Centers & Institutes

The Academy for Teacher Excellence Research Center (ATE) is grounded in the “Culturally Efficacious Teacher” model and serves as a center for research, design, evaluation, program implementation, and collaboration for area school districts, community colleges, the private sector, and UTSA. ATE leverages institutional and community resources to better prepare teacher candidates and in-service teachers who work with diverse student populations. ATE guides the preparation and retention of teachers who will demonstrate the attitudes, knowledge, and skills of a Culturally Efficacious Teacher (Flores, Clark, Claeys, & Villarreal, 2007).

The UTSA Brain Health Consortium is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary team committed to discovering the inner workings of the brain. The Consortium integrates researchers with expertise in stem cells/precision medicine, neuroscience, biomedical engineering, psychology and learning, with the common goal of applying those discoveries to prevent and treat neurological disorders. The Consortium recently merged with the Bank of America Child and Adolescent Policy Research Institute and the UTSA Neurosciences Institute to expand transdisciplinary research.

The Center for Advanced Measurements in Extreme Environments aims to build a sustainable source of diverse, highly trained researchers to enter the Nation’s workforce in NASA fields of earth system sciences, remote sensing technologies, computational fluid dynamics, and experimental fluid mechanics.

The center was founded in 2007 at the University of Texas at San Antonio to address a growing need for a strong interdisciplinary organization that can conduct research and development as well as provide education and training in lean manufacturing and six-sigma, supply chain and logistics engineering, warehouse systems, automation technologies, and advanced sensors and robotics.

Established in 1974 to:

• Conduct archaeological research throughout Texas and the surrounding regions;
• Carry out archaeological surveys and excavations for federal, state, and local agencies as required by legislation and executive order;
• Provide public and private sector assistance and guidance regarding cultural resource management;
• Provide students with training opportunities in archaeological field contexts, laboratory, and technical writing; and
• Disseminate to the general public information about the history and prehistory of Texas and San Antonio.

The Center for Community-Based and Applied Health Research (CCBAHR) fosters research collaborations among interdisciplinary UTSA research faculty and community partners including, but not limited to health care agencies, community-based organizations, schools, and faith-based organizations. In this endeavor, the Center provides an opportunity to integrate biomedical knowledge, technology, human resources, education, and policies needed for the maintenance and improvement of health, including fighting disease and adverse effects of aging.

The CCS provides academic research and services to benefit communities, completes large-scale research projects, provides research and educational opportunities for graduate students, and convenes leaders in the field for dialogue on global practices concerning sustainable development and construction.

The Center for Excellence in Engineering Education (CE3) provides a holistic approach for improving the quality of engineering education at The University of Texas at San Antonio. The center strives to improve the preparedness and marketability of the students in the College of Engineering for challenging and rewarding careers.

The Cyber Center for Security and Analytics conducts high-impact research in information assurance and security and educates the cybersecurity workforce needed now and in the future. The center’s research objective is to offer leading-edge solutions that will help to solve cybersecurity problems of national scope and importance.

The Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS) is developing the world’s foremost center for multidisciplinary education and development of operational capabilities in the areas of infrastructure assurance and security. Our vision is to become the leader in the advancement of state and community cyber security capabilities and collaboration. The CIAS has successfully integrated efforts from academia, government, and private industry. The result has been a dynamic team dedicated to infrastructure assurance, research, and education.

The Center for Innovative Drug Discovery (CIDD), a joint venture between The University of Texas at San Antonio and UT Health SA, is composed of two facilities: a High-Throughput Screening (HTS) Facility located at UTHSCSA and a Medicinal Chemistry and Synthesis Core Facility at UTSA. The ultimate intent of the CIDD is to provide a diverse array of core facilities and expertise to facilitate the translation of basic scientific discoveries into tangible pre-clinical candidate drugs that can be further developed into clinical therapies for human disease.

The mission of the UTSA Center for Urban and Regional Planning Research (CURPR) is to generate new knowledge of the forms, processes, and impacts of metropolitan and megaregional growth while advancing the creation of more sustainable, inspiring, and equitable cities.

The Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CyManII, pronounced sī-man-ē) introduces a cybersecure energy-ROI for energy efficient manufacturing and supply chains that secures and sustains American leadership in global manufacturing competitiveness for decades. Funded by the DOE, CyManII aggregates the most advanced institutions and national laboratories in smart and advanced manufacturing, securing automation and supply chains, workforce development, and cybersecurity.

The center conducts basic and applied research in partnership with academia, government and industry. The Institute’s Executive Director Prof. Ravi Sandhu reports to the Dean, College of Sciences and to the Vice-President of Research.

Our mission is to stimulate and support excellent social, demographic and economic science research on significant practice and policy issues.

The institute is a newly established Institute at UTSA that advocates the integration of biomedical and socio-behavioral science research in addressing health disparities in South Texas and the nation. The Institute partners with local academic (UTHSCSA, school districts, etc.) and non-academic agencies (SAMHD, UHS, Texas Diabetes, Institute, etc.) to address the unequal distribution and prevalence of adverse health conditions existing in Texas and the nation.

