In a world of driver-less cars and artificial intelligence, companies have an increased need to focus on safety in the workplace. Getty Images

New technologies — driverless vehicles, delivery drones, and AI — are making an accelerated push into operational excellence across industries, and are generating a lot of attention. Hype notwithstanding, we need to also think also about safety and risk and how to prevent safety incidents before they occur so that safety operates in partnership with new technologies and innovation.

Today, safety as process that is wrapped into ones' organizational culture requiring companies to look beyond intended performance and innovation breakthroughs, to their own assumptions about safety. And how it works and does not work, despite best efforts, financial investments and operations programs that are intended to create a culture that is incident free in the workplace.

When firmly in place, an effective safety culture instills an environment where employees differentiate between events which, while detrimental to performance, have low probability of generating an incident, and those with seemingly minimal impact on performance, yet high probability of escalation into full-blown safety incidents, accidents and sometimes deaths.

Six safety principles

Creating safety in the workplace requires a new and different mindset which incorporates six sustainable safety behaviors:

  1. Leadership consistently practice positive regard and good intent to articulate, demonstrate and reinforce employee behaviors that exemplify a commitment to safety.
  2. Leadership clearly communicate safety objectives and provide employees information to enable and empower employees to make value-based decisions and set priorities consistent with their levels of accountability and roles in the organization.
  3. Leadership supports employees identifying real and perceived barriers to a safe environment in compliance with policies, regulations and risks.
  4. Leadership practice positive employee regard to encourage, and assume good intent to accept, constructive challenges to policies and practices that have little or no value.
  5. Leadership support and create an environment in which commitment to identify risks during the course of one's work activities and take action, when first seen, creates a mindset that will genuinely transform the organization.
  6. Leaders are visible and consistently viewed by employees as champions of safety every day.

Safety mindset threats

Many current safety efforts occur after the incident takes place. In other words, after an injury happens — someone falls off a lift, for example — actions are taken to prevent similar injuries in the future. This is known as reactive safety and is not an ideal solution. If we can determine the why of an accident, safety can become proactive. 

An effective safety program trains everyone, and encourages safety precautions, as well as strives to understand and reduce risk, rather than waiting for an accident to occur.

With an effective safety program in place your focus is always on preventing injuries before they occur and targeting 80 to 90 percent of the risk. Through utilization of this kind of process worker-controlled program, precautions can prevent injuries, reinforces these behaviors, identifies and removes systems, conditions and obstacles that make it difficult or impossible to take the right precautions.

In addition, employees may be practicing vicious compliance, in contrast to authentic commitment to process safety, in which they follow management's policies, procedures and other mandates "to the letter", even in situations where other choices would make more sense.

The workforce may act unilaterally based on their own assumptions, for example:

  • "They talk a good game about process safety, but I know it's really about getting the work done. I'll operate to get the desired production rate, even if this pushes the equipment to its limit." Indeed, the oft-ignored employee assumption and resulting belief is that production trumps process safety.
  • Employees' reliance upon personal experience to evaluate risk of low-frequency events: "As an employee, my experience teaches me that I've worn my personal protective equipment 100 times and there has never been an incident. So, if I don't wear it this one time, especially since I am so busy, it seems to me that the associated risk of an incident is quite low. So, why does management constantly 'get on me' about wearing it? Aren't there more important issues facing us?"

Routine behavior often includes silence or compliance, but with little challenge of issues or conversation about what could or might happen. As a result, management may perceive that all is well when in fact employees have significant concerns and issues.

To avoid major safety incidents, both known and unknown, an organization can take process safety to the next level by:

  • Exploring and challenging deeply-held beliefs, values, and assumptions by examining the underlying antecedents of process safety behaviors and utilizing new technology systems that shut down operation when a safety situation is first detected before an incident occurs.
  • Achieving the desired operational discipline, including paperless documentation, setting expectations, defining critical cyber secure procedures, and linking executive bonuses to achieving safety goals.
  • Focus on practicing a leveraged safety program that delivers results in the most effective and efficient mean possible by frequently focusing on decreasing threats, risks and increasing attention and communications to prevention, detection and correction.

