On a recent Monday in a Westside building complex, Ahsan Choudhuri sat at the head of a long conference table with about a half dozen employees who have joined his new venture, an El Paso-based aerospace and defense technology company.<\/p>\n
Nearly all of them are in their 20s, have an air of quiet confidence and have been handpicked by Choudhuri for a single quality \u2013 indefinable by some, but recognized immediately by the former UTEP aerospace engineering professor.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe most important vibe that you sense, something that\u2019s special to El Paso, is the work ethic of the community that I grew up in over the last 25 years,\u201d Choudhuri said. \u201cThere is no match for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t have everything given to them. Every little thing in their life, they have had to achieve it,\u201d he added, casting friendly glances at the young people surrounding him. \u201cThat\u2019s my students, and that\u2019s El Paso.\u201d<\/p>\n
His reference to them as \u201cmy students\u201d is more than rhetorical. All except one of his 30 or so employees are either UTEP graduates who were under his academic tutelage or are finishing their degree at the university.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
From left: Lupita Nevarez, chief of staff and systems engineer; Matthew Quezada, lead hardware engineer; Angel Ortega, lead manufacturing engineer; and Ahsan Choudhuri, founder of ARC Aerospace.<\/p>\n
Photo by Herman Delgado<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t long ago when Choudhuri \u2013 the architect of UTEP\u2019s expanded aerospace initiatives \u2013 was ousted from his position as head of the school\u2019s Aerospace Center.<\/p>\n
Accused of authoring \u201cpotentially incorrect statements\u201d on a lucrative National Science Foundation grant, Choudhuri had the integrity of his work publicly challenged \u2013 a charge he adamantly disputes \u2013 and he was demoted.<\/p>\n
Despite Choudhuri bringing major technology grants and gaining support from elected leaders in El Paso, UTEP President Heather Wilson, with backing from the UT System Board of Regents, remained adamant that Choudhuri had to vacate his position as associate vice president of the Aerospace Center.<\/p>\n
Since retiring from UTEP in December, Choudhuri has thought deeply on his time at the university, finding pride in the opportunities he made available for students in this historically disadvantaged region.<\/p>\n
\u201cI took kids from El Paso ZIP codes and put them into the aerospace and defense industry, as shining stars,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Choudhuri has primarily focused on building his new company \u2013 ARC Aerospace, founded in July 2024 \u2013 and has actively avoided making any public comments about his exit from UTEP.<\/p>\n
Choudhuri, 54, recently sat down with El Paso Inc. to talk about his new company, his thoughts on leaving the university and his vision to bring El Paso to the forefront of national defense technologies.<\/p>\n
Q: How would you describe your new company? What is it doing, and how does that serve national defense?<\/p>\n
It is trying to tackle a very complex problem that our nation is facing, and it has two overarching paths.<\/p>\n
One is our ability to produce cheap defense systems. These are drones, and these are tactical missiles, both. Unlike those very expensive missiles, our missiles are under $10,000 and will be built in El Paso.<\/p>\n
We brought in something that I have been really working on, the digital metaverse.<\/p>\n
Everything we do in this company is done first digitally. Everything has a digital \u201ctwin\u201d for us. We are pioneers in using digital twin technology and digital infrastructure to produce systems. With our systems, we can produce and make systems digitally first before we ever bend a piece of pipe. That allows us to move faster.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Second, we also built a lot of artificial intelligence capabilities. We\u2019ve been blending the digital twins with artificial intelligence, plus the robotics.<\/p>\n
Our robotics are not like other industrial robotics. These are cognitively intelligent robots. It acts like humans.<\/p>\n
And do you know what\u2019s the name of my robots? It\u2019s called Diana.<\/p>\n
Q: After former UTEP President Diana Natalicio?<\/p>\n
We celebrate Dr. Natalicio\u2019s legacy. It\u2019s called the Diana Cognitive.<\/p>\n
Q: How is your company funded?<\/p>\n
