San Pedro II will open up in January 2026.. All renderings courtesy of Overland|Gensler
OCTOBER 19, 2023 — UTSA celebrated the groundbreaking of San Pedro II, also called the Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Careers building, Wednesday evening with an interactive event at the San Pedro Creek Culture Park. The event honored innovators and entrepreneurs, while marking the building as a new connection between UTSA and San Antonio’s tech industry during San Antonio Startup Week.
Attendees were asked to name an innovator or entrepreneur to honor at the ceremony as they each placed a floating globe in the creek. In attendance were Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai and San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who each made remarks during the event.
“Together, UTSA’s targeted development of San Pedro I, San Pedro II, and the Southwest Campus represent an exciting opportunity for learning, collaboration and innovation for residents of Bexar County,” said Sakai. “This new building and the programs it hosts will make Bexar County an even better place to work and live.”
Several public leaders and community members celebrated the groudbreaking of San Pedro II in Downtown San Antonio.
San Pedro II also represents that latest progression in a long-term vision for San Antonio, according to Nirenberg.
“Today marks another milestone in the achievement of a vision we could not even fantasize about 15 years ago, and that is having a major Tier One, Carnegie-recognized university in the in the heart of downtown San Antonio,” he said. “Here we are, on the creek, which is a confluence of waterways which we know, form bioscience, that’s where life takes place, is when organisms collide. The collisions that will be happening in our community because of this new school cannot be overstated.”
San Pedro II will allow UTSA to draw on the broad opportunities that exist in San Antonio to address the city’s pressing workforce needs, to connect UTSA students with experiential learning and career-engagement opportunities, and to provide training to prepare students for careers in interdisciplinary fields such as cybersecurity, computer and data sciences.
The work that this facility will house will build on San Antonio’s reputation as a high-technology hub, Nirenberg added.
“This building is going to make our city a great spot on the map when it comes to innovation and entrepreneurship, new technology, cybersecurity, all the things that we want to be a leader in in this world,” he said. “This building and what happens in this building is going to be a major part of that.”
An advanced facility for business, education and career preparation, San Pedro II will offer students additional interdisciplinary and collaborative programs in business, computer engineering, hardware/software development and sciences through immersive, experiential learning and professional development opportunities. Seamlessly integrated into UTSA’s Downtown Campus expansion, San Pedro II will work in tandem with academic programs and research collaborations in cybersecurity and data science offered across San Pedro Creek in San Pedro I by the UTSA School of Data Science and the National Security Collaboration Center, which opened in January of 2023.
“San Pedro II will greatly amplify our rapidly growing data science and cybersecurity programs next door at San Pedro I—creating even more opportunities for career-engaged learning and connectivity between our academic and business communities,” said UTSA President Taylor Eighmy. “We are deeply committed to workforce and economic development, and the collaboration that will take place inside both buildings will advance that commitment by fostering new knowledge creation and growing the talent pipeline for our city, region and beyond.”
The new building will be constructed on land purchased from the county to revitalize this historic area of downtown, which includes the recent redevelopment of the San Pedro Creek Culture Park and the future Continental Hotel revitalization. San Pedro I and San Pedro II will anchor UTSA to San Antonio’s prospering high-tech corridor and serve as a catalyst for economic and community investment in the San Pedro Creek area.
“The groundbreaking of San Pedro II is another exciting milestone towards UTSA’s vision to expand our downtown footprint,” said UTSA Chief Enterprise Development Officer and Senior Vice President for Business Affairs Veronica Salazar. “As part of our strategic investment in downtown, this building serves as an important connection between the existing UTSA downtown campus and San Pedro I as we create a corridor along Dolorosa Street where Roadrunners can learn, work, and make meaningful educational and cultural connections.”
San Pedro I and San Pedro II are part of larger placemaking efforts to connect classrooms and meeting spaces inside with the outdoor venues, public art and greenspaces along the creek, creating an ecosystem that supports students and the community.
Designed and constructed through the partnership of Overland|Gensler and Turner Construction, San Pedro II is expected to be 180,000 square feet with a total project cost of $131 million. With a focus on indoor/outdoor connections and reconfigurable spaces for multipurpose use, the building will be designed with innovation and adaptability in mind to serve UTSA students, faculty and staff downtown for decades to come.
Construction on the new building is expected to be completed in October 2025, with the building opening for students in January 2026.
UTSA Today is produced by University Communications and Marketing, the official news source of The University of Texas at San Antonio. Send your feedback to news@utsa.edu. Keep up-to-date on UTSA news by visiting UTSA Today. Connect with UTSA online at Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Instagram.
Students, faculty and staff are invited to join UTSA's delegation at the annual César E. Chávez March for Justice in downtown San Antonio. Free transportation will be provided from the Main and Downtown Campuses, and all university community participants will receive a complimentary commemorative t-shirt (while supplies last)
1310 Guadalupe Street, San Antonio, TexasJoin UTSA Libraries and Museums to learn more about the publishing discounts available for UTSA researchers.
Virtual Event (Zoom)PubMed is an essential database for anyone conducting biomedical or health-related research. This workshop will teach attendees how to effectively navigate this free resource and locate peer-reviewed articles using advanced search features, MeSH subject headings, and Boolean operators.
Virtual Event (Zoom)Join us for a hands-on workshop about the basics of copyright, both in education and as a researcher. We’ll dispel some common copyright myths, differences between copyright law and other intellectual property law, and teach you how to apply a Fair Use checklist to your scholarly work.
Virtual Event (Zoom)In this workshop, we will explore sentiment analysis, a method for identifying feelings in text, whether the tone is positive, negative, or neutral.
Group Spot B, John Peace LibraryThe Urban Bird Project at UTSA will discuss urban bird populations, conservation efforts, and how you can get involved.
JPL Assembly Room (4.04.22,) Main CampusLearn to use the simple but powerful features of EndNote®, a citation management tool. In this hands-on workshop, participants will learn to setup an EndNote library, save references and PDFs, and automatically create and edit a bibliography.
Virtual Event ( Zoom)The University of Texas at San Antonio is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge through research and discovery, teaching and learning, community engagement and public service. As an institution of access and excellence, UTSA embraces multicultural traditions and serves as a center for intellectual and creative resources as well as a catalyst for socioeconomic development and the commercialization of intellectual property - for Texas, the nation and the world.
To be a premier public research university, providing access to educational excellence and preparing citizen leaders for the global environment.
We encourage an environment of dialogue and discovery, where integrity, excellence, inclusiveness, respect, collaboration and innovation are fostered.
UTSA is a proud Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) as designated by the U.S. Department of Education .
The University of Texas at San Antonio, a Hispanic Serving Institution situated in a global city that has been a crossroads of peoples and cultures for centuries, values diversity and inclusion in all aspects of university life. As an institution expressly founded to advance the education of Mexican Americans and other underserved communities, our university is committed to promoting access for all. UTSA, a premier public research university, fosters academic excellence through a community of dialogue, discovery and innovation that embraces the uniqueness of each voice.
