Testimony of President Shirley Strum Kenny
New York State Commission on Higher Education
Public Hearing
November 15, 2007
Garden City, NY

President Rawlings and distinguished members of the Commission, I am pleased to have the opportunity to testify before you today. I am President of Stony Brook University, now celebrating its 50th anniversary. In 1960, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the State Board of Regents challenged the leaders of Stony Brook to build a university that would "stand with the finest in the country." I am proud to say that in this remarkably short period of time we have met that challenge. Stony Brook University, the only comprehensive research university on Long Island, is recognized as one of the top 2 per cent of universities worldwide.

Stony Brook's research enterprise is extensive. Our federal research expenditures were $184 million in FY2006-7, the most of any SUNY campus, and during the last decade we have brought in 95 per cent of all SUNY royalties, approximately $137 million, ranking between 12th and 20th in the country each year. We boast three faculty members who have won the Nobel Prize, and this year three more faculty were among the researchers honored by the Nobel Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Stony Brook is the only university in the metropolitan region that manages a national research laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, which now houses Stony Brook's recently acquired super computer "Big Blue," one of the nation's top five computers outside the Department of Defense. We are the biggest outside user of Brookhaven's extraordinary research facilities; we also have a number of faculty on joint appointments between Brookhaven and Stony Brook. Our graduate students and even some undergraduates have the opportunity to work on research projects at the Lab.

We also collaborate on research and education with Long Island's other great research center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Our three institutions work closely together and already have a distinguished record of producing ground-breaking research in New York. This was demonstrated most recently by the monumentally significant discovery of a way to image a biomarker of neural stem and progenitor cells in the living human brain, an enormously important achievement by researchers collaborating across the three world-class institutions.

This partnership presents the State an extraordinary opportunity. The three institutions are unique in our geographic proximity and the cooperative nature of our work, rivaled only by the highly successful University of California system that integrates the UC-Berkeley campus and nearby Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. With Stony Brook's acknowledged strengths in mathematics, computer sciences, engineering, and the 'hard sciences'; Brookhaven's great minds and machines, like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the proposed National Synchrotron Light Source-II, and the new Center for Functional Nanomaterials; and Cold Spring Harbor's impressive record of achievement in genomics, life sciences, and neuroscience, our region and institutions have the potential for even greater innovative research, burgeoning commercial enterprise, and inspiring teaching and mentoring. The synergy of federal, state and private world-class institutions is unmatchable elsewhere-only New York can boast such a constellation.

The three Stony Brook incubators and the new Stony Brook Research and Development Park will take many discoveries to the next level. Already we are building facilities in the Research and Development Park for collaborative work on wireless technology and advanced energy. This 246-acre campus will enable the transition from discovery to development, providing the base for corporate growth in high technology and biotech fields.

The opportunity for SUNY and Stony Brook to have such a leadership role is unprecedented. In order to seize such opportunities, a research campus requires funding comparable to that of other great research universities, to recruit and retain faculty at all ranks, purchase equipment, and support talented graduate students and post-doctoral scientists. On Long Island a new era of research enterprise and entrepreneurship has already begun to create companies and offer solutions to world-wide environmental, medical, technological, and security issues that are of paramount concern for our state and nation. We can not let this moment pass.

If SUNY is to continue its upward trajectory and be recognized as the great system it can and should be, it must have one or more world-class research institutions, and it must support them appropriately for their missions. Stony Brook and Buffalo are SUNY's two members of the Association of American Universities, the invitation-only organization of the top 62 research universities in North America. With the requisite financial support, we can compete with California, Michigan, Texas and the other top systems. It is an opportunity we cannot afford to squander.

Thank you again for this opportunity to speak before you today.