Faculty in research and what you need to know, according to this Houston expert

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To be better leaders, the administration should engage its primary audience: the faculty. Graphic by Miguel Tovar/University of Houston

The world of academic research is tough. As institutional research offices juggle regulatory and financial challenges within a continually strained system, they still have to lead their respective enterprises and serve their research communities.

“Service before leadership,” said Amr Elnashai, vice president/vice chancellor for research and technology transfer at the University of Houston. “We cannot miss this very important fact – we have to serve the needs of our research communities, first, before they will trust us to lead.”

How can we better serve faculty while tackling the many challenges faced by research divisions?

Sara Bible, associate vice provost for research at Stanford University, says the best way is to continually engage faculty in the business of research.

Rule making within research

Let’s be honest – faculty don’t particularly enjoy the administrative overburden dished out by university research offices. Nor should they.

But involving faculty in the process is the quickest way to earn their cooperation.

“You will have good results if you put in the time,” said Bible. “It’s really important to be flexible with faculty and staff on campus.”

One way Bible has successfully engaged her research community is in policy development. Her office at Stanford implemented a research policy working group that spends months testing policy language and effectiveness with university faculty and staff before it is launched.

“We’ve had great results,” she said. “People want to engage and be part of the process, not just be expected to follow a rigid set of rules.”

The pre-deadline deadline

Another way to partner with faculty is to work with them to improve the proposal review cycle, for everyone knows the risks of pushing the magic button mere minutes before the deadline.

Melinda Cotton, assistant vice president for Sponsored Programs at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, recommends creating a pre-deadline deadline.

Her office worked with faculty, schools and departments to establish the submission of proposals a full seven days before their due dates. This gave the office time to strengthen merit of the research project and fix minor details that could disqualify a proposal.

“Within our School of Medicine, more than 80 percent of our proposals came in by our pre-deadline,” she said. “We work hard to communicate and advocate to faculty that we can serve them better by doing it this way, and it’s working for us.”

Ultimately, there are lots of processes university research offices have to put in place to do the business of research. But to be better leaders, the administration should engage its primary audience: the faculty.

Engagement in policy-making, for instance, gives insight into pain points and allows research offices to put the best processes in place to get the job done for everyone.

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This article originally appeared on the University of Houston's The Big Idea. Lindsay Lewis, the author of this piece, formerly served as the executive director of communications for the UH Division of Research.


Faculty in academia shouldn't be hesitant to follow their entrepreneurial goals just because it may be difficult to balance the two worlds. Graphic by Miguel Tovar/University of Houston

University of Houston: Tips for balancing faculty and founder life

Houston voices

Finding balance in your professional life and your dreams can be hard for anyone. Faculty in academia, hoping to become entrepreneur and start their own companies, find this especially difficult. Finding this balance is essential to having success both professionally and in entrepreneurial endeavors.

Amy J. Ko, a professor at the University of Washington Information School and Co-Founder of AnswerDash, said in a post on her Bits and Behavior blog that she found parallels between being an entrepreneur and being a professor that helped her start her technology company.

Here are four parallels between startup life and faculty life that Ko found striking.

1. Fundraising.

"I spend a significant amount of my time seeking funding, carefully articulating problems with the status quo and how my ideas will solve these problems. The surface features of the work are different—in business, we pitch these ideas in slide decks, elevators, whereas in academia, we pitch them as NSF proposals and DARPA white papers—but the essence of the work is the same: it requires understanding the nature of a problem well enough that you can persuade someone to provide you resources to understand it more deeply and ultimately address it."

2. Experimentation.

"Research requires a high degree of iteration and experimentation, driven by carefully formed hypotheses. Startups are no different. We are constantly generating hypotheses about our customers, our end users, our business plan, our value, and our technology, and conducting experiments to verify whether the choice we've made is a positive or negative one."

3. Learning.

"Both academia and startups require a high degree of learning. As a professor, I'm constantly reading and learning about new discoveries and new technologies that will change the way I do my own research. As a founder, and particularly as a CTO, I find myself engaging in the same degree of constant learning, in an effort to perfect our product and our understanding of the value it provides."

4. Teaching.

"The teaching I do as a CTO is comparable to the teaching I do as a Ph.D. advisor in that the skills I'm teaching are less about specific technologies or processes, and more about ways of thinking about and approaching problems."

Ko also mentions the distinct differences between the two are the pace, the outcomes, and the consequences.

Finding Balance as a Professor and Entrepreneur

Alaina G. Levine, an award-winning entrepreneur, science journalist, and STEM careers consultant said in a Science Mag blog post that the key to success is to find ways to balance the two worlds.

