4 Houston innovators join prestigious group of inventors as senior members

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Houston's Birol Dindoruk, Megan Robertson, Francisco Robles Hernandez and Allison Post have been named senior members of the National Academy of Inventors. Photos courtesy UH and THI.

Houston is home to four new senior members of the National Academy of Inventors.

To be eligible to be an NAI Senior Member, candidates must be active faculty, scientists and administrators from NAI member institutions that have demonstrated innovation and produced technologies that have “brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society,” according to the NAI. The members have also succeeded in patents, licensing and commercialization, and educating and mentoring.

The University of Houston announced that three professors were selected to join the prestigious NAI list of senior members. UH now has 39 faculty members on the NAI list.

“We congratulate these three esteemed colleagues on being named NAI Senior Members,” Ramanan Krishnamoorti, vice president for energy and innovation at UH, said in a news release. “This recognition is a testament to their dedication, research excellence and pursuit of real-world impact by knowledge and technologies. Their achievements continue to elevate the University as a leader in innovation and entrepreneurship.”

UH’s new senior members include:

Birol Dindoruk, the American Association of Drilling Engineers Endowed Professor of Petroleum Engineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Cullen College of Engineering. He is known for his research in carbon capture and storage, fluid-rock interactions and hydrogen storage. He holds three patents.
Megan Robertson, the Neal R. Amundson professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UH’s Cullen College of Engineering. She is developing new polymers and groundbreaking strategies for recycling and reusing plastics. Robertson currently has three patents and two more patent applications pending.
Francisco Robles Hernandez, a professor of mechanical engineering technology at the UH College of Technology. He holds four patents, and several others are under review. His work focuses on carbon materials, including pioneering work with graphene and designs with steel and aluminum used in automotives and railroads.

“As an inventor, this is one of the highest honors you can be awarded, so I am very proud to receive it,” Robles Hernandez said in a news release. “UH has been instrumental in supporting my research and innovation efforts, but it’s the creativity of the students here that makes it successful.”

Allison Post, associate director of electrophysiology research and innovations and manager of innovation partnerships at the Texas Heart Institute at Baylor College of Medicine, also made the list.

Post was recognized for her work in biomedical engineering and commitment to advancing cardiovascular care through innovations. Post is the youngest member to be inducted this year.

Other notable Texas honorees include Emma Fan from the University of Texas, Arum Han from Texas A&M and Panos Shiakolas at UT Arlington.

In 2024, Edward Ratner, a computer information systems lecturer in the Department of Information Science Technology at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering, and Omid Veiseh, a bioengineer at Rice University and director of the Biotech Launch Pad, were named NAI fellows.

The Senior Member Induction Ceremony will honor the 2025 class at NAI’s Annual Conference June 23-26 in Atlanta, Georgia.

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The Texas Heart Institute — located in the Texas Medical Center — has upgraded its tech to reach more patients. Photo via texasheart.org

Houston health institute launches advanced translation platform to reach more patients online

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The Texas Heart Institute launched a new translation technology on its websites this month that will allow speakers of more than 100 languages to learn from and interact with its digital resources.

Known as a neural machine translation network, the artificial intelligence service has been deployed on THI's texasheart.org and texasheartmedical.org to translate heart-health information in several Spanish dialects, Vietnamese, Chinese, Arabic, and numerous other languages.

Now, when users visit these sites they are presented with a drop down menu of a long list of languages to choose from. Once they make their selection, the website is shown in their native or chosen language in a form that's nearly identical to its presentation in English. These thousands of shifts were achieved through machine translation that predicts the likelihood of a sequence of words in a sentence.

“The Texas Heart Institute remains committed to serving as a trusted source of health information and patient empowerment by simplifying access to our extensive library of knowledge,” Dr. Joseph G. Rogers, CEO and President of The Texas Heart Institute, said in a statement.

Neural machine translations, or NMTs, are considered to be more accurate that statistical translations when translating to and from the English language. Rather than running a set of rules to translate a set of words and phrases in a sentence, known as machine or statistical translations, NMT uses a series of nodes to look at the language as a whole and understand the context to create a more fluent translation.

NMT translations have accuracy scores of 8.3 out of 10, and are expected to improve with more adoption, THI shared from a 2021 study by the UCLA Medical Center. Human translations have accuracy scores of 8.5 out of 10.

