As part of a federal effort to improve research security, the National Science Foundation chose the Texas schools to oversee SECURE Southwest, one of five new regional centers mandated by the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022.
The wide-ranging bill aims to create jobs, strengthen supply chains and counter China by investing in research and development in science and growing technologies such as clean energy, nanotechnology, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
The bill calls for creating regional centers to address growing concerns about international entities accessing U.S. research unethically or unlawfully. This risk of such interference has grown as researchers collaborate more with colleagues around the world.
The NSF describes the SECURE centers — short for safeguarding the entire community of the U.S. research ecosystem — as clearinghouses "for information to empower the research community to identify and mitigate foreign interference that poses risks to the U.S. research enterprise." They will enable researchers, administrators and funding agencies to collaborate in a secure online environment.
Experts hope the centers will help protect intellectual property while continuing to foster collaboration.
They "will also provide updates about security threats, coordinated responses to those threats and training to increase researchers' situational awareness and skills," a UTSA statement said.
Lori Schultz, UTSA's senior associate vice president for research administration, will co-lead SECURE Southwest with Kevin Gamache, associate vice chancellor and chief research security officer at Texas A&M University.
Together they'll seek feedback from universities and research organizations across the region and work to incorporate any recommendations.
"Currently, information is siloed, inconsistent, and changing all the time," Schultz said in a statement. "The research community needs access to real-time information, resources to ask questions and a place to connect with other institutions doing similar work. NSF calls upon us to conduct 'principled, international collaboration.' SECURE is how we realize that vision."
The other regional centers include SECURE West led by the University of Washington, a state university in Seattle; SECURE Northeast led by Northeastern University, a private university in Boston; SECURE Southeast led by Emory University, a private university in Atlanta; and SECURE Midwest led by the University of Missouri, a public university in Columbia, Mo.
The University of Washington will also lead the national SECURE center.
Mississippi State University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the College of Charleston in South Carolina will also contribute to the program.
"We aim to foster the transparency and openness required by the academic research tradition while balancing the possible security risks to ensure work is protected," Schultz said in a statement.
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