HOUSTON, Texas — UTHealth Houston held a ribbon-cutting Wednesday for the new home of its School of Public Health in Houston, a 10-story tower beside the Texas Medical Center’s Helix Park campus.
The building at 1930 Old Spanish Trail covers about 350,000 square feet. It pulls together classes and research that had been split among three separate buildings, and it adds a teaching kitchen, dedicated nutrition research space and a broadcast studio for a new public health communications program.
Students began using the tower when the fall term opened on Aug. 31. Labs inside back research on genetics, epidemiology, behavioral science and infectious disease, and a skybridge will link the school to a research center next door. The design collects rainwater for irrigation and leans on natural light.
The tower also serves the school’s regional campuses in San Antonio, El Paso, Dallas, Austin and Brownsville, whose students will reach Houston classmates and professors through upgraded distance-learning equipment.
Crews broke ground in June 2023. Kirksey Architecture and Smith Group drew up the plans, and Vaughn Construction served as general contractor.
Founded in 1967, the school was the first public health school in Texas. It now teaches through five academic departments, including biostatistics and data science, epidemiology, and management, policy and community health, and its enrollment has climbed 27 percent over the past five years.
School leaders see demand ahead for those graduates. Jagat Narula, an executive vice president at UTHealth Houston, has estimated that public health agencies at the state and local level must fill at least 80,000 jobs in the coming years.
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