According to the institute, the shift aligns with THI's mission of providing access to heart-health information, regardless of language barriers. In 2011, the institute launched heart-health topics and articles in Spanish on its sites. Those pages are among the most used on the side today, the institute says, and people from about 235 countries, territories, and dependencies visit THI's website every year.

Last year, Innovation Map spoke with THI's then-newly appointed manager of innovation partnerships Allison Post, whose mission is to support THI's in-house inventors while making sure it is bringing in the best new external technologies out there to its patients. Click here to learn more or listen to the full interview on the Houston Innovators Podcast.

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Alfredo Arvide of Slalom Consulting, Allison Post of the Texas Heart Institute, and Jeff Price of Pronto Pay. Courtesy photos

3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

Editor's note: In this week's roundup of Houston innovators to know, I'm introducing you to three local innovators across industries — tech consulting, health care, and fintech — recently making headlines in Houston innovation.

Alfredo Arvide, senior principal within product engineering at Slalom Consulting

Should you launch an app? Or just a web page? This consultant weighs in with his advice. Photo courtesy of Slalom

Tech founders have a lot of decisions to make, and Alfredo Arvide of Slalom Consulting wrote a guest column for InnovationMap to help advise on a big one.

"One of the biggest decisions you'll have to make as an entrepreneur is whether you should host your product or service on the web, via an app, or through a webapp," he writes. "Product development has a million intricacies that will dictate – and sometimes demand – a specific route to market." Read more.

Allison Post, manager of innovation partnerships at the Texas Heart Institute

Allison Post joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to share what she's focused on in cardiac innovation. Photo courtesy of THI

In a perfect world, Houston's health care institutions work collaboratively on innovative health care solutions and the city soars as a major hub for life science innovation. That perfect world is Allison Post's goal. As Texas Heart Institute's manager of innovation partnerships, she is in charge of supporting THI innovators and connecting the institute with the rest of the city.

"I only see just phenomenal things for Houston, and what I really want is for the Texas Medical Center to become even more interconnected. We've got to be able to transfer ideas and thoughts and intentions seamlessly between these institutions and right now there are a lot of barriers," Post says. "And I really think Texas Heart is hopefully going to serve as an example of how to take down those barriers." Read more and stream the episode.

Jeff Price, founder and CEO of Pronto Pay

This Houston startup has an app for helping employees get a portion of their paychecks before payday. Photo via Pexels

So much of the country lives paycheck to paycheck, and Jeff Price saw a business opportunity to help out employees who need an advance on their wages. He founded Pronto Pay in the first quarter of 2021. The software aims to connect hourly works with transparent access to wages earned before pay day without disrupting the employers' books.

"When you think about it, payroll hasn't changed in nearly two centuries. As far as we can remember, you get paid weekly or bi-weekly. And that's precisely the point we're trying to solve," Price says. Read more.

Allison Post, manager of innovation partnerships at the Texas Heart Institute, joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to share what she's focused on in cardiac innovation. Photo courtesy of THI

Newly appointed innovation leader calls for more health care collaboration in Houston

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 80

Allison Post is a professional dot connector for the Texas Heart Institute. Located in the Texas Medical Center and founded in 1962, THI has long had a history of innovation — from Denton Cooley, THI's founder, performing the first artificial heart implementation in 1970.

Now, Post — who was appointed to a newly created position of manager of innovation partnerships — is focused on working with THI's latest generation of cardiac health innovators. She works internally to foster and support THI's brightest inventors as well as externally to make sure the institute is bringing in the best new technologies out there to its patients.

"The whole mission of the Texas Heart Institute is to help our patients. If that means that someone else has an incredible idea we want to jump onboard and bring it to people," Post says in this week's episode of the Houston Innovators Podcast.

Post, who has a bioengineering background and has worked on both sides of the table as an entrepreneur and a startup mentor, is looking to support breakthrough cardiac innovations within stem cells, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and more. And unfortunately, the cardiac health space has an increasing need to develop new health care solutions.

"Because of the growing burden of heart disease, heart failure, coronary artery disease, the unfortunately long list of things that can go wrong with someone's heart means the pressing need for therapies is just growing," she says on the show. "We're trying to keep up and break into things that people haven't done a lot of work on, such as women's heart health."

