Welcome and Introduction

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us for this celebration.  Today is a very special day, as we dedicate the UT Education and Research Center at Laredo and expand UT’s mission to support this community and its students.  Today, three UT institutions are joining forces to create a center for training and education in some of the most vital health care fields we need to support all Texans.

We are pleased to have many guests with us today, and I especially want to acknowledge the high school students gathered with us as we embark on a revitalized mission to serve you, as you consider your future career opportunities.  Thank you all for being with us.

There are many ways to measure the impact of a life, and they are often insufficient.   This is especially true of someone who lived a life with the impact that Diana Natalicio had.   There are, of course, many of the usual ways to quantify the Diana’s impact --- growth in access and enrollment, UTEP’s impressive research growth, the economic impact of this vital campus—but I am convinced her most enduring legacy will be in the hearts and minds of not only the students, faculty, staff, and community members who she impacted, and there are many thousands of them, and which of course it will—but it will live on and impact the success of generations of students still to come, the ramifications of discovery yet to be made, and continued vitality of this community—El Paso and the Paso Del Norte region. 

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Welcome

Thank you, General Murray. It is a pleasure to be here with you today to kick off a summit that brings together academic, clinical and military experts focused on research that will continue to save lives and improve the care of those who serve our country.

As you move through today’s sessions, I have no doubt that the great minds who are sharing ideas and research with one another here today will propose meaningful next steps and new ideas for us to explore together.

This forum is another example of the important partnership between the UT System and the Army Futures Command. When the Army selected Austin—and specifically, the UT System Building—for its AFC headquarters, it cited the desire for proximity to innovative academic and research partners.

Introduction

Thank you Robert, for that introduction, for your leadership of TxEDC, and for being such a great partner to the University of Texas System.  Thanks to Chairman Daniel and everyone at the Texas Workforce Commission as well.

Texas’s greatest strength is its people, and we all want to make the most of that strength by making sure Texas workers – and by extension, Texas enterprises and organizations of all kinds – can compete, win, and prosper.

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Thank you, Montez, for the introduction and for inviting me to participate today.  It’s a pleasure to virtually be with you all.

President Jackson and I connected when he reached out through Linkedin, and I look forward to seeing all of you in person when that’s a thing again.  I wanted to provide a little background today on the UT System and how I think about and approach my job as Chancellor.

I’ve been in higher education for more than thirty years.  I’m not sure I remember why I got into it – I started my career on Wall Street – but I can tell you why I stayed.