Welcoming the New Academic Year

The Polytechnic Institute of NYU’s 2011-2012 Academic Year is off to an exciting start – and not just because of the earthquake and hurricane that ushered it in.  President Jerry Hultin, addressing the NYU-Poly community at the October 12th Town Hall, shared a number of updates that position the Institute for continued growth and excellence.

Hultin started by welcoming NYU-Poly’s new provost, Katepalli R. Sreenivasan, and noting excellent new faculty hires – Juliana Freire, Claudio Silva and Justin Cappos, in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE); and Jonathan Viventi in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

“We are actively recruiting faculty for Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Bioengineering, Urban and other key departments and strategic areas of focus,” Hultin said.  “We want to combine the best of who we have with the best of the world.”  

NYU-Poly builds on significant strides made in recent years, including strong financial results, robust and growing student enrollment, a nearly $2-million increase in faculty research expenditures over fiscal year 2010, and a more than 35% gain in private support from donors over fiscal year 2010.  Further, NYU-Poly has elected seven new directors to its Board of Trustees in the last two years, all of whom Hultin described as “movers and shakers” in the business and technology arenas.

Hultin also highlighted significant progress that has been made in NYU-Poly’s continuing integration with NYU, including:  a major NYU initiative slated to move to MetroTech Center; representation by the president and provost in NYU’s Science and Technology Council; continued coordination on global programs in China and Abu Dhabi; and new undergraduate minors through NYU’s College of Arts & Science (CAS), Stern School of Business, Tisch School of the Arts, and Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. 

A significant exemplar of the integration is the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), a joint NYU-Poly and NYU proposal that answers Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s call for an innovative applied science and engineering campus which will lead to significant job creation and spur the formation of new companies and industries in New York City.  The Brooklyn-based CUSP would be interdisciplinary across NYU and NYU-Poly, and would incorporate a number of academic and corporate partners.

“With CUSP we are proposing a new urban infrastructure that would create smart cities around the world.   Leveraging New York City as the perfect laboratory, we would lead the development of the growth industries that will serve cities over the next twenty years,” Hultin said.

Additionally, Dennis Dintino, Vice President of Finance and Business Affairs, and Daniel Hernandez of Jonathan Rose Companies, shared the latest news on the i2e Campus Transformation, the capital plan to elevate NYU-Poly’s facilities up to world-class standards in support of the Institute’s academic plan.

Dintino opened with a reminder of the four core strategies of the Capital Plan: 1) renovate Rogers Hall, NYU-Poly’s largest and most robust building; 2) expand into MetroTech Center; 3) prepare the Jacobs Administration Building and Civil Engineering sites for redevelopment; and 4) invest in NYU-Poly’s existing assets on a continual basis.

With NYU-Poly’s expansion into 2 and 15 MetroTech Center well underway, Hernandez explained that the remainder of 2011 through early-2012 essentially will mark a period of logistical moves that set the stage for the larger goals of the capital plan.  

In January 2012, most of the CSE and ECE departments will move to 2 MetroTech Center’s 10th floor, which will accommodate faculty offices, research labs and workspaces for post-docs, graduate students and department administration.  Also, in January, the final phase of the moves into the new administrative space in 15 MetroTech Center will be completed.  The plans for the 9th floor of 2 MetroTech, to be completed by the start of the fall 2012 semester, call for new classrooms of various sizes, faculty offices, a new data center to serve the entire NYU-Poly community along with CSE and ECE researchers, and “dry” computational labs for new faculty and researchers in those departments. 

With the pivotal moves into MetroTech Center set into motion, planning is being finalized for the space and programming requirements to house student services in the Dibner Building and student activities in the Wunsch Building.  The next priorities for the campus transformation will be the master planning of Rogers Hall to carve out new and expanded equipment-based and “wet” laboratories for new faculty hires, meeting classroom demand, and ongoing improvements of existing assets.

For more information, go to: http://engineering.nyu.edu/ct/