11 Houston researchers named to Rice innovation cohort

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Lilie has named the 2026 Rice Innovation Fellows. Photo via LinkedIn.

The Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) has named 11 students and researchers with breakthrough ideas to its 2026 Rice Innovation Fellows cohort.

The program, first launched in 2022, aims to support Rice Ph.D. students and postdocs in turning their research into real-world ventures. Participants receive $10,000 in translational research funding, co-working space and personalized mentorship.

The eleven 2026 Innovation Fellows are:

Ehsan Aalaei, Bioengineering, Ph.D. 2027

Professor Michael King Laboratory

Aalaei is developing new therapies to prevent the spread of cancer.

Matt Lee, Bioengineering, Ph.D. 2027

Professor Caleb Bashor Laboratory

Lee’s work uses AI to design the genetic instructions for more effective therapies.

Thomas Howlett, Bioengineering, Postdoctoral 2028

Professor Kelsey Swingle Laboratory

Howlett is developing a self-administered, nonhormonal treatment for heavy menstrual bleeding.

Jonathan Montes, Bioengineering, Ph.D. 2025

Professor Jessica Butts Laboratory

Montes and his team are developing a fast-acting, long-lasting nasal spray to relieve chronic and acute anxiety.

Siliang Li, BioSciences, Postdoctoral 2025

Professor Caroline Ajo-Franklin Laboratory

Li is developing noninvasive devices that can quickly monitor gut health signals.

Gina Pizzo, Statistics, Lecturer

Pizzo’s research uses data modeling to forecast crop performance and soil health.

Alex Sadamune, Bioengineering, Ph.D. 2027

Professor Chong Xie Laboratory

Sadamune is working to scale the production of high-precision neural implants.

Jaeho Shin, Chemistry, Postdoctoral 2027

Professor James M. Tour Laboratory

Shin is developing next-generation semiconductor and memory technologies to advance computing and AI.

Will Schmid, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Postdoctoral 2025

Professor Alessandro Alabastri Laboratory

Schmid is developing scalable technologies to recover critical minerals from high-salinity resources.

Khadija Zanna, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ph.D. 2026

Professor Akane Sano Laboratory

Zanna is building machine learning tools to help companies deploy advanced AI in compliance with complex global regulations.

Ava Zoba, Materials Science and Nano Engineering, Ph.D. 2029

Professor Christina Tringides Laboratory

Zoba is designing implantable devices to improve the monitoring of brain function following tumor-removal surgery.

According to Rice, its Innovation Fellows have gone on to raise over $30 million and join top programs, including The Activate Fellowship, Chain Reaction Innovations Fellowship, the Texas Medical Center’s Cancer Therapeutics Accelerator and the Rice Biotech Launch Pad. Past participants include ventures like Helix Earth Technologies and HEXASpec.

“These fellows aren’t just advancing science — they’re building the future of industry here at Rice,” Kyle Judah, Lilie’s executive director, said in a news release. “Alongside their faculty members, they’re stepping into the uncertainty of turning research into real-world solutions. That commitment is rare, and it’s exactly why Lilie and Rice are proud to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them and nurture their ambition to take on civilization-scale problems that truly matter.”

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Rice University scientists Kshitij Rai, Caleb Bashor and Ronan O’Connell have developed CLASSIC, a new AI-driven process that can generate and test millions of DNA designs at the same. Photo by Jeff Fitlow. Courtesy Rice University.

Houston scientists develop breakthrough AI-driven process to design, decode genetic circuits

biotech breakthrough

Researchers at Rice University have developed an innovative process that uses artificial intelligence to better understand complex genetic circuits.

A study, published in the journal Nature, shows how the new technique, known as “Combining Long- and Short-range Sequencing to Investigate Genetic Complexity,” or CLASSIC, can generate and test millions of DNA designs at the same time, which, according to Rice.

The work was led by Rice’s Caleb Bashor, deputy director for the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute and member of the Ken Kennedy Institute. Bashor has been working with Kshitij Rai and Ronan O’Connell, co-first authors on the study, on the CLASSIC for over four years, according to a news release.

“Our work is the first demonstration that you can use AI for designing these circuits,” Bashor said in the release.

Genetic circuits program cells to perform specific functions. Finding the circuit that matches a desired function or performance "can be like looking for a needle in a haystack," Bashor explained. This work looked to find a solution to this long-standing challenge in synthetic biology.