Another factor in Post's role, which she's had since last fall, is to bring THI further into both the TMC's innovation efforts as well as the greater Houston innovation ecosystem — as well as beyond. To her, Houston has a huge opportunity to lead health care innovation.

"It makes no sense that we aren't the health care leaders yet in med tech development. It should not be Boston, San Francisco, or Minneapolis. It should be Houston," Post says. "We have everything we need to do it. We just need to bring it all together."

The key to getting there, she says, is further collaboration. If there's one thing the world has learned about health care innovation from COVID-19, it's that when experts are rallying behind and collaborating on solutions, the speed of development is much faster.

"The more minds we have the better the solutions I going to be," she says.

Post says that she hopes her work at THI can inspire other institutions to collaborate ‚ since everyone has the same goal of helping patients.

Post shares more about what she's focused on and where THI is headed on the episode. Listen to the full interview below — or wherever you stream your podcasts — and subscribe for weekly episodes.

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State-of-the-art innovation hub opens in Houston Energy Corridor

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French multinational company Schneider Electric has opened a new 10,500-square-foot, state-of-the-art Energy Innovation Center in Houston.

The new facility is located in Houston’s Energy Corridor and is designed to “foster increased collaboration and technological advancements across the entire value chain,” according to a news release from the company. The new Houston location joins Schneider's existing innovation hubs in Paris, Singapore and Bangalore.

The venue will serve as a training center for process control engineers, production superintendents, manufacturing managers, technical leads and plant operations personnel. It can simulate various real-world scenarios in refineries, combined-cycle power plants, ethylene plants, recovery boilers and chemical reactors.

It includes an interactive control room and artificial Intelligence applications that “highlight the future of industrial automation,” according to the release.

"Digitalization is significantly enhancing the global competitiveness of the U.S. through continuous innovation and increased investment into next-generation technology," Aamir Paul, Schneider Electric's President of North America Operations, said in the release.

Texas has over 4,100 Schneider Electric employees, the most among U.S. states, and has facilities in El Paso, the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and other areas.

"This flagship facility in the Energy Capital of the World underscores our commitment to driving the future of software-defined automation for our customers in Houston and beyond,” Paul added in the release. “With this announcement, we are excited to continue supporting the nation's ambitions around competitive, efficient and cost-effective manufacturing."

Schneider Electric says the new Houston facility is part of its expansion plans in the U.S. The company plans to invest over $700 million in its U.S. operations through 2027, which also includes an expansion at its El Paso campus.

The company also announced plans to invest in solar and battery storage systems developed, built, and operated by Houston-based ENGIE North America last year. Read more here.

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This story first appeared on our sister site, EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

9 can't-miss Houston business and innovation events for April

where to be

Two new conferences will launch while another longtime business competition celebrates its 25th anniversary this month in Houston. Plus, there are networking opportunities, family tech events and more.

Here are the Houston business and innovation events you can't miss in April and how to register. Please note: this article might be updated to add more events.

Ion Block Party: Art Crawl

Network and socialize with other tech enthusiasts and business-minded individuals while taking in the new gallery at Community Artists’ Collective and experiencing the immersive dome at Omnispace360. See work by Joel Zika, who will showcase his digital sculptures through augmented reality screens, and other public art around the Ion while also enjoying food and drink.

This event is Thursday, April 3, from 4-7 p.m. at the Ion. Click here to register.

CLA Presents: Raising Capital over Happy Hour

Gain a better understanding of the capital-raising process and various funding opportunities at this educational happy hour. Keith Davidson, the market leader for CLA in Dallas and former CFO of ICS, will present.

This event is Thursday, April 10, from 4-6 p.m. at The Cannon. Click here to register.

Rice Business Plan Competition

The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship will host the 25th annual Rice Business Plan Competition this month. Forty-two student-led teams from around the world, including one team from Rice, will present their plans before more than 300 angel, venture capital, and corporate investors to compete for more than $1 million in prizes.

This event is April 10-12. Stream the Elevator Pitch Competition and Final Round here.

RSVF Annual Conference

The Rice Student Venture Fund will host its first-ever Annual Conference to celebrate the university's entrepreneurial spirit and the rising generation of student-led innovation. The conference will include live startup demos, an RSVF fund update, a keynote fireside chat, a builder-investor panel and networking. RSVF welcomes students, alumni, investors, faculty and staff, and innovators and community members of the broader tech scene.

