Leadership & Org Chart

In addition to her roles at UTSA, Dr. Potter serves as Senior Vice President for Research, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Founding Director of the Be Well Institute on Substance Use and Related Disorders at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Dr. Potter serves as a principal investigator (MPI) of the Institute for Integration of Medicine and Science (IIMS), home to UT Health San Antonio’s NIH-supported Clinical Translational Science Award (CTSA) and the Peer Recovery Innovation Network (PRIN), a National Institutes on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded initiative to build and expand the field of recovery science. Dr. Potter has been part of major studies that have transformed treatments for substance use disorders including the NIAAA-supported COMBINE study, NIMH-supported Project LIGHT, and the NIDA-supported POATS trials.

As Founding Director of the Be Well Institute on Substance Use and Related Disorders, Dr. Potter oversees a comprehensive statewide system of care to increase access to evidence-based substance use services in Texas. Programs include the Be Well Texas Provider Network of over 150 providers, the Be Well Clinic that provides telehealth and in-person services statewide, the Center for Substance Use Training and Telementoring, and the Texas Substance Use Symposium, now the largest substance use-related conference in Texas.

Prior to joining UT Health San Antonio in 2008, Dr. Potter was with Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and received her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Georgia and her Master of Public Health from Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.

Melinda Cotten has worked in research administration for 30 years. Her extensive experience encompasses university leadership, research administration, regulatory compliance, research reporting, and institution-wide system implementations in higher education. Her role as Associate Vice President for Research Business Operations at the University of Alabama at Birmingham included responsibility for the Office of Sponsored Programs, where she managed a portfolio exceeding $840 million in awards, as well as Research Technology and Communications and the Material Transfer Office.

Ms. Cotten’s experience and expertise includes appointments such as Assistant Vice Provost for Sponsored Programs and Research Compliance at Rice University where she was responsible for the Office of Sponsored Research, compliance areas such as the IRB office (OHRP), the COI office, Export Control, as well as the IACUC and Biosafety offices. Cotten is well known nationally as a leader in the field and has attended and presented at national conferences as well as being a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Report on Research Compliance for ten years and previous service as an Editorial Board Member (Ad hoc Reviewer) for the SRA Journal of Research Administration for over four years.

Diana Huffaker most recently served as the associate vice president for research at The University of Texas at Arlington. She also served there as the chair of the Electrical Engineering Department from 2020 to 2023. Prior to her time at UT-Arlington, Dr. Huffaker worked at Cardiff University in the U.K. for five years.

Dr. Huffaker worked as founding director of the Institute for Compound Semiconductors (ICS), a roughly $150 million project. She also held the prestigious EU/Welsh Government Sêr Cymru chair in advanced materials and engineering, overseeing a portfolio of $16 million.

Dr. Huffaker first became engaged in research leadership at UCLA, where she served as professor of electrical engineering for over nine years. Throughout her career, she has attracted more than $30 million in research dollars, co-authored over 300 refereed journal publications with more than 13,000 citations, and obtained nine U.S. patents and one U.K. patent.

She is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the National Security and Science Engineering Faculty (Vannevar-Bush Faculty Fellowship) and the Humboldt Society. She is an active participant in the technical community, having served in leadership roles for many international societies including the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the American Society for Engineering Education and Women in Science.

Nicole Lang Beebe, Ph.D. is a Professor of Cyber Security, at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). She is currently dual-hatted, serving as the Interim Associate Vice President for Research Special Projects and Assistant Vice President for Faculty Research Development in the Office of Research. She previously served for five years as the Director of The Cyber Center for Security and Analytics at UTSA. Dr. Beebe’s research interests relate to cybersecurity, cyber analytics, digital forensics, and data analytics with applications to insider threat detection and analysis, IoT security and forensics, and cyber threat hunting. She has published approximately 50 peer-reviewed articles in top journals and conferences that have been cited over 1,700 times. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security, various Department of Defense agencies, and several industry partners, and has resulted in a patent-pending cyber search algorithm and multiple software platforms.

