The College’s Premier Research Spaces: Part Two

Students and faculty in the College of Sciences have access to multiple research centers and institutes that offer state-of-the-art

facilities and instrumentation.These spaces provide the environment, resources and guidance students and researchers need to make meaningful scientific contributions to our world.

Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security

The Brain Health Consortium

The Brain Health Consortium (BHC) is a collaborative, transdisciplinary team committed to discovering the inner workings of the brain and promoting brain health in all its forms. Across six colleges, the BHC integrates researchers with expertise in stem cells/precision medicine, neuroscience, biomedical engineering, psychology, behavior and learning, with the common goal of applying their discoveries to prevent and treat neurological disorders. Using cutting-edge technologies, researchers work with students to identify strategies to restore and improve brain function while educating and training the next generation of innovative thinkers. In February, UTSA’s Neurosciences Institute (NI) and Bank of America Child and Adolescent Policy Research Institute (BOA-CAPRI) joined the BHC in order to further expand research opportunities, academic efforts and community outreach.

Established in 2001, the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS) delivers research, training, K-12 education, and competition and exercise programs to advance organizational and community cybersecurity capabilities and collaboration. The center conducts scenario-based cybersecurity preparedness exercises to test an organization’s communication, incident response, disaster recovery, business continuity and security awareness. It initially received $5 million from the U.S. Department of Defense through a grant sponsored by then-Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison to research cybersecurity topics like hardware-based intrusion detection, elliptic curve cryptography, detection of steganography and biometric access control methods.

GREG WHITE is the director of the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security and a professor in the Department of Computer Science.

In 2020, the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS) was awarded a grant by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to develop a method for state, local, tribal and territorial governments to determine their High Value Assets (HVAs) so they can focus their cybersecurity efforts where they are most needed. The CIAS developed guidance based on best practices to address the identification, categorization and prioritization of IT systems to enable increased protection of HVAs across various jurisdictions. This included the development of scalable guidelines, templates and tools that can be used to facilitate implementation of identified processes within the context of each community’s risk management framework, available resources and authorities.

Institute for Cyber Security

The Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) conducts basic and applied research in partnership with academia, government and industry. ICS operates two world-class academic research laboratories—the ICS FlexCloud and the ICS FlexFarm—designed to study current and emerging cybersecurity issues. Composed of several production clouds, the ICS FlexCloud offers significant computation capacity and similar design features adopted by cloud computing providers. It is one of the first dedicated academic research environments focused on studying security challenges surrounding cloud computing. The ICS FlexFarm is an internet-connected environment providing researchers with a dedicated platform to conduct academic research on malware programs and methods for improving malware detection as well as faster response times to malware infections and effective malware removal techniques with a focus on botnets. (Botnets are networks of hijacked computer devices used to carry out cyber crime.)

Center for Innovative Drug Discovery

The Center for Innovative Drug Discovery (CIDD), a joint venture between The University of Texas at San Antonio and UT Health San Antonio, facilitates the translation of basic scientific discoveries into tangible, pre-clinical candidate drugs that can be further developed into clinical therapies for human disease. The CIDD is composed of two facilities: a High-Throughput Screening (HTS) Facility located at UT Health San Antonio and a Medicinal Chemistry and Synthesis Core Facility at UTSA. Located on the west campus of UTSA, the Medicinal Chemistry and Synthesis Core Facility is a 2,000-square-foot, stateof-the-art technological center that performs all necessary chemistry and synthesis services to support a large range of small molecule drug discovery efforts in all therapeutic areas.

Instrument Highlights

RAVI SANDHU is the ICS executive director, the Lutcher Brown Endowed Chair in Cyber Security and a professor of computer science.

Dell Technologies Grant

Last year, UTSA received a grant from Dell Technologies to support advanced technologies and a new research infrastructure platform at the university. With the grant, UTSA invested in a hybrid cloud approach that uses solutions from Dell to help deliver research in data science and cybersecurity.

With the support of the technology grant, UTSA invested in a broad range of Dell infrastructure solutions, which include servers, storage, networking and data protection. These solutions also include several of the latest Dell innovations ranging from a high-performance computing (HPC) system for data- and compute-intensive projects, storage for big data workloads, software-defined networking, and disaster recovery and business continuity.

This grant has provided reliable services, reduced operating expenses, transformed procedures and operating models as well as offered supercomputing resources as a service. Several research programs at UTSA have directly benefited from the grant, including the Open Cloud Institute, the Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute and the MATRIX AI Consortium for Human Well-Being.

u 12 fully functional synthesis hoods with N2/high vacuum manifolds, stir plates, JKem controllers and block reactors, and Buchi R-210 Rotovaps with V-700 vacuum pumps u Biotage Selekt and Isolera One purification systems with UV detection and automatic fraction collections u Agilent DD2 400 MHz Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer u Agilent 1290 HPLC with Agilent 6150 MS u Agilent SCF CO2 1260 Infinity HPLC with variable wavelength UV detection and auto sampler u Agilent 1260 Prep HPLC with variable wavelength UV detection, auto sampler and fraction collector u Anton Paar Monowave 300 microwave reactor with auto loader