First, the team developed a library of proof-of-concept genetic circuits. It then pooled the circuits and inserted them into human cells. Next, they used long-read and short-read DNA sequencing to create "a master map" that linked each circuit to how it performed.

The data was then used to train AI and machine learning models to analyze circuits and make accurate predictions for how untested circuits might perform.

“We end up with measurements for a lot of the possible designs but not all of them, and that is where building the (machine learning) model comes in,” O’Connell explained in the release. “We use the data to train a model that can understand this landscape and predict things we were not able to generate data on.”

Ultimately, the researchers believe the circuit characterization and AI-driven understanding can speed up synthetic biology, lead to faster development of biotechnology and potentially support more cell-based therapy breakthroughs by shedding new light on how gene circuits behave, according to Rice.

“We think AI/ML-driven design is the future of synthetic biology,” Bashor added in the release. “As we collect more data using CLASSIC, we can train more complex models to make predictions for how to design even more sophisticated and useful cellular biotechnology.”

The team at Rice also worked with Pankaj Mehta’s group in the department of physics at Boston University and Todd Treangen’s group in Rice’s computer science department. Research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Office of Naval Research, the Robert J. Kleberg Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation, the American Heart Association, National Library of Medicine, the National Science Foundation, Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute and the Rice Institute of Synthetic Biology.

James Collins, a biomedical engineer at MIT who helped establish synthetic biology as a field, added that CLASSIC is a new, defining milestone.

“Twenty-five years ago, those early circuits showed that we could program living cells, but they were built one at a time, each requiring months of tuning,” said Collins, who was one of the inventors of the toggle switch. “Bashor and colleagues have now delivered a transformative leap: CLASSIC brings high-throughput engineering to gene circuit design, allowing exploration of combinatorial spaces that were previously out of reach. Their platform doesn’t just accelerate the design-build-test-learn cycle; it redefines its scale, marking a new era of data-driven synthetic biology.”

Xiaoyu Yang, a graduate student at Rice, is the lead author on a study published in the journal Science on smart cell design. Photo by Jeff Fitlow/ Courtesy Rice University

Rice research breakthrough paves the way for advanced disease therapies

study up

Bioengineers at Rice University have developed a “new construction kit” for building custom sense-and-respond circuits in human cells, representing a major breakthrough in the field of synthetic biology, which could "revolutionize" autoimmune disease and cancer therapeutics.

In a study published in the journal Science, the team focused on phosphorylation, a cellular process in the body in which a phosphate group is added to a protein, signaling a response. In multicellular organisms, phosphorylation-based signaling can involve a multistage, or a cascading-like effect. Rice’s team set out to show that each cycle in a cascade can be treated as an elementary unit, meaning that they can be reassembled in new configurations to form entirely novel pathways linking cellular inputs and outputs.

Previous research on using phosphorylation-based signaling for therapeutic purposes has focused on re-engineering pathways.

“This opens up the signaling circuit design space dramatically,” Caleb Bashor, assistant professor of bioengineering and biosciences and corresponding author on the study, said in a news release. “It turns out, phosphorylation cycles are not just interconnected but interconnectable … Our design strategy enabled us to engineer synthetic phosphorylation circuits that are not only highly tunable but that can also function in parallel with cells’ own processes without impacting their viability or growth rate.”

Bashor is the deputy director for the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute, which launched last year.

The Rice lab's sense-and-respond cellular circuit design is also innovative because phosphorylation occurs rapidly. Thus, the new circuits could potentially be programmed to respond to physiological events in minutes, compared to other methods, which take hours to activate.

Rice’s team successfully tested the circuits for sensitivity and their ability to respond to external signals, such as inflammatory issues. The researchers then used the framework to engineer a cellular circuit that can detect certain factors, control autoimmune flare-ups and reduce immunotherapy-associated toxicity.

“This work brings us a whole lot closer to being able to build ‘smart cells’ that can detect signs of disease and immediately release customizable treatments in response,” Xiaoyu Yang, a graduate student in the Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology Ph.D. program at Rice who is the lead author on the study, said in a news release.

Ajo-Franklin, a professor of biosciences, bioengineering, chemical and biomolecular engineering and a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas Scholar, added “the Bashor lab’s work vaults us forward to a new frontier — controlling mammalian cells’ immediate response to change.”

These three entrepreneurs saw a need in their industries and created their own solutions. Photos courtesy

3 Houston innovators to know this week

Who's who

A true innovator is someone who's able to look past how something has been done for years — decades even — and be creative enough to find a better way to do it.

