BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT

Last November, the sunlight-filled central atrium of the Ion was packed for two solid days as scientists, doctors, venture capitalists, space start-up founders and space flight operators convened for the inaugural In-Space Physical AI Workshop, a collaborative event between NASA, Purdue University and Rice Nexus. Over 200 experts from across industry and academia alike — from the Texas Space Commission to Baylor College of Medicine — gathered for panels, workshops and networking to discuss everything from the design of reusable spacecraft to the impact of long space journeys on astronauts’ health.

“It was an amazing cross section of people, who are all accomplished in their own fields, and it creates an incredible brain trust,” said Sanjoy Paul, executive director of the Rice Nexus. “We ended the conference with three groups of people brainstorming new ideas for which they will be writing proposals to the Department of Defense or the National Science Foundation. You can’t ask for anything more.”

The Nexus is Rice’s premier innovation factory, launched last fall, offering state-of-the-art facilities, guidance and mentoring for testing and launching new ventures by Rice faculty and students. Designed to de-risk, develop and deploy new technology, the Rice Nexus aims to bridge the gap between the university and commercial markets by fostering partnerships with key corporate, government, community and venture capital (VC) firms. And the wildly successful In-Space Physical AI Workshop is just one example of how the Nexus is creating an intentionally collaborative environment to solve real-world issues.

“There’s no reason why Rice cannot transform the ecosystem of Houston in a big way,” said Paul. “Rice has everything — connections to the space industry, to the medical industry, to the energy industry — and there’s just so much that we can do for Houston in those areas.”

Theodore Levitt, the Harvard scholar who brought us the term “globalization,” said it best: “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” That’s exactly what’s happening at the Rice Nexus at the Ion.

The Ion itself — a repurposed historic building in the heart of Houston’s 16-acre innovation district — is already a hive of entrepreneurial activity on Main Street. Its six floors are nearly 100% occupied by some of the nation’s leading firms and exciting new start-ups: Occidental, Activate and Fathom Funds moved in late last fall, while the Ion’s strategic partnerships with organizations like Chevron, Microsoft, Aramco, Baker Botts, ExxonMobil and Woodside Energy have made it a hub for hard tech innovation and entrepreneurship.

Last fall, Rice moved its very own innovation space into the Ion with the Nexus, which spans 10,000 square feet across two floors. It offers not only a huge variety of state-of-the-art prototyping tools but also the comprehensive entrepreneurial support and funding to grow and launch Rice hard tech startups — of which there are now 10 housed in the Nexus, alongside three VC firms.

“That’s a lot,” said Paul, whose experience as head of research and development for Accenture and work in Bell Laboratories led him to this new role at Rice in 2024. The space at the Nexus is, in part, inspired by the innovations on display at places like Bell Labs and the MIT Media Lab.

When visitors enter the first level of the Nexus, they’re greeted with some Rice’s own creations — for instance, a device that captures heart sound digitally without requiring clinically trained staff and sends a phonocardiogram signal to the cloud. There, sophisticated AI models can analyze the signal for early detection of rheumatic heart disease (RHD), the most commonly acquired heart disease in people under age 25, primarily in low- or middle-income countries. RHD is rare in high-income countries, but it still poses a health challenge, and there is a lack of data on its impact within the highest-income regions.

“More than 300,000 people die every year across the globe due to RHD,” said Paul. “Now we can capture heart signals with this device, analyze the signals using AI and figure out with a very high probability that a person has RHD — it’s a game changer.”

The Nexus will also serve as a gateway for industry partners to bring problems to Rice for faculty and student researchers to crack. Traditionally, academics have pursued their own research silos, while industry has struggled to map its own problem areas onto research that’s already being performed in universities, instead relying on expensive consulting firms.

“That’s where we come in,” Paul said. “We can leverage Rice students and faculty to work on those problems, which is a new approach entirely. We can solve their problem at a fraction of the cost of consultants, and with much higher quality people.”

He cited Axiom Space as an example of an industry leader Nexus is already working with to solve the issue of maintaining critical data centers in space. Axiom, which is currently constructing the world’s first commercial space station, is also creating low-Earth orbit data centers to store and process data captured in space and serve as disaster recovery sites.

“One of their biggest problems right now is cybersecurity,” said Paul. “So we gave them a proposal of what we can do for them in cyber defense, and they were really, really excited.”

And as the Nexus continues to find more areas to collaborate with corporate leaders, its incubator space will also grow new companies based in part on solving complex industry issues. Each startup in the Nexus is afforded one year of support, which includes office space in the Ion, access to VC firms and an incredible array of prototyping equipment.

Two of those newly established climate tech companies created by Rice faculty are already making waves: Solidec, founded by Haotian Wang, recently signed a licensing agreement and won a $100,000 grant from Rice to continue its work manufacturing chemicals and fuels using only air, water and renewable electricity — in essence, producing chemicals and fuels without carbon emissions. Coflux Purification, co-founded by Rafael Verduzco and Pulickel Ajayan, also won an $80,000 grant from Rice for its instream remediation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances from water and was, along with Solidec, selected as one of the inaugural Houston cohort of the Activate Fellowship for 2024.

And this is just the beginning.

“I want people to think, ‘Wow, the Nexus is the place to be,’ because they realize that if they come here, they will be successful,” Paul said. Within the next five years, he expects 25% to 40% of the start-ups incubated here will become fully-funded companies of their own.

“Between these companies and the venture capitalists coming in, putting in money, people will actually be
able to talk, interact, contribute — all in this buzzing, living space,” Paul said. “What we want to do is to keep changing the innovation landscape, because so much is coming out of Rice, and this will be a continuously thriving place to be.”