UTSA names first director of its National Security Collaboration Center

A few years ago, retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Guy Walsh came to San Antonio from Washington, D.C., to meet with high school students and their instructors through the Air Force Association’s CyberPatriot program.

Walsh, who worked in the Pentagon’s U.S. Cyber Command Center, toured a former automotive workshop transformed into a cyber lab, joined by Chamber of Commerce leaders and Brian Kelly, Rackspace’s chief security officer. The general was impressed with the students and the community and industry support provided to them.

Walsh stayed in touch with the students, many of whom landed good industry jobs and stayed in San Antonio.

Fast forward to this year, and Walsh is leaving his Washington post to move here as the founding executive director of the University of Texas at San Antonio’s National Security Collaboration Center.

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“The opportunity to come and leave the government and go into academia is something, always, as a career path I’d chosen,” Walsh said before a reception Wednesday at the UTSA main campus to introduce him to university, military, cyber industry and community leaders.

Since 2011, Walsh had been a strategic initiatives leader for the U.S. Cyber Command, a unified command of the Department of Defense. His projects have included the Cyber Command’s Guard and Reserve Directorate, its Cyber Guard training exercises and its Capabilities Development Group — all of which required collaborating with other governmental agencies and in some situations with private industry.

Collaboration between federal and state agencies and the private sector has been a big challenge, Walsh said, but a good portion of his time in the federal government was spent building those relationships.

“What I’m trying to do is actually build upon my responsibilities with U.S. Cyber Command and bring organizational networking and understanding about how we work” to UTSA’s collaboration center, Walsh said.

As the university stands up the center, Walsh said, he can envision students being involved with state and federal governments to find solutions to computer security problems, helping safeguard electoral processes, for example. He is also determined for the center to cultivate the industry in San Antonio to keep graduates in the area rather than see them move to Washington or California’s Silicon Valley.

UTSA plans to open the center downtown in 2022, university spokeswoman Christi Fish said. For now, Walsh’s office is on the main campus on the city’s Northwest Side just inside Loop 1604.

Walsh was among a national pool of candidates to run the center identified by an outside firm, Fish said. University leaders narrowed the list to three, interviewed them and selected Walsh.

“Simply put, Guy Walsh is a highly successful, highly disruptive leader whose steady hand has transformed our nation’s cyber strategy. He’s the kind of leader that universities dream about recruiting,” UTSA President Taylor Eighmy said in a prepared statement.

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Eighmy announced the collaboration center last year along with plans to transform the downtown campus, a project backed by city and county leaders, University of Texas System regents and private industry donors.

City Council unanimously approved selling property bounded by South Santa Rosa, Dolorosa, South Flores and West Nueva streets for $7.3 million to be used for the collaboration center and UTSA’s new School of Data Science.

Eighmy and other supporters have described the center as a cohesive ecosystem of government and industry leaders that students can be immersed in.

“They’ll be in the same coffee shops and working on the same problems as Dell and Rackspace … and have practical problems working with the government,” including the National Security Agency, Walsh said. “Having that immediate contact is a huge piece.”

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