"Issues of intellectual property ownership, human resources protocols, and time management, as well as the challenge of keeping a delineated barrier between professorial and business activities can be difficult to manage, but these concerns shouldn't prevent academics from seeking to create a startup company," Levine said in the blog post.

How to Balance Entrepreneurship and Faculty Responsibilities

According to Levine, these are a few things to consider before perusing entrepreneurship in order to successfully balance professorial and entrepreneurial activities:

1. Know your priorities

"If you are a professor who ponders whether your research can be developed into a technology that can be commercialized, your initial step should be to ponder your priorities. Do you want to stay in academia? Do you desire a career in industry? Deciding these choices early on, even before the lawyers and university representatives get involved, is crucial to forging a balance and a satisfying career."

2. Figuring out what path to take

"To wrangle the options and make it through the multiverse of marketing and manufacturing without sacrificing professorial duties, an academic's initial stop should be their institution's office of technology transfer (OTT). The OTT can assist faculty with understanding how much time they can spend on outside endeavors and how it must be structured. Technology transfer professionals also provide insight into patent law and can help professors navigate intellectual property (IP) issues."

3. Managing potential conflicts of interest

"Once you engage in entrepreneurship, you must create a distinct separation between your university lab and your company's facilities. IP can't flow freely between the two, and neither can labor—your grad students cannot work for you in your group and intern at your company at the same time. Safeguards that prevent mingling are necessary for legal purposes, say experts, as well as to synthesize a balance between being in academia and being in business."

4. Getting a Return on Investment on the faculty side

"Even with a targeted separation of academic and business endeavors, pursuing commercialization can actually enhance your skills in education. The connections that faculty make not only help the students but benefit the department and university as a whole as well."

What's The Big Idea?

Faculty in academia shouldn't be hesitant to follow their entrepreneurial goals just because it may be difficult to balance the two worlds. Take what you already know as a professor and apply it to your new venture as an entrepreneur. Also, know where your priorities lie, what path you're taking, watch out for conflicts of interest and make sure you, your students and university are all getting something out of it.

According to both writers, universities and research go hand in hand and both are "of critical importance" to the advancement of our society. So, is your research impactful? If the answer is yes, go for it.

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This article originally appeared on the University of Houston's The Big Idea. Cory Thaxton is the communications coordinator for The Division of Research.

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Houston healthtech startup raises $30M to scale surgical healing gel

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Houston-based healthtech startup TYBR Health has raised a $30 million Series A round to scale its B3 GEL System, which helps protect tendons from scarring after surgery.

The round was led by Minneapolis-based Vensana Capital and Cleveland-based Mutual Capital Partners, with participation from Denver-based Neovate Capital Partners and existing investors, according to a news release from the company.

TYBR Health said it plans to use the funding to broaden the B3 GEL System's clinical applications, expand commercialization and conduct studies to evaluate its ability to protect tissue and improve healing outcomes.

"Surgeons are exceptionally good at the structural repair, but the biology that follows is what determines how it heals. That part of the equation has gone largely unaddressed ... There's a shift underway across surgical specialties, from focusing almost entirely on the mechanical repair to also weighing the biological conditions that repair needs to succeed," Tim Keane, co-founder and CEO of TYBR Health, said in the news release. "This financing lets us reach more surgeons and generate the clinical evidence to move that shift forward."

As part of the financing round, Greg Banker of Vensana Capital and Liz Todia Zambory of Mutual Capital Partners will join the TYBR board, alongside independent director Aaron Smith.

"TYBR Health is addressing a gap surgeons have lived with for a long time, with a product that fits the way they already work," Zambory, principal at Mutual Capital Partners, added in the release. "We're excited to co-lead this round and support the company's growth."

TYBR was founded in 2020 and originated from the TMCi’s Biodesign fellowship and participated in the TMC's Accelerator for HealthTech. Its B3 GEL System is a flowable extracellular matrix hydrogel designed to protect tendons, ligaments, muscles, and the surrounding soft tissue while they heal from orthopedic surgery. It received FDA 510(k) clearance last June and launched an Australian clinical trial in the fall.

The B3 GEL System has been used in hand, wrist, shoulder, foot and ankle, and sports medicine procedures since it launched, according to the company, and was first used in the clinical setting earlier this year by Dr. Tammam Hanna with Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.

Houston space companies win NASA funding to build Mars exploration robots

mission to mars

Two Houston-area spacetech companies have landed a portion of a $17 million award from NASA to develop robots for exploring the surface of Mars, the agency announced this month.