The Matrix AI Consortium for Human Well-Being is dedicated to conducting transformative research in the design, use and deployment of AI to enhance human life. MATRIX prepares future leaders to be agile learners and trains them in a transdisciplinary environment to develop forward-looking, sustainable, and comprehensive solutions.

Today’s world calls for greater collaboration to protect America’s national security infrastructure. UTSA is leading this charge, armed with world-class faculty and a reputation as the undisputed leader in cybersecurity education. The university’s new National Security Collaboration Center (NSCC) is taking this leadership to the next level, creating a powerful ecosystem to engage government, industry and academia to tackle the nation’s greatest cybersecurity threats.

The Open Cloud Institute (OCI) created in 2015 is part of an initiative to develop degree programs in cloud computing and big data and foster collaboration with industry, positioning UTSA and San Antonio as world leaders in open cloud technology. With UTSA already recognized as the top university in the country for cybersecurity, the Open Cloud Institute further distinguishes UTSA as a top tier-research institution. OCI has already received many in-kind donations from industry leaders such as Rackspace, Yahoo, AMD, Intel, Mellanox Technologies and Seagate, and the OpenStack Foundation.

OCI is a neutral, third party research and education laboratory that encourages research, the development, and adoption of standards-based open technologies such as open compute, openstack, and openflow by providing infrastructure, platform and software. The OCI has one of the largest Open Clouds in academia utilizing OpenStack software, co-founded by Rackspace and Open Compute hardware, founded by Facebook, to support advanced computing and big-data analytics research.

The IWRSP serves as an entity that draws faculty within UTSA, as well as water professionals from around the San Antonio area and South Texas region, to identify water-related problems, to facilitate areas of common research interests, to address water resources for individuals, communities, agriculture, and industry, and to build an excellent research, teaching, and service center.

To create a data science and distributed sensor framework founded on new discoveries to enhance performance, eliminate inefficiencies, and allow agencies and the private sector to make decisions that yield the most benefit to urban residents, particularly during strenuous circumstances.

The center was established to focus state and national attention on UTSA in the fields of molecular microbiology, immunology, medical mycology, virology, microbial genomics, vaccine development and biodefense. One of the major areas of emphasis at STCEID is on the pathogenic mechanisms of emerging infectious diseases.

The University of Texas at San Antonio created the Texas Sustainable Energy Research Institute to partner with our community and contribute to a new energy future that builds on a diverse resource base to position San Antonio as a significant contributor to the 21st century global energy economy.

The Urban Education Institute at UTSA produces improvement-focused, collaborative research to raise educational attainment, advance economic mobility, and help people achieve their potential in the greater San Antonio region.

The UEI pursues its mission by (1) producing rigorous and actionable analysis that supports education policymaking, program implementation, and philanthropic giving; (2) convening community leaders to address entrenched challenges that harm education and human development; and (3) training the next generation of social scientists and educators to address education challenges through inquiry, analysis, and discovery.

The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Mexico Center was officially established in October 2005 to promote greater knowledge and understanding of Mexico and U.S.-Mexico relations. The Mexico Center is an umbrella organization that connects Mexico-related expertise within UTSA through cross-disciplinary collaboration on research projects and activities.

The Women’s Studies Institute provides access to interdisciplinary knowledge on women, gender, sexuality, and race through collaboration among researchers, students, community and through public programming to make research accessible.

The Center for Applied Community & Policy Research brings research, evaluation, and policy expertise to bear on the challenges facing America’s communities. From community wellness to violent crime, affiliated faculty study real-world problems and develop evidence-based solutions to help improve the delivery of government and related services.

The IRM advances fundamental knowledge toward developing transformative technologies and therapeutics in Regenerative Medicine while training future biomedical leaders and innovators to serve the health-related needs of civilian and military communities.

The UTSA Center for Public Opinion Research (CPOR) is a full-scale academic public opinion research center that produces and facilitates basic and applied opinion research contributing to our understanding of important political and governance issues. CPOR endeavors to gauge how the public in the San Antonio area, Texas, and the region think about politics and related issues via periodic polls; provide samples for researchers and organizations who wish to gain insight into the local population or conduct pilot studies; engage in research of innovative polling techniques; and advance our students’ education in the dynamic science of opinion research and social science methodology.

The mission of UTSA Arts is to promote the arts in San Antonio, South Texas, and beyond. It will connect the cultures of the world to our community through world-class programs, exhibits, and performances, leveraging partnerships with other arts organizations in San Antonio, across Texas, and the nation.

UTSA Arts will sponsor educational programs for the benefit of people of all ages and backgrounds who desire to develop their creative abilities in a safe and supportive learning community.

Finally, UTSA Arts will be a makerspace that fosters collaborations in the arts and facilitates research related to the arts in the community. To achieve this mission, UTSA Arts will be an independent arts institute, sitting alongside but autonomous from the university’s academic schools and departments.