(Communicated by the Prime Minister's Media Adviser)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Technion Executive Vice President and director General Dr. Avital Stein and congratulated her on the selection of the Technion, along with Cornell University, to build an applied science and engineering campus in New York City.
Prime Minister Netanyahu said, "This is an additional achievement for the Technion less than ten days after Professor Dan Shechtman won the Nobel Prize. This is additional proof of the accomplishments of local technology, and a source of pride for both higher education and the entire State of Israel."
About the project
New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Cornell University President David J. Skorton, and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology President Peretz Lavie on Monday, December 19, announced an historic partnership to build a two-million-square-foot applied science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City. "Thanks to this outstanding partnership and groundbreaking proposal from Cornell and the Technion, New York City's goal of becoming the global leader in technological innovation is now within sight," said Mayor Bloomberg.
The campus will be organized around three interdisciplinary hubs: Connective Media, Healthier Life, and the Built Environment. Cornell will immediately offer Master and Doctoral degrees in areas such as Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Information Science and Engineering. In addition, after receiving the required accreditation, the campus will also offer innovative Technion-Cornell dual Master of Applied Sciences degrees.
The NYCTech Campus will host entrepreneurs-in-residence, organize business competitions, provide legal support for startups, reach out to existing companies to form research partnerships and sponsor research, and establish a pre-seed financing program to support promising research. The NYCTech Campus will also establish a $150 million revolving financing fund that will be solely devoted to start-up businesses in the City.
Cornell is widely known as a global leader in the fields of applied science, engineering, technology and research, as well as commercialization and entrepreneurship. Cornell is home to the top-rated Ivy League engineering program and is one of only a handful of institutions with top-10 programs in the key disciplines that drive today's tech sector: Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Materials Science and Nanotechnology, and Information Science.
Like Cornell, the Technion also has a world-class track-record in research, development and entrepreneurship. The Technion's departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are considered to be among the best in the world. The Technion boasts top ranking faculty members including Nobel laureates -the most recent, Professor Dan Shechtman - who just last week accepted the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Professor Shechtman is also well-known for his course on entrepreneurship, now in its 26th year and boasting 10,000 graduates. The Technion has long been considered a driving force behind Israel's emergence as one of the world's great centers of technology.
Israel today has one of the highest concentrations of high-tech start-up companies globally. In partnership with a strong community of incubators, private investors, venture capitalists, angel groups and entrepreneurs, the Technion's tech transfer arm, Technion Technology Transfer (T3), has filed an average of 300 new patents each year and annually nurtures innovative startups in sectors such as clean-tech, cell therapy, drug delivery, nanotechnology and others. Companies including Intel, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Yahoo! and Hewlett-Packard have established major operations near or on the Technion campus, where they can take advantage of the world-class research and students and faculty members of the Technion.
The Technion graduates currently head nearly half of the 121 Israeli companies on the NASDAQ, which have a combined market value of over $28 billion. More than 70 percent of the Technion graduates are employed in the high technology sectors that drive Israel's economic growth. Presently, Israeli companies headed by the Technion graduates employ 85 percent of Israel's technical workforce. According to a recent article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, there are approximately 4,000 start-up companies located around the Technion's home campus.
With the selection of Cornell/Technion now complete, the project is scheduled to move into the environmental and land use review process, expected to be completed by the fall of 2013. Groundbreaking on the first phase of the Roosevelt Island campus is expected by the beginning of 2015. A temporary off-site campus will be open in 2012.
