The School of Professional Studies will move to a new, larger home in the Jewelry District over the summer, according to Karen Sibley, dean of the SPS and vice president for strategic initiatives.
Presently located at 200 Dyer St., SPS has outgrown the roughly 20,000 square feet of space that house its four executive master’s programs, said Brian Clark, director of news and editorial development. By moving just across the street into the fourth and fifth floors of a newly constructed building called the Innovation Center, the SPS will gain an additional 30,000 square feet of space.
The University signed a 15-year lease to provide space for SPS in the Innovation Center, The Herald previously reported.
The University’s total investment in the SPS’s move to the Innovation Center is expected to exceed $35 million, Clark said. This will cover the costs of the lease payments, capital improvements, furniture and equipment. SPS, which already generates its own income to support its staff and programs, will directly cover a portion of these costs, Clark added.
The new space will allow the SPS to house its full staff in one shared space and “serve our students with large classroom space and space for multiple cohorts of students to be in residence at the same time,” Sibley wrote in a follow-up email to The Herald. The larger space will also allow for the production of online course content and will improve classroom space for faculty, offices for student interviews and collaborative areas for small group meetings.
By moving to the Innovation Center, SPS will not only expand its location but also its program sizes. The move will allow the school to create new programs for mid-career students and employers searching for specific educational opportunities relevant to their teams, Sibley wrote. SPS currently offers four executive master’s programs in business, science and technology, healthcare and cybersecurity.
Use of SPS’s new space will not be limited to SPS students and staff. Other University organizations will be able to reserve the space for events like other buildings on campus.
The building, which was developed by Wexford Science & Technology, will also be occupied by Johnson & Johnson and Cambridge Innovation Center, a company that provides office space to foster innovation for startups and entrepreneurs, according to its website.
Sibley said that she is looking forward to the potential opportunities that will arise from being in the same space as Johnson & Johnson and CIC. “It will be a strong positive for our students, faculty and Brown in general to be in a building where collaboration with other enterprises, specifically CIC, is enhanced,” Sibley wrote.
The ground floor, lobby and common areas of the Innovation Center are designed to help “encourage the kind of collaboration and collisions where new ideas come from,”said Thomas Osha, senior vice president of innovation & economic development at Wexford Science & Technology.
The building’s location in the Jewelry District will make SPS accessible to professionals and “expose them to the kinds of activities growing in (the) building,” Osha said. “Whether they’re young startups out of the Cambridge Innovation Center, whether they’re companies that want to be near J&J or others, (the Innovation Center) continues to provide more opportunity for Brown to continue to grow this signature program.”
