Virtual groundbreaking marks milestone for UTSA downtown expansion
From SABJ:
The University of Texas at San Antonio is moving forward on its $90 million downtown campus expansion in a pandemic environment with a virtual groundbreaking for a six-story home for its new School of Data Science and the National Security Collaboration Center.
The 167,000-square-foot building will be on a site east of the downtown campus along Dolorosa Street on a site UTSA purchased from the city of San Antonio. It will abut the redeveloped San Pedro Creek and will represent the first major anchor of a broader UTSA expansion.
UTSA President Taylor Eighmy said the project will advance the university’s quest to be recognized as a research-intensive institution and also bolsters San Antonio’s national standing as Cyber City USA.
"This wonderful project is at the center of our efforts to expand our downtown presence, advance our contributions to workforce development and to further catalyze the development of the data science and cybersecurity business ecosystem here in our city," Eighmy said.
This project is indeed a landmark moment for Eighmy, who shared with the Business Journal more than three years ago his vision for big changes for the center city campus.
“We need to completely rethink what’s going on at our downtown campus,” Eighmy told me in November 2017, little more than two months after he took the UTSA job. “I think we can do something pretty profound … to create what I would call a giant collaboratory.”
The new structure, which Eighmy has referred to as a transdisciplinary building, will house the first School of Data Science in Texas, enabling UTSA to prepare more students for high-tech jobs. It will also allow government, industry and academic partners to work in unison to address global security challenges.
“The National Security Collaboration Center and the School of Data Science will attract the kind of talent and employers we want to see grow in San Antonio,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said.
The University of Texas System Permanent University Fund is providing $75 million toward the cost of construction of the new building, which is expected to be completed by July 2022. San Antonio entrepreneur Graham Weston has contributed $15 million to the project.
Weston believes UTSA’s downtown expansion will have a ripple effect on the center city.
“This is the biggest thing to happen downtown since HemisFair,” he said.
The School of Data Science will get nearly 86,000 square feet of classroom, laboratory and research space for some 6,500 students who are projected to take classes in the new facility by 2022.
UTSA will also house its 70-plus faculty members in cybersecurity, cloud computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence in the downtown building.
The university’s Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Statistics and Data Sciences, and Information Systems and Cyber Security departments will reside in the new facility, as will its Open Cloud Institute.
The National Security Collaboration Center will take up more than 81,000 square feet in the building, which will include space for laboratories, research and innovation.
The Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute will be housed within the center, which will also include space for collaborative work in various fields, including forensics, visualization and analytics, network security, and cyber training and workforce development, among others.
The building will be accessible to the community and home to a ground-level café, as well as a large, multipurpose event space.
|