(San Antonio)--The University of Texas at San Antonio's Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) has been selected to participate in a five-year, $7.5 million Department of Defense Multi University Research Initiative (MURI) grant.

Leading the UTSA team of investigators is Ravi Sandhu and Shouhuai Xu. Sandhu holds multiple positions as executive director of ICS, Lutcher Brown Endowed Chair in Cyber Security and as a professor in the UTSA Department of Computer Science. Xu serves as an assistant professor of computer science in the UTSA Department of Computer Science.

In partnership with The University of Maryland at Baltimore County, Purdue University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, and The University of Texas at Dallas, UTSA's Institute for Cyber Security Research role will be to develop and test security models to safeguard the transfer of data among government agencies.

"In this post 9/11 era, we need to move from the doctrine of a 'need to know' policy of information gathering to a more proactive one of 'need to share', where people are readily seeking and receiving information," said Sandhu. "One of the problems identified in the 9/11 Commisssion Report, was the inability of people to connect the dots, in part due to the lack of information sharing."

The UTSA Institute for Cyber Security was created in June 2007 with a $3.5 million grant from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. This award was the first proposal submitted by the ICS and will bring $1 million directly to UTSA. The ICS mission is to produce world-class cybersecurity research and to catalyze the commercialization of leading edge security and privacy innovations.

As a nationally recognized leader in cyber security education and research, UTSA's Institute for Cyber Security is one of several components in San Antonio's effort to attract the Air Force's Cyber Command center which could add 500 permanent jobs to the local economy.

MURI grants support multi-disciplinary basic research in areas of DoD relevance that intersect more than one traditional science and engineering discipline. For research areas suited to a multi-disciplinary approaches, bringing together scientists and engineers with different disciplinary backgrounds can accelerate both basic research progress and transition of research results to application.

The University of Texas at San Antonio is one of the fastest growing higher education institutions in Texas and the second largest of nine academic universities and six health institutions in the UT System. As a multicultural institution of access and excellence, UTSA aims to be a premier public research university providing access to educational excellence and preparing citizen leaders for the global environment.

UTSA serves more than 28,500 students in 64 bachelor's, 44 master's and 20 doctoral degree programs in the colleges of Architecture, Business, Education and Human Development, Engineering, Honors, Liberal and Fine Arts, Public Policy, Sciences and Graduate School. Founded in 1969, UTSA is an intellectual and creative resource center and a socioeconomic development catalyst for Texas and beyond.