AUSTIN (Aug. 24, 2012) — The University of Texas System Board of Regents on Thursday [Aug. 23] authorized a $45 million Academic Learning and Teaching Center to be constructed at the UT Health Science Center San Antonio. The 125,000-square-foot center will include a state-of-the-art gross anatomy teaching facility that is needed to train medical, dental, nursing and health professions students. It will also help relieve the Health Science Center’s nearly half-million-square-foot space deficit by providing additional classroom space and lecture halls.
The $45 million will come from Permanent University Fund bond proceeds. “We are grateful to the Board of Regents for their support of this project, which will enhance interprofessional education at the Health Science Center and allow us to educate more students,” said Kenneth L. Kalkwarf, D.D.S., M.S., president ad interim of the Health Science Center.
Medical students to be enrolled in a future independent, freestanding, comprehensive and research-intensive regional medical school in South Texas will benefit from the Academic Learning and Teaching Center. Fifteen additional medical students will matriculate at the Health Science Center beginning in 2014 under a separate medical student admissions track for South Texas, with this number growing to 50 by 2018. For these students, the first and second year of medical school will be at the Health Science Center, with their third and fourth year of medical school education at the Regional Academic Health Center in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.
In other action Thursday, the Board of Regents approved design plans for the Center for Oral Health Care at the MARC project, a $95 million Dental School clinical building that the board authorized in February. The 198,000-square-foot building will be constructed in the South Texas Medical Center adjacent to the Medical Arts & Research Center (MARC), the flagship patient care facility of UT Medicine San Antonio. UT Medicine is the clinical practice of the School of Medicine at the Health Science Center.
The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, one of the country’s leading health sciences universities, ranks in the top 3 percent of all institutions worldwide receiving federal funding. Research and other sponsored program activity totaled $231 million in fiscal year 2011. The university’s schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, health professions and graduate biomedical sciences have produced approximately 28,000 graduates. The $736 million operating budget supports eight campuses in San Antonio, Laredo, Harlingen and Edinburg. For more information on the many ways “We make lives better®,” visit www.uthscsa.edu.