|
Marist Awarded $5 Million State Grant for new Economic Development Center
State Senator Stephen M. Saland has secured a $5 million capital grant from the State of New York to create a center in a new technology building on the Marist campus that will encourage economic development in the ten-county Hudson River Valley region. The center will support research and development, testing, and business incubation. Senator Saland announced the award at a news conference at Marist this morning.
"Marist College has the technology platform, the brainpower, and a long history of collaboration with the community to ensure the success of this venture," said Saland. "The center will promote the Hudson River Valley's identity as a high-tech corridor and will be a means by which we can bolster New York State's technical and business talent pool and competitiveness for decades to come."
The new technology building will be constructed on land owned by the College. A portion of the facility will provide local entrepreneurs, technology start-ups, and small business owners with an innovative environment for turning their ideas, research, and business plans into reality.
Some of these amenities include research and development laboratories, high-tech education and training facilities, collaborative workspace for joint projects, testing facilities for technology transfer, and an executive presentation center. It will also provide access to academic expertise and some of the most advanced IBM server technologies and Cisco networking systems in the world.
The new building will also house Marist Computer Science and Information Technology faculty conducting research, as well as many of the existing regional and global technology initiatives for which Marist has earned a leading reputation, including the Center for Collaborative and On-Demand Computing, sponsored by the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research; the Open Source Development Lab, one of only three such facilities in the world; the Institute for Data Center Professionals, supported by a National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation grant; and the IBM-Marist Joint Study Project.
"Marist has proven its leadership in educating next-generation
innovators by equipping them for change, supporting collaborative creativity, encouraging entrepreneurship, and investing in frontier research," said Marist President Dennis J. Murray. "This new center will place the Hudson River Valley in the forefront of achieving the Council's goals and energizing even more innovation in this part of New York State."
Earlier this year, Marist was named one of the 25 "most connected campuses in America" by Forbes and The Princeton Review. A comprehensive liberal arts college, Marist has also been recognized nationally for its student and faculty research and has been consistently rated among the nation's most select colleges and universities by Barron's, U.S. News & World Report, The Princeton Review, and other publications. Marist was also named a "Campus Technology Innovator" in the August edition of Campus Technology magazine and was the first college or university in the United States to become a partner in the World Community Grid, providing researchers with extensive computational power for solving complex global problems.
| 
