New York City seeds tech campus

Cornell University and the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology will establish a graduate school for applied sciences and engineering on Roosevelt Island, a sliver of land in New York City’s East River between Manhattan and Queens. On 19 December, in announcing the winners of a city-sponsored competition for the project, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the campus will “educate tomorrow’s entrepreneurs and create the jobs of the future.” The city hopes CornellNYC Tech will become the heart of a broader set of initiatives to diversify the city’s economy and transform the city “into the world capital of innovation for the 21st century,” says Seth Pinsky, president of the nonprofit New York City Economic Development Corp.

“There is still a huge gap between the time scales of universities—decades and centuries—and the time-scale needs of the commercial sector,” says Dan Huttenlocher, Cornell’s dean of computing and information sciences and dean of the new campus. CornellNYC Tech is designed to “address this gulf.”

The CornellNYC Tech project is creating a buzz, but many details remain to be fleshed out. The plan is to build up over 30 years to some two million square feet of facilities, 280 faculty members, and 2500 students—which will nearly double the total number of engineering graduate students in the city. Old buildings, including a former smallpox hospital, will be razed, and new construction is set to start in two years. Move-in is scheduled for 2017. In the meantime, the first students are to start this fall in leased space. “This is a huge undertaking,” says Pinsky. “And it’s moving from 0 to 60 in what in the academic world is warp speed.”

Tailoring academics

Academically, the new campus will be organized around flexible, interdisciplinary hubs. The first three are dubbed connective media, the built environment, and healthier life. “These hubs are tailored to the types of industries that already exist in New York City,” says Craig Gotsman, the Technion’s deputy senior vice president in charge of academic development for CornellNYC Tech.

The hub themes may change over time “in response to changes in technology, and changes in the marketplace. It’s very different from a traditional university campus,” says Lance Collins, Cornell’s dean of engineering. “We are bringing faculty together now to sharpen up definitions.”

In the connective media hub, for example, researchers from computer science, electrical engineering, communications, information sciences, and other fields might work on topics related to advertising, media, entertainment, and banking. The built environment hub could involve work related to smart buildings, the electric grid, transportation, building facades, and the like. In the healthier life hub, work may involve epidemiological analyses, medical devices, and cyber-security of electronic medical records—but molecule design and pharmaceuticals were excluded in the city’s call for proposals.

For the healthier life hub, an example mentioned in the winning proposal is multiphoton devices developed by Cornell biophysicists Watt Webb and Chris Xu. “One is a small and flexible endoscope that can be inserted through natural openings,” says Xu. “The second is larger and rigid, and allows a doctor to examine surgical margins intraoperatively so they don’t cut out more or less than necessary.”

“Real goals in the real world”

To start with, faculty will come from the two home universities, and the first students will come from Cornell’s upstate base in Ithaca. In the longer term, researchers from Cornell and the Technion may spend stints of several years at CornellNYC Tech; others may split their time between their home university and the new campus; and the campus will also hire. All faculty will be tenured through a traditional department at one of the home universities.

The new campus will offer master’s and PhD degrees, and Cornell undergraduates will be able to apply to do research projects. Degrees may be through either or both of the founding universities; a mainstay of the academic program is expected to be a master’s in applied sciences through the collaborative Technion–Cornell Innovation Institute. A significant portion of degree work will be an industrial project in collaboration with a company, says Gotsman. “From day one, students will feel they are a part of the industry—not just in R&D, but also in the commercial, marketing, and entrepreneurial aspects. We want the student to feel he’s part of a start-up project with a real goal in the real world.”

“Every student will be assigned a professional mentor,” says Collins. “We are going to draw from our alumni base. We have thousands of people who would like to be mentors.”

Prestige, spin-offs, and jobs

Cornell is responsible for raising funds for the new campus. In addition to $100 million in seed money and the 11-acre site from the city of New York, Cornell starts off with the largest single donation it has ever received, $350 million from alumnus Charles Feeney. The total running costs over 30 years will exceed $2 billion, to be paid through federal and corporate grants and contracts, philanthropy, and tuition.

Cornell provost Kent Fuchs notes that CornellNYC Tech is “organizationally similar” to the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia (see PHYSICS TODAY, August 2007, page 33 , and November 2009, page 24 ).

For the Technion, which “is a bit geographically isolated and wants to interact better with colleagues in the US and Europe,” says Gotsman, it is advantageous to have a US presence. For Cornell, the Technion’s track record in spin-off companies is a plus.

Making New York City into a successful locale for spin-offs “is not going to happen by itself,” says Gotsman. “We don’t want to wait 100 years or take the risk of its not happening. This campus is designed in order to make it happen.” CornellNYC Tech has also promised to engage in outreach for schoolchildren and teachers.

According to an economic impact analysis carried out by the New York City Economic Development Corp, the new campus will create some 20 000 construction jobs and up to 8000 permanent jobs. Over the next 30 years, it will generate more than $23 billion in economic activity and some $1.4 billion in tax revenues. The corporation estimates that the campus will generate around 600 spin-off companies that will provide up to 30 000 permanent jobs.