At Gotham Foundry’s Sept. 22 launch event, leaders from across New York City gathered at Columbia’s Jerome L. Greene Science Center for the exciting debut, which included a biomaterials exhibition, a fashion show of bio-derived designs, and remarks from Gotham Foundry Director Helen Lu; Columbia University Provost Angela Olinto; Andrew Kimball, CEO of NYCEDC; Adolfo Carrión, Deputy Mayor for Housing, Economic Development and Workforce; Dr. Joyce F. Brown, president, FIT; Rosemarie Wesson, associate vice chancellor and university vice provost for Research at CUNY; and Neena Chakrabarti, PhD, who spoke on behalf of Genspace; as well as Janet Rodriguez, founder and CEO of SoHarlem.

Community partners from Harlem Biospace and Communitas America were also in attendance, along with faculty from the Gotham Foundry Materials Innovation Team, a transdisciplinary network of engineering and science faculty at Columbia, CUNY, and FIT. 

The featured materials exhibit, “Regenerative Vision,” showcased the work of more than 30 start-ups and research teams, demonstrating the transformative power of regenerative materials and green manufacturing approach in the industries Gotham Foundry will initially target: fashion textiles, construction, and healthcare. The event closed with young designers from SoHarlem, an incubator for cultural industries, sporting green fashions they had created as part of their entrepreneurship program with legendary designer Dapper Dan.

Gotham Foundry is initially located at Harlem Biospace at the Mink building in West Harlem. Its permanent home will be in a new Columbia Engineering building on the Manhattanville campus—currently in planning, and set to break ground in 2027 and open in 2030.

“We are thrilled to launch the Gotham Foundry with our partners and the support of the NYCEDC, led by Professor Helen Lu, a true pioneer in regenerative materials,” said Shih-Fu Chang, Dean of Columbia Engineering. “We are looking forward to creating a leading hub for biofabrication and the circular economy as part of a growing innovation ecosystem in Upper Manhattan, bringing together our own history of breakthrough research in sustainability with other academic researchers, industry innovators, and community partners in job training and education.”

“A bold vision for our future is that all human-made products emulate nature’s circular life cycle by demonstrating desired performance and being fully regenerative or degradable at the end of service. Establishment of Gotham Foundry is a major step in fulfilling this vision,” said Lu. “We are so grateful to the NYCEDC for supporting this project and our partners for their ongoing collaboration and commitment. We are eager to seize this opportunity to build a more sustainable future through the promise of novel regenerative materials, while boosting the city’s economy and training a skilled future manufacturing workforce.”

Today, the global market for sustainable materials is valued at $358 billion and is expected to grow to $800 billion by 2032. Advancing innovation in sustainable and biomaterials has the potential to transform key industries that drive New York City's economy, from fashion and construction to plastics and medical supplies. Researchers at Columbia and partner institutions will collectively share their knowledge and rich expertise to bring new materials innovations to industry and consumers. Gotham Foundry will serve as an ecosystem for innovation to fuel a green economy, not just for R&D but to cultivate startups, for education, training, and workforce development, and to become the centralized space open to creators and designers who seek access to a state-of-the-art facility and its resources. 

Through its tightly integrated consortium, Gotham Foundry is redefining how infrastructure and commercialization efforts are coordinated. Gotham Foundry will leverage existing infrastructure at Harlem Biospace (for biofabrication and biocharacterization, technical consult, materials library, and training programs), ASRC (for advanced and complex materials characterization),  FIT (for fashion prototyping, production, and design), and Genspace (for workforce training).

The new hub is expected to generate $5.12 billion in economic output over the next three decades and will create career opportunities for New Yorkers, including through workforce training programs for entrepreneurs and students. It is supported by LifeSci NYC, the city’s $1 billion initiative to create 40,000 jobs over the next 10 to 15 years, and puts into action the city’s Green Economy Action Plan, a vision that integrates economic and talent development in this space. Gotham Foundry will leverage Columba’s established partnerships with its surrounding community to create opportunities for students and job seekers interested in learning skills for the green economy and to empower the next generation of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

Lead Photo Caption: From left to right: Kate Ascher, co-director of Gotham Foundry (GF) and professor of practice of urban development at Columbia; Rein Ulijn, co-director of GF and founding director of the CUNY ASRC Nanoscience Initiative; Helen Lu, director of GF and Percy K. and Vida L.W. Hudson Professor of Biomedical Engineering; Theanne Schiros, co-director of GF and associate professor at FIT; and Neena Chakrabarti, board member at Genspace. 
Lead Photo Credit: Chris Taggart/Columbia Engineering

On September 30, Columbia’s hookup was completed: photons, the quantum particles that make up light, can now be distributed and detected from Long Island to Morningside Heights. Entangled photons, one of the cornerstones of quantum science that enable instant information transfer, will soon follow. 

The network will link different quantum devices, including quantum sensors and computers, that are under development at the partner institutions into a nascent quantum internet. At Columbia, it now reaches three labs: those of Gil Zussman, Sebastian Will, and Alexander Gaeta:  

• The Glue: Gil Zussman, Kenneth Brayer Professor of Electrical Engineering, provided access to the optical fibers needed to transport entangled photons; these fibers were originally deployed for the NSF COSMOS testbed. Seed funding from Columbia Engineering and the Data Science Institute allowed the team to expand the network to Qunnect in Brooklyn. An expert in classical networking and communications, Zussman will also help develop new protocols and standards to efficiently send information along the quantum network.
• The Device: Sebastian Will, associate professor of physics and co-PI on the NQVL grant, is developing quantum devices that will send and receive information via the entangled photons transmitted along the network. His lab has been pioneering techniques to trap individual atoms into arrays that can serve as quantum bits, or qubits—a rapidly evolving approach to quantum computing, one of the goals of the NQVL collaboration.
• The Translators: Alex Gaeta, David M. Rickey Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science and professor of electrical engineering along with Michal Lipson, Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering and professor of applied physics (and a co-PI on the NQVL grant), will make sure the devices at the network’s nodes, like Will’s atomic arrays, can “talk” with the entangled photons, which will be transmitted along the network’s fibers at a different wavelength than the devices can understand. Experts in quantum optics, Gaeta and Lipson have created quantum frequency converters that can change the wavelength of photons without breaking the entangled states that are essential to the network. 

“At Columbia, we are combining our expertise in networks, optics and photonics, and atomic physics to tackle open questions in quantum networking,” said Will. “Now the fun can really begin.”

Lead Photo Caption: Shivalee Shah, MS student in Quantum Science and Technology, and John Drogo, Electrical Engineering PhD student, worked with CUIT and Crown Castle on the fiber connection to Brooklyn.