USU and UVU Awarded $5M from State to Prepare Students to Tackle Challenges in Emerging Tech Sector

In an effort to advance and secure Utah’s emerging technology sector, the Utah Legislature has funded an initiative that partners Utah State University and Utah Valley University with leading local industry partners to produce students who are trained to anticipate both opportunities and emerging security challenges in the technology sector.

The Deep Technology Talent Initiative (DTTI) recently awarded $5,013,900 to the Intermountain Intelligence, Industry, and Security Consortium (I3SC), a university-industry partnership led by USU’s Center for Anticipatory Intelligence and UVU’s Center for National Security Studies.

With the appropriation, the I3SC will create a multifaceted academic pipeline program available to students at both institutions. These students will obtain cross-disciplinary credentials preparing them to work in Utah’s tech sector as innovators able to think through the full range of complexity about potential security challenges.

Program offerings will be coordinated, complementary and stackable across both UVU and USU. The areas of study include secure computing, artificial intelligence, security analytics, cybersecurity, anticipatory intelligence and security studies.

“Our state and country face a wide range of challenges and the need for smart, skilled, and experienced professionals is greater than ever,” said Ryan Vogel, director of the Center for National Security Studies at Utah Valley University. “The I3SC consortium between UVU, USU and Utah industries will be a major player in preparing the workforce that can meet these challenges and help secure Utah’s emerging technology sector.”

The I3SC’s key industry partners include Adobe, AgilePQ, FireEye, Fortem Technologies, Northrop Grumman, USU’s Space Dynamics Lab and Strider. These organizations will provide students the opportunity to gain direct work experience through internships, capstones and laboratory work in applying resilience design and industry intelligence tools.

“The next advancement in higher education requires us to play as a team,” said Jeannie Johnson, director of the Center for Anticipatory Intelligence at USU. “USU is excited to lead out alongside UVU in creating a leading-edge learning team — the I3SC consortium — that includes industry, state and federal partners working together in unprecedented ways to prepare our graduates to be leaders in innovation, security and resilience."

Currently, hundreds of students throughout the state are already participating in both USU and UVU’s respective programs. The consortium will increase cooperative efforts to equip students with an even broader skillset and provide a workforce to Utah companies operating in unstable global environments.

Industries are being confronted with a major rise in disruptions in many forms: from cyberattacks, often occurring with the support of adversarial foreign governments; interruption or manipulation of critical components in emerging technology development and production lines; and biological threats from another pandemic or the malicious use of biotechnology. Like the rest of society, emerging technology industries are facing threats to their supply chains and processes from natural disasters ranging from increasingly common severe drought and major wildfires to rare but potentially devastating events such as earthquakes or an extreme space weather event. I3SC academic programs will equip students with the broadened perspective and skill sets to help build more resilient industries and drive innovation forward.

About Utah State University

Since its founding in 1888, Utah State University has evolved from a small agricultural college tucked away in the Northern Utah mountains to a thriving, multi-campus research university known throughout the world for its intellectual and technological leadership. Utah State is a premier student-centered land-grant and space-grant university that fosters the principle that academics come first by cultivating diversity of thought and culture, and by serving the public through learning, discovery and engagement.

About Utah Valley University

At Utah Valley University, we believe everyone deserves the transforming benefits of high-quality education — and it needs to be affordable, accessible, and flexible. With opportunities to earn certificates to master’s degrees, our students succeed by gaining real-world experience and developing career-ready skills. As we celebrate the milestone of our 80th anniversary in 2021, we continue to invite people to come as they are — and leave ready and prepared to make a difference in the world. For more, visit uvu.edu or follow us on Instagram or Facebook.