President Andrea Goldsmith’s 2026 State of the University Address Transcript
Bold Actions for a Bold Future
September 14, 2026
Good afternoon, esteemed students, faculty, staff, elected officials, State University of New York leadership, members of the Stony Brook Council and the Stony Brook Foundation Board, alumni, friends and community partners. To all of you attending either in person or online today, welcome to Stony Brook’s 2026 State of the University Address.
Russell, thank you for your wonderful and warm words. I was truly moved by your beautiful introduction of me as well as the description of your transformational journey as a Stony Brook student. I am so grateful for your outstanding leadership and valued partnership in helping every student on this campus to thrive. You exemplify what is so special and inspiring about our Stony Brook students.
As I begin my second year leading this exceptional university, I am filled with immense gratitude for everyone who has made the first year of my presidency so joyful and rewarding: our inspiring students; our passionate, brilliant faculty and dedicated staff; our compassionate healthcare teams; our visionary academic leaders; and our steadfast supporters and friends. It is all of you — our people — that are the foundation of our excellence, the fuel behind our momentum and the inspiration for our dreams to advance this university toward even loftier heights of achievement.
It is my honor and privilege to serve as your president. Our prestigious standing among universities today would not have been possible without the valued leadership and partnership of the Stony Brook Council, the Stony Brook Foundation and the State University of New York Board of Trustees, as well as our local, state and federal elected officials. Also instrumental in our success has been the support of our alumni, friends, partners, community members, and our generous donors. Your widespread belief and investment in the potential and upward momentum of Stony Brook have played a vital role in shaping the extraordinary university we are today.
From the very start of my presidency, I carried a certainty that every chapter of my personal and professional life prepared me to lead Stony Brook with optimism, boldness and conviction at this time of great opportunity and great disruption.
Over the 573 joyful, magical days since being named the seventh president of Stony Brook University, a flagship of the State University of New York system and the number one public university in this great state, I have witnessed our excellence across every dimension of our mission: education, research, healthcare, and service, and our significant positive impact through that mission on our community, the state of New York, the country, and the world.
This excellence and impact, coupled with our compelling ambitions, is the strong foundation for the extraordinary future we are building together.
One year ago, I delivered my first State of the University address with only a few weeks of knowledge about the magical university I had come to lead. Today, following an intense year of deep engagement with Stony Brook students, faculty, staff, leaders, stakeholders, and supporters, I have a far better understanding of this remarkable institution than I did one year ago.
And I can tell you with conviction that the state of our university is strong.
That strength is due to our remarkable upward trajectory throughout our relatively short history as a university. The State University of New York at Stony Brook was founded in 1957 when the SUNY Board of Trustees envisioned a major new university center on Long Island that would one day stand with the finest in the country. We have achieved that vision over our 70-year history due to people who believed in Stony Brook’s promise, set aspirational goals to realize that promise, and then achieved them.
Because of these visionaries, Stony Brook now stands among the nation’s leading universities.
Indeed, from its modest beginnings, Stony Brook has risen to become the number-one public university in the great state of New York. At $7,000-a-year-tuition for in-state undergraduate students, we deliver outstanding, accessible education and serve as a catalyst for opportunity, recognized by our ranking as one of the top universities in the country for upward mobility.
Forty percent of our undergraduates have parents who did not earn a college degree, and more than 40 percent are Pell Grant recipients…students whose families are least able to afford college. These students have a higher graduation rate than the average across all our students, demonstrating their determination to seize the opportunities a Stony Brook degree provides.
And when these students graduate, they change the trajectory of opportunity for all future generations of their family. At Commencement I recognized this remarkable achievement of our first-generation and Pell Grant graduates to thundering applause from the audience.
At a time when the value of a college degree is being questioned, I have seen in my expansive engagements with our undergraduates how the broad education and mentoring we provide prepare these students not just for their first job, but for a successful career and life. Our graduates leave here with a depth and breadth of knowledge, along with the ability to think critically, to act ethically, to collaborate, to question, and to imagine what might be possible that does not yet exist. These lifelong skills and core values of our resilient hard-working students are highly prized by employers, especially now when those skills and values are needed to harness the power of AI for good across all job sectors.
Along with our educational excellence, Stony Brook is also a research powerhouse, advancing the frontiers of knowledge to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. Our world-class faculty, researchers, post-docs and doctoral students are the foundation of that strength as they push discovery in their fields and, through their breakthroughs, deliver solutions to problems of great national and global importance.
