Top row: Deborah Armstrong, Harry Tracy
Bottom row: Gary Bridges, Ali Tosun, Yufeng Wang, Shouhuai Xu, Lorenzo Brancaleon

College of Sciences welcomes new administrators, faculty

(Nov. 4, 2003)--The UTSA College of Sciences welcomes three new administrators and four new faculty members.

Deborah Armstrong was appointed interim dean of the college, replacing William Scouten, who accepted the newly created position of associate vice president for research and development.

Harry Tracy was named interim associate dean for the College of Sciences at the Downtown Campus, replacing Armstrong. Tracy, who teaches undergraduate courses in biology, physiology and pathology at the Downtown Campus, has contributed nationwide to projects studying the response of blood components to chronic stress, physiological testing of protective clothing and laser-technology research.

Joining Armstrong at the 1604 Campus is Gary Bridges, newly appointed assistant dean of the College of Sciences. Bridges most recently served as adjunct professor of accounting in the College of Business and director of the Small Business Development Center Information Clearinghouse at the UTSA Institute for Economic Development.

Additionally, four new assistant professors came to the physics and astronomy, computer science and biology departments.

Lorenzo Brancaleon, who will conduct research in molecular biophysics, received his doctoral degree in biophysics from the University of Parma in Italy.

Ali Tosun and Shouhuai Xu joined the Department of Computer Science. Tosun will research multimedia networking, multimedia security, applications of multimedia and security in databases. Xu's research interests include provable security of cryptographic protocols, construction of secure and survivable systems, secure electronic commerce and intrusion detection.

Tosun received his doctoral degree from Ohio State University and Xu received his doctorate from Fudan University in Shanghai, China.

Yufeng Wang is the latest addition to the Department of Biology faculty. She received her doctoral degree from Iowa State University. Her research interests include bioinformatics and computational biology, comparative functional genomics, evolution of gene networks, and evolutionary mechanisms and population genetics of infectious diseases.

--Kris Rodriguez