Houston stadium rebrands with aspirational new logo to reflect city spirit

Name Change

BBVA group executive chairman Carlos Torres Vila outside of BBVA Stadium in Houston. Photo courtesy of BBVA

Rebranding is no easy feat for any company, much less one with 75.5 million customers and a presence in over 30 countries. BBVA, formerly BBVA Compass in the United States, recently began the lofty endeavor of rebranding worldwide.

It launched its public rebranding efforts in Houston at an exclusive stadium event on June 13, during which the home of the Houston Dynamo, Houston Dash, and Texas Southern University football was renamed BBVA Stadium.

BBVA group executive chairman Carlos Torres Vila noted that with more than 160 years of history, this was a huge transition for BBVA, but a worthwhile one, as it would help the company live out its three key tenets: the customer comes first, think big, and we are one team.

"Our purpose at the bank is to bring the age of opportunity to everyone," says Vila.

BBVA USA president and CEO Javier Rodríguez Soler cited unity and technology as the two reasons for BBVA's worldwide rebranding.

"Having employees across the globe working under a single brand identity makes it very clear that we are indeed one team," says Soler. "It also underscores for all of us the importance of our commitment to provide our customers with global products and services, the best user experience, and the solutions that help our customers make the best decisions in their lives and in their businesses."

There are many parallels between BBVA and the stadium which shares its name. BBVA is an international company which desires to provide all its customers worldwide with the same level of service. It also tailors its community involvement to each location.

Similarly, BBVA Stadium itself has an international footprint. Per John Walker, Houston Dynamo president of business operations, the stadium is the most internationally programmed soccer stadium in the United States, yet it also maintains a focus on the city of Houston itself — East Downtown and the Greater East End in particular.

Former Houston Dynamo defender Bobby Boswell was on hand to applaud the stadium's impact on the city. Boswell noted that having a stadium contributes greatly to team and civic pride for both pro athletes and young kids who visit the stadium and may be inspired to one day play there.

"I chose to live back in Houston because of the community," says Boswell.

BBVA and the Dynamo and Dash's commitments to the neighborhood were on full display at the stadium renaming. Soler announced that a portion of the proceeds from the inaugural BBVA Classic, to be held on July 24 at 7:30 pm, will benefit the Tejano Center for Community Concerns. The Tejano Center works to develop education, social, health, and community institutions that empower families to transform their lives.

Among other programs, the center runs the Raul Yzaguirre Schools for Success (RYSS). At the stadium unveiling, students from the RYSS STEM Primary Academy's soccer teams stood onstage and helped count down to the official unveiling. When the countdown reached zero, blue confetti filled the room, while outside blue powder exploded in the air and a curtain was dropped to reveal the stadium's new logo.

Vila pointed out that the "A" in the logo is higher than the other three letters, standing for "aspirational." What better image to symbolize the city of Houston, a place of opportunity?

Photo courtesy of BBVA

Vila (left), former Dynamo player Bobby Boswell (center), and Soler (right) at the BBVA Stadium press conference.

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Houston scientist wins prestigious Pew Scholar award for brain cancer research

standout scholar

Christina Tringides, an assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, is one of 21 scientists to win a prestigious Pew Biomedical Scholar award.

She is the first faculty member from Rice to win the distinction, which provides $300,000 over four years for advances in biomedicine, according to the university. The awards are granted to researchers who are in the first few years at the assistant professor level.

In Tringides’ case, the funding will support her innovative new method of modeling glioblastoma, a common and extremely aggressive form of brain cancer. Thanks to producing its own blood supply, glioblastoma spreads quickly, weaving tendrils of blighted tissue throughout the brain. Because of this, surgery is difficult and conventional therapies ineffective.

Understanding the way glioblastoma spreads is crucial to the search for a cure. Tringides is using hydrogels that mimic the brain’s extracellular matrix. Using cultures and a microscopic labyrinth, her team can see how the cancer spreads, bonds with neurons and changes cell wall activity. Essentially, Tringides has devised an intelligence test for tumors in hopes of learning how to outsmart them.

“As cancer crawls through the maze, we can look at how it is interacting with the neurons more and more, and measure how electrical activity is changing as a result,” she said in a news release from Rice.

Examining how cancer cells grow can reveal which conditional changes slow them down. Finding ways to alter the structure of brain matter in a way that makes it inhospitable to the cancer could lead to therapies that would impede growth or even reverse it. Using her custom-made ersatz brain maze makes it easier to observe changes than it would be in a patient’s brain.

“Imaging synapses is time-intensive ⎯ it can involve large data files that are hard to visualize, but if we know that the only place where we might have a synapse is this tiny 1-by-4-by-10 micron channel, it makes it much faster and reliable to image them,” Tringides said.

