In 2022, Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul unveiled plans for Science Park and Research Campus (SPARC) Kips Bay, a state-of-the-art jobs and education hub in New York City. SPARC will transform Hunter College’s Brookdale Campus with an ambulatory care center, health care training simulation centers, an NYC Public Schools high school with health and science focus, and more. Driven by historic investment from the city and state, SPARC Kips Bay will make New York a global leader in creating and attracting accessible jobs in life sciences, health care, and public health by creating a pipeline from local public schools to careers in these growing and essential fields. New York City’s health care sector employs over 750,000 New Yorkers, and the metropolitan area’s life sciences sector is a rapidly growing industry with nearly 150,000 additional jobs in recent years. The city estimates the campus’s new commercial lab space will create about 2,000 quality jobs and attract new companies and startups, leading to additional good-paying jobs in the health care and life sciences fields.

 

During this walking tour, participants will have the opportunity to tour the Brookdale campus, visit a working laboratory, and learn more about the next stages of the SPARC project and how the city and state are working together to support the life sciences industry in New York City.

It has been almost 12 years since New York City launched the Applied Sciences NYC initiative, a once-in-a-generation investment in higher education with the aim of ensuring NYC remains one of the world's premier economic hubs for the future. The initiative involved the creation of three new campuses across the city—the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute on Roosevelt Island, the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress in Downtown Brooklyn, and the Columbia University Data Science Institute in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. The city offered over 12 acres of city-owned land at Roosevelt Island, a seed investment of $100 million of city capital, and the full support of the administration. The cost to the city was significant, but the impact was expected to be enormous ($33 billion overall economic impact, 1,000 spin-off companies, and 48,000+ jobs over three decades). How successful has this initiative been thus far and will it be worth the investment? What were the lessons learned? How can other cities leverage their higher education institutions to create a strong commercialization pipeline, from academia to industry, to create more jobs?

In 2011, Cornell Tech emerged as the winner of a global contest—Mayor Bloomberg’s Applied Sciences NYC Initiative—that was designed to dramatically expand the city’s capacity in the applied sciences sector to maintain the city’s global competitiveness and create jobs. The winning bid by Cornell Tech, a partnership between Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, proposed the development of a 2-million-square-foot innovative science campus on Roosevelt Island, which will serve more than 2,000 graduate students and hundreds of faculty and staff upon its completion. By 2017, the $1 billion, 850,000-square-foot first phase opened, boasting a net-zero academic building, a striking co-location office building, a 40,000-square-foot conference center, a 224-room hotel and a residential tower with 350 apartments in the largest Passive House tower in the world at the time of its opening. The campus embodies New York’s commitment to technology’s growing impact in New York City. Discover Cornell Tech: NYC’s thriving innovation hub!