3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Jim Sledzik of Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures, Arti Bhosale of Sieve Health, and Paul Cherukuri of Rice University. Photos courtesy

Editor's note: In this week's roundup of Houston innovators to know, I'm introducing you to three local innovators across industries — from corporate venture capital to digital health — recently making headlines in Houston innovation.

Jim Sledzik, North American managing director of Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures

Jim Sledzik joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to discuss corporate venture, Houston's role in the energy transition, and more. Photo courtesy of Aramco

When it comes to venture capital, the corporate model can be considered a little less risky, Jim Sledzik, North American managing director of Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures, says on last week's episode of the Houston Innovators Podcast. Over the past decade, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures has invested $320 million into 33 portfolio companies in the United States. Sledzik, who's worked in various energy services roles around the world before entering in to investment, explains that the corporate venture model is ideal for scaling big technology — and fast.

“When you’re using the venture model in a corporate setting, you have the company and the balance sheet behind you, which brings different benefits to companies you’re investing in,” he says. “These entrepreneurs who are looking to figure out how to deploy technology at scale becomes the real interesting item. All entrepreneurs want to grow — and they want to grow fast."

Scaling fast is risky, but big corporates — like Aramco — can help address the risks by providing a foothold in the market, a place to roll out the technology, and more. Click here to stream the episode and read more.

Arti Bhosale, co-founder and CEO of Sieve Health

Sieve Health is an AI cloud-based SaaS platform designed to automate and accelerate matching patients with clinical trials. Photo

Throughout her career, Arti Bhosale has seen the inefficiency and the ineffectiveness of selecting patients for clinical trials.

“Across the globe, more than 30 percent of clinical trials shut down as a result of not enrolling enough patients,” says Bhosale. “The remaining 80 percent never end up reaching their target enrollment and are shut down by the FDA.”

So, in 2020, Bhosale and her team developed Sieve Health, an AI cloud-based SaaS platform designed to automate and accelerate matching patients with clinical trials and increase access to clinical trials. Click here to read more.

Paul Cherukuri, the inaugural vice president for innovation at Rice University

Meet Paul Cherukuri — the new face of innovation at Rice University. Photo via Rice.edu

Rice University has stood up a new office of innovation — and named its new leader. Paul Cherukuri, the executive director of the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering, the inaugural vice president for innovation. In his role, Cherukuri will "lead Rice’s technology and commercialization infrastructure to translate breakthrough discoveries into inventions for the benefit of society," per a news release from Rice.

“I am thrilled and honored to serve in this new role at this inflection point in our university’s history,” Cherukuri says in the release. “Rice has some of the finest minds in the world and I look forward to working with President DesRoches and the leadership team he has assembled to chart a bold new path for world-changing innovation from Rice by engaging the remarkable innovation ecosystem including the Ion District, the Texas Medical Center, industry and other unique assets in Houston.” Click here to read more.

Sieve Health is an AI cloud-based SaaS platform designed to automate and accelerate matching patients with clinical trials. Photo via Getty Images

Houston-based health tech startup is revolutionizing patient selection for clinical trials

working smarter

On many occasions in her early career, Dr. Arti Bhosale, co-founder and CEO of Sieve Health, found herself frustrated with having to manually sift through thousands of digital files.

The documents, each containing the medical records of a patient seeking advanced treatment through a clinical trial, were always there to review — and there were always more to read.

Despite the tediousness of prescreening, which could take years, the idea of missing a patient and not giving them the opportunity to go through a potentially life-altering trial is what kept her going. The one she didn’t read could have slipped through the cracks and potentially not given someone care they needed.

“Those stories have stayed with me,” she says. “That’s why we developed Sieve.”

When standard health care is not an option, advances in medical treatment could be offered through clinical trials. But matching patients to those trials is one of the longest standing problems in the health care industry. Now with the use of new technology as of 2018, the solution to the bottleneck may be a new automated approach.

In 2020, Bhosale and her team developed Sieve Health, an AI cloud-based SaaS platform designed to automate and accelerate matching patients with clinical trials and increase access to clinical trials.

Sieve’s main goal is to reduce the administrative burden involved in matching enrollments, which in turn will accelerate the trial execution. They provide the matching for physicians, study sponsors and research sites to enhance operations for faster enrollment of the trials.

The technology mimics but automates the traditional enrollment process — reading medical notes and reviewing in the same way a human would.

“I would have loved to use something like this when I was on the front lines,” Bhosale says, who worked in clinical research for over 12 years. “Can you imagine going through 10,000 records manually? Some of the bigger hospitals have upwards of 100,000 records and you still have to manually review those charts to make sure that the patient is eligible for the trial. That process is called prescreening. It is painful.”

Because physicians wear many hats and have many clinical efforts on their plates, research tends to fall to the bottom of the to-do list. Finding 10-20 patients can take the research team on average 15-20 months to find those people — five of which end up unenrolling, she says.

“We have designed the platform so that the magic can happen in the background, and it allows the physician and research team to get a jumpstart,” she says.” They don’t have to worry about reviewing 10,000 records — they know what their efforts are going to be and will ensure that the entire database has been scanned.”

