Cornell Tech

Greg Morrisett serves as Dean and Vice Provost, overseeing the Roosevelt Island graduate campus. Dan Huttenlocher, the founding dean, remains the institution's most visible external figure, but stepped back from daily operations to chair OpenAI's board; his research and founding imprint still shape the campus's commercial posture. The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute operates semi-autonomously under its own director, bridging the Israeli and American tech ecosystems.

Cornell Tech itself does not operate a venture fund. It runs the Runway Startup Postdoc program — one of the longest-running academic startup founders programs in the Northeast — placing recent PhDs into a structured commercial cohort with seed funding sourced from philanthropic grants and corporate partners. Companies originated on campus have raised external capital from Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital, and General Catalyst.

The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute is a joint venture between Cornell and Israel's Technion, housed on the same Roosevelt Island campus. It awards dual master's degrees in Connective Media and Health Tech, with a curriculum explicitly designed to place graduates inside New York's venture-backed startup ecosystem. Its financing came from a $400 million gift that launched the campus, and its governance sits separately from Cornell Tech's standard CS and MBA programs.

The Tata Innovation Center hosts corporate research outposts from Google, Bloomberg, Verizon, and Ferrero, among others. These companies fund applied studio projects staffed by graduate students and postdocs, collaborating directly with faculty labs on machine learning, urban infrastructure, and media technology. The arrangement gives corporate partners early access to talent and pre-commercial IP while funding graduate education.

Standard Cornell University IP policies apply, meaning the university retains ownership of faculty inventions, but the campus has historically been permissive with spinout licensing — consistent with its founders' explicit goal to accelerate commercialization. Corporate-funded studio projects negotiate IP terms on a per-consortium basis, and PhD students who launch companies through Runway typically negotiate license agreements early, before asset valuations spike.