Dr. Heather Wilson became the 11^th President of The University of Texas at El Paso in 2019 after serving as Secretary of the United States Air Force. She is the former president of the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, and she represented New Mexico in the United States Congress for ten years. Dr. Wilson has also worked in the private sector, serving as a senior adviser to defense and scientific industry.

Active in community and national affairs, Dr. Wilson is a member of the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation and she chairs the Women in Aviation Advisory Board of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Wilson has also served on several corporate, non-profit and advisory boards.

Dr. Wilson is the granddaughter of immigrants and was the first person in her family to go to college. She graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in the third class to admit women and earned her masters and doctoral degrees from Oxford University in England as a Rhodes Scholar.

UTEP is located on the U.S.-Mexico border – in the fourth largest manufacturing region in North America – and serves more than 25,000 students with 166 bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs in 10 colleges and schools. In the top 5% of public research universities in the United States and designated a community-engaged university by the Carnegie Foundation, UTEP is one of America’s leading Hispanic Serving Institutions. It is the 4th largest research University in Texas and serves a student body that is over 81% Hispanic.

President Wilson is an instrument rated private pilot. She and her husband, Jay Hone, have three adult children.

The Honorable Sethuraman “Panch” Panchanathan is an electrical and computer engineer and the 15^th director of the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Dr. Panchanathan has a distinguished career in science, technology, engineering, and education that spans more than three decades. He served as executive vice president of the Arizona State University Knowledge Enterprise, where he also founded the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing. Prior to becoming director of NSF, Panchanathan served on the National Science Board for six years and has also served on and chaired numerous high-level research and innovation organizations and publications. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and other prestigious science and engineering organizations. Dr. Panchanathan’s research focuses on human-centered multimedia computing and processing, including applications and tools to enhance the qualify of life for people with disabilities.

Garnett S. Stokes was installed as the 23rd president of The University of New Mexico on May 12, 2018. She is the first female president in UNM’s 129-year history. In the opening months of her presidency, she spoke to more than 1,300 New Mexicans on her Statewide Listening Tour, which helped frame her immediate presidential initiatives of campus safety, supporting student Veterans, and furthering the University’s mission of world-class research. In February 2019, Stokes announced the UNM Grand Challenges, calling on researchers from across disciplines to address problems of global, national and regional significance. After receiving proposals from research teams from across UNM’s campuses, Stokes chose three focuses for the UNM Grand Challenges: Sustainable Water Resources, Successful Aging, and Substance Use Disorders. She charged researchers with developing goals that enable multiple paths towards solutions and that are relevant across varied disciplines and communities.

A first-generation college graduate, Stokes earned a B.A. in psychology from Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Georgia in industrial/organizational psychology. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

Dr. Shery Welsh, a member of the Senior Executive Service, is the Director, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Arlington, Virginia. In this role she leads the management of the United States Air Force’s global basic research investment. 

She brings more than 33 years of experience from the Department of Defense as a federal employee for the United States Air Force and the Missile Defense Agency. In her previous role, she served as the Director, Science & Technology, for the Missile Defense Agency. She sought out cutting edge technology from across the world within industry, DoD, and the National Laboratories to advance state-of-the-art technologies to benefit the warfighter. Other assignments in the Missile Defense Agency include Chief Engineer for the Airborne Laser Program, Director of Target and Countermeasure Requirements, Chief Scientist for the Interceptor Knowledge Center and Chief Engineer for the Advanced Technology Program Office. Dr. Welsh’s 20 years working for the Air Force afforded her the opportunity to work many programs such as the C-130U Gunship, C-17, Joint Strike Fighter, F-16, B-2, F-22, Airborne Laser, and the Wide-body Aerial Sensor Platform.

Her accomplishments also include published articles in major scientific journals, two Rising Star Awards from the Missile Defense Agency, and Engineer of the Year from the Air Force as well as serving as a part-time professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Barbara Helland also leads the development of DOE’s Exascale Computing Initiative to deliver a capable exascale system by 2021. Ms. Helland previously served as ASCR’s Facilities Division Director. Prior to assuming the role of Division Director, she served as the Program Manager for ASCR’s Argonne and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facilities and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. She was also responsible for the opening of ASCR’s facilities to national researchers, including those in industry, through the expansion of the Department’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. Prior to DOE, Ms. Helland developed and managed computational science educational programs at the Krell Institute. She also spent 25 years at Ames Laboratory working closely with nuclear physicists and physical chemists to develop realtime operating systems and software tools to automate experimental data collection and analysis. While there, she worked on the deployment and management of lab-wide computational resources.

She received a B.S. in Computer Science and a M. Ed. in Organizational Learning and Human Resource Development from Iowa State University.