3 Houston innovators to know this week

Who's who

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Joanna Nathan of Prana Thoracic, James Rees of BWT, and Aimee Gardner of SurgWise. Photos courtesy

Editor's note: In this week's roundup of Houston innovators to know — a special Labor Day edition, I'm introducing you to three local innovators across industries — from human resources to medical devices — recently making headlines in Houston innovation.

Joanna Nathan, CEO and founder of Prana Thoracic

Joanna Nathan joins the Houston Innovators Podcast and explains why she's taken on leading a medical device startup. Photo courtesy of Joanna Nathan

If there was a Houston innovation ecosystem playing card, Joanna Nathan would definitely have BINGO by now. From starting a startup while a student at Rice University and being an early hire of medical device company Saranas to leading investment at Johnson & Johnson's Center for Device Innovation, Nathan is headed back to the founder seat with Prana Thoracic, a new company planning to equip physicians with a better tool for lung cancer intervention.

"Unlike breast, prostate, and other types of cancers, we historically have not actively screened for lung cancer," Nathan says on this week's Houston Innovation Podcast. "Screening has only just begun in this world, and because of that, physicians still need the right tools to take early screening information and turn it into early intervention."

Last month, Nathan, who serves as CEO of the company, and Prana announced that Nucore Medical Inc., its wholly owned subsidiary, has been awarded a $3 million grant from CPRIT. Click here to read more and stream the podcast episode.

James Rees, chief impact officer at Botanic Water Technologies

James Rees is the Houston-based chief impact officer at BWT. Photo via LinkedIn

This probably isn't breaking news, but the world is on the midst of a water crisis. More than 2 million Americans don’t have access to clean drinking water, according to one study by the U.S. Water Alliance group.

To help close that water gap, international firm, Botanical Water Technologies, has plans to expand its presence in the United States with the Houston region being a strategic area to roll out the implementation of a patented water filtration technology. In addition, the group is launching a blockchain enabled trading platform with Fujitsu to help support the business.

“Water is finite,” says Houston-based James Rees, chief impact officer at BWT. “Due to global growth and climate conditions, we are going to have between 20 to 30 percent less water available to us by 2025. Communities are facing issues with water infrastructure. Some communities don't have water. This is where BWT plans to come in to help.” Click here to read more.Click here to read more.

Aimee Gardner, CEO and co-founder of SurgWise

Aimee Gardner is the CEO and president of Houston-based SurgeWise. Photo via surgwise.com

Over the course of the summer, Aimee Gardner has been writing strategic columns for startups with hiring tips. Her articles have focused on scaling quickly, why not to just trust your gut when hiring, and attracting and retaining a diverse workforce.

Gardner's advice is especially keen since she herself is a startup founder — but also has a Master's degree in organizational psychology. For years, she's been advising both her clients at her company SurgWise Consulting, but also students at Baylor College of Medicine.

"If your startup has gotten to the point of being able to grow the team, it is clear that ample vision, strategy, and innovation has been dedicated to the mission up until this point. Hiring in the next round of team members is not a process that should undergo any less dedication," she writes in one of her articles. "Ensuring that those around you share your vision, goals, and have a complementary set of skills and attributes will be critical to ensure success in your company’s growth and achievements." Click here to read her guest columns,

Consider these evidence-backed hiring tips before scaling your startup's team. Photo via Getty Images

Houston expert: How to scale your startup team quickly and efficiently

guest column

Startups often use the first rounds of funding to bring in key individuals who will help make the company vision a reality. But hiring the right talent is not an easy task, and ensuring the right team is in place is important now more than ever during the early stages of your company’s growth.

Fortunately, there is a science to employee selection. In fact, there is entire field — Industrial & Organizational Psychology — dedicated to providing professional guidelines, best practices, and over 100 years of evidence to support recommendations into identifying talent an effective, efficient, and equitable manner.

