Office of the President, Shirley Strum Kenny

Online commentaries from President Shirley Strum Kenny

SPEAKING OF ...
The Research and Development Park

You may have read recently in the New York Times that Yale University purchased a building seven miles from campus for $100 million to expand research facilities.

Stony Brook University has found a great solution to the need for more research space. Through the extraordinary efforts of Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, the University received State funding to purchase 246 acres directly across Stony Brook Road from the campus, in order to build a research and development park. The property extends as far west as the LIRR train tracks; it does not include the Flowerfield catering hall or the industrial building on the other side of the tracks. Although the property now belongs to the University, the purchase price, based on appraisals, continues to be contested through the courts by the Gyrodyne Corporation.

The land will be utilized to create 10 buildings housing research and development projects. The first two are the Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technologies, already under construction, for which the University received $50 million through Governor Pataki’s Centers of Excellence initiative, and the Center for Advanced Energy, now in design phase, for which we received an allocation of $35 million from the State.

The Research Park will enable the University to expand its research facilities and provide space for new young companies hatched in our three incubators (with some faculty members among the incubator entrepreneurs). These companies need to graduate to more adequate space, and it is also important that they release incubation space to make it available for new occupants. But they do not want to move far away from the University, with its research faculty and graduate students. The students themselves are enabled to garner research experience on the job. And corporations large and small will be able to partner with our researchers in the new facilities.

The intention is for Stony Brook, the only major research university on Long Island, to accelerate economic development for the entire region. The extraordinary development of the computer industry near the University of Texas at Austin, the Palo Alto and Seattle colonies, and the Boston Corridor are examples of what can arise out of great universities partnering with the corporate community.

We are more than lucky that our Research Park is next door rather than seven miles away. As Stony Brook University grows and increases construction on campus, this land will provide invaluable expansion room for the research activities that define our best-known strength.

Shirley.Kenny@stonybrook.edu