Director's Welcome
A very cordial welcome to the Mike Loya Center for Innovation and Commerce – where our vision is, “Innovation as a Mindset!” The Mike Loya Center strives to discover, study, develop, and deploy research innovations to the world of commerce, at the natural nexus between our Colleges of Business Administration and Engineering. To this end, we have focused our considerable resources on interdisciplinary research and cross-education, and broadened our vision to be inclusive of all academic and professional disciplines that may contribute to realizing this goal. Our new web presence is a bright and open window into this renewed emphasis. We invite your participation and contributions focused on innovation, as powerful drivers of discovery and collaboration that will define our success as a lightning rod for regional innovation and commercialization of university research.
The University of Texas at El Paso has attained coveted R1 designation in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education - one of only 130 (4.5%) top tier universities among the 2,883 four-year higher education institutions across the U.S. to earn this prestigious R1 distinction. We have joined the ranks of such universities as Stanford, M.I.T., Michigan, Arizona and California-Berkeley. Here at the Mike Loya Center, we are honored and delighted to be engaged in the breadth, depth and richness of inquiry and dissertation that are the source of this remarkable distinction – and be able to examine its alignment with similarly compelling research from across our region. This is the beauty and significance of platforms like ours, that can bring the creators of these ideas together to build new awareness and understanding, define new avenues of collaboration, and ultimately highlight new paths of discovery illuminated by our collective knowledge and experience.
I want to express my most heartfelt thanks to our devoted and faithful Staff, our brilliant and hard-working Research Fellows, Our Deans of Engineering and Business, and of course our dear President for their extraordinary support, as we have worked so hard to refocus and reinvigorate our Center. I am most grateful to our namesake and esteemed benefactor, Mr. Mike Loya, UTEP Alumnus, Engineering Gold Nugget, and world-renowned international energy authority, whose unsurpassed generosity made it possible for our Center to be established, and flourish.
I wish you all the very best, and look forward to an opportunity to collaborate with you!
Michael S. Garcia
Clinical Professor of Corporate Enterprise
Director, Mike Loya Center for Innovation and Commerce