The ultimate effective safety process and program relies upon effective use of new technologies in the workplace self- and organizational awareness, and the constant, never-ending focus on safety everyday and minute that we spend in the workplace.

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Mark Hordes is principal at Houston-based Mark Hordes Management Consultants LLC, an organizational consulting advisory.

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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

biotech breakthroughs

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.

How Houston's innovation sector fared in 2025 Texas legislative session

That's a Wrap

The Greater Houston Partnership is touting a number of victories during the recently concluded Texas legislative session that will or could benefit the Houston area. They range from billions of dollars for dementia research to millions of dollars for energy projects.

“These wins were only possible through deep collaboration, among our coalition partners, elected officials, business and community leaders, and the engaged members of the Partnership,” according to a partnership blog post. “Together, we’ve demonstrated how a united voice for Houston helps drive results that benefit all Texans.”

In terms of business innovation, legislators carved out $715 million for nuclear, semiconductor, and other economic development projects, and a potential $1 billion pool of tax incentives through 2029 to support research-and-development projects. The partnership said these investments “position Houston and Texas for long-term growth.”

Dementia institute

One of the biggest legislative wins cited by the Greater Houston Partnership was passage of legislation sponsored by Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican, to provide $3 billion in funding over 10 years for the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Voters will be asked in November to vote on a ballot initiative that would set aside $3 billion for the new institute.

The dementia institute would be structured much like the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), a state agency that provides funding for cancer research in the Lone Star State. Since its founding in 2008, CPRIT has awarded nearly $3.9 billion in research grants.

“By establishing the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, we are positioning our state to lead the charge against one of the most devastating health challenges of our time,” Huffman said. “With $3 billion in funding over the next decade, we will drive critical research, develop new strategies for prevention and treatment, and support our healthcare community. Now, it’s up to voters to ensure this initiative moves forward.”

More than 500,000 Texans suffer from some form of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, according to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

“With a steadfast commitment, Texas has the potential to become a world leader in combating [dementia] through the search for effective treatments and, ultimately, a cure,” Patrick said.

Funding for education

In the K-12 sector, lawmakers earmarked an extra $195 million for Houston ISD, $126.7 million for Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, $103.1 million for Katy ISD, $80.6 million for Fort Bend ISD, and $61 million for Aldine ISD, the partnership said.

In higher education, legislators allocated:

     
  • $1.17 billion for the University of Houston College of Medicine, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Baylor College of Medicine
  • $922 million for the University of Houston System
  • $167 million for Texas Southern University
  • $10 million for the Center for Biotechnology at San Jacinto College.

Infrastructure

In the infrastructure arena, state lawmakers:

     
  • Approved $265 million for Houston-area water and flood mitigation projects, including $100 million for the Lynchburg Pump Station
  • Created the Lake Houston Dredging and Maintenance District
  • Established a fund for the Gulf Coast Protection District to supply $550 million for projects to make the coastline and ship channel more resilient

"Nuclear power renaissance"

House Bill 14 (HB 14) aims to lead a “nuclear power renaissance in the United States,” according to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office. HB 14 establishes the Texas Advanced Nuclear Energy Office, and allocates $350 million for nuclear development and deployment. Two nuclear power plants currently operate in Texas, generating 10 percent of the energy that feeds the Electric Reliability Council Texas (ERCOT) power grid.

“This initiative will also strengthen Texas’ nuclear manufacturing capacity, rebuild a domestic fuel cycle supply chain, and train the future nuclear workforce,” Abbott said in a news release earlier this year.

One of the beneficiaries of Texas’ nuclear push could be Washington, D.C.-based Last Energy, which plans to build 30 micro-nuclear reactors near Abilene to serve power-gobbling data centers across the state. Houston-based Pelican Energy Partners also might be able to take advantage of the legislation after raising a $450 million fund to invest in companies that supply nuclear energy services and equipment.

Reed Clay, president of the Texas Nuclear Alliance, called this legislation “the most important nuclear development program of any state.”

“It is a giant leap forward for Texas and the United States, whose nuclear program was all but dead for decades,” said Clay. “With the passage of HB 14 and associated legislation, Texas is now positioned to lead a nuclear renaissance that is rightly seen as imperative for the energy security and national security of the United States.”

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A version of this article first appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.