3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Ryan DuChanois of Solidec and Stephanie Campbell and Diana Murakhovskaya of The Artemis Fund. Photos courtesy

Editor's note: Welcome to another Monday edition of Innovators to Know. Today I'm introducing you to three Houstonians to read up about — three individuals behind recent innovation and startup news stories in Houston as reported by InnovationMap. Learn more about them and their recent news below by clicking on each article.

Ryan DuChanois, co-founder and CEO at Solidec

Ryan DuChanois pitched his company Solidec at CERAWeek, and took home a prize of $25,000. Photo via Solidec/LinkedIn

For the third year, the Greater Houston Partnership's Houston Energy Transition Institute hosted its startup pitch competition at CERAWeek by S&P Global. A dozen startups walked away with recognition — and three some with cash prizes.

Houston-based Solidec won the top prize for the TEX-E pitches. The company, which is working on a platform to produce chemicals from captured carbon, won first place and $25,000. Ryan DuChanois, co-founder and CEO, pitched at the event.

"This prize will help us scale up our technology from the lab at Rice University and ultimately fulfill our mission of capturing yesterday's emissions and generating tomorrow's fuels," the company writes in a post on LinkedIn. Read more.

Stephanie Campbell and Diana Murakhovskaya, co-founders and general partners of The Artemis Fund

Diana Murakhovskaya and Stephanie Campbell are co-founders of The Artemis Fund, a Houston-based, female founder-focused venture capital firm that just announced its $36 million fund II. Photo courtesy of Artemis

In 2019, Stephanie Campbell saw an opportunity in the market — investing in women-led startups, something that wasn't happening at the volume it should have been.

"When we looked around, we really wanted to solve the problem of why women only receive 2 percent of venture capital," Campbell says on the Houston Innovators Podcast.

As angel investors, Campbell and Diana Murakhovskaya, co-founders and general partners of The Artemis Fund, saw tons of promising women-led businesses. Read more.

Diana Murakhovskaya and Stephanie Campbell are co-founders of The Artemis Fund, a Houston-based, female founder-focused venture capital firm that just announced its $36 million fund II. Photo courtesy of Artemis

Houston VC leaders to empower female founders in fintech, commerce, and care with new $36M fund

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 228

In 2019, Stephanie Campbell saw an opportunity in the market — investing in women-led startups, something that wasn't happening at the volume it should have been.

"When we looked around, we really wanted to solve the problem of why women only receive 2 percent of venture capital," Campbell says on the Houston Innovators Podcast.

As angel investors, Campbell and Diana Murakhovskaya, co-founders and general partners of The Artemis Fund, saw tons of promising women-led businesses.

"We were finding these incredible female founders who we felt deserved capital to bring their innovations to the market because they're solving big markets and big problems But there was a disconnect in terms of their access and network," she continues.

The other issue, as Campbell explains, was that firms that did have a female-focused angle weren't leading these early-stage rounds. That's where Artemis comes in.

"Our goal was to be the leading firm for these overlooked, underserved markets that have the ability to deliver outsized returns," Campbell says.

Almost five years and around 20 investments later, The Artemis Fund has announced its second $36 million fund to continue to fund female-led upstarts with a tech solution within fintech, commerce, and care — the three pillars The Artemis Fund invests in.

"We really wanted to solve not just problems for women, which is a lot of what we do, but for families, small businesses, and immigrants, which is how we came around to these three verticals," Murakhovskaya says.

She goes on to explain that a significant percentage of adults are a part of the "sandwich generation" — caring not only for their own children, but for their aging parents. Innovations within caregiving can help this generation with their caregiving and maintain their role in the workforce. Additionally, over half the United States workforce is employed by small businesses, but these companies usually lack access to innovative technology.

"We're thinking about what founders are building in these industries to help these businesses thrive and leave these legacy assets to their children," Murakhovskaya says.

The Artemis Fund has announced that it's closed its second fund. Courtesy photos

Houston-based, female-focused VC closes $36M fund

fresh funding

A women-led venture capital group based in Houston has closed its second fund to continue its mission of supporting female-founded startups in fintech, commerce, and care.

The Artemis Fund announced its $36 million second fund this month. Co-founded in 2019 by General Partner Stephanie Campbell, General Partner Diana Murakhovskaya, and Venture Partner Leslie Goldman Tepper, the firm has invested in more than 20 female-led startups — with over 60 percent with Black, Latinx, or immigrant leadership.