Born in Ames, Iowa, Tringides received her doctorate in biophysics from Harvard before joining Rice in 2024 through a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) recruitment award.

Her research was also one of the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice Brain Institute and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program.

Texas residents earn 11th highest income in U.S., says 2026 study

Money Matters

A new WalletHub study comparing income disparities across America has ranked Texas residents No. 11 on the list of states with the highest earning residents in the nation.

The report, "States Where People Have the Highest Income (2026)," analyzed U.S. Census Bureau income data in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report evaluated the average annual income of the top five percent, the median annual household income, and the average annual income of the bottom 20 percent of residents in every state, all adjusted for the cost of living.

The report's data revealed the top five percent of Texans, the highest earners, make $520,378 on average yearly after adjusting for the cost of living. That's the seventh-highest income among the top five percent of earners nationwide.

Meanwhile, the median annual income of a Texas household is just under $76,000. The bottom 20 percent of Texas residents make $17,651 a year, the report found.

For additional context, the latest data from the Federal Reserve shows an American household's median yearly income is about $83,700. WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo also found that the highest earning 10 percent of individuals in the U.S. earn over 12 times more than those in the lowest-earning 10 percent, based on the latest Census data.

"By measuring the income of various percentiles against a state's median income, we can better identify where income disparities are more prevalent, which could help us better understand why residents of certain states struggle more to make ends meet," said Lupo.

Virginia is the state where residents earn the highest income in the U.S., WalletHub said. Based on the report's findings, the top five percent of Virginians make $545,097 on average per year after adjusting for the cost of living. The median annual income of a Virginia household comes out to $95,339, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $19,671 annually on average.

Conversely, West Virginia is the state where people have the lowest income in the U.S. A West Virginia household makes a median annual income of $56,610, the third-lowest nationally, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $13,260 on average per year, which is the fifth-lowest in the nation. The top five percent of West Virginians make $372,218 on average per year.

The top 10 states where residents have the highest income are:

No. 1 – Virginia
No. 2 – New York
No. 3 – New Jersey
No. 4 – Washington
No. 5 – Connecticut
No. 6 – Utah
No. 7 – Colorado
No. 8 – Minnesota
No. 9 – Illinois
No. 10 – Massachusetts

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

23 Houston companies rank among America’s most future-ready businesses

future focused

By one measure, Spring-based tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprises reigns as the most future-ready Houston-area company on the S&P 500 stock index.

HPE sits at No. 72 in a first-time ranking of the best S&P 500 companies for the future. Including HPE, 23 Houston-area companies appear on the list.

Published by The Wall Street Journal, the ranking was created by Bendable Labs for the WSJ Leadership Institute. It evaluates how S&P 500 companies stack up in six areas: AI readiness, innovation, talent readiness, financial fitness, resilience and agility. To be ranked, a company had to be part of the S&P 500 as of Dec. 31.

Among the six categories, HPE ranked highest for innovation (No. 30) among local companies. The WSJ didn’t say why HPE scored so well for innovation. However, the company stands out in this category thanks to:

Creation of the El Capitan and Frontier supercomputing systems
Research into photonic computing and quantum networking
Last year’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks, giving HPE an edge in AI-native networking
Establishment of the everything-as-a-service GreenLake hybrid cloud platform for data centers, colocation facilities and edge computing environments

In an interview with the Six Five podcast at HPE Discover 2025 in Las Vegas, CEO Antonio Neri said the company’s strategy is “basically founded on innovation, and that innovation drives shareholder value over the long term.”

While HPE fared well in the innovation category, it ranked toward the bottom for financial fitness. What’s behind the No. 430 ranking in the financial category? HPE’s low score likely reflects a debt-heavy acquisition strategy coupled with a historically low-margin hardware business.

Here’s the full list of the 23 Houston-area companies included in the ranking of the best companies for the future:

No. 72 Hewlett Packard Enterprise
No. 105 SLB
No. 120 Baker Hughes
No. 125 ConocoPhillips
No. 158 NRG Energy
No. 176 Targa Resources
No. 185 Chevron
No. 195 Halliburton
No. 223 Coterra Energy
No. 229 Waste Management
No. 235 Exxon Mobil
No. 250 Kinder Morgan
No. 257 Quanta Services
No. 276 CenterPoint Energy
No. 285 Sysco
No. 313 Occidental Petroleum
No. 318 Camden Property Trust
No. 333 EOG Resources
No. 365 LyondellBasell Industries
No. 373 Comfort Systems USA
No. 401 Crown Castle
No. 408 Phillips 66
No. 500 APA

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