brain-powered

This brainy Houston ZIP code declared the smartest in Texas

Texas Medical Center, downtown, Houston, skyline

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:

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brain scientists at work

Rice University scientists invent new algorithm to fight Alzheimer's

Vicky Yao and Qiliang Lai of Rice University work on a laptop.

Photo courtesy of Rice University

Vicky Yao, an assistant professor of computer science and member of the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University, and Qiliang Lai, a Rice postdoctoral researcher

A new breakthrough from researchers at Rice University could unlock the genetic components that determine several human diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Alzheimer's disease affected 57 million people worldwide in 2021, and cases in the United States are expected to double in the next couple of decades. Despite its prevalence and widespread attention of the condition, the full mechanisms are still poorly understood. One hurdle has been identifying which brain cells are linked to the disease.

For years, it was thought that the cells most linked with Alzheimer's pathology via DNA evidence were microglia, infection-fighting cells in the brain. However, this did not match with actual studies of Alzheimer's patients' brains. It's the memory-making cells in the human brain that are implicated in the pathology.

To prove this link, researchers at Rice alongside Boston University developed a computational algorithm called “Single-cell Expression Integration System for Mapping genetically implicated Cell types," or SEISMIC. It allows researchers to zero in on specific neurons linked to Alzheimer's, the first of its kind. Qiliang Lai, a Rice doctoral student and the lead author of a paper on the discovery published in Nature Communications, believes that this is an important step in the fight against Alzheimer's.

“As we age, some brain cells naturally slow down, but in dementia ⎯ a memory-loss disease ⎯ specific brain cells actually die and can’t be replaced,” said Lai. “The fact that it is memory-making brain cells dying and not infection-fighting brain cells raises this confusing puzzle where DNA evidence and brain evidence don’t match up.”

Studying Alzheimer's has been hampered by the limitations of computational analysis. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) map small differences in the DNA of Alzheimer's patients. The genetic signal in these studies would often over-emphasize the presence of infection fighting cells, essentially making the activity of those cells too "loud" statistically to identify other factors. Combined with greater specificity in brain regional activity, SEISMIC reduces the data chatter to grant a clearer picture of the genetic component of Alzheimer's.

“We built our seismic algorithm to analyze genetic information and match it precisely to specific types of brain cells,” Lai said. “This enables us to create a more detailed picture of which cell types are affected by which genetic programs.”

Though the algorithm is not in and of itself likely to lead to a cure or treatment for Alzheimer's any time soon, the researchers say that SEISMIC is already performing significantly better than existing tools at identifying important disease-relevant cellular signals more clearly.

“We think this work could help reconcile some contradicting patterns in the data pertaining to Alzheimer’s research,” said Vicky Yao, assistant professor of computer science and a member of the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice. “Beyond that, the method will likely be broadly valuable to help us better understand which cell types are relevant in different complex diseases.”

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