Rice University Faculty to Present at South by Southwest Conference

This year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin will feature a number of faculty and staff from the Rice University – Jones Graduate School of Business, including Yael Hochberg, Jones School Associate Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship and head of the Rice Entrepreneurship Initiative.

SXSW is an annual music, film and interactive media gathering boasting attendance in the tens of thousands. In addition to the Jones School’s Yael Hochberg, other Rice faculty will be taking the stage at this year’s conference to present and conduct workshops. Among them will be Kim McGaw, director of professional programs at the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies.

McGaw, who comes from a background in improvisational comedy, will put her skills to work combining improv with online education. In her workshop, “Improv and Zombies: Waking Up the Virtual Classroom”, McGaw will utilize her experience to help others enliven online classrooms, helping educators to be more creative by bringing improv games to online learning.

Rice will be further represented by Scott Carlson, metadata coordinator at Fondren Library, and Norie Guthrie, archivist and special collections librarian at Fondren’s Woodson Research Center. The pair will be presenting “Preservation Tips for DIY Labels and Indie Bands” at SXSW, which will focus on both physical and digital presentation techniques for indie bands, which often only have digital records of their work that could be easily wiped away in a disaster.

Finally, Yael Hochberg and Susan Cohen, assistant professor of management at the University of Richmond’s Robins School of Business, will present “Accelerators: Flaming Out or Burning Hot?”

Hochberg and Cohen are co-directors of the Seed Accelerator Rankings Project, which seeks to understand what makes seed accelerators successful, and provide entrepreneurs with all the necessary tools for their success. The SXSW presentation will host a discussion and debate regarding the staying power of such accelerators, and will conclude by announcing the 2016 Seed Accelerator Rankings.