From this field, we know that the first step to hiring in the right talent for your startup is to perform a thorough job analysis. Whether you are bringing in a new CEO, a vice president of sales, or extra hands for your technology platform, gaining consensus among your team about the competencies and attributes required to effectively perform in a new role is critical.

It sounds simple, but it is actually a rarity for organizational stakeholders to get together and comprehensively map out what the role entails and what candidate qualities are necessary to meet those requirements and expectations. Factoring things in such as early-stage demands, future landscape, and organizational culture will help create a list of competencies and attributes needed to be optimally effective in the role, beyond just professional experience and certifications.

After prioritizing the list of competencies and qualities deemed vital for candidates, you will then want to prioritize the list based on importance, how frequently they are required in the role, and the extent to which each is required upon hire —versus being easily trained or acquired on the job. Those at the top of the list should be directly assessed during the candidate screening and selection process. Whether it is through work samples, written assessments, situational judgment tests, or interviews, creating a diverse lineup of candidate screening processes will help ensure you are able to measure the whole person.

Because selection decisions can be high stakes — both for the candidate and your company — ensuring these assessments are directly related to the position, data-driven, and equitable will be key for maximizing the utility and legal defensibility of your selection system. For example, implementing unstructured interviews is common practice in many organizations large and small.

However, what the data shows is clear: structured interviews — those that consist of a pre-defined list of questions related to the role that are used for every candidate, use standard interview rating tools, and involve interviewers who have been trained to conduct structured interviews and use the rating tools — are more efficient and effective in accurately assessing job candidates.

Furthermore, the structure involved in this interview format reduces the opportunity for common biases and inappropriate questions to emerge during the interview process, thereby enhancing the likelihood for making equitable selection decisions and avoiding potential for legal litigation. Thus, it is important to ensure every screening tool or process has been thoughtfully considered and implemented from an efficiency, effectiveness, and equity lens. Making a shortlist of candidates and final offers based on the data accumulated through these processes will maximize the likelihood of identifying best fit candidates based on comprehensive data points.

If your startup has gotten to the point of being able to grow the team, it is clear that ample vision, strategy, and innovation has been dedicated to the mission up until this point. Hiring in the next round of team members is not a process that should undergo any less dedication. Ensuring that those around you share your vision, goals, and have a complementary set of skills and attributes will be critical to ensure success in your company’s growth and achievements.

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Aimee Gardner is the co-founder of SurgWise, a tech-enabled consulting firm for hiring surgeons, and associate dean at Baylor College of Medicine.

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Kelly Pracht of nVenue, Aimee Gardner of SurgWise, and Kelly Avant of Mercury. Courtesy photos

3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

Editor's note: In this week's roundup of Houston innovators to know, I'm introducing you to three local innovators across industries — from sports tech to venture capital — recently making headlines in Houston innovation.

Kelly Pracht, CEO and co-founder of nVenue

nVenue's proprietary predictive analytics appear at the bottom right corner of the screen on Apple TV broadcasts. Photo via nvenue.com

Next time you're watching an Astros game on Apple TV, check the bottom right-hand side of the screen. That prediction data comes by way of a Texas startup with deep Houston roots. nVenue, co-founded by Houstonian Kelly Pracht, struck a deal earlier this year that allowed her data-driven sports analytics platform on the screens of baseball viewers this season.

"In under two weeks we structured the deal, convinced them it worked, pulled together every bit of testing we could — by then we only had one week of pre-season games to test — and we pulled it off," Pracht says.

The technology has a lot of potential when it comes to microbetting — a part of sports fandom that's growing by the second. Click here to read more.

Aimee Gardner, CEO and president of SurgWise

SurgeWise is giving surgical teams the right support for hiring. Photo via SurgWise.com

Hiring surgeons is a whole thing — tons of paperwork, inequitable and archaic processes, and lots of medical practitioners' time wasted. Five years ago, Aimee Gardner came up with a solution and founded SurgWise Consulting, where she serves as president and CEO.

"We help provide assessments to help screen competencies and attributes that people care about," Gardner says. "(Those) are really hard to assess, but really differentiate people who really thrive in training in their careers and people who don't."

