Strengthen the Neurosciences Institute

Nearly 100 million Americans suffer from one or more diseases of the nervous system, resulting in an annual economic cost of over $760 billion per year. Stony Brook University’s Neurosciences Institute (NI) provides comprehensive neurological, neurosurgical and psychiatric care for a wide range of disorders affecting the brain, spine, nerves or muscle and seeks to advance current standards of care through basic, translational and clinical research.

More than 200 faculty at Stony Brook are engaged in neuroscience clinical care, research or teaching. Within the School of Medicine alone there are over 100 faculty investigators with external grant funding, comprising more than 25% of total external funding within the School.

• Graduate Fellowships:
  • Recruit outstanding trainees, guaranteeing them a base level of salary support independent of uncertainties in external funding
• Endowed Faculty:
  • Enhance our ability to recruit or retain top leaders in the field by adding six more endowed chairs to our current total of three
• Research Support:
  • Apply funds to both immediate use and the enhancement of core research facilities, as well as funding for deserving high risk/high payoff projects, with priority given to interdisciplinary projects involving faculty from more than one department
• Expand the Stony Brook Heart Institute:
  • Create at least four faculty endowments, for leaders in cardiology, cardiovascular surgery, cardiac research and vascular research
  • Improve facilities and funding for interdisciplinary cardiovascular research, creating state-of-the-art research space that supports a successful team science model

Continue to Build Stony Brook Children’s

Stony Brook Children’s Hospital is home to the most advanced pediatric specialty care in the region. A new children’s hospital will meet needs of the youngest residents on Long Island, create a higher standard of children’s healthcare, and attract additional pediatric specialists, pediatric investigators and research funding to our community.

• Stony Brook Children’s Hospital Building Fund
  • Dedicating several floors of the 10-story Hospital Pavilion to the new Stony Brook Children’s Hospital, including a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, adolescent unit, procedure suite, hematology/oncology unit and medical/surgical units. The Knapp Swezey Foundation Children’s Challenge, a $2.5 million matching challenge pledge from the Knapp Swezey Foundation, helped to raise the $5 million needed to complete the $25 million Children’s Hospital Building fund philanthropic goal.
• Physician-in-Chief Endowed Chair
  • Oversees all aspects of pediatric care at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital, advancing innovative research, clinical, community health and education programs while ensuring the delivery of compassionate, world-class care to our youngest patients.
• Pediatric Surgeon-in-Chief Endowed Chair
  • Will ensure that Stony Brook can recruit and retain an exceptional thought leader in pediatric surgery, strengthen our position as a major center for pediatric surgery, research and training and advance the stature of the entire surgery program.
• Advocacy Efforts
  • Use our specialized pediatric expertise to keep Suffolk County’s children healthy by sponsoring education, outreach and prevention programs, as well as connecting patients to resources including support groups and local chapters of national organizations.

Create a World-Class Research Program

The Biomedical Sciences Institute (BSI) will unite groups of basic and clinical scientists across disciplines to create a world-class translational research program. The BSI will feature remodeled space and vital equipment, cultivating synergy among faculty, graduate students and MD/PhD students. In addition, growing the Stony Brook Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), minimally funded by the NIH, will populate the BSI’s highly innovative laboratories with the very best students. Additional funds will fund postdoctoral study start-up initiatives for new faculty members.

The BSI will also house an umbrella graduate program for the biomedical sciences, bringing together the graduate programs in Molecular and Cellular Biology, Biochemistry, Neurobiology, Pharmacology, Genetics and Physiology. In doing so, not only will we cultivate cross-disciplinary interactions, but graduate students will receive more time to choose their field of study through a first-year graduate student endowment. Undecided students make up about half of all entering graduate students in the life sciences, and forcing Stony Brook applicants to immediately choose their field of study causes us to lose some of the very best students.

Establish the Stony Brook Cancer Center (SBCC) as a Clinical and Research Leader

At Stony Brook Cancer Center (SBCC) we are breaking new ground and building a new model for cancer research and treatment, serving more than 3,000 newly diagnosed adult cancer patients each year. In addition to delivering the most advanced cancer medicine, SBCC’s robust basic and translational research programs are on the leading edge of developing advances in molecular biology and genetics, enabling a more precise understanding of the underlying mechanisms of cancer.

