President's Biography

Heather Wilson
President, The University of Texas at El Paso

Dr. Heather Wilson became 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 10 years.

Active in community and national affairs, she serves as a board member of the Texas Space Commission, was the inaugural Chair of the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities, and is a member of the boards of directors of Lockheed Martin Corporation and Google GPS.

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 master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford University in England as a Rhodes Scholar.

UTEP is located on the U.S.-Mexico border – in the fifth-largest manufacturing region in North America – and serves over 26,000 students with 169 bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs in nine colleges and schools. In the top 5% of public universities in the United States for research, UTEP is America’s leading Hispanic university.

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