At a Glance
Fast Facts
The University of South Florida St. Petersburg is Pinellas County’s only residential, public research institution. Located on Bayboro Harbor and in the heart of downtown, the campus offers more than 40 undergraduate and graduate programs. USF St. Petersburg has many of the advantages of a large public university while maintaining the ability to offer small class sizes in a close-knit learning environment.
Many USF St. Petersburg students take the opportunity to engage in research and internships, and have done everything from working on presidential primary campaigns to creating startups to researching the abundance and distribution of microplastics in Tampa Bay.
The campus is home to a number of student organizations, from the Co-Ed Sailing Team to the Puppy Raisers Club.
New state-of-the-art facilities include a STEM robotics lab that infuses teaching with the latest in science, technology, education and math, a Wealth Management Center equipped with the resources and technology utilized by financial experts around the world and a new residence hall that includes the campus’ first full service dining facility.
Entrepreneurs Kate Tiedemann and Ellen Cotton donated $10 million in 2014 to name the USF St. Petersburg campus School of Business and Finance, pledged an additional $3 million in 2019 to endow the campus dean’s position within the school and another $14 million in 2022 to make USF a hub of fintech education and innovation.
Research
Our award-winning faculty have earned grants from major funding agencies and organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Archives.
Faculty members have taken part in a variety of exciting endeavors, including: being part of the first team to film the elusive giant squid in U.S. waters, writing books that have become national PBS documentaries, conducting cutting edge research on Alzheimer's disease and launching apps that track flood conditions in real time.
Sustainability
USF St. Petersburg is committed to environmental stewardship. We strive to improve the environment by funding renewable energy projects, building green, improving energy efficiency, saving water, planting native species and more. Each project or activity also provides an opportunity for educating students, our campus and the community.
Major sustainability projects and accomplishments include:
- More than 140kW of on-site solar energy that helps to power our parking garage and a portion of our Warehouse Laboratory that contain biology and physics labs. This includes a 100-kW solar array and a 200-kW Tesla battery storage system installed in partnership with Duke Energy on top of our 5th Avenue Parking Facility.
- A new partnership between USF St. Petersburg and the City of St. Petersburg will bring an industrial-sized composter to campus to process food waste and produce nutrient-rich compost for the community.
- The campus also features a number of EV charging stations, outdoor study and collaboration stations with solar-powered charging capabilities, a butterfly garden that contains native Florida plants and a bike-share program.