Northeastern said Tuesday it plans to enhance its satellite campus program this September by offering graduate classes in Seattle, Wash., where the university hopes to capitalize on the Puget Sound technology sector.

The Seattle campus will offer 16 graduate degree programs, according to a statement posted on the Northeastern website Tuesday. The offerings “will range from cybersecurity and computer science to health informatics and engineering.” Northeastern launched its satellite program last fall with a graduate campus in Charlotte, N.C.

“We are living in a period of knowl­edge explo­sion, and higher edu­ca­tion must do its part to develop the human cap­ital needed to power the indus­tries of today and tomorrow,” Pres­i­dent Joseph E. Aoun said in the statement. “Because of our his­tory and our link­ages to thou­sands of employers around the world, North­eastern is ide­ally suited to take on this challenge.”

In Seattle, Northeastern said, it hopes to integrate the graduate program into a technology sector that is “anchored by Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Boeing.” About 13 percent of professionals in the area have a graduate-level education, the university said, and it hopes to fill a gap by producing job-ready workers.

Like the Charlotte campus, the Seattle offering will follow what Northeastern called “a hybrid delivery model,” or a combination of classroom and online learning. Faculty will teach courses both at the satellite campuses and online.

A lawyer from Seattle, Tayloe Wash­burn, will serve as dean and campus exec­u­tive officer of the new branch. Wash­burn has served as an adviser to Wash­ington Governor Chris Gre­goire and was a former chair of the Seattle Met­ro­pol­itan Chamber of Com­merce, Northeastern said. He was named the 2012 Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment Cham­pion of the Year by enter­pris­eSeattle, an economic development partnership in the region, and the university views him as a “busi­ness and civic leader.”

Washburn said in an interview Wednesday that the university first approached him about the job eight to 10 weeks ago. After some research, he said he found that his vision aligned with that of the university’s, and he agreed to take the role.

In Seattle, “there’s not just a need, there’s a pressing need” for prepared and innovative workers, the new dean said. Based on almost any metric, he said, Washington does not produce enough employees to fill all of the region’s job openings.

“There is a dire shortage of engineers, of health informatics people, of biomedical folks,” he said.

The satellite campus will not offer undergraduate courses, but the university hopes to bolster its relationship with co-op employers in the northwest.

Washburn said the university’s plan to expand in Seattle offers a “net improvement” for all students. He said he hopes to establish new courses, and he said many co-op positions will emerge in the Pacific Northwest with the new branch.

“We’re going to have a lot more employment opportunities for students here at NU in an area where a lot of innovation is happening,” he said.

The expansion effort follows the theme of shifting away from “place-based” learning that Aoun wrote about last May in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Today a college or university increasingly is not just one place, but many places — a main campus, a satellite branch in a different city or state, an international outpost and a virtual-learning environment,” Aoun wrote.

Washburn furthered that idea Wednesday, saying “what you might call a residential university has some limit.”