"Many funds have come to market that focus on diverse founders. Few are also funding the technology to address key barriers faced by overlooked businesses, communities, and families in the U.S.," Artemis leadership writes in a news release.

"Artemis invests in the big personal, every day, economic problems that Silicon Valley doesn’t understand or know how to solve," the release continues. "We see massive opportunity in what many VCs will quickly write off as too small, too fragmented, and too hard to solve. If it keeps families and small business owners up at night, we are likely backing a company solving it."

Artemis Fund II includes support from limited partners Bank of America, Bank of Montreal, TIAA Nuveen’s Churchill Asset Management, Texas Capital Bank, Amazon, The Rockwell Fund, and Ballentine Partners.

“The Artemis Fund is not only breaking down barriers themselves, but they are also investing in companies looking to catalyze change," Hong Ogle, Houston president at Bank of America, says in the release. "Artemis keenly understands how to identify and support diverse entrepreneurs, which ultimately helps us toward achieving our goal to advance economic opportunity for all our communities."

The second fund has already made investments in five startups:

  • Alameda, California-based Hello Divorce, a tech-enabled guide to divorce with research, planning, therapy, and community support.
  • Gemist, based in Los Angeles, provides tech tools to jewelers.
  • West Palm Beach, Florida-based Max Retail, a platform to sell leftover inventory.
  • Payverse, headquartered in Sherman Oaks, California, is a cross border payment processor leveraging their modern processing platform.
  • New York-based Builder's Patch, a software platform that streamlines the process to finance the development and preservation of affordable multifamily housing for CRE lenders and developers.

If you feel like it's hard to find venture capitalists in Houston, you wouldn't be wrong, according to this Houston investor. Photo via Getty Images

Houston investor outlines how rare VCs are in Houston — and how to find them

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As a venture capitalist and former startup founder living in Houston, I get asked a lot about the best way to find and connect with a venture capitalist in Houston. My usual advice is to start with a list, and reach out to everyone on that list. But no one has a comprehensive list. In fact, VCs are such a quiet bunch that I’ve yet to meet someone who personally knows everyone on this proverbial list.

So, I got together with a couple of VC friends of mine, and we put together our own Houston venture capitalist list.

There are, by our count, 11 active venture capital funds headquartered in Houston of any size and type, and outside of corporate venture capital and angel investors, there are 30 total venture capitalists running funds.

Houston has always been quite thin on the VC fund front. I’ve jokingly introduced myself for a while as “one of the 13 venture capitalists in Houston.”

Let’s put this scale in some brutal perspective. With 7.2 million people in the Greater Houston Metro Area, the odds of finding a partner level active venture capitalist in Houston is about 1 in 240,000, if you take a most expanded definition of venture capitalist that might come down to 1 in 100,000. We’re the fifth largest metropolitan area in the country with a tremendous economic engine; there is a ton of capital in Houston, but it’s residing in things like institutional fixed income and equities, real estate, wealth management, corporate, private equity, family office, energy and infrastructure Basically, mostly everywhere but in venture capital funds for tech startups.

By comparison, there are almost as many Fortune 500 CEOs in Houston — 24, by our count — as venture capitalists and fewer venture capitalists than Fortune 1000 CEOs, of which there are 43. That means running into a VC in the checkout line at HEB is about as rare as running into the CEO of CenterPoint, ConocoPhillips, or Academy. In fact, as there are 115 cities in the Greater Houston area, you are three times more likely to be a mayor in Greater Houston Area than a partner at an investor at a VC firm, and more likely to be a college or university president. While we’re at it, you’re 400 times more likely to be a lawyer, 250 times more likely to be a CPA, and over 650 times more likely to be a medical doctor.

Our 30 venture capitalists in the Greater Houston Area are spread across 20 firms and all major venture sectors and stages. Venture capitalist is defined for this list as a full time managing director or partner-level investment professional actively running a venture capital fund with limited partners, currently investing in new venture capital deals from their fund from seed to growth stage, and residing in the Greater Houston Metro area.

To get to 31 we added in a couple of people running venture set asides for PE funds, and a number who work from Houston for funds with no office here. We excluded CVCs, as the decision making is more corporate than individual and rarely includes the committed fund and carried interest structure that defines venture capital, and excluded professionals at angel networks, accelerators, and seed funds that provide investment, but don’t manage conventional venture capital funds, as well as PE funds that do the occasional venture deal. We might be able to triple the number if we include venture capitalists at any professional level, and add in those professionals at PE and angel and seed funds, and corporate venture capital teams who are actively investing. But we’ll get to those other sources of funding in the next list.

