Houston researchers tap into tech to provide new brain-related health care solutions

research roundup

From advanced computation to robots, Rice University, the University of Houston, and Houston Methodist are all working on using technology for medical innovation. Graphic via Getty Images

Research, perhaps now more than ever, is crucial to expanding and growing innovation in Houston — and it's happening across the city right under our noses.

In InnovationMap's latest roundup of research news, three Houston institutions are working on brain-related health care solutions thanks to technologies.

University of Houston research team focused on brain injury treatment through computation

Badri Roysam and his team at the University of Houston are working with the National Institute of Health to develop tools to treat concussions and brain injuries. Photo via uh.edu

A University of Houston researcher is tapping into technology to better treat brain injuries and conditions that scientists have not yet figured out treatment for. Badri Roysam, the current chair of electrical and computer engineering at UH and a Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor, and his team have created a new computational image analysis methods based on deep neural networks.

"We are interested in mapping and profiling unhealthy and drug-treated brain tissue in unprecedented detail to reveal multiple biological processes at once - in context," Roysam says in a UH press release about his latest paper published in Nature Communications. "This requires the ability to record high-resolution images of brain tissue covering a comprehensive panel of molecular biomarkers, over a large spatial extent, e.g., whole-brain slices, and automated ability to generate quantitative readouts of biomarker expression for all cells."

Roysam's system, which was developed at the the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, analyzes the images on UH's supercomputer automatically and can reveal multiple processes at once – the brain injury, effects of the drug being tested and the potential side effects of the drug, per the release.

"Compared to existing screening techniques, using iterative immunostaining and computational analysis, our methods are more flexible, scalable and efficient, enabling multiplex imaging and computational analysis of up to 10 – 100 different biomarkers of interest at the same time using direct or indirect IHC immunostaining protocols," says Roysam in the release.

The open-source toolkit, which was developed thanks to a $3.19 million grant from the National Institute of Health, is also adaptable to other tissues.

"We are efficiently overcoming the fluorescence signal limitations and achieving highly enriched and high-quality source imagery for reliable automated scoring at scale," says Roysam. "Our goal is to accelerate system-level studies of normal and pathological brains, and pre-clinical drug studies by enabling targeted and off-target drug effects to be profiled simultaneously, in context, at the cellular scale."

Houston Methodist and Rice University launch new collaboration to use robotics for clinical solutions

Rice University's Behnaam Aazhang and Marcia O'Malley are two of the people at the helm of the new center along with Houston Methodist's Dr. Gavin Britz. Photos via Rice.edu

Rice University and Houston Methodist have teamed up to create a new partnership and to launch the Center for Translational Neural Prosthetics and Interfaces in order to bring together scientists, clinicians, engineers, and surgeons to solve clinical problems with neurorobotics.

"This will be an accelerator for discovery," says the new center's co-director, Dr. Gavin Britz, chair of the Houston Methodist Department of Neurosurgery, in a news release. "This center will be a human laboratory where all of us — neurosurgeons, neuroengineers, neurobiologists — can work together to solve biomedical problems in the brain and spinal cord. And it's a collaboration that can finally offer some hope and options for the millions of people worldwide who suffer from brain diseases and injuries."

The center will have representatives from both Rice and Houston Methodist and also plans to hire three additional engineers who will have joint appointments at Houston Methodist and Rice.

"The Rice Neuroengineering Initiative was formed with this type of partnership in mind," says center co-director Behnaam Aazhang, Rice's J.S. Abercrombie Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who also directs the neuroengineering initiative. "Several core members, myself included, have existing collaborations with our colleagues at Houston Methodist in the area of neural prosthetics. The creation of the Center for Translational Neural Prosthetics and Interfaces is an exciting development toward achieving our common goals."

The team will have a presence on the Rice campus with 25,000 square feet of space in the Rice Neuroengineering Initiative laboratories and experimental spaces in the university's BioScience Research Collaborative. The space at Houston Methodist is still being developed.

"This partnership is a perfect blend of talent," says Rice's Marcia O'Malley, a core member of both the new center and university initiative. "We will be able to design studies to test the efficacy of inventions and therapies and rely on patients and volunteers who want to help us test our ideas. The possibilities are limitless."

Three UH researchers are revolutionizing the way we think the brain works. Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images

3 ways University of Houston researchers are innovating brain treatments and technologies

Brain teasers

While a lot of scientists and researchers have long been scratching their heads over complicated brain functionality challenges, these three University of Houston researchers have made crucial discoveries in their research.

From dissecting the immediate moment a memory is made or incorporating technology to solve mobility problems or concussion research, here are the three brain innovations and findings these UH professors have developed.

Brains on the move

Professor of biomedical engineering Joe Francis is reporting work that represents a significant step forward for prosthetics that perform more naturally. Photo courtesy of UH Research

Brain prosthetics have come a long way in the past few years, but a UH professor and his team have discovered a key feature of a brain-computer interface that allows for an advancement in the technology.