Stony Brook Medicine, Suffolk County's first and only academic health system, is another example of our institutional excellence. Its four hospitals and widely distributed clinics serve all members of our community including those who cannot afford healthcare. We have forged a strong partnership with the Southampton Hospital Association to fundraise and then build a new state-of-the-art hospital on our Southampton campus, which our East End community needs and deserves. In addition, our superb schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, health professions and social welfare train our region’s next generation of compassionate and highly skilled healthcare providers.
Stony Brook Medicine takes advanced healthcare to where people live. It operates Long Island’s only Mobile Stroke Unit Program, a lifesaving emergency response vehicle and team that treat stroke patients at the scene, since every single second of delayed treatment can dramatically impact a patient’s outcome. We also have a mobile dental clinic that brings dental care to the elementary schools of low-income children, many of whom have never seen a dentist. And our mobile mammography unit brings essential screening to patients who otherwise would go without this life-saving early detection of breast cancer.
As a flagship public university, Stony Brook is committed to widely and broadly serving our communities. This past year, Seawolves served over 111,000 people from New York City to the East End and beyond through engagements and partnerships that connect our employees and students with our communities in meaningful ways. For example, Wolfie’s Toy Drive and Parade last holiday season, led by our Enterprise Risk Management team, delivered hundreds of toys to children in the hospital as well as gifts to our heroes at the Long Island State Veterans Home.
In addition, over the past year around 2,000 students volunteered in activities benefitting our local communities, demonstrating a strong commitment to public service despite the many other demands on their time. And this spirit of service influences our newest Seawolves as well. During Move-In Week last month, our new first-year students spent a day lifting up the place they now call home through our Community Service Day. Stony Brook’s community engagement also includes helping talented high school students prepare for the rigors of college through successful programs like Pre-College Summer, Accelerated College Education and Future Scholars.
Stony Brook’s mission also includes a responsibility to enhance prosperity and enrichment across our entire region. Our economic impact on Long Island is over nine billion dollars. We are the largest single-site employer on Long Island and the 23rd largest employer in the entire New York area that encompasses all of New York City and its surrounding counties in both New York and New Jersey. Stony Brook is also at the center of community engagement and enrichment. From our annual CommUniversity Day where we welcome thousands of community members to our campus, to hosting the World Cup Watch Experience and the Youth World Cup, to topical dialogues, dance and theater performances, art exhibits, and film screenings, at our main and Southampton campuses, we are a source of entertainment, culture, and intellectual engagement across our region.
These examples are but a small sample of what I’ve observed about the strengths of our exceptional university. But over this past year, I have come to believe that the greatest strength of Stony Brook is its community spirit and values.
Stony Brook is a place where we support one another, celebrate each other’s successes and work together to overcome challenges. The warm, welcoming, and inclusive culture here inspires and elevates us individually and collectively, and greatly mitigates the divisions and hostility some campuses around the country have experienced in recent years.
Our community strives to be the gold standard for higher education where people come together to learn from each other, to have respectful discussions about different viewpoints, and to be compassionate, empathetic and intellectually curious in their engagements with others, because those values are the very essence of university life and learning. We expect members of our community to showcase these values on and off our campus to help bolster the public’s trust in universities to educate broad and open-minded citizens.
As we reflect on all we have accomplished, the state of our university is clearly strong. Yet we strive for greater heights of excellence and impact because New York State deserves to have one of the best public universities in the country that is a model of higher education for good.
We are confident we can reach this pinnacle through a collective willingness to embrace bold aspirations, and to chart the path to achieve them.
Times of disruption are often times of opportunity for the bold, privileged, or powerful, but these times can also leave many people behind that cannot adjust to the new world that the disruption brings about. Speaking as both an engineer and a lifelong student of history, I’ve seen that from ancient times until today, the most profound changes in civilizations came about due to technology disruption, from the invention of the wheel and the printing press to the more recent innovations of electricity, the steam engine, computers, the Internet and my own field of wireless communications.
Today we are experiencing profound disruption in technology through AI, which is coupled with a profound disruption in higher education. The last time both of these disruptions happened simultaneously was the industrial revolution, when modern machinery replaced millions of manual labor jobs.
That disruption devastated many families economically, but it also ignited a movement to widen educational opportunity. The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 established public universities to ensure that low-income and displaced workers’ children could pursue an affordable college education.
The vibrant ecosystem of public universities across our country, advancing the public good through accessible education, research, and service, shows that disruptive times create opportunities for change and innovation that can benefit millions.
