New York University is planning a $500 million expansion of high-tech campuses in Brooklyn, school President Andrew Hamilton said.
The investment the university will make over the next decade builds on its existing NYU Tandon School of Engineering in Downtown Brooklyn, which has 5,212 students enrolled in white-hot fields such as computer coding and video game design.
The facility will add 500,000 square feet of university space by developing the former transit headquarters on Jay St. When it opens in summer 2017, it will nearly double the area’s 600,000 square feet of NYU space.
“Innovation and entrepreneurship have propelled Brooklyn’s economic trajectory and earned the borough bragging rights as the epicenter of New York’s burgeoning technology industry,” Hamilton said ahead of his planned talk at an Association for a Better New York breakfast Thursday in Manhattan. “NYU’s expanded presence in downtown Brooklyn will lead to innovative solutions to real challenges facing the world’s urban centers.”
NYU won a 99-year lease for the Jay St. building in 2012 as part of then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Applied Sciences NYC initiative. The mayor’s goal was to boost the city’s education options in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math — better known as STEM.
NYU will start moving academic programs into the Jay St. facility in fall 2017.
A $100 million gift from philanthropists Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon in 2015 is providing a chunk of the funding.
Officials said the Jay St. building will be the largest NYU facility in Brooklyn and will provide space for 1,100 students and 40 faculty members.
The existing Tandon Building at MetroTech Center hosts a variety of academic programs for younger students, in addition to college and graduate courses.
About three dozen public school kids were enrolled in one such summer program in 2016 called GenCyber. The free course covered cutting-edge subjects, including digital forensics.
