Fall 2025
By Juliana Lightsey

Since Rice’s ribbon-cutting ceremony in Bengaluru last November, which formally announced the university’s Rice Global India initiative, the university’s collaborations and involvement in the region have continued to expand.

“We’re taking next steps with a lot of the industry partners we met with in November,” said Rice’s vice president for global strategy, Caroline Levander.

One such step is a new strategic partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, complementing Rice’s existing partnerships with IIT Kanpur and the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. The Madras partnership holds promise for specific fields of research, Levander said, particularly in physics.

During a visit to India in June, Levander returned to Houston with a slate of new partnerships and initiatives involving some of the country’s leading institutions — including Infosys, an international digital technology company. Founded in Bengaluru, Infosys now operates a sprawling campus in India’s third-largest city. Rice Global is in discussions with the company to create student opportunities such as fall internships and fellowships.

“The Infosys campus is astounding,” Levander said. “It’s a beautiful place for Rice students to live, to work [and] to develop a corporate educational context.”

Levander also met with Chevron India to explore joint programs in robotics and artificial intelligence.

“Chevron is the country’s head of innovation, and one of the big goals of Rice Global India is to accelerate our industry relationships and partnerships,” Levander said. “So this is a really terrific opportunity to be outside of Houston, to be different or faster than what we do inside of Houston.”

In March, Rice Global India launched three initiatives to expand research and impact in India: supplemental grant support, a faculty impact multiplier program and joint faculty research awards.

“Those are all new, and faculty have been applying to those, so that has been wonderful,” Levander said.

The faculty impact multiplier program is designed to support faculty who are already traveling to India, facilitating their participation in events such as meeting with local educational leaders or giving talks at Indian universities in order to strengthen Rice’s presence in the country.

“The challenge is that Rice is a largely unknown brand in India,” Levander said. “So any time a faculty member makes the long trip to be there, we want to support them. We’re trying to increase awareness of who we are as a university, and I think the best way to do that is have our faculty be the voice of the university — and so far we’ve had wonderful uptake.”

Additionally, Levander visited Hyderabad, home to the entrepreneurial launchpad T-Hub. Rice Global India previously explored collaborative opportunities with T-Hub, and Levander said they’re currently in talks to provide market access for startup ventures between Houston and India.

As Rice’s global strategy continues to develop, Levander said the university sees opportunity for further involvement in other cities in India and beyond.

“The opportunities are really vast,” she said. “Hyderabad looks very promising, and there are opportunities beyond those two cities that we’re still exploring.” Delhi, she said, will inevitably be part of Rice’s strategy for India, too, as the government center for the country.

Rice’s most established international initiative is its Paris campus, which functions as a research hub, conference site and host for student programs. Levander, who oversees both the Paris and India strategies, said a recent conversation at a tech summit in Paris sparked ideas for bridging the two regions.

“I was talking to the chief innovation officer at CNS, the French government’s space exploration office,” Levander said. “And he said, you know we have a [Bengaluru] office. And I was like, ‘Oh, what a great opportunity to think about a trilateral network focused on space and exploration.’”

For Levander, that offhand conversation in Paris captured what Rice Global is about: unexpected links, real opportunities and a strategy that moves as fast as the world does. “We’ll go where the ideas take us,” she said.