Most of Houston's smartest ZIP codes surround the Texas Medical Center. Photo by Dwight C. Andrews/Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau

The Houston area is bursting with brain power. Three ZIP codes in the region are home to the biggest share of Texans who've earned a master's, professional, or doctoral degree, according to a new list from UnitedStatesZipCodes.org. And that, according to one economic development executive, is a boon to Houston's workforce.

Houston's 77030 ZIP code, which houses the Texas Medical Center, sits atop the new ranking. There, more than half (51.7 percent) of adults 25 and over, or about 3,800 people, hold a postgraduate or professional degree. As a whole, 12 percent of adults in the Houston metro area have a postgraduate or professional degree, according to the Greater Houston Partnership.

The postgraduate category includes PhDs and MBAs, while the professional category includes JDs (law degrees) and MDs (medical degrees).

"When deciding where to live, neighborhoods full of residents with postgraduate degrees are … increasingly attractive," reads UnitedStatesZipCodes.org, which based its ranking on U.S. Census Bureau data. "Well-educated communities — full of leaders in technology, medicine, business, and more — can bring new industries and revenue."

Ranking second on the list of brainiest Texas ZIP codes is Houston's 77005, where 48.5 percent of adults (or about 8,600 people) hold a postgraduate or professional degree. This ZIP code, which neighbors the 77030 ZIP code, includes the Rice campus. Also, it's presumably home to a lot of highly educated Rice professors and Texas Medical Center doctors.

Directly to the west of the 77030 ZIP is Bellaire — 77401 — which appears at No. 3 in the ranking. In the 77401 ZIP code, 47.6 percent of adults (or nearly 6,300 people) have earned a postgraduate or professional degree; it, too, is likely packed with Rice University professors and Texas Medical Center doctors.

Susan Davenport, senior vice president of economic development at the Greater Houston Partnership, says the region's two top-tier schools — Rice and the University of Houston — along with the region's more than 40 other four-year and two-year schools contribute to Houston's collective brain trust. So do two nearby schools: the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University in College Station.

"More broadly, we are an attractive market for educated professionals from across the country, especially compared to leading East or West Coast cities, because of our lower cost of living, affordable housing prices, and strong economy," Davenport says.

"This creates a virtuous cycle: Companies move to or expand in Houston because they want access to this talent," she adds, "and leading talent moves here because they want to work for these companies and institution."

Davenport says initiatives like the Innovation Corridor, the TMC3 research campus and The Ion entrepreneurship hub also help nurture a well-educated workforce.

"We anticipate these projects will attract even more of the world's brightest minds to our region," she says.

Three other Houston ZIP codes made the top 10 in Texas:

  • No. 5 — 77098 (39.2 percent). That percentage represents about 4,300 people. This ZIP code is just northwest of the Rice and Texas Medical Center campuses.
  • No. 6 — 77025 (39.15 percent). That percentage represents almost 8,200 people. This ZIP code is just southwest of the Rice and Texas Medical Center campuses.
  • No. 10 — 77024 (35.4 percent). That percentage represents about 9,400 people. This ZIP code is slightly east of the Energy Corridor.

"It is no surprise that top-flight, innovation-focused talent would flock to neighborhoods near downtown, Uptown and the world-renowned Texas Medical Center," Davenport says.

Other Texas ZIP codes in the top 10 for postgraduate or professional degrees are:

  • No. 4 — 78703, Austin (41.5 percent). This ZIP code, less than two miles west of the University of Texas campus, includes high-end neighborhoods such as Tarrytown and Old West Austin.
  • No. 7 — 75205, Dallas (37.7 percent). The Southern Methodist University campus sits on the east side of this ZIP code.
  • No. 8 — 78746, Austin (37.2 percent). This ZIP code encompasses parts of West Austin, as well as the wealthy suburbs of Rollingwood and West Lake Hills.
  • No. 9 — 78731, Austin (37.1 percent). This ZIP code incorporates part of Central Austin and a large swath of Northwest Austin.

Federal data shows the unemployment rates for people with master's, professional, and doctoral degrees are lower than for other groups, such as people whose bachelor's or associate's degrees are their most advanced degrees. In addition, people with a postgraduate or professional degree typically earn more money.