Now, Gardner is tapping into the last five years of data she's accumulated and has big plans for developing a tech platform for her solution. Click here to read more.

Kelly Avant, investment associate at Mercury Fund

Kelly Avant, investment associate at Houston-based Mercury Fund, shares how and why she made her way into the venture capital arena. Photo courtesy of Mercury

Kelly Avant's resume might not make sense to you at first. She went from a gender studies major in undergrad, followed by a stint in the Peace Corps, before heading to law school. After moving on to get her MBA over her JD, Avant realized a way she could really make the biggest impact: venture capital.

"VC is an awesome way to shape the future in a more positive way because you literally get to wire money to the most innovative thinkers, who are building solutions to the world’s problems," Avant tells InnovationMap.

Avant joined the Mercury Fund team last year as an MBA associate before joining full time as investment associate. Now, after completing her MBA from Rice University this month, Avant tells InnovationMap why she's excited about this new career in investment in a Q&A. Click here to read more.


SurgWise is giving surgical teams the right support for hiring. Photo via Getty Images

Houston startup equips medical teams with data-driven hiring tool

staffing up

A surgeon spends over a decade in school and residency perfecting their medical skills, but that education doesn't usually include human resources training. Yet, when it comes to placing candidates into surgical programs, the hiring responsibilities fell on the shoulders of surgeons.

Aimee Gardner, who has her PhD in organized psychology, saw this inefficiency first hand.

"I worked in a large surgery department in Dallas right out of graduate school and quickly learned how folks are selected into residency and fellowship programs and all the time that goes into it — time spent by physicians reviewing piles and piles of like paper applications and spending lots and lots and of hours interviewing like hundreds of candidates," Gardner tells InnovationMap. "I was just really shocked by the inefficiencies from just a business and workforce perspective."

And things have only gotten worse. There are more applicants hitting the scene every year and they are applying to more hospitals and programs. Future surgeons used to apply for 20 or so programs — now it’s more like 65 on average. According to her research, Gardner says reviewing these applications cost lots of time and money, specifically $100,000 to fill five spots annually just up to the interviewing phase of the process.

Five years ago, Gardner came up with a solution to this “application fever,” as she describes, and all the inefficiencies, and founded SurgWise Consulting, where she serves as president and CEO.

"We help provide assessments to help screen competencies and attributes that people care about," Gardner says. "(Those) are really hard to assess, but really differentiate people who really thrive in training in their careers and people who don't."

Aimee Gardner is the CEO and president of Houston-based SurgWise. Photo via surgwise.com

These are the non-technical skills, like the professionalism, interpersonal skills, and communication. While SurgWise began as a service-oriented consulting company, the company is now ready to tap technology to expand upon its solution. The work started out of Houston Methodist, and SurgWise is still working with surgery teams there. She says they've accumulated tons of data that can be leveraged and streamlined.

"We're now pivoting from a very intimate client approach to a more scalable offering. Every year we assess essentially around 80 percent of all the people applying to be future surgeons — those in pediatric surgery, vascular surgery, and more,” Gardner says. “We’ve used kind of the last five years of data and experiences to create a more scalable, easy-to-integrate, and off-the-shelf solution.”

Gardner says her solution is critical for providing more equity in the hiring process.

“One of our goals was to create more equitable opportunities and platforms to assess folks because many of the traditional tools and processes that most people use in this space have lots of opportunity for bias and a high potential for disadvantaging individuals from underrepresented groups," she says. "For example, letters of recommendation are often a very insider status. If you went to some Ivy League or your parents were in health care and they know someone, you have that step up from a networking and socioeconomic status standpoint."

Personal statements and test scores are also inequitable, because they tend to be better submissions if people have money for coaching.

SurgWise hopes to lower the number of programs future surgeons apply to too to further streamline the process. She hopes to do this through an app and web tool that can matchmake people to the right program.

