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Diana Jue-Rajasingh has been in her McNair Hall office for only three years, since she joined Rice Business as an assistant professor of strategic management, but she uses it to tell a much longer story. “I try to fill my office with things that are from my journey,” she says, gesturing toward the objects and photos that trace the questions that have shaped her work.
Those questions have stayed remarkably consistent. Since her undergraduate and master’s work at MIT, and later in the academic path that brought her to Rice from a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, Jue-Rajasingh has been interested in a deceptively simple problem: how life-improving products actually make their way to the people they are meant to serve. She describes it as a question of systems, organizations and reaching the “last mile,” a challenge she sees as both essential and overlooked.
One photo in her office helps crystallize that concern: an image she took in South India of clean cook stoves sitting unused in a storehouse, not yet reaching the households they were designed to help. “That’s the photo that started everything,” she says. For Jue-Rajasingh, the sight of unused life-saving tech captures the gap between invention and impact — the problem that has shaped both her scholarship and her own social venture.
Her office reflects the path she’s taken ever since. Awards and recognitions line her shelves, including a Forbes 30 Under 30 nod and the Grinnell Prize, alongside other markers of research, entrepreneurship and undergraduate mentoring at Rice. For Jue-Rajasingh, those honors matter less as accolades than as reminders that the same core question has followed her across different stages of her career.
Another image on the wall represents the stakes of everything she’s done and hopes to do in the future. It’s another photo taken in India. An off-grid barber has just switched on a solar-powered lantern, lighting his small shop, which attracts a new customer. This scene stayed with her because it turns seemingly abstract research interests into something visible and concrete. As she puts it, it was “an economic opportunity just brought on by light.”
That same question continues to shape where her work goes next. Flyers from a recent research project in Nigeria, tied to an experiment on recycling participation, are tacked to her desk board. She recently submitted the paper for peer-review. “Different projects bring me to different places, but I’m still following the same thread — trying to close the gap between what could help people and how to actually reach them.”
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