InstitutionsCornell Tech
Cornell Tech is a revolutionary model for graduate education that fuses technology with business and creative thinking. Cornell Tech brings together like-minded faculty, business leaders, tech entrepreneurs and students in a catalytic environment to produce visionary ideas grounded in significant needs that will reinvent the way we live.
The Joan & Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute embodies the academic partnership between Cornell University and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology at Cornell Tech.
From 2012-2017, the campus was temporarily located in Google’s New York City building. In fall 2017, 30 world-class faculty and almost 300 graduate students move into the first phase of Cornell Tech’s permanent campus on Roosevelt Island, continuing to conduct groundbreaking research, collaborate extensively with tech-oriented companies and organizations and pursue their own start-ups. When fully completed, the campus will include two million square feet of state-of-the-art buildings, over two acres of open space, and will be home to more than 2,000 graduate students and hundreds of faculty and staff.
Our Mission
Cornell Tech focuses on creating pioneering leaders and technologies for the digital age, through research, technology commercialization, and graduate-level education at the professional master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral levels.
Our premise is that the rapid pace of innovation in the digital age calls for new approaches to commercializing university technology, new levels of strategic collaboration between companies and universities, and new curricula for graduate education. We are creating new academic programs that blend technical depth, business knowhow, design skills and a “builder” mindset.
Our History
In December 2010, the City of New York issued a challenge to top institutions from around the world to propose a new or expanded applied sciences and engineering campus in New York City. NYC offered to provide city-owned land, a seed investment of city capital and the full support of the administration in making this project a reality. The result was 18 proposals from 27 outstanding institutions from six US states and 8 countries.
In October 2011, the city received seven qualifying responses from 17 world-class institutions to the Request for Proposals, which sought a university, institution or consortium to develop and operate a new or expanded campus in the city in exchange for access to city-owned land and up to $100 million in city capital.
On December 19, 2011, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Cornell University President David Skorton, and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology President Peretz Lavie announced an historic partnership to build an applied science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City.
The selection of Cornell and the Technion – which pairs two of the world’s top institutions in the fields of science, engineering, technology and research – marked a major milestone. The proposal was ultimately selected due to its large scale and vision, the long and impressive track record of both institutions in generating applied science breakthroughs and spinning out new businesses, the financing capacity of the consortium, the focus of the consortium on the collaboration between academia and the private sector, and the overall capacity of the partnership to execute the project.
On April 22, 2013, Dr. Irwin Mark Jacobs, Founding Chairman and CEO Emeritus of Qualcomm, and his wife, Joan Klein Jacobs, announced a $133 million gift to Cornell University and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology to create the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute.
Our Home Campuses
The Cornell Tech network expands beyond New York City to the other institutions that help us pursue our mission every day.
Cornell is a private, Ivy League university and the land-grant university for New York State. Cornell’s mission is to discover, preserve and disseminate knowledge; produce creative work; and promote a culture of broad inquiry throughout and beyond the Cornell community. Cornell Tech offers degrees in conjunction with these schools:
When Cornell was preparing a bid for New York City’s Applied Science competition, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology was a logical choice for an academic partner. With Israel’s reputation as the “Startup Nation” and the Technion’s history of producing the country’s leading tech entrepreneurs, Cornell knew there was a common vision:
- Israel is home to the greatest concentration of high-tech startup companies outside of the Silicon Valley.
- Technion graduates comprise the majority of Israeli-educated scientists and engineers, constituting over 70% of the country’s founders and managers of high-tech industries.