“Our ultimate goal is to create a platform for applicants to obtain a lot more information about the various places to which they apply to empower them to make more informed decisions, so that they don't have to apply to a hundred places," Gardner says. "We want to essentially create a match-style app that allows them to input some data and tell us 'here's what I'm looking for here are my career goals and any preferences I have.'”

While that tool is down the road, Gardner says SurgWise is full speed ahead toward launching the data-driven hiring platform. The bootstrapped company hopes to raise early venture funding this summer in order to hire and grow its team.

“As we continue to consider this app that I talked about and some of the other opportunities to scale to other specialties we're gonna start looking for a series A funding later this summer.”

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UH-backed project secures $3.6M to transform CO2 into sustainable fuel with cutting-edge tech

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A University of Houston-associated project was selected to receive $3.6 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy that aims to transform sustainable fuel production.

Nonprofit research institute SRI is leading the project “Printed Microreactor for Renewable Energy Enabled Fuel Production” or PRIME-Fuel, which will try to develop a modular microreactor technology that converts carbon dioxide into methanol using renewable energy sources with UH contributing research.

“Renewables-to-liquids fuel production has the potential to boost the utility of renewable energy all while helping to lay the groundwork for the Biden-Harris Administration’s goals of creating a clean energy economy,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm says in an ARPA-E news release.

The project is part of ARPA-E’s $41 million Grid-free Renewable Energy Enabling New Ways to Economical Liquids and Long-term Storage program (or GREENWELLS, for short) that also includes 14 projects to develop technologies that use renewable energy sources to produce sustainable liquid fuels and chemicals, which can be transported and stored similarly to gasoline or oil, according to a news release.

Vemuri Balakotaiah and Praveen Bollini, faculty members of the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, are co-investigators on the project. Rahul Pandey, is a UH alum, and the senior scientist with SRI and principal investigator on the project.

Teams working on the project will develop systems that use electricity, carbon dioxide and water at renewable energy sites to produce renewable liquid renewable fuels that offer a clean alternative for sectors like transportation. Using cheaper electricity from sources like wind and solar can lower production costs, and create affordable and cleaner long-term energy storage solutions.

Researchers Rahul Pandey, senior scientist with SRI and principal investigator (left), and Praveen Bollini, a University of Houston chemical engineering faculty, are key contributors to the microreactor project. Photo via uh.edu

“As a proud UH graduate, I have always been aware of the strength of the chemical and biomolecular engineering program at UH and kept myself updated on its cutting-edge research,” Pandey says in a news release. “This project had very specific requirements, including expertise in modeling transients in microreactors and the development of high-performance catalysts. The department excelled in both areas. When I reached out to Dr. Bollini and Dr. Bala, they were eager to collaborate, and everything naturally progressed from there.”

The PRIME-Fuel project will use cutting-edge mathematical modeling and SRI’s proprietary Co-Extrusion printing technology to design and manufacture the microreactor with the ability to continue producing methanol even when the renewable energy supply dips as low as 5 percent capacity. Researchers will develop a microreactor prototype capable of producing 30 MJe/day of methanol while meeting energy efficiency and process yield targets over a three-year span. When scaled up to a 100 megawatts electricity capacity plant, it can be capable of producing 225 tons of methanol per day at a lower cost. The researchers predict five years as a “reasonable” timeline of when this can hit the market.

“What we are building here is a prototype or proof of concept for a platform technology, which has diverse applications in the entire energy and chemicals industry,” Pandey continues. “Right now, we are aiming to produce methanol, but this technology can actually be applied to a much broader set of energy carriers and chemicals.”

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This article originally ran on EnergyCapital.

Houston innovator drives collaboration, access to investment with female-focused group

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 262

After working in technology in her home country of Pakistan, Samina Farid, who was raised in the United States, found her way to Houston in the '70s where business was booming.

She was recruited to work at Houston Natural Gas — a company that would later merge and create Enron — where she rose through the ranks and oversaw systems development for the company before taking on a role running the pipelines.