As a public flagship in a powerful state, at a time when AI is disrupting not only the job market, but also our ethics, values, and the very core of our society, our responsibility is to ensure this powerful technology strengthens each dimension of our mission, the communities we serve, and society as a whole.
Rather than retreating during this uncertain time, we are seizing the opportunities it provides to set and achieve our bold aspirations and to help our communities navigate this change.
A year ago, as a new president, I stood on this stage and I asked you to imagine the headlines we hoped to see about Stony Brook a decade from now. But we are not waiting 10 years to make headlines. In just 12 months Stony Brook has delivered remarkable accomplishments that have earned recognition across the region and the nation.
Our headlines tell a powerful story — one of academic excellence and student success, transformative discovery, world-class patient care, and broad impact.
In one headline, our total enrollment reached a record high this fall of more than 27,700 students driven by 1,000 more undergraduates than last year, who will fuel New York’s economy when they graduate.
We saw record-high freshman applications for the Great Class of 2030 entering this fall with more than 66,000 applications for around 4,000 spots. Last year’s freshman class had a retention rate of over 90 percent, the highest in more than a decade. And, a few weeks ago, we welcomed a first-year class with the highest high-school GPA in Stony Brook’s history.
These headlines didn’t come out of nowhere.
They emerged from deliberate investments and coordinated work by our devoted faculty and staff.
And these statistics reflect only a portion of what we have achieved in educational excellence.
Behind the headlines are the individual experiences that shape how our students build the foundation for their future careers, which I have seen firsthand. At last spring’s undergraduate research fair, I spoke with students presenting groundbreaking discoveries shaped by months of curiosity-driven exploration guided by faculty mentorship. In January I met our Simons STEM Scholars at the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya, where they explained their impressive work collaborating with world-renowned scientists across anthropology, geology, and environmental science. These inquiry-based learning experiences are transformative which is why, in another headline, we have increased our undergraduate participation in research by 50 percent over pre-COVID levels.
These broad, life-changing experiences outside the classroom were first championed by Stony Brook’s 4th President Shirley Strum Kenny, who believed that undergraduate students should engage in meaningful research to inspire broad learning and inquiry. This vision transformed education at Stony Brook and around the country, which lives on as part of Kenny’s powerful legacy.
Stony Brook researchers also had some remarkable accomplishments this past year, which you may have read about in the local and national news:
Governor Kathy Hochul’s transformational $300 million investment, in the sixth week of my presidency, to establish our new Quantum Research and Innovation Hub signaled her confidence in Stony Brook to spearhead the future of quantum networking, sensing, and computing and to ensure New York State’s leadership in these technologically disruptive fields.
We’ve also built the world’s first and largest metropolitan area quantum network, sending information via entangled photons across Long Island, including under your feet, and into New York City. And our vision is to extend this network throughout New York State, the country and the world.
To enable that vision, a few weeks ago, we demonstrated the world’s longest wireless quantum link, sending information via entangled photons between Stony Brook and our key partner, Brookhaven National Laboratory. Next in our quantum plans is to extend the quantum wireless link across Long Island Sound to Yale, and then to expand the quantum network to upstate New York, then west across the country and, via satellite, around the globe.
We are thrilled Stony Brook is leading the world in creating this network, which will guarantee data sent across it cannot be stolen, manipulated or destroyed, thereby foiling sophisticated hackers attempting to break into our finance, healthcare, and national security systems.
We are also national leaders in the use of AI to advance the frontiers of knowledge across all dimensions of science, an area championed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, one of the largest federal investments in scientific research in decades. With eight awards from more than five thousand submissions, Stony Brook ranked ninth among universities nationwide in this highly competitive initiative.
And as the lead institution for the New York Climate Exchange, we are positioning Stony Brook as a global leader in unlocking solutions to climate change at speed and scale to address the biggest challenge facing humanity. The Exchange's future home on Governors Island will be a soaring, spectacular building visible from Manhattan, Brooklyn, as well as airplanes landing at JFK and LaGuardia, an iconic symbol of New York’s commitment to confronting the existential threat of climate change.
Across all areas of research, Stony Brook achieved record-high research expenditures in fiscal year 2026 despite a highly turbulent national funding landscape. In addition, Stony Brook leapfrogged almost 150 universities in the 2026 Shanghai Rankings, placing us among the top research universities in the world.