The 11 venture capital funds headquartered in Houston are: Mercury, Energy Transition Ventures (my fund), Montrose Lane (formerly called Cottonwood), Texas Medical Center Venture Fund, Artemis, New Climate Ventures, Fitz Gate Ventures, Curate Capital, Knightsgate Ventures, Amplo Ventures,and First Bight Ventures.

Another half a dozen firms have a partner level venture capital investor here, but are headquartered elsewhere: Energy Innovation Capital, Decarbonization Partners, 1984 Ventures, Altitude Ventures, Ascension Ventures, Moneta Ventures, and MKB & Co. Two others, CSL Ventures and SCF Partners, are local private equity funds with a venture capital partner in Houston and a dedicated allocation from a PE fund.

Culling these for partner or managing director level currently in Houston, in alphabetical order by first name, LinkedIn profile and all.

We may have missed a couple of VCs hiding in plain sight, as venture capital is a pretty dynamic business.

VCs are just rare. And yes, perhaps more rare in Houston than in California. Something less than 1 in 100 VCs in the country live in Houston. Across the US there are somewhere around 1,000 to 2,000 active venture capital firms, and maybe another 1,000 to 2,000 active US based CVCs — so, plus or minus maybe at most 4,000 to 5,000 currently active partner level venture capitalists in the country excluding CVC professionals (active VCs and VC funds are really hard to count).

Perhaps in the most stunning statistic, the 7,386 elected state legislators in the US today outnumber the total number of American venture capitalists. Luckily for startup founders, the venture capitalists are more likely to return your phone call.

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Neal Dikeman is a venture capitalist and seven-time startup co-founder investing out of Energy Transition Ventures. He’s currently hosting the Venture Capital for First Time Founders Series at the Ion, where ETV is headquartered.

Meet five of the many Houston innovators that will be out at SXSW Pitch, Houston House, Founded in Texas, and much more this week and into next week. Photos courtesy

5 Houston innovators headed to SXSW to know this weekend

who's who

Editor's note: It's a special Friday edition of innovators to know this week — well, weekend. SXSW kicks off today and Houstonians will be headed up to Austin for the week or just the weekend. If you're looking out for the best panels and talks to go to, look no further than this guide I created — as well as the five Houston innovators I think you should know who are listed below.

Lara Cottingham, chief of staff for Greentown Labs

Photo via LinkedIn

Calling all energy transition startups, investors, and more. The Greater Houston Partnership is hosting a full day of energy transition discussions at Houston House on Monday, March 14, at the Line Hotel. Lara Cottingham of Greentown Labs will be at the activation site with a must-attend networking hour at 4 pm called Transition on Tap.

Diana Murakhovskaya, co-founder and general partner of The Artemis Fund

Photo via LinkedIn

Who runs the world? Women. And Diana Murakhovskaya knows that based off her work with her Houston-based venture capital fund, The Artemis Fund. Project W, Artemis Fund, HearstLab, and Beam have teamed up at SXSW to present the second Founded in Texas event on Sunday, March 13, at Relay Coworking. Twelve founders selected by application will pitch to investors from across the country . The audience will get a glimpse of the innovation and creativity at work in the growing Texas startup ecosystem.

Pamela Singh, co-founder and CEO of CaseCTRL

Photo courtesy of CaseCTRL

Pamela Singh is the only Houston startup founder to pitch this year at SXSW's pitch competition. Representing her digital health startup, Case CTRL, Singh takes the prestigious stage Saturday, March 12, to compete in the Enterprise & Smart Data Technology category.

Sandy Guitar, managing director of HX Venture Fund

Photo courtesy of Sandy Guitar

The HX Venture Fund is hosting a meetup that all of the Houston startup ecosystem needs to know about. Network with a number of founders from Houston's fastest-growing startups along with several great VCs around the nation to participate in a joint conversation about founding tech startups. The event will take place at 11:30 am to 12:30 pm at Hilton Austin Downtown, Room 408.