Houston-based Inuitive Machines and Webster, Texas-based MEI Technologies, which does business as Aegis Aerospace, were among the seven companies selected to receive the funding from NASA's Science Transport and Robotic Innovation for Deployment and Exploration (STRIDE) initiative.

According to the release from NASA, the companies are tasked with creating "innovative mobility systems" that would allow future Mars missions to access more challenging terrain and difficult-to-reach regions of the planet, and to travel farther distances. NASA estimated that the work will begin this fall.

NASA solicited proposals for participants in the STRIDE initiative in January. The seven named companies are the first selected to participate in the program.

The additional five companies to receive STRIDE funding include:

"STRIDE demonstrates NASA’s commitment to strong public-private partnerships, allowing the agency to explore new approaches for Mars surface exploration while identifying key capability gaps and development needs for commercial systems that could operate and traverse realistic Martian environments," NASA shared in the announcement.

Last month, Intuitive Machines was awarded $148.3 million to deliver its Nova-C lander to the moon. The funding was part of $600 million the space agency awarded to three companies as part of its Moon Base Program and was Intuitive Machines' sixth task order under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Astrobotic was also one of the companies to land funding for the Moon Base program, as well as Austin-based Firefly Aerospace.

Around the same time, Firefly Aerospace was awarded a $13 million subcontract from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop technology for NASA’s SkyFall mission to Mars. The mission aims to deploy three Mars helicopters to "perform science and demonstrate airborne subsurface mapping and resource prospecting on the planet." Read more here.

SpaceX launches Starship test flight with most advanced Starlinks to date

Out in Space

SpaceX’s mammoth Starship rocket blasted off Friday, July 24, on another test flight stretching halfway around the world, this time releasing 20 of the most advanced Starlinks.

Towering 407 feet, Starship soared from the company’s base at the southern tip of Texas. NASA monitored the space-skimming flight, a critical step toward using the Starship as a lunar lander for moon crews.

The hourlong journey ended with a splashdown so soft that the spacecraft remained afloat in the Indian Ocean as the SpaceX webcast drew to a close, drawing cheers from employees back at the launch site.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX had replaced six of the 33 engines on the first-stage booster after they failed to ignite earlier in July, resulting in a last-second launch abort. The previous Starship flight in May also experienced engine trouble, which prevented the booster from making a controlled return.

This time, all of the engines fired at liftoff, but not enough of them lit back up for the booster's return, causing it to descend too fast and slam into the Gulf of Mexico. The spacecraft continued soaring eastward, popping out the Starlinks one by one 124 miles up before reentering.

It was the 13th flight of the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket, and the second this year of the new version dubbed V3. Like the previous demo, neither the booster nor spacecraft was meant to be saved, instead plunging into the sea.

The stainless steel, retro-looking spacecraft hovered upright over the Indian Ocean before lowering into the water, more than 10,000 miles from where the flight began.

It was the best reentry yet, according to SpaceX, with the intact booster floating amid just a few flames. Previous flights ended with the spacecraft engulfed in flames and exploding at splashdown — or rupturing in midair.

“We're really pumped about this,” said SpaceX engineer Kate Tice, calling it “lucky flight 13.”

The Starlinks accomplished all their jobs before reentering over the Indian Ocean.

After being ejected from the Starship’s Pez-like dispenser, the Starlinks managed to communicate via lasers with older Starlink models already in orbit. With more than 10,000 Starlinks currently providing internet, SpaceX boasts the world’s largest satellite constellation.

Six of the newly launched Starlinks carried cameras that photographed Starship’s heat shield at flight's end, beaming back amazingly crisp shots even as the spacecraft bobbed in the ocean. The heat shield was also equipped with sensors to measure the extreme pressure placed on the spacecraft during launch. Most of the heat shield’s thermal tiles were black, but some were deliberately painted white to simulate missing tiles, part of an experiment to test the shield’s robustness.

"We got all the heat shield data we needed and then some!" Musk said on X.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman offered congratulations. “Excited for what will be learned from this mission,” Isaacman noted on X.

SpaceX wants to make sure Starship’s heat shield can withstand the heat of entry before trying to return it to the Starbase launch pad near the Texas-Mexico border. The company already has used a pair of giant mechanical arms at the pad to capture a Starship booster. The company plans to do the same with the actual spacecraft, which is designed to be totally reusable.

NASA needs Starship to wrap up testing and reach orbit soon so the Artemis III astronauts — three Americans and one Italian — can practice docking their capsule with it next year.

Starship is also the vehicle with which Musk intends to build a city on Mars. He's already booking tourist trips to Mars, as well as the moon.

The latest test flight was delayed first by the July 16 launch abort, then again July 23 by thick clouds from Tropical Storm Bertha.

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