From redesigning conventional lab space to seeing a niche opportunity for luxury home rentals, these three innovators to know this week have made strides in changing the game.

Caleb Bashor, professor at Rice University

Photo courtesy of Caleb Bashor

Not all labs are created equal — or affordably. Caleb Bashor, a professor at Rice University, along with seven colleagues, created a DIY lab to further research efforts based at the university.

The DIY lab, eVOLVER, comprises three modules: a customizable "smart sleeve" housing and interface for each culture vessel, a fluidic module that controls movement of liquid in and out of each culture vessel, and a modular hardware infrastructure that simplifies high-volume bi-directional data flow by decoupling each parameter into individual microcontrollers.

"The prototype 16-chamber version of eVOLVER described in the new paper cost less than $2,000, cheaper than what a lab might pay for a single continuous culture bioreactor," Bashor says. Read more about the eVOLVER here.

Sébastien Long, founder and CEO of Lodgeur

Photo courtesy of Lodgeur

Sébastien Long ended up in Houston by chance, and the city ended up being a great place to take his luxe apartment rental business plan and turn it into a reality. Houston-based Lodgeur is a rental company that takes the convenience of Airbnb and adds in the luxury experience of a hotel.

Long identified stylish apartment complexes and built his business which now has a couple properties downtown that are attractive to a niche market of clientele.

"We're roughly split between leisure guests and business travelers," Long says. "They want to feel like they're staying in a home away from home." Read more about Lodgeur here.

Gustavo Sanchez, co-founder and CEO of Pandata Tech

Photo courtesy of Pandata Tech

In oil and gas, proper data management can be the difference of millions of dollars in savings. Pandata Tech can run a data quality check for its oil and gas clients — and even engages automation and machine learning for quicker, more thorough results.

Gustavo Sanchez, co-founder and CEO of the company, is looking to bring his data systems into new industries, like health care, where data management can be hectic, overwhelming, and crucial to life-saving opportunities.

"There's so much data, and it's so noisy, that it's hard to know whether the data can be trusted or not," Sanchez says. Read more about Pandata Tech here.

The DIY lab, called the eVOLVER, costs $2,000 less than a comparable setup. Photo courtesy of Rice University

Houston scientist creates a DIY lab concept for flexible and efficient work

Work space

Every scientist needs his or her own space, and each discipline calls for different types of tools and space requirements. Caleb Bashor, a professor at Rice University, along with seven colleagues, created a DIY lab to further research efforts based at the university.

Stemming from the need of a more customized study, Bashor and his team created a setup that combines the control of automated cell-culturing systems that can run continuously for months with the scale of high-throughput systems that grow dozens of cultures at once, according to a news release issued by Rice University.

The DIY lab, eVOLVER, comprises three modules: a customizable "smart sleeve" housing and interface for each culture vessel, a fluidic module that controls movement of liquid in and out of each culture vessel, and a modular hardware infrastructure that simplifies high-volume bi-directional data flow by decoupling each parameter into individual microcontrollers.

"The prototype 16-chamber version of eVOLVER described in the new paper cost less than $2,000, cheaper than what a lab might pay for a single continuous culture bioreactor," Bashor says in the release.

Bashor, who has been at the university since 2017, has worked in science for 15 years and received his post doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he met many of his colleagues that collaborated on eVOLVER.

"If you don't have something to do the job in the lab, you go and you build it," says Bashor. "It might take a few rounds of building and rebuilding, but eventually you get around to having it be something that gives you what you want. In this case, it's something a lot of different academic labs want now, we have actually given this out to dozens of labs."

The DIY initiative has made waves throughout the Rice student body, Bashor shares with InnovationMap. One graduate student, Brandon Wong, tasked to help with the project has shared a how-to for the DIY lab online.

"It's a basic research tool, it's exciting," says Bashor. It's something that can be leveraged for a lot of great research projects inside of the university."

Bashor and his team in the bioengineering department support lead cellular and biomolecular engineering research, which led them to create the lab.

"We turned to DIY electronics and we decided to build it ourselves," Bashor tells InnovationMap. "The process took about three years. We had to learn all of the tools that were out there for doing DIY work and a lot of these tools have showed up in the last ten years."

Rice University's department of bioengineering is a member of the Texas Medical Center and hosts interdisciplinary training programs at MD Anderson Cancer Center and Baylor College of Medicine, according to the school's website.