At a moment when federal uncertainty is slowing research momentum across the country, Stony Brook is not only growing its competitiveness and prestige but also building a strong foundation for the next generation of discoveries, partnerships, and innovation. Our research continues to be powered by our brilliant, creative, and fearless faculty, whose work has earned major national and international recognition. This year, our faculty member John Pardon received the highly prestigious Fields Medal, often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, that honors distinguished achievement and future promise in this powerful discipline.
This extraordinary recognition of Pardon’s ground-breaking work reflects something larger — a research enterprise that is accelerating its ambition, impact, and prestige. And that same strength is just as visible in the exemplary work of Stony Brook Medicine — in the care we provide, the research we drive and the service we deliver to our region every single day.
Stony Brook Medicine continues to dominate the headlines for high-quality, compassionate care. For the fourth consecutive year, Stony Brook Medicine was named one of America’s 50 Best Hospitals, placing our health system among the top one percent nationwide. We are ranked number one in the state for pediatric care, which gives tremendous peace of mind to Long Island families, who rely on us for the highest-quality care of their children. We earned Magnet Recognition this year, the nation’s highest honor for nursing excellence, joining an elite tier of fewer than 11 percent of U.S. hospitals with this distinction.
Consistently Stony Brook’s healthcare is cited with rankings excellence. But rankings can’t capture the compassion our patients and their families remember from the care they and their loved ones receive — that measure lives on in people’s hearts forever.
The deep commitment and sense of purpose our faculty and staff have for our mission also makes headlines. For the second consecutive year, and the fourth time ever, Forbes magazine has named Stony Brook University among America’s Best-in-State Employers.
Another outstanding headline this past year with remarkable significance is that, less than three years after the historic Simons Infinity Investment and the launch of New York State’s Endowment Match challenge, our endowment has grown to almost one billion dollars from a level of $392 million dollars only three years ago. This investment in our students, our faculty, our research, our medical programs and our facilities will have a lasting impact on our success and our aspirations across all dimensions of our mission in the years and decades ahead.
These headlines and accomplishments mark a trajectory of progress that is reshaping what Stony Brook can achieve.
And they are stepping stones toward a much larger vision: our strategic plan ASPIRE 2035, which charts our bold path forward.
Stony Brook has always been driven by ambition, purpose, and a belief in what bold action can achieve.
Over my first year as president, in conversations across our community, I saw that fierce determination in our people. Their willingness to dream big, take risks, and build what does not yet exist shaped the collaborative process that produced ASPIRE 2035, our shared vision for the decade ahead. This vision is our North Star — a guide that will remain unwavering, no matter the obstacles, as we pursue our future that this university, our community and this state deserve.
ASPIRE 2035 sets our sights on ambitious goals across research, education, healthcare, and societal impact and it gives us a clear path to achieve them. Built from the first letter of each of the six goals introduced at my Investiture, ASPIRE 2035 captures our strategic vision for the decade ahead.
Specifically, in the acronym ASPIRE:
- A stands for accelerating discovery to solve humanity’s greatest challenges, advancing knowledge that shapes the course of the world’s future.
- The S in ASPIRE is for setting a new standard for educational excellence, access, and student success
- P is for propelling Stony Brook to a position of visionary global leadership where the world looks to us as thought leaders and for action-oriented solutions to critical issues.
- I stands for igniting regional prosperity by driving innovation, economic growth and vitality for everyone across this beautiful island.
- R is for reimagining medicine, health and wellness for all with accessible, compassionate, and cutting-edge healthcare.
- And the last letter E, in ASPIRE, is for enabling the foundations for our success, ensuring that our people, infrastructure, and resources can make every ambition possible.
After this speech, you’ll find the full strategic plan, along with every action item and its associated tactics, on my presidential website. The plan is designed to be interactive and dynamic, a place where you can explore the details, offer feedback, and see our progress as it unfolds. We are putting this plan on a public website because we want your feedback, and we also intend to show, transparently, our progress toward the goals of our strategic vision.
ASPIRE 2035, with its 12 ambitious actions, will guide us through a world where the pace of change is accelerating. Our strong foundation and the remarkable achievements we have celebrated across our entire history signify a university ready to seize this moment.
ASPIRE 2035 calls on us to make big bets: bold, future-shaping commitments that strengthen our institution, our region, our great state, the country, and the world. Those commitments are what will define the decade ahead for our university.
Our success in achieving our goals will come from our willingness and preparedness to seize opportunity and accelerate change through high-risk, high-reward actions.
And in this moment of disruption for higher education, we are taking those big bets to accelerate our momentum and amplify our positive impact.