The company is founded with my personal wealth. So I provided all of the initial money.<\/p>\n
This company doesn\u2019t take VC (venture capital) funding.<\/p>\n
I decided from the very beginning that I would do this differently. At this point, I don\u2019t want any of that external funding. This is funded by governmental work right now, a lot of government contracts.<\/p>\n
We have a lot of my own money in the company, initial infrastructure.<\/p>\n
Q: Explain the connection between the modern warfighters out in the field and the technology being developed by your company.<\/p>\n
Things have changed. The future war will be different. It will be fought with drones. It will be fought with low-cost defense systems, autonomous systems. All the work I have done in the last 25 years, I really need to convert it to support this new war doctrine, something different.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s the birthplace of ARC Aerospace. It is not replacing research and development. We do a lot of technical development, but we don\u2019t do basic research. We only do technological development.<\/p>\n
That directly converts to a system that the Army, Marines and all others can use.<\/p>\n
Q: When you first started at UTEP in 2001, what was your goal?<\/p>\n
The goal was to do something big, something meaningful for all the students around. When I was interviewing, I met a few students and they said, \u201cWe want to pursue aerospace. We want to do this, but we have no facility. Come here and help us to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then 9\/11 happened the same year, and everything was really difficult for me. I had trouble getting funded the first year. At one point, sometime in November or December 2001, I thought maybe I had made a wrong decision. I have no lab space. There\u2019s no laboratory that I can build.<\/p>\n
Q: When you started to feel those reservations about maybe making the wrong decision, what was going on at that time?<\/p>\n
It was a lot of struggle, not having funding.<\/p>\n
At the same time, I had students who were always attached to me, and they showed up in my office, and I said, \u201cI have no money.\u201d<\/p>\n
They said, \u201cIf you leave, our dream goes with you. You are the only thing we have.\u201d<\/p>\n
They said, \u201cYou have to promise that you will stay.\u201d And they were convincing, and I said, \u201cI will stay and I will try my best.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Photo by Herman Delgado<\/p>\n
Q: So the program was building up. How did things proceed?<\/p>\n
In 2014, I started working with my friend, U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar. She was concerned that graduates were leaving the region. She said, \u201cYou\u2019re graduating them, but they\u2019re not here.\u201d<\/p>\n
So I started to get into the economic development work. I got two major grants. Those types of grants never happened in El Paso \u2013 the Build Back Better, the NSF engine grant. El Paso never would get those things.<\/p>\n
It happened because we told the story about a community that needs opportunity.<\/p>\n
Q: Matching technology with El Paso\u2019s economic development, that seemed to be a successful formula. How did that push begin?<\/p>\n
That started in 2014. It was mainly pushed by Veronica.<\/p>\n
We did a lot of grants together. We got the EDA grant, all of the slow build up, all those things necessary to attract people here.<\/p>\n
What Veronica and I primarily worked on was to create the necessary infrastructure and ecosystem here that companies are interested in. In the beginning, I was trying to recruit some big defense contractors. Pretty soon, I realized that that would be a difficult task.<\/p>\n
Defense companies, 70% of the things they buy are from the outside, and they integrate, so there\u2019s a big supply chain. So then I realized that if I can build the supply chain here, it\u2019s the same impact.<\/p>\n
I started to work with a lot of small and medium-sized manufacturers. All my proposals with the Build Back Better, or NSF, were designed to support local manufacturers, taking them to a level so that they can compete.<\/p>\n
And to be honest, they were very, very good at doing that. Using the academic strength that I had, the talent I had here, and unleashing them to support local manufacturers is a recipe that you need to grow this community.<\/p>\n
Q: And how successful was that formula?<\/p>\n
We were starting to get very, very successful before all those nasty things happened.<\/p>\n
Q: You are referring to your demotion from UTEP and leaving the university. How disruptive was it when the UTEP situation happened?<\/p>\n
