Houston Independent School District launches new COVID-19 tracker

TRACKING COVID IN HISD

HISD's new dashboard will track active COVID-19 cases. Photo by Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images

Greater Houston parents have an important date circled and marked on their calendars: October 19. That's the day Houston Independent School District welcomes students back for in-person instruction at all schools.

However, a major point of concern and contention with area parents is the possibility of fellow students contracting, carrying, and spreading COVID-19. To that end, the district has announced a new COVID-19 dashboard to keep the community informed about the impact of the pandemic. Parents can view the COVID-19 dashboard here.

The online dashboard launched Monday, September 28, to track the number of confirmed COVID-19 students and staff cases on campuses, in an effort to display transparency, according to a press release. As of September 28, some 23 active cases are reflected on the dashboard, out of more than 222,000 students and staff.

HISD's new dashboard was developed using Texas Education Agency guidelines for reporting COVID-19. It will be updated daily, allowing users to review student and staff data by location and districtwide, according to the district. The dashboard will also include a map to clearly illustrate and mark active cases throughout the district.

All applicable privacy laws relating to the release of personal health information will be followed, according to a press release.

"As we navigate this pandemic together, we want to ensure that we are transparent as we provide crucial updates," said HISD interim superintendent, Grenita Lathan, in a statement. "This new dashboard will give our staff members and families the information they need in an accessible and easy-to-use way to make informed decisions."

For more information on HISD's reopening plan, visit the official site.

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

Kids in need will receive 2,000 new computers. Photo courtesy of Pixlr

Houston kids connect to $1 million in new computers thanks to local nonprofit

helping hand

As the global pandemic and hurricanes and tropical storms pester the Greater Houston area, a greater emphasis is being placed on online learning for local students. Now, to ensure there is less of a limited digital divide, a local nonprofit has made a significant gift to the Houston Independent School District.

The Moody Foundation announced a grant of $1 million to HISD for the purchase of more than 2,000 computer devices. The grant will cover devices for pre-K through fifth-grade students in the district's Achieve 180 schools, which have been designated as underserved and underperforming HISD feeder pattern communities, according to a press release.

Such a grant is pivotal in a time when data shows Texas leading the country with the widest digital divide among students and teachers. According to research from the distinct, some 35 percent of HISD 209,000 students lacked internet at home, while another 40 to 45 percent lacked a computer device. Meanwhile, per the distinct, thousands of impoverished students still require devices.

The Achieve 180 students scored lower than non-Achieve 180 students at the Approaches Grade Level on STAAR, per HISD. Reports show that these students were also less engaged during remote learning.

"The pandemic has only further magnified the digital divide," said Ross Moody, trustee of the Moody Foundation. "The Moody Foundation has a long history of supporting early childhood education to build opportunities for student success. Everyone deserves and should have the same level of access to education."
 
Since the onset of COVID-19 in March, the foundation has granted over $10 million in COVID-19 funds to more 100 nonprofits and schools in Houston, Galveston, and Austin.

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

Even in light of community concerns, HISD is moving forward on its pursuit to receive a District of Innovation designation. Getty Images

Houston school board votes in favor of moving forward with innovation designation

moving forward

In the Houston Independent School District's board meeting on Thursday, May 14, the board of trustees voted in favor to begin a process that would designate HISD a District of Innovation.

The ruling allows HISD to begin the process of receiving the DOI designation and to join the almost 900 other Texas school districts with the designation, which would be implemented for the 2021-2022 school year.

The designation would allow for several exemptions from state law, including beginning the school year earlier than the fourth Monday in August, allowing flexibility in attendance requirements, and allowing for non-accredited teachers to conduct Career and Technical Education courses.

Before the HISD board discussed the motion and voted, they heard from community members who expressed concern with this particular accreditation matter during the meeting's call for community speakers. Due to COVID-19, the speakers wrote in their concerns, which were then read for the board.

Andrew Dewey, executive vice president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, asked the board to oppose the motion as the exemptions allowed by DOI aren't in themselves innovative, he says.

To allow for non-accredited CTE instructors, "the district would have to be exempted from the entire section of the law requiring certification," writes Dewey. "That action would open the door for future administration and school boards or board of managers to allow non-certified teachers in other content areas."

Several other community members voiced this concern over allowing non-accredited teachers, and another concern was timing of the motion. A few community members argued that now is not the time to pursue the DOI designation — and Trustee Elizabeth Santos of District I echoed that concern.

"Our students deserve better than to have something shoved down their throat when there's a pandemic, and we should be solely focusing on safety and instruction," Santos says in the meeting.

Trustee Anne Sung of District VII made a motion to push back voting on the matter to the board's June meeting, but the motion was struck down in a 3-6 vote. Moving forward, Sung called for the district to proceed with caution on the accreditation of teachers.

"I want to say publicly that in the plan I will be looking for extreme rigor in protecting certification in our teachers," Sung says in the meeting.

Now that the motion has passed, it has allowed HISD's Superintendent Grenita Lathan to push forward on the DOI designation. The district's next move is to create a planning committee and collect the community's concerns on the process.

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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

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.

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