New York City’s Roosevelt Island is half a world away from the Technion’s home on Mount Carmel. But that is exactly the point, says Oded Shmueli, vice president for research, explaining why the Israeli university is embarking on an ambitious multi-billion-dollar joint venture with Cornell to build a new technology institute of higher education in New York.
New York City will benefit from the new university, drawing high tech businesses, and creating new jobs and new companies. But the Technion, also known as the Israel Institute of Technology, will benefit too by raising its profile in the scientific world and attracting new human and financial resources.
“If you look at science and technology today, it’s no longer a local affair. Our scientists cooperate with scientists worldwide,” Shmueli told The Media Line.
Shmueli was speaking a day after the city announced the two universities had won a heated competition to build the campus on a small island off Manhattan. Their joint proposal calls for spending $2 billion to build a campus of 2,500 students and 280 faculty with the aim of not just conducting research and teaching but acting as an incubator of high tech start-ups. The plan includes a $150 million revolving to fund to get them off the ground.
The Technion has had a successful history of morphing its academic research into commercial technology and in the process attracting technology start-ups and multinational R&D operations into its orbit. Its Alfred Mann Institute, set up four years ago, is dedicated to creating practical applications for medical-technology research.
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