"When you're in technology, you're always looking for inefficiencies, and you always see areas where you can improve," Farid says on the Houston Innovators Podcast, explaining that she moved on from Enron in the mid-'80s, which was an exciting time for the industry.

"We had these silos of data across the industry, and I felt like we needed to be communicating better, having a good source of data, and making sure we weren't continuing to have the problems we were having," she says. "That was really the seed that got me started in the idea of building a company."

She co-founded Merrick Systems, a software solutions business for managing oil and gas production, with her nephew, and thus began her own entrepreneurial journey. She came to another crossroads in her career after selling that business in 2014 and surviving her own battle with breast cancer.

"I got involved in investing because the guys used to talk about it — there was always men around me," Farid says. "I was curious."

In 2019, she joined an organization called Golden Seeds. Founded in 2005 in New York, the network of angel investors funding female-founded enterprises has grown to around 280 members across eight chapters. Suzan Deison, CEO of the Houston Women's Chamber, was integral in bringing the organization to Houston, and now Farid leads it as head of the Houston Chapter of Golden Seeds.

For Farid, the opportunity for Houston is the national network of investors — both to connect local female founders to potential capital from coast to coast and to give Houston investors deal flow from across the country.

"It was so hard for me to get funding for my own company," Farid says. "Having access to capital was only on the coasts. Software and startups was too risky."

Now, with Golden Seeds, the opportunity is there — and Farid says its an extremely collaborative investor network, working with local organizations like the Houston Angel Network and TiE Houston.

"With angel investing, when we put our money in, we want these companies to succeed," she says."We want more people to see these companies and to invest in them. We're not competing. We want to work with others to help these companies succeed."

Building a biotech workforce: How this Houston program is shaping the next generation

future focused

Houston is currently in need of biomanufacturing professionals to keep up with the ever-growing industry. That's what Saniya Mansuri, health care consultant for BioPath @ TMC, says.

“Houston has lost out on a big biopharmaceutical company. And when there was a feasibility study that was done, it was identified that one of the reasons that Houston wasn't chosen was the lack of a workforce and a lack of workforce development programs,” she explains.

Mansuri and the TMC Innovation team are doing just that with the introduction of the new program. She moved from Toronto in 2023. When she applied for a role at TMC Innovation, she was handpicked to help shepherd the BioPath program, thanks to her background that included starting a nonprofit for underserved youth in Canada.

The goal of the BioPath program is to attract young people considering going into the trades to learn the skills to become biomanufacturing professionals. According to BioPath’s website, 42 percent of TMC institutions anticipate a great need for biotechnicians in the near future, but there’s a lack of places for workers to train that aren’t part of a four-year degree. BioPath not only helps to recruit youths to careers that only require two years of training, but educates them for success in their newly chosen jobs.

“For the role of biomanufacturing technician, you can do a certificate program, get certified and enter into an entry level career that pays upwards of $50,000 — a stable career where there is a lot of development and job mobility involved,” says Mansuri.

This school year saw the debut of a pilot program that began with marketing and awareness to begin to get kids excited. Working with the organization Bridge Year, BioPath has created a booth for career fairs at which there’s a simulation of the skills involved in column chromatography that potential technicians would be learning. The booth is currently touring HISD high schools.

BioPath is also partnering with the national nonprofit, Learning Undefeated, to create a mobile STEM lab that will park at schools starting in January.

“Instead of students going to a biology class, you would swap it out for a class on this mobile STEM lab, and we have a biomanufacturing activity and curriculum that the students would learn,” explains Mansuri.

But that’s only the beginning. BioPath is looking at securing internships for the students, as well as sponsoring interested students in attending a biomanufacturing summer camp run by Texas A&M. Once educated, Mansuri and her team will help their charges with certification, mentorship and finding jobs post-certification.

Mansuri says she’s already received emails from interested students who have taken part in the “Career Test Drive” booth, but expects more after a soft launch in February in which 200 high school students will come to the TMC to learn more. The future for biomanufacturing in Houston is looking more promising already.

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