After more than a year, NSF eliminates ‘suspended’ UTEP-led grant
by Daniel Perez August 13, 2025
Sign up for essential news about El Paso. Delivered to your inbox — completely free.
The National Science Foundation has officially killed the grant it awarded in January 2024 to a UTEP-led collaborative, which could have brought $160 million to the region.
The NSF deferred the initial $15 million award for the Paso del Norte Defense and Aerospace Innovation Engine in April 2024 so it could review the grant proposal.
The NSF’s web page on its grants shows that the UTEP grant, which had been scheduled to end in February 2026, was ended Tuesday, and the last of the original grant funding was withdrawn. None of the $15 million was ever spent.
Officials from the University of Texas at El Paso and the NSF did not respond to requests for comments.
UTEP has stated that the application had “incorrect statements” and used that as a reason to demote the grant’s principal investigator, Ahsan Choudhuri, who had been associate vice president of UTEP’s Aerospace Center.
Choudhuri, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, had secured tens of millions of research dollars for the university since 2014. He plans to go on leave at the end of this month and retire in December.
The professor declined to comment on the grant’s change of status. Through his attorney, he has maintained that the proposal had “no meaningful or material incorrect statement of flaw” that should warrant a suspension.
UTEP’s Shery Welsh, executive director of the Aerospace Center, and Ahmad Itani, vice president for Research and Innovation, did not respond to requests for comment from El Paso Matters. Kenith Meissner II, dean of the College of Engineering, said he would coordinate his response with UTEP’s Division of Marketing and Communications. Neither he nor the university has responded.
Ryan Wicker, the proposal’s co-principal investigator, did not respond to a request for comment. The founder and former director of UTEP’s W.M. Keck Center for 3D Innovation, and professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Wicker retired in November 2024.
An official with the NSF Office of Inspector General told El Paso Matters in an email that her office cannot comment on the status of the grant. Last May, the office stated that it could not confirm nor deny whether there had been an investigation into the UTEP proposal.
READ MORE: 1 year later: NSF suspension of UTEP-led aerospace grant remains mystery
Among the grant’s goals were to support government, industry, nonprofits and academia in research and development of concepts, procedures and technologies to lift the region’s commercial prospects.
The project was to have involved 18 partners from eight counties in West Texas and Southern New Mexico. They included the city and county of El Paso, Spaceport America, Workforce Solutions Borderplex, El Paso Community College, the Rio Grande Council of Governments, and the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining.
The U.S. Economic Development Administration had designated six of the eight counties – Sierra and Doña Ana in New Mexico, and Hudspeth, El Paso, Culberson and Presidio in Texas – as Persistent Poverty Counties because the poverty rates stayed above 20% for at least 30 years.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
