3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

This week's Houston innovators to know includes Sola Lawal of Nuro, Jose Diaz-Gomez of CHI St. Luke's Health, and Kimberly Baker of UT School of Public Health. Courtesy photos

Editor's note: A key attribute of innovators and inventors is the ability to look forward — to see the need for their innovation and the difference it will make. Each of this week's innovators to know have that skill, whether it's predicting the rise of autonomous vehicles or seeing the future of health care.

Sola Lawal, product operations manager at Nuro

Autonomous vehicle delivery service is driving access to food in Houston’s vulnerable communities

Native Houstonian Sola Lawal is looking into how AI and robotics can help increase access to fresh foods in local food deserts. Photo courtesy of Nuro

Sola Lawal has always found himself back in his hometown of Houston. Now working for artificial intelligence and robotics company, Nuro, he sees the potential Houston has to become a major market for autonomous vehicles.

"I think that autonomous vehicles are going to become an industry in the same way your standard vehicles are," Lawal says."One really strong way the Houston ecosystem and Nuro can partner is essentially building out the ancillary."

Lawal shared more on how Houston and Nuro can work together on this week's episode of the Houston innovators podcast. Read more and stream the episode.

Jose Diaz-Gomez, an anesthesiologist at CHI St. Luke's Health

CHI St. Luke's Health has invested in around 40 of the Butterfly iQ devices that can be used to provide accurate and portable ultrasonography on COVID-19 patients. Photo courtesy of CHI St. Luke's

A new, portable ultrasound device has equipped Jose Diaz-Gomez and his team with a reliable, easy-to-use tool for diagnostics and tracking progress of COVID-19 patients. And this tool will continue to help Diaz-Gomez lead his team of physicians.

"Whatever we will face after the pandemic, many physicians will be able to predict more objectively when a patient is deteriorating from acute respiratory failure," he says. "Without this innovation, we wouldn't have been able to be at higher standards with ultrasonography." Read more.

Kimberly A. Baker, assistant professor at UTHealth School of Public Health

UTHealth School of Public Health launched its Own Every Piece campaign to promote women's health access and education. Photo courtesy of Own Every Piece

It was unnerving to Kimberly Baker that proper sex education wasn't in the curriculum of Texas schools, and women were left without resources for contraceptives. So, along with UTHealth School of Public Health, she launched its Own Every Piece campaign as a way to empower women with information on birth control and ensure access to contraceptive care regardless of age, race, relationship status or socioeconomic status.

"You feel like the campaign is talking to you as a friend, not talking down to you as an authority or in any type of shaming way," says Kimberly A. Baker, assistant professor at UTHealth School of Public Health. One of her favorite areas of the website is the "Find a Clinic" page, connecting teens and adult women to nearby clinics, because "one of the biggest complaints from women is that they didn't know where to go," says Baker. Continue reading.

CHI St. Luke's Health has invested in around 40 of the Butterfly iQ devices that can be used to provide accurate and portable ultrasonography on COVID-19 patients. Photo courtesy of CHI St. Luke's

Houston hospital taps new tech to provide more accurate COVID-19 diagnostics and treatment

hand held

With such a dynamic virus like COVID-19 that affects patients with different levels of severity, the first challenge doctors face when treating infected patients is assessing the situation. CHI St. Luke's Health has been implementing a new technology that allows its physicians better access to that initial diagnosis.

Dr. Jose Diaz-Gomez, an anesthesiologist at CHI St. Luke's Health and ultrasonography expert, says the Butterfly iQ's portable ultrasonography technology has been a key tool in his team's point of care for COVID-19 patients. Over the past few years, ultrasonography equipment has been evolving to be more portable and more accurate. That's what the Butterfly iQ technology provides, and Diaz-Gomez says his team was quick to realize how the technology can help in diagnostics and treatment of coronavirus patients.

A traditional approach to examining a patient's lungs would mean radiography, but Diaz-Gomez says his team saw the opportunity ultrasonography and these new, portable devices had on providing more accurate and timely diagnostics.

"In conditions that are dynamic, you want to have a diagnostic tool that, over time as you're treating a patient, you can see meaningful changes — good or bad," Diaz-Gomez says. "The pandemic has enabled us to use — from the initial care to when they are on the ventilator — ultrasonography to see the changes in the patient's' lungs."

Jose Diaz-Gomez is an anesthesiologist at CHI St. Luke's. Photo courtesy of CHI St. Luke's

The Butterfly iQ device is different from its ultrasound predecessors in that it's built to be more accurate, portable, easy to use, and low cost (even being made available for commercial purchase). According to Diaz-Gomez, he could train someone on the device in just a few hours.

Ahead of the pandemic, CHI St. Luke's had 20 of these devices and now has doubled that initial fleet. Along with the other non-Butterfly iQ ultrasonography devices, Diaz-Gomez's team has access to 70 ultrasonography devices — 80 percent of which are dedicated to COVID-19 patients.

"Our institution was very supportive of bringing a very robust roll-out program for point-of-care ultrasonography during the pandemic," Diaz-Gomez says. "We were able to incorporate 40 ultrasound devices — the Butterfly system. Not only that, we actually implemented a very rigorous infection control process to make sure we do it in a safe manner. You don't want to bring tools that will be another source of transmission from patient to patient."

While this new technology is continuing to make a difference in St. Luke's COVID units, Diaz-Gomez is already looking forward to the difference the devices will make post pandemic.

"Whatever we will face after the pandemic, many physicians will be able to predict more objectively when a patient is deteriorating from acute respiratory failure," he says. "Without this innovation, we wouldn't have been able to be at higher standards with ultrasonography."

The device, with its portability, low cost, and ease of use, also has an application for telemedicine and at-home health, and that's something that's exciting for Diaz-Gomez. However, both in his COVID units or in the home setting, the device is only as good as the clinician who's interpreting the images paired with the other diagnostics.

"The integration of ultrasonography with the clinical practice itself — it has to go hand in hand," Diaz-Gomez says. "The clinical decision will depend on that integration."

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Greentown Labs names Lawson Gow as its new Houston leader

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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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