Ashley DeWalt, managing director of DivInc

Photo courtesy of DivInc

Ashley DeWalt, managing director of DivInc, is just one of the many Houston innovators featured in Houston House from the GHP. The activation starts Sunday, March 13, at the Line Hotel with a day of programming across industries and topics — from sports tech and diversity (both topics DeWalt specializes in) to health care innovation and space. Catch DeWalt's panel, Game Changers - The Rise of Sports Tech, on Sunday at 11:30 am at Houston House.

Looking into venture capital deal growth, new coworking coming to town, and more Houston innovation news. Getty Images

Houston's spike in VC deals, accelerator acquired, new coworking, and more innovation news

Short stories

Houston has seen some big headlines this month when it comes to innovation news — and you could have missed something.

From a report on venture capital funding last year and new coworking coming to town to a Houston investor selling her accelerator company, here's the latest batch of short stories in Houston innovation.

Houston sees spike in venture capital deals in 2019

Houston saw more venture capital funding in 2019 compared to 2018. Chart via crunchbase.com

Overall, 2019 was a good one for Texas venture capital deals. Austin had a record turnout of money invested in startups. Austin companies raised over $1.8 billion, which put the state capitol in the top 10 cities based on money raised, according to a report by Crunchbase.

And this Texas VC roundup on Crunchbase focused a lot of the Austin funding and didn't harp too much on the other Texas cities. But Houston's numbers are also record breaking. The Bayou City raised nearly $400 million last year — with the bulk of that being recorded in Q2 of 2019.

Houston's recorded $399.6 million in VC deals surpasses 2018's recorded funding by almost $20 million, but if you look at PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association's data, the amount is higher. According to Pitchbook, the total funding raised in 2019 in Houston deals surprasses $600 million across 98 deals.

Houston investor-founded accelerator acquired

Houston investor ​Diana Murakhovskaya has sold her New York-based accelerator program. ​Photo courtesy of The Artemis Fund

New York-based Monarq Incubator, a venture capital-focused accelerator program for women, has been acquired by Female Founders Alliance. Monarq was co-founded by Diana Murakhovskaya, one of the three co-founders of Houston-based, female-focused The Artemis Fund.

Since its founding in 2017, Monarq accelerated 32 companies that have then gone on to raise more than $10 million in venture capital. The combined company, according to a news release, now represents the largest network of women and non-binary venture-scalable founders.

"FFA and Monarq share more than just a mission – we share founder DNA," says Leslie Feinzaig, CEO of Female Founders Alliance, in the release. "Our two communities and accelerator programs were built by women founders, for women founders. We are uniquely able to build programming that accelerates the success of women in our space, and now along with founder cred, we have scale and a national footprint. I am so excited for what we can achieve in this next stage of FFA."

The acquisition means a heightened focus on The Artemis Fund for Murakhovskaya.

"Now that I am full time focused on raising and investing with Artemis, it's great to know that our community and founders will have a home and provide us with a great source of deal flow," she says in an email to InnovationMap.

A new coworking company to enter Houston with Galleria-area office

New Galleria-area coworking is coming later this year. Photo via serendipitylabs.com

Serendipity Labs Coworking, which has over 100 coworking spaces across the United States and United Kingdom, announced its plans to enter six new markets this year. Houston is among the new locations for the coworking company.

Expected top open in the fall, the Houston coworking space will be a 28,331-square-foot space on the 20th floor of the Marathon Oil Tower at 5555 San Felipe St. in the Galleria area. According to the release, Cameron Coworking, a division of Cameron Management, will be the development partner for the Houston market.

"By partnering with asset owners of office, retail and residential buildings and then managing the Labs, we bring our operational expertise and marketing power, and we assure the upscale service standards of one of the top national flexible workplace networks will be met at every location," says John Arenas, chairman and CEO of Serendipity Labs, in a news release.

MassChallenge Texas opens applications for second cohort

Applications are open for MassChallenge Texas' second Houston cohort. Courtesy of MassChallenge

At an event on January 29 in both Houston and Austin, MassChallenge Texas opened applications for its 2020 cohorts

The 4-month accelerator program is set to begin in June and online applications close March 9. Prizes include six months of free office space and up to $250,000 in equity free investment. Click here for more information.

Houston entrepreneur named to 2020 class of Presidential Leadership Scholars

Houston startup founder, Reda Hicks, has been named a Presidential Leadership Scholar. Photo via presidentialleadershipscholars.org

For this sixth year, the Presidential Leadership Scholars announced its class of veterans, educators, physicians, public servants, and corporate professionals to participate in the program. Reda Hicks, founder of GotSpot was named as one of the 60 scholars. The program began this week in Washington D.C..