This event is Monday, April 14, from 4-8 p.m. at the Ion. Click here to register.

TEX-E Conference

TEX-E will host its inaugural conference this month under the theme "Energy & Entrepreneurship: Navigating the Future of Climate Tech." The half-day conference will feature a keynote from Artemis Energy Partners CEO Bobby Tudor as well as panels with other energy and tech leaders from NRG, Microsoft, GE Vernova and TEB Tech.

This event is Tuesday, April 15, from 1-4:30 p.m. at the Ion. Click here to register.

Houston Methodist Leadership Speaker Series

Hear from Dr. Jonathan Rogg, Chief Quality Officer and Vice President of Operations at Houston Methodist Hospital and a a practicing emergency medicine physician, at the latest Houston Methodist Leadership Speaker Series. Rogg will present "Leadership from the Bedside to the Boardroom."

This event is on Wednesday, April 23, from 4:45-6 p.m. at the Ion. Click here to register.

Ion Family STEAM Day– Let's Build a Tripwire Alarm

STEAM on Demand will host a hands-on, family-friendly engineering lesson for young ones on the Ion Forum Stairs. Kids will learn to create and test their own working alarm system. The event is geared toward those ages 7 to 14.

This event is Sunday, April 26, from 10 a.m. to noon at the Ion. Click here to register.

Greentown Houston Fourth Anniversary Transition On Tap

Climatetech incubator Greentown Labs will celebrate its fourth anniversary with a special edition of its signature networking event, Transition On Tap. Entrepreneurs, investors, students, and friends of climatetech are invited to attend.

This event is Tuesday, April 29, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at Greentown Labs. Click here to register.

Integrate Space Technology Into Your Small Biz

The SBA Houston District Office and the UH Technology Bridge will host a collaborative event designed to help small businesses leverage space technology for prototype development. Attendees will also hear from industry experts on resources and gain access free technical engineering assistance to help accelerate their businesses.

This event is Wednesday, April 30, from 9:30-11:30 a.m. at UH Technology Bridge Innovation Center. Click here to reserve your spot.

Texas university's innovative 'WaterHub' will dramatically reduce usage by 40%

Sustainable Move

A major advancement in sustainability is coming to one Texas university. A new UT WaterHub at the University of Texas at Austin will be the largest facility of its kind in the U.S. and will transform how the university manages its water resources.

It's designed to work with natural processes instead of against them for water savings of an estimated 40 percent. It's slated for completion in late 2027.

The university has had an active water recovery program since the 1980s. Still, water is becoming an increasing concern in Austin. According to Texas Living Waters, a coalition of conservation groups, Texas loses enough water annually to fill Lady Bird Lake roughly 89 times over.

As Austin continues to expand and face water shortages, the region's water supply faces increased pressure. The UT WaterHub plans to address this challenge by recycling water for campus energy operations, helping preserve water resources for both the university and local communities.

The 9,600-square-foot water treatment facility will use an innovative filtration approach. To reduce reliance on expensive machinery and chemicals, the system uses plants to naturally filter water and gravity to pull it in the direction it needs to go. Used water will be gathered from a new collection point near the Darrell K Royal Texas Memorial Stadium and transported to the WaterHub, located in the heart of the engineering district. The facility's design includes a greenhouse viewable to the public, serving as an interactive learning space.

Beyond water conservation, the facility is designed to protect the university against extreme weather events like winter storms. This new initiative will create a reliable backup water supply while decreasing university water usage, and will even reduce wastewater sent to the city by up to 70 percent.

H2O Innovation, UT’s collaborator in this project, specializes in water solutions, helping organizations manage their water efficiently.

"By combining cutting-edge technology with our innovative financing approach, we’re making it easier for organizations to adopt sustainable water practices that benefit both their bottom line and the environment, paving a step forward in water positivity,” said H2O Innovation president and CEO Frédéric Dugré in a press release.

The university expects significant cost savings with this project, since it won't have to spend as much on buying water from the city or paying fees to dispose of used water. Over the next several years, this could add up to millions of dollars.

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A version of this story originally appeared on our sister site, CultureMap Austin.

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