"No better way to turbo-charge a research program."

“No better way to turbo-charge a research program.”

That’s how Greg Morrisett, Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech, described a landmark donation to Cornell University – a gift from Bloomberg L.P. co-founder and philanthropist Tom Secunda totaling $10.5 million over 5 years. It will support the creation of the Cornell Empire AI Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in partnership with the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

But what does this really mean, and *how* will it turbo-charge research? Glad you asked…

It might help to start with a definition of a “postdoc.” A post-doctoral student, often called a postdoc, is a person who just earned their Ph.D. and thus is a subject matter expert ready to transition from focusing on their degree to full-time research.

“Postdocs are force multipliers for the institution,” said Morrisett. “There is no better way to turbo-charge a research program than to add a group of post-doctoral researchers.”

Secunda’s gift will be used to fund 25 new, 2-year post-doctoral positions on the NYC and Ithaca campuses over the next five years. Cornell is looking for people who want to pursue new, groundbreaking AI developments across all disciplines, and these new hires will be focused exclusively on research conducted using Empire AI.

The postdocs will primarily focus on improving AI and machine learning in ways that serve other research. That includes everything from streamlining AI so that it requires less training data, solving for issues of bias, accountability, and transparency, and understanding security models for generative AI.

“Adding postdocs to a research community helps to scale up efforts and allows investigation into areas that otherwise wouldn’t be possible,” said Morrisett.

Cornell Tech is hoping to have some of these new hires on campus as soon as the fall of 2025, with the program ramping up to full strength in 2026 – just in time to start using the full power of Empire AI, which is set to be completed on the campus of the University at Buffalo next year.

The funding will also be used to host an annual public AI summit on the Cornell Tech campus starting in 2026. The summit will combine an academic symposium and an industry-facing event.

“Bringing in this wave of new researchers does two things,” said Secunda. “First, early-career scientists help make research using Empire AI more efficient by really diving into machine learning and improving the systems. Second, it’s a huge benefit to the industry in New York. Not only are we creating 25 new jobs that just weren’t there yesterday, but after two years in these roles, these will be some of the most high-demand experts in the field, and they will go to work in the industry or other academic institutions, growing the entire ecosystem of AI research in New York.”