With Sieve, the team was able to help some commercial pilot programs have a curated data pool for their trials – cutting the administrative burden and time spent searching to less than a week.

Sieve is in early-stage start up mode and the commercial platform has been rolled out. Currently, the team is conducting commercial projects with different research sites and hospitals.

“Our focus now is seeing how many providers we can connect into this,” she says. “There’s a bigger pool out there who want to participate in research but don’t know where to start. That’s where Sieve is stepping in and enabling them to do this — partnering with those and other groups in the ecosystem to bring trials to wherever the physicians and the patients are.”

Arti Bhosale is the co-founder and CEO of Sieve Health. Photo courtesy of Sieve

Ad Placement 300x100

Ad Placement 300x600

CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Property Showcase

West Coast innovation organization unveils new location in Houston suburb to boost Texas tech ecosystem

plugging in

Leading innovation platform Plug and Play announced the opening of its new flagship Houston-area location in Sugar Land, which is its fourth location in Texas.

Plug and Play has accelerated over 2,700 startups globally last year with corporate partners that include Dell Technologies, Daikin, Microsoft, LG Chem, Shell, and Mercedes. The company’s portfolio includes PayPal, Dropbox, LendingClub, and Course Hero, with 8 percent of the portfolio valued at over $100 million.

The deal, which facilitated by the Sugar Land Office of Economic Development and Tourism, will bring a new office for the organization to Sugar Land Town Square with leasing and hiring between December and January. The official launch is slated for the first quarter of 2025, and will feature 15 startups announced on Selection Day.

"By expanding to Sugar Land, we’re creating a space where startups can access resources, build partnerships, and scale rapidly,” VP Growth Strategy at Plug and Play Sherif Saadawi says in a news release. “This location will help fuel Texas' innovation ecosystem, providing entrepreneurs with the tools and networks they need to drive real-world impact and contribute to the state’s technological and economic growth."

Plug and Play plans to hire four full-time equivalent employees and accelerate two startup batches per year. The focus will be on “smart cities,” which include energy, health, transportation, and mobility sectors. One Sugar Land City representative will serve as a board member.

“We are excited to welcome Plug and Play to Sugar Land,” Mayor of Sugar Land Joe Zimmerma adds. “This investment will help us connect with corporate contacts and experts in startups and businesses that would take us many years to reach on our own. It allows us to create a presence, attract investments and jobs to the city, and hopefully become a base of operations for some of these high-growth companies.”

The organization originally entered the Houston market in 2019 and now has locations in Bryan/College Station, Frisco, and Cedar Park in Texas.

Uniquely Houston event to convene innovation experts across aerospace, energy, and medicine

guest column

Every year, Houston's legacy industries — energy, medicine, and aerospace — come together to share innovative ideas and collaborate on future opportunities.

For the eighteenth year in a row, the annual Pumps & Pipes event will showcase and explore convergence innovation and common technology themes across Houston’s three major industries. The hosting organization, also called Pumps & Pipes, was established in 2007 in Houston and is dedicated to fostering collaboration amongst the city's three major industries.

With NASA in its backyard, the world’s largest medical center, and a reputation as the “Energy Capital of the World,” Houston is uniquely positioned to lead in cross-industry convergence innovation and is reflected in the theme of this year’s event – Blueprint Houston: Converge and Innovate.

Here's what you can expect to explore at the event, which will take place this year on December 9 at TMC Helix Park. Tickets are available online.

The state of Texas’ aerospace investments

How are the recent strategic investments in aerospace by the State of Texas transforming the space economy and driving growth in adjacent industries? What is the case for cultivating a more dynamic and vibrant aerospace R&D environment?

These are the key questions explored in the opening session of Pumps & Pipes, moderated by David Alexander (Director, Rice Space Institute). Joining the discussion are distinguished leaders Norman Garza, Jr., Executive Director of the Texas Space Commission (TSC); as well as two members of the TSC board of directors: Sarah “Sassie” Duggelby, CEO/Co-Founder of Venus Aerospace; and Kathryn Lueders, GM at Starbase, SpaceX.

This panel will spotlight Texas’ critical role in shaping the future of aerospace, with a focus on its cross-sector impact, from space exploration to innovation in energy and health care. We’ll explore how the state’s investments are fueling research and development, creating economic opportunities, and fostering a more interconnected, high-tech ecosystem for the future.

Real-world applications of robotics and synthetic biology

Explore the groundbreaking intersection of syntheticbiology and robotics as they reshape industries from aerospace to energy to health care. Experts from academia and industry — Rob Ambrose of Texas A&M University, Shankar Nadarajah of ExxonMobil, Shalini Yadav of the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute, and Moji Karimi of Cemvita — will discuss the real-world applications and future possibilities of these two fields, including innovative uses of robotics and drones to monitor emissions from deep-sea oil rigs, and synthetic microbes that convert carbon dioxide into valuable chemical products.

Discover how synthetic biology and robotics are paving the way for a more sustainable, autonomous, efficient, and interconnected future.