It was disruptive, seriously disruptive, in many ways. It was hugely disruptive for a few months, definitely trying to figure out what was next.<\/p>\n
Q: Can you elaborate on what was going on at that time, with the NSF issue?<\/p>\n
Most people like me would have just walked out of El Paso and gone somewhere else. But whoever was doing all those things miscalculated my resolve.<\/p>\n
When I was doing the NSF grant, there were like three levels of review. First is the written proposal, then the actual site visit, and there are two days\u2019 worth of site visits. You would not know how hard that site visit was.<\/p>\n
Every day, they looked at every little thing. They all participated in those site visits. The NSF didn\u2019t give me a grant based on just the proposal. There were three different site visits.<\/p>\n
So all that nonsense saying, \u201cOh, there\u2019s something wrong with the proposal.\u201d There were two levels of review after that, so that bull—- doesn\u2019t go anywhere.<\/p>\n
At the end, they took me into a small room and said, \u201cIt does look like this idea, this vision, is centered around you. What if you leave?\u201d<\/p>\n
The NSF, the lead NSF reviewer. Very simple, plain question, \u201cIt does look like you are the centerpiece of it, and if you leave, it falls apart.\u201d<\/p>\n
So I told him, \u201cHow can I satisfy you that I\u2019m not leaving El Paso?\u201d I called my wife and I said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you send my will?\u201d<\/p>\n
So she sent my will, and I told the NSF, \u201cLook what it says. It says that I need to be buried in El Paso. I don\u2019t think I can give you more guarantee than that.\u201d<\/p>\n
I told him that \u201ceven when I die, I have to be here.\u201d So, I guess we got the grant.<\/p>\n
Q: If I can take you back to your frame of mind when the issues with UTEP arose, and your demotion. It seems, correct me if I\u2019m wrong, that you did not anticipate that.<\/p>\n
It would be wrong to say I was not anticipating it. There were a lot of issues since the Build Back Better grant.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t have much support from the leadership. Part of me was very naive to not anticipate that, and that\u2019s my fault.<\/p>\n
It was hard for me. I\u2019m an academic. I\u2019m not a politician. This whole thing was handled like a political campaign. You know, going to the media and all the other stuff.<\/p>\n
But in the three weeks after that, I decided my mission had not ended.<\/p>\n
Q: At that point, you knew you were going to leave UTEP?<\/p>\n
Q: So you arrive at that conviction, that your mission has not ended. Your mission then became what?<\/p>\n
A couple of things happened. Sometime at the end of May, I sat with myself, after all the initial trauma was over. I sat with myself and said, \u201cWhat is my first priority?\u201d<\/p>\n
My first priority is my students. That\u2019s been the No. 1 priority all my life. I was trying to understand what\u2019s going to happen to them.<\/p>\n
Q: How did it feel stepping away from what you built at UTEP?<\/p>\n
I was sad sometimes, yes, losing my baby. But I got another baby.<\/p>\n
And having all those people come with me, almost all came with me here, I\u2019m much freer to do things I want to. I spend a lot of time with them every day, and so it is the same level of excitement.<\/p>\n
Our Defense Department partners are very, very excited. So we are very well regarded in the Department of War circuit right now because of the talent pool we have, and our ability to produce things so quickly.<\/p>\n
Q: Talk about the transition from UTEP to the private sector.<\/p>\n
It was a good run for 25 years at UTEP. But in the last few years, I\u2019ve also been thinking about how to exponentially increase the impact.<\/p>\n
And ARC Aerospace is the reflection of that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On a recent Monday in a Westside building complex, Ahsan Choudhuri sat at the head of a long…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63103,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[11170,33092,33090,33089,33091,4018,138,140,139,32939,4533],"class_list":["post-63102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-aerospace-technology","tag-ahsan-choudhuri","tag-arc-aerospace","tag-defense-systems","tag-digital-twins","tag-drones","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news","tag-university-of-texas-at-el-paso","tag-utep"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}