Lisa Mallon ’01

While an undergraduate engineering student at Rice, Lisa Mallon ’01 felt a rush of excitement when generating small-scale earthquakes on laboratory “make-and-shake” tables. Now an engineering supervisor, it’s clear that she hasn’t lost that sense of wonder. Sitting behind her desk in the Houston offices of ExxonMobil, her eyes lit up as she described the offshore drilling structures that she has helped conceptualize and build during her 10-year career.

“They’re incredibly complicated, challenging and interesting,” she said, happily showing off a miniature reproduction of Kizamba A, a deepwater rig off the coast of Angola. It was the first project that Lisa worked on, and it has helped surpass one billion barrels of cumulative oil production from the region.

At ExxonMobil, the single largest employer of Rice graduates, Lisa has joined fellow alumni to give back to the university in a big way. “ExxonMobil offers a tremendous 3-to-1 matching program for our charitable gifts, so the decision to give is easy,” she said. “In fact, you almost can’t afford not to do it.” Both Lisa and her husband, C.W. Mallon ’00, take full advantage of their companies’ matching gift programs in order to provide leadership support to the Rice Annual Fund.

Thanks to Lisa’s generosity, much of what inspired her at Rice — like learning from passionate professors and taking summer internships at well-known companies — will also be experienced by future generations of Owls. “Helping others who may not otherwise have the opportunity to attend Rice just makes sense,” she said.