JoAnn Browning, Ph.D., P.E.
Interim Vice President | The Office of Research
JoAnn Browning most recently served UTSA as the Dean of the Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design and David and Jennifer Spencer Distinguished Chair. She is also a Professor of Civil Engineering with expertise in reinforced concrete structures, performance-based design, natural hazards engineering and engineering education.
Browning holds the following degrees: Ph.D., Civil Engineering, Purdue University, M.S., Civil Engineering, University of Kentucky, B.S., Civil Engineering, University of Kentucky. Her awards include: Purdue University Distinguished Woman Scholar; Inspiring Women in STEM Award, INSIGHT Into Diversity; ACI Fellow, American Concrete Institute; ACI Young Member Award for Professional Achievement, American Concrete Institute; Woman’s Leadership Award, San Antonio Business Journal; Miller Scholar, University of Kansas; Henry E. Gould Award for Distinguished Service to Undergraduate Education, University of Kansas. She is a registered Professional Engineer in Kansas and Texas.
Nicole L. Beebe, Ph.D.
Interim Associate Vice President | Research Partnerships & Strategy
Assistant Vice President | Faculty Research Development
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.
Melinda T. Cotten
Interim Associate Vice President, Grant Administration
Melinda Cotten serves as the Interim Associate Vice President for Research Integrity and Infrastructure. She leads the Laboratory Safety, Research Integrity, Laboratory Animals Research Center, and Core Facilities programs at UTSA.
She is an accomplished and passionate research administration professional having most recently served as Associate Vice President for Research Business Operations at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Assistant Vice Provost at Rice University. She has over 28 years of wide-ranging experience in research administration; university leadership; regulatory compliance including federal regulations.
Rod McSherry
Associate Vice President & Director | Institute for Economic Development
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 the field of 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.
Howard Grimes, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer, CyManII
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.
David Brown, Ph.D.
Executive Director, National Security Collaboration Center
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.
Dhireesha Kudithipudi
Executive Director, MatrixAI Consortium
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 (eg: memristors), energy efficient machine intelligence, and AI accelerators.
Jenny Hsieh
Director, Brain Health Consortium
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.
Jeff Provost
Executive Director, Open Cloud Institute (OCI)
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
- Distributed computing architecture
- Power management techniques in cloud computing
- HPC in cloud