the Rice Thresher

Issue date: 11/21/08 Section: Backpage

Media Credit: Ariel Shnitzer

You know the guy who seems to run every club meeting you go to on campus? In a couple of decades, he'll be Kevin Kirby. Dr. Kirby, the VP for Administration, oversees almost every campus project you could imagine. He met the Backpage at the South Plant on Wednesday to chat about moustaches, the Predator aircraft, why he loves Rice and the Green Bay Packers.

BP: We dug up the photo you had when you came to Rice in 2005. You used to have a pretty formidable moustache [see inset]. Where'd it go?

KK: I graduated high school when I was 16. When I went to work I was always the youngest person in the room for the first 15 years of my career, so I grew a mustache right when I got out of college to look older. My family had never seen me without it, so I let each of my sons shave off half apiece so they could see what I looked like. It makes me look younger than I really am.

BP: Have you ever experimented with other types of facial hair?

KK: No, no beard.

The son of a chemistry professor with an ardent love for languages, Kevin Kirby grew up all over America. As an undergraduate at Syracuse studying chemical engineering, Kirby's research centered around the transfer of fluids between placental membranes. Though it was a "massive failure," Kirby was "hooked on research" and kept it up for seven years. After graduation, he worked on low-temperature materials for infrared sensors in night vision devices. Kirby eventually got a job in the military and was involved in the development of some really interesting technologies.

KK: I found a program where I would go out into the field with the Army .... I worked for the guy who ran the Army in the United States. I spent two years as his science adviser. It was great fun.

BP: What did you work on?

KK: I actually think it's a lot like what I do now. I think that ideas are relatively easy but implementing something is not. So, you see, while universities are places of ideas, actually getting something done at a university is hard .... That's one of the things I liked about this job - in research, most things would take eight, ten, twelve years to go from research to the field. When I was a science adviser I would do something that could be immediately used. I did some work for the Special Forces who would jump out of airplanes with shoulder-to-air missiles-

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