s career at Rice spanned 66 years and seven of Rice’s eight presidents. He was there for many pivotal moments in Rice’s history, escorting President John F. Kennedy into Rice Stadium for the famed “moon speech” in 1962, spending hours writing machine-language programs for Rice’s first supercomputer and giving a speech urging integration in the 1960s, which resulted in him being threatened by the Ku Klux Klan.
Ron used his scientific and diplomatic skills to markedly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from rice farming worldwide. His research on the production and reduction of methane emissions from rice fields was internationally respected by scientific peers, who chose him to take part in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. His other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Piper Professor Award from the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation.
Equally impressive was Ron’s dedication to teaching and student life at the university. He won the campus’s top teaching award, the George R. Brown Prize for Excellence in Teaching, three of the first four times it was given. He served as a Hanszen College magister and championed two lasting initiatives: the student-run radio station KTRU and the student-run Rice Coffeehouse.
He continued teaching after retirement in the Master of Liberal Studies program at Rice’s Glasscock School of Continuing Studies and outside of Rice, leading teacher workshops and demonstrating teaching methods to science teachers in Conroe. Sass co-founded the Glasscock School’s Center for Education in 1988 and served on the scientific advisory committee of the College Board.
I invite you to read more about him in Rice News.
Warm regards,
Amy Dittmar Howard R. Hughes Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs