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I want to mention just one more thing in the research realm. Stony Brook University will be a founding member of the New York Genome Center, a sequencing and bioinformatics center, designed to serve the top scientific and medical research institutions in the city, to compete with the best sequencing centers, the Broad Institute, Baylor, and Washington University, for large-scale genome sequencing projects, and to provide affordable sequencing for hospitals and clinical needs. More details will be forthcoming, but this new genome center may be a tremendous resource for research and clinical care for Stony Brook University.

These are just a few examples of opportunities, but each will require some level of investment, including strategic faculty recruitment, but the potential returns for Stony Brook, our region, and our nation, are significant.

Third, we must grow our international efforts. We must be able to recruit outstanding students and faculty from abroad, we must provide better international opportunities for our students, and we want access to international research and academic collaborations. This is one area that will require investment but also real focus in the research and service areas. Obviously, there are opportunities everywhere, but we must identify those programs where we can create the scale necessary to actually make a difference. We have some signature international programs already (Turkana Basin Institute, efforts in Madagascar, and our new SUNY Korea initiative), ones that have tremendous potential and can really differentiate us from other Universities, and one of my highest priorities over the next year is to make sure our current programs are the best they can be.

Fourth, we must renew our commitment to providing an outstanding learning and student life experience on our campus. Our new classrooms and planned IT infrastructure improvements will be important first steps, but we must also find ways to improve our content delivery, and to reward faculty who develop innovative ways to help our students learn. Our new Provost has a particular interest in online learning, and I am looking to him to take a lead role in helping us develop groundbreaking initiatives in this area. To state the obvious, today’s students simply learn and gather information in new ways. And we must adapt.

Academics are paramount, but the safety and well being of our students will continue to be our highest priority, and we will do everything we can to make this a welcoming and supportive environment for each and every member of the Stony Brook community. Our new recreation center, plans to remodel the Student Union, our outstanding athletics program under the direction of Jim Fiore, and the wonderful offerings at the Staller Center, are all integral parts of our commitment to our students and our community to make Stony Brook University a vibrant recreational and cultural center. We have come a very long way since the days of Mudville and the Bridge to Nowhere, but we are not resting on our laurels, there is much more to do.

Finally, we must be strategic. We will have the opportunity to hire new faculty and staff, we will have the opportunity to increase our enrollment, and we will need to make significant infrastructure investments. But, we will have to do this in a relatively scarce resource environment. We will not be able to hire new faculty for every department, and we will not be able to fund every center or institute that is proposed. This is where the strategic plans that you developed will be critical—they will help provide the template for this effort. And since things always evolve, we will also be looking for new ideas from faculty, departments, and schools for how to best invest in the future. We need to develop areas of excellence, areas of differentiation for Stony Brook in the arts, in the humanities, in the social sciences, and in the natural and life sciences. This will be a challenging task, and will involve difficult choices, but how wonderful it will be to talk about growing programs, instead of cutting them.

I want to conclude by thanking all of you for your attendance, by thanking each of our speakers for their eloquent tributes to John Toll, and by once again, paying tribute to that remarkable man, who moved us forward so fast, yet so well.

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