The State University of New York at Stony Brook (also known as Stony Brook, Stony Brook University or SUNY Stony Brook) is a public sea-grant and space-grant research university in the eastern United States. It is located in Stony Brook, New York, east of New York City on Long Island, and is part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system.
The institution was founded 61 years ago in 1957 in Oyster Bay as State University College on Long Island, and moved to Stony Brook in 1962. The university has expanded to include more than 200 major buildings with a combined area of more than 11 million gross square feet across 1,454 acres (5.9 km2) of land. In 2001, SUNY Stony Brook was elected to the Association of American Universities, joining four private universities (Cornell, Columbia, NYU, and Rochester) and one public university (SUNY Buffalo) elsewhere in its state. It is also a member of the larger Universities Research Association for which its president Samuel Stanley is a council president.
The university owns Stony Brook Medicine, co-manages the Brookhaven National Laboratory, in 2005 acquired land for a Research & Development Park adjacent to its main campus, and has four business incubators across the region. The university has a regional economic impact of over $4.6 billion annually accounting for nearly 4% of economic activity in eastern Long Island and research expenditures that have surpassed the $200 million mark annually.
Stony Brook is the largest single-site employer on Long Island; more than 24,500 students are enrolled at the university, which has over 14,500 employees and over 2,400 faculty. Stony Brook's intercollegiate athletic teams are the Seawolves. Since 1994, they have competed in Division I of the NCAA, and are members of the America East Conference and the Colonial Athletic Association.
