Less than a year after opening its Roux Institute campus in Portland, Northeastern plans to open another new campus near Washington, D.C. to be closer to the federal government, according to a report from the Boston Business Journal.

The university is looking to lease around 17,360 square feet of a tower in Rosslyn, Virginia. The Boston Business Journal reported that the university received around $29 million in research funding from the Department of Defense, which is located in the same county as Rosslyn.

Matthew Weinstein, a lawyer representing Northeastern as it attempts to get a permit to use some of the space for classes, wrote in a letter that the school’s defense-related programs will benefit “from close proximity to government customers.”

This move is part of a decade of expansion beyond Boston. The university opened its first satellite campus in Charlotte in 2011, followed by a campus in Seattle in 2013, San Jose in 2015, Toronto in 2016, San Francisco in 2018, Vancouver in 2019 and Portland in 2020. NU also operates centers in Dedham, Burlington and Nahant in Massachusetts.

At the time of the Charlotte campus’s opening, President Joseph E. Aoun told Inside Higher Ed that the university’s goal was to bring high-quality programs to other parts of the country and to center programs in the places where their industries are located.

In recent years, satellite campuses have also helped to expand the university’s research capabilities.

According to the Business Journal, the Innovation Campus at Burlington, Massachusetts drove much of the $180 million in research funding that the university received in 2020. Vice President of the Burlington campus and Senior Vice Provost for Research David Luzzi told the publication that they “want to replicate many of the things we have in Burlington” and “that means executing research and having space for meetings with government and industry leaders.”