Joe Francis,a UH professor of biomedical engineering, reported in eNeuro that the BCI device is able to learn on its own when its user is expecting a reward through translating interactions "between single-neuron activities and the information flowing to these neurons, called the local field potential," according to a UH news release. This is all happening without the machine being specifically programmed for this capability.

"This will help prosthetics work the way the user wants them to," says Francis in the release. "The BCI quickly interprets what you're going to do and what you expect as far as whether the outcome will be good or bad."

Using implanted electrodes, Francis tracked the effects of reward on the brain's motor cortex activity.

"We assume intention is in there, and we decode that information by an algorithm and have it control either a computer cursor, for example, or a robotic arm," says Francis in the release.

A BCI device would be used for patients with various brain conditions that, as a result of their circumstances, don't have full motor functionality.

"This is important because we are going to have to extract this information and brain activity out of people who cannot actually move, so this is our way of showing we can still get the information even if there is no movement," says Francis.

Demystifying the memory making moments

Margaret Cheung, a UH professor, is looking into what happens when a memory is formed in the brain. Photo courtesy of UH Research

What happens when a brain forms a new memory? Margaret Cheung, a UH professor in the school of physics, computer science, and chemistry, is trying to find out.

Cheung is analyzing the exact moment a neuron forms a memory in our brains and says this research will open doors to enhancing memory making in the future.

"The 2000 Nobel laureate Eric Kandel said that human consciousness will eventually be explained in terms of molecular signaling pathways. I want to see how far we can go to understand the signals," says Cheung in a release.

Cheung is looking at calcium in particular, since this element impacts most of cellular life.

"How the information is transmitted from the calcium to the calmodulin and how CaM uses that information to activate decisions is what we are exploring," says Cheung in the release. "This interaction explains the mechanism of human cognition."

Her work is being funded by a $1.1 million grant from the National Institute of General Medical Science from the National Institutes of Health, and she's venturing into uncharted territories with her calcium signaling studies. Previous research hasn't been precise or conclusive enough for real-world application.

"In this work we seek to understand the dynamics between calcium signaling and the resulting encoded CaM states using a multiphysics approach," says Cheung. "Our expected outcome will advance modeling of the space-time distribution of general secondary messengers and increase the predictive power of biophysical simulations."

New tech for brain damage treatment

Badri Roysam, chair of the University of Houston Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is leading the project that uncovering new details surrounding concussions. Photo courtesy of UH Research

Concussions and brain damage have both had their fair shares of question marks, but this UH faculty member is tapping into new technologies to lift the curtain a little.

Badri Roysam, the chair of the University of Houston Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is heading up a multimillion-dollar project that includes "super microscopes" and the UH supercomputer at the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Data Science Institute. Roysam calls the $3.19 million project a marriage between these two devices.

"By allowing us to see the effects of the injury, treatments and the body's own healing processes at once, the combination offers unprecedented potential to accelerate investigation and development of next-generation treatments for brain pathologies," says Roysam in a release.

The project, which is funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), is lead by Roysam and co-principal investigator John Redell, assistant professor at UTHealth McGovern Medical School. The team also includes NINDS scientist Dragan Maric and UH professors Hien Van Nguyen and Saurabh Prasad.

Concussions, which affect millions of people, have long been mysterious to scientists due to technological limitations that hinder treatment options and opportunities.

"We can now go in with eyes wide open whereas before we had only a very incomplete view with insufficient detail," says Roysam in the release. "The combinations of proteins we can now see are very informative. For each cell, they tell us what kind of brain cell it is, and what is going on with that cell."

The technology and research can be extended to other brain conditions, such as strokes, brain cancer, and more.

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Rice University breaks ground on new innovation hub, The Arc

breaking ground

Construction is officially underway on Rice University's The Arc in Houston’s Ion District.

The university broke ground on the 200,000-square-foot research, corporate innovation and office building on Nov. 4. The facility will share a plaza with the existing Ion building, fostering collaboration within the innovation space, according to Rice.

“The Arc will bring Rice’s extraordinary research and talent and Houston’s impactful innovation ecosystem into even closer connection with the industries and innovators working to solve some of the world’s most consequential challenges,” Rice President Reginald DesRoches said in an announcement. “That constant exchange of ideas and expertise will help move discoveries more rapidly from the laboratory to real-world impact.”

Construction is scheduled to be completed by Q2 2028. Rice Real Estate Co. is developing the project, and Rice University will occupy about 80,000 square feet in the building (about 40 percent). Preleasing has begun, with floor plans ranging from 28,000 to 31,000 square feet.

The Arc will feature conference and meeting spaces, an amenity lounge, fitness center, outdoor plazas, underground parking, and on-site retail and dining, according to the release.

It aims to host tenants focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning, data science, robotics, quantum science and engineering and energy, including Rice's new AI Foundry.

Rice says the AI Foundry will be a space where university experts and partners can support organizations with AI challenges. Rice recently committed to hiring 75 new AI-focused faculty and announced plans to launch a new Master of Artificial Intelligence (MAI) next fall.