"I cannot wait to work with, and learn from, these exceptional leaders," Hicks shares on LinkedIn. "And through the program, I will be working on RescueSpot, a community resiliency application of GotSpot Inc."

Another Houstonian was selected too — Ganesh Betanabhatla, who is the managing partner and chief investment officer at Ramas Capital Management.

Ion Smart Cities Accelerator opens applications for second cohort

Aatonomy, a member of the first cohort, walked away with a cash prize at Demo Day. F. Carter Smith/Station Houston

The second cohort for the Ion Smart Cities Accelerator Program has opened applications online. The first cohort, focused on resilience and mobility, is currently in pilot mode. Cohort II will be focused on water purification/quality, air quality, and clean technology.

The applications will close on Monday, February 17, and startups that are selected will be notified the week of March 2.

The program, which was announced in June, is backed by Microsoft and Intel and named its first cohort last fall. The demo day for the first cohort took place last month. The accelerator has its own space and prototyping lab in downtown Houston, which opened in September.

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Houston residents rank economy as biggest problem, new Kinder survey shows

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The region’s economy tops the list of concerns of Houston-area residents surveyed by Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.

Respondents in the Kinder Houston Area Survey, which questioned nearly 9,000 residents of Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties, cite the regional economy as the area’s “biggest problem.”

Shrinking confidence in job opportunities and growing household financial pressures fueled the grim economic outlook:

  • The share of residents rating job prospects as “good” or “excellent” fell by more than 25 percentage points, the sharpest single-year decline since the 1980s.
  • Seventy-nine percent of those earning less than $25,000 said they’d be unable to cover an unplanned $400 expense. That was up from 72 percent last year. In the $50,000-to-$99,999 category, the figure was 39 percent, up from 30 percent last year.
  • More than 20 percent of residents said their financial status was worse than it was 12 months earlier.

“These challenges were particularly notable among lower- and middle-earning households,” according to a report about the survey.

Dan Potter, co-director of the institute’s Houston Population Research Center, says the annual survey “provides community leaders and the public with a map of where we’ve been on key issues, where we are now, and what’s of looming importance. It allows everyone to work together toward a better future for our city and our region.”

Houston-based Oxy officially announces CEO transition, names successor

Team Transition

Houston-based Occidental (Oxy) has officially announced its longtime CEO's retirement and her successor.

Oxy shared that Vicki Hollub will retire June 1. Reuters first reported Hollub's plan to retire in March, but a firm date had not been set. Hollub will remain on Oxy's board of directors.

Richard Jackson, who currently serves as Oxy's COO, will replace Hollub in the CEO role.

“It has been a privilege to lead Occidental and work alongside such a talented team for more than 40 years," Hollub shared in a news release. "Following the recently completed decade-long transformation of the company, we now have the best portfolio and the best technical expertise in Occidental’s history. With this strong foundation in place, a clear path forward and a leader like Richard, who has the experience and vision to elevate Occidental, now is the right time for this transition. “I look forward to supporting Richard and the Board through my continued role as a director.”

Hollub has held the top leadership position at Oxy since 2016 and has been with the energy giant for more than 40 years. Before being named CEO, she served as COO and senior executive vice president at the company. She led strategic acquisitions of Anadarko Petroleum in 2019 and CrownRock in 2024, and was the first woman selected to lead a major U.S. oil and gas company.

Hollub also played a key role in leading Oxy's future as a "carbon management company."

Jackson has been with Oxy since 2003. He has held numerous leadership positions, including president of U.S. onshore oil and gas, president of low carbon integrated technologies, general manager of the Permian Delaware Basin and enhanced oil recovery oil and gas, vice president of investor relations, and vice president of drilling Americas.

He was instrumental in launching Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, which focuses DAC, carbon sequestration and low-carbon fuels through businesses like 1PointFive, TerraLithium and others, according to the company. He also serves on the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative’s Climate Investment Board and the American Petroleum Institute’s Upstream Committee. He holds a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M University.

Jackson was named COO of Oxy in October 2025. In his new role as CEO, he will also join the board of directors, effective June 1.

