When the State University of New York opened a campus here nearly 50 years ago, in woodlands along the north shore of Long Island, state higher-education leaders heralded it as the Berkeley of the East. New York’s Stony Brook campus would be a world-class research institution, they said, with top-flight professors working on groundbreaking projects.
Certainly, some of that has come true. But over the last 20 years, professors and administrators say, Stony Brook’s promise as one of the country’s leading scholarly institutions has faded. As the university’s former president focused on sprucing up the campus and improving undergraduate life, some professors believe Stony Brook lost its focus on research. A Chronicle analysis shows that while Stony Brook more than doubled its own spending on academic research over the last decade, the amount it received in federal grants declined when inflation is taken into account. As a result, Stony Brook took a nose-dive in the ranking of institutions receiving the most federal research money for science and engineering—falling to No. 97 from No. 53.
Now the university has a new president and, professors here say, a chance to reclaim the original vision. Samuel L. Stanley Jr., a biomedical researcher with a medical degree, took over in June 2009 with a mandate from the university’s board to boost the institution’s research productivity. He is already bringing in new research-oriented administrators, promoting work that connects basic scientists with clinicians at the university’s medical center, and hiring professors whose scholarly work reaches across disciplines.
“When I came, I knew there hadn’t been a significant growth of federal research funding in over a decade,” says Dr. Stanley. “It seemed clear we had a great opportunity to do better.”
Scientists here aren’t as measured when they talk about the refocus on research. “We look at this administration as the Messiah Administration,” says Jorge L. Benach, chairman of the department of molecular genetics and microbiology.
Adds Clinton T. Rubin, chairman of the university’s department of biomedical engineering: “Research is now what we’re going to be, rather than research off to the side as an appetizer.”
‘A Show-Stopper’
According to The Chronicle’s analysis of figures that institutions provided to the National Science Foundation, Stony Brook more than doubled its own research spending, to $113.8-million in 2009 from $49.5-million, its 1999 level when adjusted for inflation. In their report to the NSF, research administrators here may have inflated the amount the university spent on research and, as a result of The Chronicle’s inquiries, they are reviewing the figures. But in general, they say, the money spent on research came primarily from gifts, royalty income from patents and licenses, medical-center revenues, and funds the university received to cover the indirect costs of doing sponsored research. The university spent the money in a variety of ways, including on start-up labs for new faculty members, on seed money to help professors gather preliminary data for projects they hoped would attract outside dollars, and on a new building for geometry and physics. The university’s physics program is one of its strongest, bolstered by connections with Brookhaven National Laboratory, a U.S. Energy Department facility Stony Brook manages that is just a half-hour’s drive away.
As Stony Brook raised its own spending, it also saw a nearly fivefold increase in research money from New York State, after adjusting for inflation. That grew to $23.2-million in 2009 from just $4.1-million a decade earlier—although research money from the state still equals less than a quarter of what Stony Brook receives from the federal government. A new, 245-acre research-and-development park on the southern edge of the Stony Brook campus is a testament to the state’s largess.
So far the park has two centers built with state grant money, although a total of 10 facilities are in the plans. Just inside one of the new buildings—a 100,00-square-foot Center of Excellence in Wireless & Information Technology—is a “virtual-reality cave.” The 3-D box displays moving pictures inside, not just on the walls but on the ceiling and floor. It was built with $500,000 in state and institutional research money and allows urban planners studying security concerns to watch ways in which a poisonous gas might spread through a city, for example. It has also been used to help guide doctors through virtual colonoscopies using a tool invented at Stony Brook.
The initial investment in the cave helped Stony Brook attract a $1.6-million grant last year from the National Science Foundation to build a much larger virtual-reality theater inside the wireless center. Next door to the wireless center is the Advanced Energy Research & Technology Center, financed by a $45-million state grant. So far, the facility—which opened just this academic year—seems quiet. There are few cars in the parking lot, which has stations for charging electric-powered vehicles. But professors say the existence of the facility is already helping them attract outside grants.
“If you don’t have space,” says Erez Zadok, an associate professor of computer science here, “it’s a show-stopper.” He is working on a new $12.5-million grant from the Department of Energy to develop a more efficient, secure, and resilient power grid (a so-called smart grid) on Long Island.
While Stony Brook professors are eager to show off how university and state investments have helped them reel in federal dollars, that clearly isn’t the whole story. Indeed, over all, Stony Brook saw an 11-percent decline in research money from the federal government over the last decade. Federal money fell to $107.4-million in 2009 from its inflation-adjusted value of $121.2-million in 1999. Interestingly, part of that decline happened after 2001, when the university was accepted into the Association of American Universities—an organization that represents the country’s leading research institutions.
No one on the campus seems to know exactly why. Some point to the fact that grant dollars from the National Science Foundation have become famously hard to get, as more scholars file more applications for a pool of money that has seen only small increases. But federal funds from the National Institutes of Health actually doubled from 1998 to 2003, a growth in which Stony Brook clearly did not share.
During the 15 years that Stony Brook’s last president was in office, the campus did make advancements on the research front. It was that president, Shirley Strum Kenny, who helped broker the deal to open the research-and-development park, and it was on her watch that Stony Brook took over management of Brookhaven. But Ms. Kenny saw her mandate as making over the university’s look—something many professors here agreed was sorely needed. “Undergraduate education was something that had to be fixed,” Ms. Kenny said in a telephone interview. “But our emphasis was always on building the science departments. Research was always a top priority.” (Some have said that Ms. Kenny’s focus on aesthetics—along with the dominance of science and technology here—has led to a decline in the humanities and social-science departments, some of which have lost half their faculty lines over the last couple of decades.)
Dr. Stanley says the university has now moved into a new phase where “being an actor on the federal stage is critically important.” He adds: “When your federal dollars are not at a level you want, you have to ask, Are your faculty putting in applications? Are they teaching too much? Do they have good ideas? Do they have the infrastructure?”
He doesn’t know all of the answers yet. But he is quickly putting into place a plan that scientists here hope will bolster the research enterprise. Last summer the president hired a new dean of medicine, Kenneth Kaushansky, who wants to build “translational” research that brings physicians at the university’s medical center together with Stony Brook’s scientists to come up with solutions for human disease and patient care.
Mr. Rubin, the biomedical-engineering chair on the campus, does the kind of work Dr. Kaushansky wants to foster. He developed a device humans can stand on that moves at a very low frequency. The movement helps turn cells into bone instead of fat, which is critical in people with bone loss. Mr. Rubin’s “buzzing plate,” which has been tested in animals and in humans, is being sold by a research-and-development company Mr. Rubin started.
Howard C. Crawford, an associate professor in the school of medicine who studies pancreatic cancer, says that until Dr. Kaushansky came from the University of California at San Diego, Stony Brook was having trouble hiring a director for the medical school’s cancer center. Candidates for the job, he says, seemed unsure that the university was really committed to high-level research. But as soon as they learned of Dr. Kaushansky’s appointment, “they said, I’m in,” relates Mr. Crawford. “The search became a furious race between several highly qualified candidates on the dean’s reputation alone.”
The search is now down to the final two candidates. “This administration automatically knew what had to be done here,” says Mr. Crawford, “and what would pay off big time for us in the future.”