Columbia Joins A Tech-Campus $80 Mil Party

The city predicts the new institute will have $4 billion in economic impact over the next three decades and generate more than 4,500 jobs.

Cornell and New York University won’t be the only schools working with cool startups. Columbia University is joining the city’s increasingly lively tech party, too.

With financial support from the city, New York’s oldest institution of higher learning is creating a new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering, becoming the third major school to take part in the Bloomberg administration’s Applied Sciences NYC Initiative. The agreement between the city and the university was announced Monday by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Columbia President Lee Bollinger.

It will lead to 44,000 square feet of dedicated space spread over existing Columbia locations and the addition of 75 faculty members over the next 15 years. The city will contribute $15 million in the form of debt forgiveness and discounted energy transmission costs. Columbia’s own investment in the project will come to at least $80 million.

Though not as dramatic a deal as CornellNYC Tech, the new institute grew out of the same international competition last year won by Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute, which are building a $2 billion campus on Roosevelt Island. The city’s request for proposals for that contest offered land and $100 million.

While Columbia missed out on the big money, the competition triggered a larger effort than the school might otherwise have made.

“Had we perhaps been inspired to compete for a $15 million prize, we might have been somewhat less ambitious in our initial approach,” said Columbia University Provost John Coatsworth, in an interview. “But by the time the smaller prize came in prospect, we had already done an enormous amount of work bringing together people across the campus and putting together the thinking that went into creating this Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. And even at $15 million, we can see how important it is to the future of the university.”

The new institute will develop five “centers” of focus: new media, smart cities, health analytics, cybersecurity and financial analytics. In its first phase, the school will use space in its new Northwest Corner Building and its current engineering building, both on its Morningside Heights campus. For the second phase, the institute will use 10,000 square feet, currently vacant, for a bio-research incubator in the Audubon building in Washington Heights.

The city predicts the new institute will have $4 billion in economic impact over the next three decades and generate more than 4,500 jobs.

Apart from the Columbia and Cornell projects for the Applied Sciences NYC initiative, NYU is leading a consortium of universities in building a Center for Urban Science and Progress in downtown Brooklyn.