"This is one of the biggest centers in the world for immunotherapy, particularly clinical immunotherapy, and so we're working with people who do immunotherapy using my special engineering techniques, which mostly involve engineering the way that cells behave to try to more effectively kill cancer," says Bashor.

Caleb Bashor and his associates created the lab. Photo courtesy of Rice University

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Houston ranks among world’s top 30 emerging startup ecosystems

Startup Status

Long known as the Energy Capital of the World, Houston also ranks among the world’s top 30 emerging startup ecosystems, according to a new report.

The report from Startup Genome, a research and advisory organization, doesn’t assign a specific numeric ranking to Houston’s startup ecosystem. Rather, it puts Houston in the ranking range of 21 to 30 for emerging ecosystems. Startup Genome weighed factors such as early-stage funding, performance and talent to identify the top emerging ecosystems.

Houston also gained notice for being one of the world’s 20 emerging ecosystems with at least four unicorn startups in the past 10 years. Houston and nine other ecosystems each had four unicorns.

According to StartupBlink, a startup research platform, Houston’s startup ecosystem grew 24 percent in 2025, with over 1,300 startups and total startup funding exceeding $808 million. StartupBlink places Houston at No. 46 among the world’s top 100 startup ecosystems.

In a recent post on LinkedIn, David Horsup, executive in residence at the Rice Alliance Clean Energy Accelerator, wrote that Houston “has all the ingredients to be wildly successful if it stays true to its differentiated pillars that drive the economy — energy, medical, and aerospace.”

Mumbai topped Startup Genome’s list of emerging ecosystems, followed by Istanbul, Madrid, Salt Lake City-Provo and Barcelona. After Salt Lake City-Provo, the top U.S. ecosystems were Phoenix, Detroit, Minneapolis and Las Vegas.

Silicon Valley led Startup Genome’s ranking of the world’s top established ecosystems, followed by New York City, London, Tel Aviv and Boston. Austin landed at No. 18 in this category and Dallas at No. 27.

“For much of the past decade, this report has chronicled the welcome dispersion of opportunity beyond the traditional hubs,” Startup Genome writes. “That trend has not died — but it has been complicated. Capital and scale are consolidating once more, particularly in the United States, and the gap between leading and emerging ecosystems is widening.”

KBR names C-suite duo to lead $5.3B government services spinoff

new leaders

In advance of the spinoff of its Mission Technology Solutions unit, Houston-based KBR has made two C-suite hires for the new business.

Michael LaRouche is coming aboard as president and CEO of the spinoff, currently called SpinCo, on Sept. 26. Nicholas Veasey is joining as executive vice president and chief financial officer on July 1.

“Michael and Nick bring a highly complementary combination of operational leadership, financial expertise, and mission-driven experience, and together they will accelerate our impact for stakeholders,” Stuart Bradie, chairman, president and CEO of publicly traded KBR, said in a news release.

LaRouche currently is CEO of Serco North America, a Herndon, Virginia-based government services contractor. Veasey most recently was CFO of MAG Aerospace, a Fairfax, Virginia-based defense contractor.

SpinCo, a government services contractor, will launch with more than $5.3 billion in annual revenue and 20,000 employees. KBR’s total headcount is around 36,000. Branding for SpinCo, including a formal name, will be revealed in July.

“SpinCo is positioned as a top-tier provider of differentiated technology solutions, anchored by deep mission expertise, global scale, and a relentless commitment to delivering for our customers,” LaRouche says.

After the spinoff, the slimmed-down KBR will focus on its Sustainable Technology Solutions business, a provider of energy and industrial technology that generated $2.5 billion in revenue in 2025. Bradie will remain chairman, president and CEO of the business.

Both SpinCo and the new KBR will be public companies. The spinoff is scheduled to be completed in January.

Experts: Houston's VC ecosystem has set the foundation — now we need scale

guest column

Fervo Energy went public earlier this summer. The Houston geothermal company priced its IPO at $27 per share, raised $1.89 billion, and opened the next morning at a market capitalization north of $10 billion. By most measures, it is the largest venture-backed cleantech IPO in history and an unambiguous win for Houston. It’s also a useful moment to look at where Houston's venture ecosystem stands and where it can go. The highlight: Houston's venture ecosystem has real foundations and, with increased company formation activity, can grow into the scale our city's ambitions deserve.

