McTeam

Jenifer Bratter and Noe Perez

We are Jenifer Bratter and Noe Perez, the Magisters of McMurtry College, and we are thrilled to welcome you to the community!

College Magisters are faculty members who live on campus with their families. We live right next to the college, across from the commons. We are here to foster the intellectual, cultural, and social life at the college and to support you during your years at Rice. We are excited to meet you and to nurture the kind, open, and stimulating culture here at McMurtry. To do this, we will host events in our home, share meals with you in the commons, and help you navigate your life at the college. We hope that McMurtry will soon feel like your home away from home.

Jenifer is a Full Professor in the Sociology Department. Her research and teaching focus on race and ethnicity and their significance for the ways individuals identify, form relationships, and experience well-being. She has been professor at Rice since 2006 and sincerely enjoys teaching and mentoring the creative and intellectually dazzling graduate and undergraduate students of the Rice community. Noe is a researcher with expertise in education and community health. He loves carpentry, cooking, volunteering, kickboxing, and biking. Jenifer was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and Noe hails from south Texas, known as “the Valley”. We met at University of Texas at Austin in the graduate program in Sociology. As a first year grad student, Noe stole Jenifer’s desk in the teaching assistant lounge. We became fast friends, eventually started dating, and later married. After moving across the country together, they decided to settle in Houston, where Jenifer started teaching at University of Houston and then moved over to Rice.

We have two boys: Ricardo, 15, and Sam, 9. Our kids love watching movies, playing video games, and being creative. Ricardo’s passion is Sasuke and American Ninja Warrior, the obstacle course shows - he was on the first season of American Ninja Warrior Junior under the name, “The Origami Ninja” and continues to compete in ninja leagues. Sam loves dancing and martial arts, especially Brazillian capoeira, which is almost a perfect blend of the two. Together, they have a shared love of creating short films. Sam and Ricardo were too happy to create a short video in honor of the 2020’s beer bike theme, “The Mandapourian”. We have lived in the Rice residential colleges as Head Resident Fellows for five years prior to becoming McMurtry Magisters and have enjoyed bringing some of our favorite hobbies to the students on campus.

We are all eager to welcome you to the college and learn more about the hobbies and activities that you enjoy! As new students, you are an important part of McMurtry. We will all work together to energize our community. Keep in mind, McMurtry is your college – the most AMAZING and BEST residential college at Rice. We encourage you to have fun, ask questions, be safe, be active, and be creative. We will do our best to support your vision for McMurtry. We look forward to meeting every one of you!