One of our audacious strategic bets is to significantly grow our faculty in disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields critical to the vibrancy and prosperity of our world, which will allow us to educate more New Yorkers for gratifying careers and expand our leadership in transformative discoveries and their impact.
This big bet includes plans to hire up to 12 new faculty in the field of quantum information science over the next two years. This investment will allow us to recruit a large cohort of stars in this critical technology area, and maintain our state’s leadership in developing the quantum Internet of the future.
We are also planning to expand our faculty in additional key technology areas important to our state, the country, and the world, thereby enhancing our leadership not only in quantum, but also across biotechnology, AI and robotics, advanced materials, semiconductors, energy systems, and other dynamic fields. Expanding faculty in these areas will allow us to double the number of engineering students we graduate in the next five years. Given that today there are around 18,000 unfilled engineering jobs right here in New York, we want to fill these jobs with our inspiring and remarkable Stony Brook graduates to ensure New York companies will drive economic growth and technology leadership for our great state.
While we have already increased our four-year graduation rates by 14 percentage points in the last ten years, we want every one of our students to graduate on time and debt free, ready to contribute to New York’s vibrant economy. Thus we are committed to even more dramatic improvement in our graduation rates through the SUNY Academic Momentum Campaign, planning for another five percentage point-increase in graduation rates over the next four years. The drive underlying that aspirational statistic is the fact that every additional student we graduate provides a more prosperous life for that graduate and their families.
Essential to our bold aspirations to elevate student success and graduation rates is another big bet - that we will reimagine teaching and learning in this era of AI to strengthen, rather than compromise, the learning and discovery process through the use of this powerful tool. Navigating this shift requires us to ask important, complex questions about the value and nature of a Stony Brook education, including how our students learn, what knowledge they need to master for successful careers and lives, and how we assess this mastery. While we have started to address these questions by determining how our students and faculty currently use AI in teaching and learning, we are still in the very early stages of understanding how to harness this transformative technology to enhance education and student success.
Another part of our mission as a New York State flagship is to support economic growth across our region. That is why we are betting that Stony Brook will serve as the catalyst to transform Long Island into Silicon Island, a place where entrepreneurs create a region buzzing with exciting startups that grow up right here, from Manhattan to Montauk, into large iconic companies. To enable this, we are investing in a startup incubator on our campus that will give our students, faculty, alumni, and community members the bridge they need to turn brilliant ideas into technologies, products, and services that are the foundation for building successful companies.
In discussions with academic leaders across the globe, we are also betting big on our role as a leader on the international stage. This year alone, in visiting SUNY Korea and in discussions with leaders in Asia, Mexico, and Canada, we have seen how international partnerships expand our academic reach, deepen research collaborations, grow our prestige globally, and open transformative opportunities for our students to experience the world. For example, Stony Brook’s Freshman Launch Year program has grown from 65 students last year to nearly 250 students this fall who right now are spending their first college semester immersed in spectacular countries and cultures, including Korea and Italy.
Here at home, as one part of our ten-year facilities master plan, we are setting our sights on building a vibrant college town through a public-private partnership that addresses affordability, housing demand, and campus vitality. This mixed-use, village-style development will bring on-campus student and employee housing together with retail, dining, and shared amenities, creating a walkable connected community that invigorates the Stony Brook experience for all.
These are the commitments that will shape our next decade — the Stony Brook we will build together. We are willing to take courageous, high-impact strides forward because they are essential to achieving our aspirations.
I’m an entrepreneur, and so I know some of these bets will succeed spectacularly… some will likely fail… and learning from all of them will shape and inform future decisions to ensure they are the right ones to reach our goals.
ASPIRE 2035 is our North Star, the high-level framework shaped by what we heard from all of you, and a plan that belongs to all of us. Because ASPIRE 2035 is a living, breathing framework, it will evolve as circumstances change, as opportunities emerge, and as our community continues to shape its bold vision for the future.
That is why every one of you has a role to play in bringing this compelling vision for our university to life. As a public flagship, Stony Brook embraces the responsibility to guide how this moment of simultaneous dramatic change in both technology and higher education can strengthen communities and serve the common good.
Together, we will make Stony Brook one of the greatest public universities in the nation. New York deserves nothing less — a university our state, our country, and our world look to as a model of American possibility and progress.
Whether you are a student, faculty member, staff member, researcher, healthcare professional, alumni, university partner, donor or community member, it is your bold ambitions, your vision, and your passion that will allow us to reach our North Star of … A! … S! … P! … I! … R! … E!
Thank you so much, and Go Seawolves!