“I am grateful to be appointed President and CEO of Occidental and excited about the opportunity to execute from the strong position and capabilities that we built under Vicki’s leadership,” Jackson added in the release. “It means a lot to me personally to be a part of our Occidental team. I am committed to delivering value from our significant and high-quality resource base. We have a tremendous opportunity to focus on organic improvement and execution to deliver meaningful value for our employees, shareholders and partners.”

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This article first appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

Rice Brain Institute awards seed grants for dementia, Alzheimer’s research

brain trust

The recently established Rice Brain Institute awarded 12 seed grants last month to support research on dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders.

The grants are part of the Rice DPRIT Seed Grant Program, which aims to help faculty members generate preliminary data, test and teams that would be supported under the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

The DPRIT was approved last year to provide $3 billion in state funding over a 10-year span for research on dementia prevention and other neurological conditions. It will be modeled after the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), which has awarded nearly $4 billion in grants since 2008.

“DPRIT is a historic initiative with transformative impact potential and at Rice we are very well equipped to contribute to its mission and help make Texas a leader in brain health and innovation,” Behnaam Aazhang, a Rice professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Neuroengineering Initiative and the RBI, said in a news release.

The Rice DPRIT Seed Grant Program is supported by the RBI and the Educational and Research Initiative for Collaborative Health (ENRICH) office at Rice. Most of the funding came from Rice's Office of Research, with a contribution from Rice's Amyloid Mechanism and Disease Center, which also launched last year.

A number of the teams include collaborators from Houston's Texas Medical Center, including Baylor College of Medicine, University of Texas Medical Branch and the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston.

The 12 teams are:

  • Keya Ghonasgi, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rice. Ghonasgi's research addresses the high risk of falls among people with different types of dementia and aims to develop a personalized, home-based fall-prevention approach using textile-integrated wearable sensors.
  • Luz Garcini, associate professor of psychological sciences at Rice, and Hannah Ballard, associate director of community and public health at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice. Garcini and Ballard's research looks at barriers and facilitators to early detection of Alzheimer’s disease in diverse, medically underserved urban communities and focuses on populations that experience late diagnosis, including Hispanic/Latino groups.
  • Lei Li, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, and Pablo Valdes, assistant professor of neurosurgery at UTMB. Li and Valdes' project develops a noninvasive, bedside imaging approach to monitor brain blood flow and oxygenation in patients recovering from stroke or brain surgery using photoacoustic imaging through a specialized transparent skull implant.
  • Cameron Glasscock, assistant professor of biosciences at Rice. Glasscock's project addresses repeat expansion disorders, such as Huntington’s disease and myotonic dystrophy, and focuses on stopping DNA instability before repeats reach a disease-causing threshold.
  • Raudel Avila, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rice. Avila's project focuses on everyday health factors such as nutrition, hydration and brain blood flow and how they influence brain aging long before symptoms of dementia appear.
  • Isaac Hilton, associate professor of bioengineering at Rice, and Laura Lavery, assistant professor of biosciences at Rice. Hilton and Lavery's project uses precise CRISPR-based gene regulation to target multiple genetic drivers of neuronal damage in Alzheimer’s.
  • Quanbing Mou, assistant professor of chemistry at Rice, and Qing-Long Miao, assistant professor of neurology at Baylor College of Medicine. Mou and Miao's project aims to develop a gene-regulation therapy for childhood absence epilepsy by restoring activity of the CACNA1A gene.
  • Momona Yamagami, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, and Christopher Fagundes, professor of psychological sciences at Rice. Yamagami and Fagundes' project addresses the physical and mental health challenges faced by spouses caring for partners with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias and aims to develop algorithms to determine the optimal timing and frequency of supportive text messages.
  • Han Xiao, professor of chemistry at Rice. Xiao's project aims to improve the delivery of antibody therapies to the brain using a noninvasive, light-based approach that temporarily opens the blood–brain barrier.
  • Lan Luan, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice. Luan's project investigates how tiny blood-vessel injuries in the brain, known as microinfarcts, contribute to dementia.
  • Natasha Kirienko, associate professor of biosciences at Rice. Kirienko's project targets a shared cause of neurodegeneration, impaired mitochondrial cleanup, and aims to identify an existing antidepressant that could be repurposed to protect neurons in diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
  • Harini Iyer, assistant professor of biosciences at Rice. Iyer's project will observe zebrafish to investigate how the brain’s primary immune cells become improperly activated in neurological disorders, leading to the loss of healthy neurons and cognitive impairment.

The RBI also named the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program in January. Read more about those projects here.

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