“Research has always been pre-eminent at Stony Brook since John Toll first lured Nobelist C.N. Yang from the Princeton Institute to what was then a raw-boned, half-baked campus.”
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In many ways the most important event in these fourteen years was our election to the Association of American Universities (AAU). For 44 years our aspiration had been election to this association of the top research universities, public and private, in North America. And in 2001 we, along with Texas A&M University, were selected. No other university has been accepted in the seven years that have followed. Membership in AAU denotes that Stony Brook is one of the 62 best North American universities in terms of research and other criteria.
Research has always been pre-eminent at Stony Brook since John Toll first lured Nobelist C.N. Yang from the Princeton Institute to what was then a raw-boned, half-baked campus. It was perhaps part of our destiny that we would eventually take over management of Brookhaven National Lab. I don’t know if you remember how controversial Brookhaven was when we competed to manage it—remember the tritium plume and the accelerator rods? I remember well; there were plenty of intelligent and respected people who wondered why I would even think we should compete to manage the Lab. But I did, and some others did, too. It took heavy-duty persuasion to convince the SUNY Board of Trustees to give permission to make the bid. Here we are, a decade later, having successfully managed the Lab with our partners at Battelle, thanks in no small part to the outstanding leadership first of our own Jack Marburger and now our colleague Sam Aronson. We are now on the verge of recompeting for the management contract, a periodic Department of Energy requirement.
And now the Alliance of Stony Brook, Brookhaven, and Cold Spring Harbor, embraced by Govs. Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson, is being realized. This is an alliance unmatched anywhere—a State institution, a federal research facility, and a private laboratory, linked together, with State funding, to work on important scientific matters such as cancer, neuroscience, and quantitative biology. The Alliance will make Long Island the place to do research because of this remarkable linkage of outstanding researchers and world-class equipment.
The Research and Development Park is another essential step in the building of our research strength, helping the basic research done here to develop into the products of the future. The R&D Park will enable University researchers, both faculty and students, to collaborate with graduates of our three incubators and corporate research teams in applied research leading to new products. The very fact of such a research base—the Alliance, the incubators, the R&D Park—will attract even more intellectual capital to the Island. Two endeavors have already begun, the Center of Wireless and Information Technologies and the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center, and others will follow.
So Stony Brook is truly the economic engine of Long Island, our $1.8 billion budget responsible through the multiplier effect for $4.7 billion in economic activity on Long Island. And besides that, we are educating the next generation of scientists and business leaders.
In our Hospital, not only has the number of patients increased significantly, from 63,000 to 100,000, an increase of 59 percent, the caseload has moved increasingly toward the most difficult tertiary cases. For example, our kidney transplant program, initiated in 1981, had done 298 transplants by 1994, 13 years into the program, an average of 23 a year. Since then, in the past 14 years, we have done an additional 759, or an average of 54 cases. Last year saw 73 transplants, and this year we have already done 59. We won three new prizes for kidney transplants in October. And that’s just part of the Hospital story. We are in the top 4 percent nationally for survival of trauma from injuries; we have the second lowest risk-adjusted cardiac mortality nationally; and, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement recognized us for success in reducing mortality. We even won the Innovator of the Year Award for Food Services—few hospitals can claim that glory. The newly completed modernization project includes ten new operating rooms for dedicated specialties, a dedicated OR pharmacy to enhance patient safety, an expanded emergency department with private rooms, a new Women and Infants Center, and even a meditative labyrinth outside. I have many times marveled at medical miracles at Stony Brook—the reattachment of a man’s two hands severed in an industrial accident, the saving of a young boy whose head was run over by an SUV, the delivery of triplets immediately followed by heart surgery for the mother, the successful delivery of sextuplets. Now with our new equipment, such as the da Vinci® robot, we are even more capable of miracles, everyday miracles that change people’s lives.
Our Veterans Home provides daily tribute to those who risked their lives to protect us. The Vets Home operates at 99.6 percent capacity—if you’ve been there, you know why. Since it opened in 1991, it has served 3,000 veterans, and served them well. It also provides the opportunity for our future doctors, nurses, therapists, and social workers to gain experience with a geriatric population.
There are lots of ways to measure the quality of a research university—the number of federal research dollars, the amount of royalty income, the number of patents, the number of members of the Academies, Nobel Prize winners, Fields Medals, Grammys. In all these categories, we have a proud story to tell, and those are the things I tend to brag about—you’ve heard me many times before.
But there are other bragging points that could get lost in the AAU context of great research—the quality of undergraduate education, the advising of students, the personal touch. My first year here, I learned that Stony Brook had barely slid under the wire for accreditation because of undergraduate education although we were outstanding in the graduate and research areas. I was told by the Accreditation Team that we must improve significantly in five years or we would not be accredited. That Middle States Report certainly got my attention. When I thought about it, I realized that we were not alone when it came to research universities underserving undergraduates. And so I visited the former SUNY Chancellor and U.S. Commissioner of Education Ernest L. Boyer, who was then head of the Carnegie Foundation, on whose board I served. We agreed something needed doing about the situation, and the National Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University (renamed for Ernie after his untimely death) was born. Many distinguished academics, including C.N. Yang, served. Our report, hotly received when issued, has changed the nature of undergraduate education, and Stony Brook, like all other universities, has profited from its insights. Most particularly, Stony Brook does a fine job of undergraduate research, and now offers seminars to all freshmen. Subsequently our undergraduate colleges have become an important part of the student experience here. Needless to say, the last Middle States Accreditation Report found our undergraduate programming working just fine.