Dr. Jeff Wilson is an AI Instructor in the Office of the Provost at Sul Ross State University, where he teaches AI 4042, "A.I. The Final (Career) Frontier." The eight-week course is open to graduating seniors in every major with no prerequisites and asks each student to build, run, and demonstrate a working AI agent for a real problem in their own field. Students who complete the build earn a university micro-credential. 

Dr. Wilson has spent more than two decades moving between the university and the startup world. He began as a Lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, did his postdoctoral research at the Harvard School of Public Health, and joined the University of Texas at Brownsville (now UT Rio Grande Valley) as an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and later Assistant Dean of the College of Science, Mathematics and Technology. In 2013 he moved to Huston-Tillotson University in Austin as Associate Professor and Dean of University College. He has taught and led at both a Hispanic-Serving Institution and a Historically Black University, and in 2011 the University of Texas System recognized him with the Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award, its highest honor for teaching across 13 instituations. 

In 2015 he left academia to found and run tech startups. He founded Kasita, a micro smart housing company that won the SXSW Interactive Innovation Award and sold in 2019; Jupe, an off-grid volumetric housing company backed by Y Combinator (S21); and No Cap AI, a Y Combinator (W23) platform for founders and investors that Audos acquired in 2026. Across the four startups he raised more than $25 million in venture capital. He is currently co-founder of Buddi AI, which builds AI coaching agents for field sales teams.  The course draws directly on that work: students will be taught in the tools out and most current each week of class. 

His research background is in environmental science and public health, with a focus on air pollution exposure and human health. He has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed publications, including work on particulate air pollution with more than 400 citations, and has led or contributed to more than $6 million in externally funded research and education initiatives, among them the $5 million Rio Grande Valley STARS program, the Health and Air Pollution in New Zealand (HAPiNZ) study, an air pollution and health study in Accra, Ghana, and National Science Foundation HBCU-UP and Ford Foundation awards at Huston-Tillotson.

His best-known experiment is The Dumpster Project, a nonprofit he founded in 2014, in which he lived for a year in a 33-square-foot dumpster as a public study in radical sustainability. The project reached tens of millions of people, drew coverage from NPR, Fast Company, CNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, USA Today, and The View, and led directly to his first company, Kasita.

Dr. Wilson holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science from the University of Canterbury, an M.S. in Geography (GIS) from Texas State University, and a B.S. in Industrial Distribution from Texas A&M University. Texas State University named him a Distinguished Alumnus in 2021. Before entering academia he worked at IBM and Ernst & Young. A sixth-generation Texan from the Hill Country, he divides his time between far west Texas and San Francisco.