“The AI Foundry is exactly the kind of collaboration the Arc is designed to enable,” Amy Dittmar, the Howard R. Hughes Provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at Rice, added in the release. “By bringing Rice researchers together with industry partners in a shared environment, we can accelerate the movement of ideas from research into practical applications while helping organizations build the capabilities they need to succeed as AI continues to evolve.

Developers of The Arc are targeting LEED Gold certification by incorporating smart building automation and energy-saving features into the project's design. Rice first announced the project in September 2025.

Rendering courtesy Bogza

Houston battery tech startup FlowCellutions acquired by Katy energy co.

M&A

Katy-based TerraFlow Energy, an energy storage and infrastructure company, has acquired Houston-based battery technology startup FlowCellutions. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

FlowCellutions still operates under its established name, but with the tagline “A TerraFlow Energy Company.” Becca Segel, founder and CEO of FlowCellutions, now runs the business as its president.

FlowCellutions specializes in electrochemical sensing, diagnostics, analytics, and testing that offer insights into battery chemistry, charging capabilities, and system performance.

“FlowCellutions has always been focused on developing better ways to understand what is happening inside a flow battery and using that information to improve how these systems perform,” Segal said in a press release. “Joining TerraFlow gives us the opportunity to apply that work at a much larger scale while continuing to build the capabilities and expertise that make FlowCellutions unique.”

The FlowCellutions platform supports data centers and other heavy users of power. It’s designed to help reduce operating costs, prevent failures and costly downtime, and extend battery lifetime from about seven years to more than 30 years.

Segel founded the company in 2022. A member of Greentown Labs, the company raised more than $2 million in non-dilutive funding and received $1.5 million in National Science Foundation funding earlier this year.

FlowCellutions is one of five finalists in the Energy Transition Business category of InnovationMap’s 2026 Houston Innovation Awards.

“FlowCellutions brings a depth of scientific and technical expertise that fits naturally with where TerraFlow is going,” Jon Parrella, CEO of TerraFlow, said in the release.

“As we move from developing these systems to deploying them at commercial scale, understanding performance at a deeper level matters,” he said. “Bringing FlowCellutions into TerraFlow strengthens that capability and gives both teams more opportunity to advance the technology.”TerraFlow, founded in 2024, develops long-duration energy storage and power infrastructure for data centers, industrial facilities, utilities and other large power consumers.

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This article originally appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

3 fast-growing Houston scaleups named Innovation Awards finalists

meet the finalists

From IPOs to groundbreakings, some of Houston's most innovative companies reached major milestones this year.

As part of the 2026 Houston Innovation Awards, our Scaleup of the Year category honors innovative later-stage startups that have recently reached a significant milestone in company growth. Three scaleups have been named finalists for the 2026 award.

Read more about these businesses, their founders and their breakthrough technologies below. The 2026 winners will be announced on InnovationMap.com in mid-November.

Erock

Energy infrastructure company Erock, previously known as Enchanted Rock, develops dual-purpose microgrids that rely on natural gas and renewable natural gas to produce lower carbon emissions and air pollutants than diesel generators. Its products can provide bridge power before grid interconnection, backup power during outages and dispatchable capacity that supports long-term grid reliability. The company has more than 1,100 megawatts of installed capacity and over 20 years of experience serving commercial, municipal and large-scale technology customers.

Erock completed its initial public offering this year, raising approximately $600 million in gross proceeds. It also grew its contracted power system sales backlog to approximately $1.7 billion, up tenfold year-over-year, with production sold out through 2028, according to the company's application. The company secured a major equipment order from Anthropic, began construction of the 366-megawatt El Paso Electric project supporting Meta's data center campus, and started assembly operations at its Hyperion facility in Cypress, Texas.

Hertha Metals

Hertha Metals produces lower-cost, lower-emission steel and high-purity iron. The company has developed a single-step process that uses natural gas as a direct reductant instead of metallurgical coal, which cuts production costs by more than 25 percent and emissions by up to 50 percent, according to the company. The same process produces high-purity iron needed for high-purity steels and rare earth magnets. The company says it aims to "re-industrialize America’s production of critical materials."

Hertha Metals was founded by CEO Laureen Meroueh in 2022 and emerged from stealth last year with more than $17 million in venture capital funding. The company closed a $133.65 million Series A this month and also broke ground on its $100M high-purity iron factory known as Chalyx in Conroe.

Venus Aerospace

Spacetech company Venus Aerospace is developing a high-thrust rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE) that replaces the subsonic combustion used in conventional rocket engines. The RDRE is a compact, simpler engine that can deliver up to 15 percent greater efficiency for defense and space applications. It completed its first U.S. flight test of the engine last summer.

Venus Aerospace was founded in 2020 by CEO Cassie Duggleby and CTO Andrew Duggleby. It raised a $20 million Series A in 2022 and $42 million Series A2 in 2025. It closed a $91 million Series B earlier this year and expanded its leadership team. The company is working toward longer-duration and higher-thrust testing and advancing its flight program.

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