September is self care awareness month, and there are ways to encourage wellness in the workplace — no matter the size of the company. Tom Merton/Getty Images

September is self-care awareness month. The purpose of the awareness campaign is to remind Americans that it is necessary to mindfully and purposefully care for yourself. Not only can individuals take steps toward self-care, but employers can play a role, too. Many employers are focusing on employee wellness, including financial wellness, realizing that when their workforce is happy and healthy, productivity rises, and their business grows.

Many innovative companies today offer wellness benefits, such as in-office yoga, massages, and acupuncture. Additionally, some companies encourage outside fitness by reimbursing gym memberships, organizing sports leagues, and coordinating classes at boutique studios.

While physical fitness is key to a healthy workforce, so is mental health. Employers have been known to provide meditation and napping rooms within the office, team trips, and flexible PTO. A wise employer will insist their employees use their PTO to refresh and decompress before returning to work with a new vigor. Several tech companies have even made confidential health assessments available and made gaining access to mental professionals easier.

As part of their wellness benefits offerings, companies should encourage financial wellness for their employees. One common contributor to our physical and mental stress is our finances. An American Psychological Association survey found that 62 percent of Americans count money as a stressor. Additionally, a Morgan Stanley study found that 78 percent of employees who report high financial stress say that their financial stress is a distraction at work.

Financial self-care involves assessing a person's financial situation and how their money is fitting into their life. As an employer, you can help your employees find the right balance in their financial life and provide them with the tools to help with their financial wellness.

Start with reviewing the retirement plan available to your employees. If you do not have a retirement plan instituted already, you will find that setting up a 401(k) is relatively easy and relatively low cost. Plus, it provides your employees with the power of saving for their retirement. This year, the IRS allows employees to contribute up to $19,000 in pre-tax dollars, $25,000 if they are 50 or over.

In addition to offering them a savings vehicle, consider providing 401(k) matching funds. For example, you may match 50 cents for every dollar they contribute. Even if an employee is not contributing to their retirement plan, an employer can still contribute money to their employees' retirement funds as a benefit of employment. Generally speaking, the limit on total employer and employee contributions for 2019 is $56,000, or 100 percent of employee compensation, whichever is lower. What better way to help your employees mind their financial self-care than to actively help them save for a secure future?

As an employer, you may go beyond retirement plans and offer other financial self-care benefits such as help with emergency savings, financial coaching, and student loan repayment. Currently, only four percent of employers offer student loan repayment programs, but that number is growing as a popular benefit for recruitment and retainment.  Under this benefit, an employer may pay down a portion of the employee's student debt over a period of time. Of note, there is no tax benefit for a debt repayment benefit, and the money is taxed as income.

This September, take the time to assess the benefits you are offering to employees. Do not forget to include financial wellness as part of your overall plan, benefiting your employees and your business.

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Claudia Mollerup-Madsen is vice president and a financial adviser with the Wealth Management Division of Morgan Stanley in Houston.

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Greentown Labs names Lawson Gow as its new Houston leader

head of hou

Greentown Labs has named Lawson Gow as its Head of Houston.

Gow is the founder of The Cannon, a coworking space with seven locations in the Houston area, with additional partner spaces. He also recently served as managing partner at Houston-based investment and advisory firm Helium Capital. Gow is the son of David Gow, founder of Energy Capital's parent company, Gow Media.

According to Greentown, Gow will "enhance the founder experience, cultivate strategic partnerships, and accelerate climatetech solutions" in his new role.

“I couldn’t be more excited to join Greentown at this critical moment for the energy transition,” Gow said in a news release. “Greentown has a fantastic track record of supporting entrepreneurs in Houston, Boston, and beyond, and I am eager to keep advancing our mission in the energy transition capital of the world.”

Gow has also held analyst, strategy and advising roles since graduating from Rice University.

“We are thrilled to welcome Lawson to our leadership team,” Georgina Campbell Flatter, CEO of Greentown Labs, added in the release. “Lawson has spent his career building community and championing entrepreneurs, and we look forward to him deepening Greentown’s support of climate and energy startups as our Head of Houston.”

Gow is the latest addition to a series of new hires at Greentown Labs following a leadership shakeup.

Flatter was named as the organization's new CEO in February, replacing Kevin Dutt, Greentown’s interim CEO, who replaced Kevin Knobloch after he announced that he would step down in July 2024 after less than a year in the role.

Greentown also named Naheed Malik its new CFO in January.

Timmeko Moore Love was named the first Houston general manager and senior vice president of Greentown Labs. According to LinkedIn, she left the role in January.

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This article originally appeared on our sister site, EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

Houston foundation grants $27M to support Texas chemistry research

fresh funding

Houston-based The Welch Foundation has doled out $27 million in its latest round of grants for chemical research, equipment and postdoctoral fellowships.

