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Engineering a Transformation

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El Paso receives two of the most significant place-based economic development federal investments: EDA Build Back Better Regional Challenge and NSF Regional Innovation Engine Grants. The vision is to bring disruptive changes with an audacious and determined goal to transform our community's economic future. As highlighted by distinguished El Paso leaders in a recent Op-Ed*, El Paso's bet on low-wage labor in the later part of the 20 th Century drove us to the losing end of the post-NAFTA manufacturing job losses. In 1990, our community had 41,400 Manufacturing Jobs**, 20 percent of the total jobs of the El Paso and Upper Rio Grande Valley Regions. The number went down to 16,850 manufacturing jobs (5.4% of the total jobs in the region) in 2019, with a loss of more than 24,000 jobs. All community leaders and policymakers agreed that we must recover at least 70% of those lost jobs to address the structural weakness and future-proofing our regional economy. However, many lost jo

The Emerging Face

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On Saturday night at the Spring Commencement, the doctoral hoods worn by Chance Garcia and Jesus Flores as they walk to the stage will reflect much more than the shining light of personal excellence but also the emergence of a powerful national research university that defies the traditional choice between Access and Excellence. We hold a deep compassion for merging opportunities with excellence. Chance will start his aerospace research career with the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in June, and Jesus has already joined a coveted engineering team at a pioneering commercial space exploration company, Blue Origin.   Engineering doctoral graduates such as Chance and Jesus carry a strong message from UTEP, i.e., it’s clear intention to change the face of the engineering workforce. Although Hispanics are still a tiny fraction of the aerospace research workforce, the academic success of Chance and Jesus is the symbol of a Sputnik-like generation of engineers who are inspired, excited, a

A PhD program at the interface........

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When three of the doctoral students from our Energy Science and Engineering PhD track graduated this semester, it wasn’t just business as usual. Aside from the graduates receiving job offers in the energy industry way before their dissertation defenses, these graduates have something special that makes all the difference—they were trained very differently than the way most doctoral programs train their students.   When we first started our Energy Science and Engineering program, we did not just want to create a PhD program to graduate future professors only. Rather, we wanted to train a generation of doctoral engineers who will understand that the research is not only the production of knowledge but also the transformation of knowledge into valuable commodities, commodities that will retain the United States’ supremacy in energy technology businesses and create jobs to support our quality of life. We wanted them to understand that the transition from knowledge to commodities requ