SBCC is uniquely poised to make a significant impact in cancer medicine by becoming one of the country’s elite National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Centers. This will be achieved by focusing the efforts of SBCC’s world-class faculty and state-of-the-art facilities (including the developing Medical and Research Translation building) on four pillar areas of cancer medicine — precision medicine (with key components of cancer genomics and informatics), cancer imaging, cancer metastasis and experimental therapeutics, and cancer metabolism and nutrition. These will be incorporated into novel foundations for disease-specific research programs.

With your support, we will revolutionize cancer research and care on Long Island and beyond. We will enhance our collaborative academic and research environment, support innovative teams of leaders in cancer care and investigation, and provide state-of-the-art patient care and research facilities, with the goal of developing personalized treatments that lead to better outcomes and increased survival of patients with cancer.

• Precision Medicine

• Create a bold new enterprise to revolutionize medicine and generate the scientific evidence needed to move the concept of precision medicine — based on the belief that cancer treatment can be tailored to the individual characteristics of each patient — into everyday clinical practice
• Recruit new scientists and clinicians to propel SBCC’s Precision Medicine Program and capitalize on Stony Brook University’s existing strengths in the following areas:
  • Cutting-edge cancer imaging
  • Bioinformatics/computational biology
  • Our growing BioBank of donated tissue samples and body fluids for analysis
  • An exceptional clinical trials program
  • Our working relationships with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the New York Genome Center

• Cancer Metastasis and Experimental Therapeutics
  • Expand SBCC’s world class Cancer Metastasis and Experimental Therapeutics by providing support for novel research ideas including investigation into tumor microenvironment and genomics, and genetics of metastasis
  • Provide dedicated seed funding for pilot projects using novel approaches to identify and validate drug targets to control the survival of metastatic and stem-like cancer cells; identify mechanisms by which metastatic cancer cells escape the immune system; develop cancer models for validation of cancer stem cell and metastasis drugs
  • Establish a pipeline to promote highly productive interdisciplinary and collaborative research among chemists, biologists, medicinal chemists, pharmacologists and physicians to commercialize potential drug targets for cancer treatment

• Metabolism and Nutrition

• Establish the first of its kind, world-class Center for Nutrition and Cancer Metabolism

• Recruit new scientists and clinicians who are international experts in cancer metabolism and pathways that control cancer metabolism

• Fund strategic investments in infrastructure capabilities in the areas of metabolic and molecular imaging, metabolomics, and informatics (e.g. high tesla MRIs that can detect molecular changes in live tissues, advanced MALDI imaging, and informatics analysis of big data from epidemiologic and related studies)

• Provide dedicated seed funding for pilot projects to study the significance of nutrition and its role in preventing and treating disease, and to provide a quantifiable understanding of the role of various vitamins and nutrients and their mechanisms of action

• Disease Specific Research Program
  • Provide funding to enhance disease-focused cutting edge research, state-of-the-art multidisciplinary care and access to innovative clinical trials, and to facilitate new discoveries to reduce cancer morbidity and mortality
  • Recruit faculty, physicians and researchers with special expertise and interest in a specific cancer disease, or a group of closely related diseases, who will synergistically work together to improve cancer prevention or disease outcomes through basic, translational and clinical research

• Scholarships

• Attract and admit the best young medical talent to Stony Brook by becoming more competitive in terms of cost by offsetting the cost of medical school with scholarships such as The Aldustus Jordan Minority Scholarship, which will help diversify the student population

Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences

In keeping with the legacy set down by CVS founder and Stony Brook benefactor Ward Melville, Stony Brook Medicine will launch its newest Health Science School in 2017, the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (SPPS).

The new school, for which there is a naming opportunity, will provide a uniquely comprehensive program that will integrate fully with the clinical, research and academic programs of the Schools of Medicine, Health Technology, Nursing and the Program in Public Health.

With funding for programs, fellowships, faculty start-up initiatives and endowment support for the founding dean, we will be able to graduate pharmacists who want to work “at the top of their license” in specialized areas of pharmacy, including population health.