"We don't think of the [Pennsylvania-New Jersey] border as significant," said Mark Greenberg, Drexel's provost. "We're a region here."
Though there is no overall "New Jersey strategy," he said, Drexel is gaining prominence across the Delaware River.
In 2009, St. Peter's University Hospital in New Brunswick became a regional campus for third- and fourth-year Drexel medical students to complete their schooling and do clinical rotations.
As of this year, students at Rutgers, New Jersey's state university, are eligible to apply to Drexel's medical school earlier than their peers elsewhere. They still must graduate from Rutgers, but they can secure Drexel admission during their sophomore year.
And for about five years, Burlington County College has been the only two-year college in the area where students with an associate degree can stay on campus and take classes with Drexel professors, then graduate with Drexel bachelor's degrees.
By all accounts, New Jersey has welcomed Drexel's interest.
For example, the Plasma Institute's labs on the entire fifth floor of the Waterfront Technology Center were built at no cost to Drexel, with $3.5 million coming from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority and $1.5 million from the federal Economic Development Administration. The institute also received $158,355 toward its 10-year lease from the $175 million fund that came with the 2002 state takeover of Camden.
The institute was crowded out of its space at 34th Street and Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia, according to its director, Alexander Fridman. But it also was attracted to working in the same building as the Applied Communications and Information Networking (ACIN) program, a business incubator Drexel started in Camden several years ago to develop technologies and products for military use.
"Most of our research is very much practical, applied sciences, the same as ACIN," Fridman said. "We have a lot of stuff to share."