Dr. Beebe received her Ph.D. in Information Technology from UTSA, an M.S. degree in Criminal Justice from Georgia State University, and a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Technological University. She has over twenty years of experience in cybersecurity and digital forensics, in both the commercial and government sectors. She was a computer crime investigator for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations from 1998-2007. She worked in the industry as a senior network security engineer for Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). She obtained her Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification in 2001. She has served as a board member on several national-level professional associations and consortiums. She serves as an Associate Editor (AE) for Computers & Security and previously served as AE for Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation, in addition to serving on the board of referees, reviewers, and/or technical program committees for approximately ten peer-reviewed journals and conferences dedicated to advancing the state of the art and knowledge in digital forensics and cybersecurity.

Rod McSherry is the Associate Vice President for Innovation and Economic Development at UTSA. McSherry oversees the Institute for Economic Development and the Office of Commercialization and Innovation and manages a staff of over 140. McSherry has over 35 years of experience in global economic, community, and business development. He has held a variety of positions, most recently as the Associate Provost, International and Border Programs, at New Mexico State University.

He has over 30 years of service in the United States Department of Agriculture culminating in his service as a Senior Foreign Service Officer. Additionally, he held postings in Afghanistan, the United Kingdom, Iraq, Thailand, Venezuela, Mexico, and Russia. He is fluent in both English and Spanish and is proficient in Russian, Thai, and French.

Dr. Howard Grimes serves as the Chief Executive Officer for the Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CyManII), led by The University of Texas at San Antonio. As a noted research scientist and author with 25 years of success in directing complex university and national laboratory research programs and entrepreneurial start-up initiatives, Dr. Grimes also serves as the Associate Vice Provost and Vice President for Institutional Initiatives at UTSA and was formally the director for Innovation and Industry Partnerships (3 years) at INL’s Idaho CAES.

Dr. Brown is a trusted, well-connected leader in civilian and military communities nationwide who has especially strong relationships within U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) organizations, laboratories, and commands and has gained national recognition for his transformative leadership in federal research and development (R&D) initiatives and projects.

In Fall 2019, Dhireesha started as a Robert F McDermott Endowed Chair in Engineering and professor with joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is also the founding Director of the MATRIX AI Consortium for Human Well-Being. She is interested in designing the next-generation AI systems that can solve problems similar to humans in the most energy efficient way. Her team has been paving a path for bio-inspired AI systems and accelerators over the past decade. Her current research interests are in neuromorphic computing, brain-inspired algorithms, novel computing substrates (e.g., memristors), energy efficient machine intelligence, and AI accelerators.

Dr. Jenny Hsieh is a Professor and Chair of Neuroscience, Developmental and Regenerative Biology in the College of Sciences, the Semmes Foundation Distinguished Chair in Cell Biology, and Director of the UTSA Brain Health Consortium. The UTSA Brain Health Consortium is a campus-wide transdisciplinary research initiative that spans stem cells/precision medicine, neuroscience, biomedical engineering, psychology, and behavior with over 40 participating full-time faculty members.

Dr. Hsieh comes to UTSA from UT Southwestern, where she and her team made a significant contribution to understanding the role of epigenetic and transcriptional regulation in adult neurogenesis. A major focus of her work was to understand the transcriptional/epigenetic regulatory circuitry that guides neural stem cell fate decisions in both normal and pathological states, and this work continues at UTSA through the Brain Health Consortium. Beyond her role at UTSA, Dr. Hsieh serves as a study section member for the National Institutes of Health and the American Epilepsy Society. She is also on the editorial board as a Reviewing Editor for The Journal of Neuroscience.

Areas of Teaching Interest

• Cloud computing for engineering and science
• Control systems
• Systems theory
• Intelligent controls
• Non-linear controls
• Power management of cloud systems

Areas of Research Interest

• Advanced control mechanisms for cloud computing
• Quantum cloud computing
• Quantum cloud computing
• Power management techniques in cloud computing
• HPC in cloud