"Graduates with the right knowledge and skills have the ability to demand higher salaries, as they are equipped to make significant contributions to the revenue and growth of the companies they work for," the Digital Marketing Institute says.
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Houston team develops low-cost device to treat infants with life-threatening birth defect

infant innovation

A team of engineers and pediatric surgeons led by Rice University’s Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies has developed a cost-effective treatment for infants born with gastroschisis, a congenital condition in which intestines and other organs are developed outside of the body.

The condition can be life-threatening in economically disadvantaged regions without access to equipment.

The Rice-developed device, known as SimpleSilo, is “simple, low-cost and locally manufacturable,” according to the university. It consists of a saline bag, oxygen tubing and a commercially available heat sealer, while mimicking the function of commercial silo bags, which are used in high-income countries to protect exposed organs and gently return them into the abdominal cavity gradually.

Generally, a single-use bag can cost between $200 and $300. The alternatives that exist lack structure and require surgical sewing. This is where the SimpleSilo comes in.

“We focused on keeping the design as simple and functional as possible, while still being affordable,” Vanshika Jhonsa said in a news release. “Our hope is that health care providers around the world can adapt the SimpleSilo to their local supplies and specific needs.”

The study was published in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery, and Jhonsa, its first author, also won the 2023 American Pediatric Surgical Association Innovation Award for the project. She is a recent Rice alumna and is currently a medical student at UTHealth Houston.

Bindi Naik-Mathuria, a pediatric surgeon at UTMB Health, served as the corresponding author of the study. Rice undergraduates Shreya Jindal and Shriya Shah, along with Mary Seifu Tirfie, a current Rice360 Global Health Fellow, also worked on the project.

In laboratory tests, the device demonstrated a fluid leakage rate of just 0.02 milliliters per hour, which is comparable to commercial silo bags, and it withstood repeated disinfection while maintaining its structure. In a simulated in vitro test using cow intestines and a mock abdominal wall, SimpleSilo achieved a 50 percent reduction of the intestines into the simulated cavity over three days, also matching the performance of commercial silo bags. The team plans to conduct a formal clinical trial in East Africa.

“Gastroschisis has one of the biggest survival gaps from high-resource settings to low-resource settings, but it doesn’t have to be this way,” Meaghan Bond, lecturer and senior design engineer at Rice360, added in the news release. “We believe the SimpleSilo can help close the survival gap by making treatment accessible and affordable, even in resource-limited settings.”

Oxy's $1.3B Texas carbon capture facility on track to​ launch this year

gearing up

Houston-based Occidental Petroleum is gearing up to start removing CO2 from the atmosphere at its $1.3 billion direct air capture (DAC) project in the Midland-Odessa area.

Vicki Hollub, president and CEO of Occidental, said during the company’s recent second-quarter earnings call that the Stratos project — being developed by carbon capture and sequestration subsidiary 1PointFive — is on track to begin capturing CO2 later this year.

“We are immensely proud of the achievements to date and the exceptional record of safety performance as we advance towards commercial startup,” Hollub said of Stratos.

Carbon dioxide captured by Stratos will be stored underground or be used for enhanced oil recovery.

Oxy says Stratos is the world’s largest DAC facility. It’s designed to pull 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air and either store it underground or use it for enhanced oil recovery. Enhanced oil recovery extracts oil from unproductive reservoirs.

Most of the carbon credits that’ll be generated by Stratos through 2030 have already been sold to organizations such as Airbus, AT&T, All Nippon Airways, Amazon, the Houston Astros, the Houston Texans, JPMorgan, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks and TD Bank.

The infrastructure business of investment manager BlackRock has pumped $550 million into Stratos through a joint venture with 1PointFive.

As it gears up to kick off operations at Stratos, Occidental is also in talks with XRG, the energy investment arm of the United Arab Emirates-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., to form a joint venture for the development of a DAC facility in South Texas. Occidental has been awarded up to $650 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to build the South Texas DAC hub.

The South Texas project, to be located on the storied King Ranch, will be close to industrial facilities and energy infrastructure along the Gulf Coast. Initially, the roughly 165-square-mile site is expected to capture 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, with the potential to store up to 3 billion metric tons of CO2 per year.

“We believe that carbon capture and DAC, in particular, will be instrumental in shaping the future energy landscape,” Hollub said.

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This article originally appeared on our sister site, EnergyCapitalHTX.com.