The total artificial heart – a uniquely Houston story

Heart failure affects millions globally, yet only a small fraction of patients receive life-saving heart transplants. The Total Artificial Heart (TAH), developed by BiVACOR, offers a revolutionary solution for patients with severe heart failure who are ineligible for a transplant.

Luminary leader, Dr. Billy Cohn, will discuss the groundbreaking BiVACOR TAH, a device that fully replaces the function of the heart using a magnetically levitated rotary pump. This innovative approach is part of an FDA-approved first-in-human study, aiming to evaluate its use as a bridge-to-transplant for patients awaiting heart transplants.

Moderated by Dr. Alan Lumsden (Chair Dept. of CV Surgery at Houston Methodist Hospital), join Dr. Cohn as he shares insights, and the story-behind, this pioneering technology and its potential to reshape the future of heart failure treatment, offering new hope to thousands of patients in need.

------

Stuart Corr is the director of Innovation Systems Engineering at Houston Methodist and executive director of Pumps & Pipes.

Houston schools shine on annual ranking of top institutions for 2025

best in class

Several Houston elementary and middle schools are at the top of the class when it comes to educating and preparing the next generation for a successful life and career, according to U.S. News & World Report's just-released list of 2025 Elementary and Middle Schools Rankings.

One such school – T.H. Rogers School in Houston ISD – is the No. 8 best middle school in Texas for 2025.

U.S. News ranked over 79,000 public schools on the state and district level using data from the U.S. Department of Education. Schools were analyzed based on their students' proficiencies in mathematics and reading/language arts on state assessments, and tie-breakers were decided based on student-teacher ratios.

Texas' best middle schools for 2025

Three Houston middle schools achieved spots among the top 10 best Texas middle schools for 2025, according to U.S. News.

T.H. Rogers School has a total enrollment of 1,063 students, with 87 percent of the student population scoring "at or above the proficient level" in mathematics, and 90 percent proficiency in reading. The school has a student-teacher ratio of 17:1, with 62 full-time teachers.

T.H. Rogers School also topped the district-wide list as the No. 1 best middle school in HISD.

Houston Gateway Academy - Coral Campus also ranked among the statewide top 10, coming in at No. 9 with a total enrollment of 914 students. U.S. News says 82 percent of HGA students are proficient in math, and 80 percent are proficient in reading.

"Houston Gateway Academy - Coral Campus did better in math and better in reading in this metric compared with students across the state," U.S. News said in the school's profile. "In Texas, 51 percent of students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 41 percent tested at or above that level for math."

Right behind HGA to round out the top 10 best Texas middle schools is Houston ISD's Briarmeadow Charter School. This middle school has 600 students, 69 percent of which are proficient in math and 74 percent are proficient reading.

Briarmeadow's student-teacher ratio is 16:1, which is better than the district-wide student-teacher ratio, and it employs 38 full-time teachers.

U.S. News also ranked Briarmeadow as the second best middle school in Houston ISD.

Six additional Houston-area schools ranked among the top 25 best middle schools in Texas, including:

No. 18 – Cornerstone Academy, Spring Branch ISD
No. 19 – Mandarin Immersion Magnet School, Houston ISD
No. 21 – Smith Middle School, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD
No. 22 – Seven Lakes Junior High, Katy ISD
No. 23 – Houston Gateway Academy
No. 25 – Beckendorff Junior High, Katy ISD

The best elementary schools in Texas
Jesus A. Kawas Elementary school in Laredo was crowned the No. 1 elementary school in Texas for 2025, while two Houston-area schools made it into the top 10.Tomball ISD's Creekside Forest Elementary in The Woodlands is the No. 7 best elementary school statewide, boasting 656 students, 42 full-time teachers, and one full-time counselor. Students at this school, which U.S. News designates is situated in a "fringe rural setting," scored 90 percent efficiency in math and 94 percent efficiency in reading.Following one spot behind Creekside Forest in the statewide ranking is Sugar Land's Commonwealth Elementary School in Fort Bend ISD, coming in at No. 8. Commonwealth has a student population of 954 with 55 full-time teachers, and two full-time counselors. The school's student-teacher ratio is 17:1, and 90 percent of students are proficient in math, and 94 percent in reading.U.S. News says student success at Commonwealth is significantly higher than the rest of Fort Bend ISD."In Fort Bend Independent School District, 59 percent of students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 47 percent tested at or above that level for math," U.S. News said in Commonwealth's profile. "Commonwealth Elementary [also] did better in math and better in reading in this metric compared with students across the state."Other Houston-area schools that were ranked among the 25 best in Texas are:

No. 13 – Bess Campbell Elementary, Sugar Land, Lamar CISD
No. 20 – West University Elementary, Houston ISD
No. 23 – T.H. Rogers School, Houston ISD
No. 25 – Griffin Elementary, Katy ISD

"The 2025 Best Elementary and Middle Schools rankings offer parents a way to evaluate how schools are providing a high-quality education and preparing students for future success," said LaMont Jones, Ed.D., the managing editor for Education at U.S. News. "The data empowers families and communities to advocate for their children’s education. Research continues to indicate that how students perform academically at these early grade levels is a big factor in their success in high school and beyond."