According to a June announcement, $25.5 million was allocated for the foundation's longstanding research grants, which provide $100,000 per year in funding for three years to full-time, regular tenure or tenure-track faculty members in Texas. The foundation made 85 grants to faculty at 16 Texas institutions for 2025, including:

  • Michael I. Jacobs, assistant professor in the chemistry and biochemistry department at Texas State University, who is investigating the structure and thermodynamics of intrinsically disordered proteins, which could "reveal clues about how life began," according to the foundation.
  • Kendra K. Frederick, assistant professor in the biophysics department at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who is studying a protein linked to Parkinson’s disease.
  • Jennifer S. Brodbelt, professor in chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin, who is testing a theory called full replica symmetry breaking (fullRSB) on glass-like materials, which has implications for complex systems in physics, chemistry and biology.

Additional funding will be allocated to the Welch Postdoctoral Fellows of the Life Sciences Research Foundation. The program provides three-year fellowships to recent PhD graduates to support clinical research careers in Texas. Two fellows from Rice University and Baylor University will receive $100,000 annually for three years.

The Welch Foundation also issued $975,000 through its equipment grant program to 13 institutions to help them develop "richer laboratory experience(s)." The universities matched funds of $352,346.

Since 1954, the Welch Foundation has contributed over $1.1 billion for Texas-nurtured advancements in chemistry through research grants, endowed chairs and other chemistry-related ventures. Last year, the foundation granted more than $40.5 million in academic research grants, equipment grants and fellowships.

“Through funding basic chemical research, we are actively investing in the future of humankind,” Adam Kuspa, president of The Welch Foundation, said the news release. “We are proud to support so many talented researchers across Texas and continue to be inspired by the important work they complete every day.”

New Houston biotech co. developing capsules for hard-to-treat tumors

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Houston company Sentinel BioTherapeutics has made promising headway in cancer immunotherapy for patients who don’t respond positively to more traditional treatments. New biotech venture creation studio RBL LLC (pronounced “rebel”) recently debuted the company at the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago.

Rima Chakrabarti is a neurologist by training. Though she says she’s “passionate about treating the brain,” her greatest fervor currently lies in leading Sentinel as its CEO. Sentinel is RBL’s first clinical venture, and Chakrabarti also serves as cofounder and managing partner of the venture studio.

The team sees an opportunity to use cytokine interleukin-2 (IL-2) capsules to fight many solid tumors for which immunotherapy hasn't been effective in the past. “We plan to develop a pipeline of drugs that way,” Chakrabarti says.

This may all sound brand-new, but Sentinel’s research goes back years to the work of Omid Veiseh, director of the Rice Biotechnology Launch Pad (RBLP). Through another, now-defunct company called Avenge Bio, Veiseh and Paul Wotton — also with RBLP and now RBL’s CEO and chairman of Sentinel — invested close to $45 million in capital toward their promising discovery.

From preclinical data on studies in mice, Avenge was able to manufacture its platform focused on ovarian cancer treatments and test it on 14 human patients. “That's essentially opened the door to understanding the clinical efficacy of this drug as well as it's brought this to the attention of the FDA, such that now we're able to continue that conversation,” says Chakrabarti. She emphasizes the point that Avenge’s demise was not due to the science, but to the company's unsuccessful outsourcing to a Massachusetts management team.

“They hadn't analyzed a lot of the data that we got access to upon the acquisition,” explains Chakrabarti. “When we analyzed the data, we saw this dose-dependent immune activation, very specific upregulation of checkpoints on T cells. We came to understand how effective this agent could be as an immune priming agent in a way that Avenge Bio hadn't been developing this drug.”

Chakrabarti says that Sentinel’s phase II trials are coming soon. They’ll continue their previous work with ovarian cancer, but Chakrabarti says that she also believes that the IL-2 capsules will be effective in the treatment of endometrial cancer. There’s also potential for people with other cancers located in the peritoneal cavity, such as colorectal cancer, gastrointestinal cancer and even primary peritoneal carcinomatosis.

“We're delivering these capsules into the peritoneal cavity and seeing both the safety as well as the immune activation,” Chakrabarti says. “We're seeing that up-regulation of the checkpoint that I mentioned. We're seeing a strong safety signal. This drug was very well-tolerated by patients where IL-2 has always had a challenge in being a well-tolerated drug.”

When phase II will take place is up to the success of Sentinel’s fundraising push. What we do know is that it will be led by Amir Jazaeri at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Part of the goal this summer is also to create an automated cell manufacturing process and prove that Sentinel can store its product long-term.

“This isn’t just another cell therapy,” Chakrabarti says.

"Sentinel's cytokine factory platform is the breakthrough technology that we believe has the potential to define the next era of cancer treatment," adds Wotton.