Aaron Cervantes is the Director of Strategic Partnerships for the College of Engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science with a concentration in Software Development. He is a proud alumnus of the MBA program of the College of Business Administration at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), and he also holds a master’s in information technologies from the College of Engineering at the same institution.

He has served as a consultant for the Labor Bureau in Mexico, worked at some of the largest telecommunications companies in the continent, and was CEO and founder of Cervantes Consultores, a consulting firm that provided organizational development and technological platform services to small and medium-sized companies.

His experience as an entrepreneur has allowed him to successfully  design and create many educational programs and is well versed in entrepreneurship education, innovation, and technology commercialization; in 2016, his work in this discipline brought international recognition to the Mike Loya Center for Innovation and Commerce, a joint research center from the College of Business and the College of Engineering, by the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers, when this unit was named Outstanding Emerging Entrepreneurship Center from more than a hundred nominees.

Additionally, his. work as an NSF I-Corps Core Instructor earned him a recommendation to serve as a Lead Adjunct Instructor for the CONACYT-NSF Binational Nodes in Mexico, a bilateral effort to replicate the success of the I-Corps program, where he oversaw training a new cadre of adjunct instructors for CONACYT.

Furthermore, Cervantes just helped secure $1.2M to help bring regional innovation into the marketplace, aiding the Borderplex region economic development and impacting the nation by helping UTEP become a new member of the NSF I-Corps Hubs initiative, the backbone of the National Innovation Network.