Long Island Business News (LIBN)
The Power List: Power 25 in Education
Rich Reeder Ranked as #11 in the Top 25 Most Powerful People in Long Island Education
Richard Reeder, phd
Vice President for Research
Operations Manager for the Research Foundation
Stony Brook University
Richard Reeder, PhD, is Vice President for Research and Operations Manager for the Research Foundation at Stony Brook University. He also serves as Associate Vice President for Brookhaven National Laboratory Affairs, acting as Stony Brook’s liaison to this Department of Energy laboratory. He is currently a member of the Brookhaven Science Associates board of directors, which serves as the management team for Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), with Stony Brook as a partner. In addition, Reeder serves on the board of directors for the Long Island High Technology Incubator. He is a member of the Stony Brook University faculty since 1980 and is a professor of geochemistry in the Department of Geosciences and the author of more than 120 peer-reviewed scientific articles. Under Reeder’s leadership, Stony Brook’s research expenditures exceeded $260 million last year, and there are more than 2,000 funded research projects at Stony Brook and more than 400 unfunded projects. Current focus areas include engineering-driven medicine, medical diagnostics and therapeutics (including medical imaging technologies), neural implant technologies, cybersecurity, articial intelligence, quantum computing and networking, sustainability energy technologies, development of novel materials, as well as other emerging science and engineering topics important to industry and the greater community.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Reeder assembled a team to safely ramp down the university’s research, and when conditions permitted, developed a plan to return more than 1,000 researchers safely to campus in stages. In collaboration with Stony Brook’s Institute for Engineering-Driven Medicine, Reeder’s office put together a seed grant program that made 17 awards for more than $400,000 to jump-start research efforts focusing on COVID-19. Overall, more than 200 COVID research projects have started since the pandemic began, including clinical trials focusing on therapeutics.
Reeder is tasked with attracting external support for research from federal, state, industry and private foundation sources, as well as through partnerships with allied organizations such as BNL and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. His research office also oversees compliance with federal and state regulations, and manages the risks posed by foreign countries.