A Houston energy story in the national recovery

The recent uptick in Houston venture activity follows national trends. U.S. venture deal count contracted roughly 22 percent from its 2021 peak through 2024 before rebounding to about 16,700 rounds in 2025. Houston's 23 percent increase in VC funding from 2023 to 2024 is part of a national recovery of comparable magnitude over the same time window.

The energy sector is where Houston exhibits unique trends—and where the story turns clearly positive. (Houston's strong health and space sectors deserve their own separate consideration.) By deal count, energy-related rounds have accounted for 15 to 20 percent of Houston activity, roughly consistent over the past few years.

By capital, energy's share surged from about 14 percent in 2023 to over 60 percent in 2025, driven by a small number of large Houston-headquartered rounds, primarily in geothermal and related technologies. Fervo is the obvious anchor, but Sage Geosystems, Quaise Energy, Zeta Energy, Vaulted Deep, Applied Carbon and Mariana Minerals have all closed meaningful rounds. Houston is concentrated and accelerating as an energy capital market, an invaluable position to build upon.

From foundation to scale

The institutional pieces are in place. Greentown Labs, Activate, the Ion and others have built sector-specialized infrastructure most cities would struggle to assemble. Fervo itself is an alum of both Activate and Greentown Labs. Mercury Fund closed its $160 million Fund V, its largest ever. Houston Angel Network, GOOSE Capital, Fathom Fund, and broader pre-seed and seed capital coverage are here. The Houston $10 million-plus Series A list now includes 40 rounds since 2021, which break roughly into two eras. While 2021 to 2022 was biotech-heavy, with companies like Sporos Bioventures, RadioMedix, Cellenkos and Coya Therapeutics, 2024 to 2025 has tilted clearly toward energy, climate, and critical minerals, with Vaulted Deep, Applied Carbon, Mariana Minerals, Sage Geosystems and Ignis H2 Energy among them.

What’s less developed is the volume of seed-stage companies flowing into that capital. Imagine a dozen more Fervos coming out of that infrastructure over the next decade, each generating jobs, recycled founder capital, and the next wave of operators and angel investors. That is the kind of opportunity Houston has within reach if we build the company-formation pipeline to feed it. To be relevant on the national stage as a venture market, and to drive an economy the size of Houston's into the 2030s, the city needs to be doing closer to 20 Series A rounds per month rather than per year. That throughput implies roughly 1,000 seed rounds per year, feeding the funnel at a 20 percent to 30 percent graduation rate. Reaching such throughput depends on how many new founders Houston produces and how quickly our innovation ecosystem can help them achieve lift-off.

Houston in context

The comparative picture brings the scaling challenge into focus. Between 2021 and 2024, Houston-area startups closed between 126 and 153 disclosed venture rounds per year, against a national count between 9,854 and 14,125. That places Houston at a little over 1 percent of the U.S. deal count. For comparison, Austin ran about three times Houston's deal count each year.

At the Series A level, Houston closed between 12 and 24 rounds in any given year. The median Houston Series A across the period was about $10.7 million, compared with $15.4 million in San Francisco. Houston founders are raising fewer and smaller Series A rounds than founders in peer metros, which points directly to where Houston has the most room to grow.

The unicorn picture tells the same story. From 2021 through 2025, the U.S. produced 590 venture-backed unicorns. Four were Houston-based: Solugen and Axiom Space in 2021, Cart.com in 2023, and Fervo Energy in 2024. Adding HighRadius from 2020 brings Houston's all-time total to five. Austin added 19 over the same five-year window. The path from here is to make Houston's entries on lists like these less the exception and more the rule.

Where this leads

Houston has a real opportunity to become the deepest, most credible energy and climate capital market in the country, with the company formation, talent and operator density to support it. The data shows the foundation is already in place. Fervo, Solugen and the growing roster of energy-adjacent Series A graduates are proof. Fervo's IPO is the first of what should be many. Houston has not had a venture-backed cleantech liquidity event of this scale before, and the city now has one to reference, recruit against and build on. With increased company formation at the seed and pre-seed stages, a Fervo-scale outcome need not be a generational event in Houston, but instead, it can become part of a chain reaction powering the city's economy.

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Stephanie T. Schmidt, PhD, is the founder of a stealth startup, a Venture Fellow at Energy Transition Ventures, and an Executive MBA candidate at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business. Lawson Gow is the Chief Operating Officer of Greentown Labs. The full Houston VC landscape report is available at Energy Transition Ventures and CleanTech.Org.

Sources: Crunchbase, PitchBook-NVCA, Carta
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