University at Albany SUNY

The State University of New York at Albany, also known as University at Albany or SUNY Albany, is a research institution with campuses in Albany, Guilderland, and Rensselaer, New York, United States. Founded in 1844, it carries out undergraduate and graduate education, research, and service. It is a part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system.

The University has three campuses: the Uptown Campus in Albany and Guilderland's McKownville neighborhood, the Downtown Campus in Albany, and the East Campus in the City of Rensselaer, just across the Hudson River from Albany. The University enrolls more than 17,300 students in nine schools and colleges, which offer 50 undergraduate majors and 138 graduate degree programs.The University's academic choices include new and emerging fields in public policy, globalization, documentary studies, biotechnology and informatics.

Through the UAlbany and SUNY-wide exchange programs, students have more than 600 study-abroad programs to choose from,as well as government and business internship opportunities in New York’s capital and surrounding region. The Honors College, which opened in fall 2006, offers opportunities for well-prepared students to work closely with faculty. The University at Albany faculty had $89.1 million in research expenditures in 2013-2014.for work advancing discovery in a wide range of fields. The research enterprise is in four areas: social science and public policy, life sciences and atmospheric sciences.

In addition to offering many cultural benefits, such as a contemporary art museum and the New York State Writers Institute, UAlbany plays a major role in the economic development of the Capital District and New York State. An economic impact study in 2004 estimated UAlbany’s economic impact to be $1.1 billion annually in New York State — $1 billion of that in the Capital Region

> History

The University at Albany was an independent state-supported teachers' college for most of its history until SUNY was formed in 1948. The institution began as the New York State Normal School on May 7, 1844, by a vote of the State Legislature. Beginning with 29 students and four faculty in an abandoned railroad depot on State Street in the heart of the city, the Normal School was the first New York State-chartered institution of higher education.

Dedicated to training New York students as schoolteachers and administrators, by the early 1890s the “School” had become the New York State Normal College and, with a revised four-year curriculum in 1905, became the first public institution of higher education in New York to be granted the power to confer the bachelor's degree.

A new campus — today, UAlbany’s Downtown Campus — was established in 1909 on a site of 4.5 acres (18,000 m2) between Washington and Western avenues. By 1913, the institution was home to 590 students and 44 faculty members, it offered a master's degree for the first time, and bore a new name — the New York State College for Teachers. Enrollment grew to a peak of 1,424 in 1932.

In 1948 the State University of New York system was created, comprising the College for Teachers and several other institutions throughout the state. SUNY, including the Albany campus, became a manifestation of the grand vision of Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, who wanted a public university system to accommodate the college students of the post–World War II baby boom. To do so, he launched a massive construction program that developed over 50 new campuses.

In 1962 the State University of New York at Albany was officially designated a doctoral-degree granting university center of SUNY. The same year, Rockefeller broke ground for the current Uptown Campus on the former site of the Albany Country Club. The new campus's first dormitory opened in 1964, and the first classes on the academic podium in the fall of 1966. By 1970, a year beyond the University’s 125th anniversary, enrollment had grown to 13,200 and the faculty to 746. That same year the growing protest movement against the Vietnam war engulfed the University when a student strike was called for in response to the killing of protesters at Kent State. The Uptown Campus, designed by architect Edward Durell Stone, accommodated this growth and gave visible evidence of the school's transition from a teachers college to a broad-based liberal arts university. The Downtown Campus became dedicated to the fields of public policy: criminal justice, public affairs, information science and social welfare. In 1985, the university added the School of Public Health, a joint endeavor with the state’s Department of Health.

In 1983, the New York State Writers Institute was founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Kennedy. As of 2013, the Institute had hosted over time more than 1,200 writers, poets, journalists, historians, dramatists and filmmakers. The list includes eight Nobel Prize winners, nearly 200 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners, several Motion Picture Academy Award winners and nominees, and numerous other literary prize recipients. In addition the institute has hosted up-and-coming writers to provide them with exposure at the beginning of their writing careers.

During the 1990s, the University built a $3 billion, 450,000-square-foot (42,000 m2) Albany NanoTech complex, extending the Uptown Campus westward. By 2006, it became home to the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, which in 2014 merged with the State University of New York Institute of Technology in Utica, New York to become a separate SUNY institution: the SUNY Polytechnic Institute.

In 1996, a third campus — the East Campus — was added 12 miles (19 km) east of the Uptown Campus in Rensselaer County, when the University acquired former Sterling-Winthrop laboratories and converted them into labs, classrooms, and a business incubator concentrating on advances in biotechnology and other health-related disciplines. In 2005, the East Campus became home to the University’s Gen*NY*Sis Center for Excellence in Cancer Genomics.

In the spring of 2005, the University created a College of Computing and Information (CCI), which has faculty on both the Uptown and Downtown campuses. In the fall of 2015, CCI was replace and its programs incorporated into a totally new college, the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. At the same time, the University unveiled another new college, the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity.

> Campuses

>> Uptown Campus

The Uptown Campus, the University's main campus, is located mostly in Albany, with a small portion (a dorm "quad" and the athletics complex) spilling into the neighboring town of Guilderland (official address: 1400 Washington Avenue in Albany). Its effect has been described as "Dazzling one-of-a-kind" by architectural critic Thomas A. Gaines, who called it "a formal masterpiece" and "a study in classical romanticism." Designed in 1961-1962 by noted American architect Edward Durell Stone and constructed from 1963-1964, the campus bears Stone's signature style of bold unified design, expressed by its towers, domes, fountains, soaring colonnades and sweeping canopy.

The campus exemplifies the style Stone used in his major projects between 1953 and 1970, including the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India; the Hotel Phoenicia in Beirut, Lebanon; the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.; 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan, New York; and the Aon Center, originally the Standard Oil Building, in Chicago. The campus was a filming location for the 1981 movie Rollover with Kris Kristofferson and Jane Fonda because of the resemblance to modern Middle Eastern architecture.

Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller envisioned a public university system to accommodate the college students of the post–World War II "Baby Boom", and as a connoisseur and patron of modern art and architecture, he encouraged many of the era's leading modernist architects to design the campuses. Stone's campus composition emphasizes residential quadrangles, or "quads" — surrounding academic buildings.

At the hub of the Uptown Campus is the rectangular "Academic Podium," featuring 13 three-story buildings under a single overhanging canopy roof. The Podium's showpiece is a central pool with fountains and an off-center circular bell tower, or "Carillon", which also serves as a water storage reservoir. In April 2012 the University undertook a complete renovation of the main fountain and water tower area, as well as of the Campus Center fountain. There is LED lighting in the base of the fountain, and a new, more interactive center element with seating areas. Completion of the project is scheduled for fall 2013.


The domed Main Library, the Performing Arts Center, and Campus Center face the pool from the west, east and south, respectively. To the north is a grand entrance, which welcomes visitors by way of a "great lawn" (Collins Circle) and the University's Entry Plaza. Four residential quadrangles are located adjacent to the four corners of the academic podium. Each quad consists of a 23-story high-rise dormitory surrounded by a square of low-rise buildings.[20]

On the west end of the Uptown Campus is the University's meteorology and characterization tools, the National Weather Service (NWS), and the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center (ASRC).

In addition to the Main Library, the Uptown Campus became home in 1999 to the third of the three libraries comprising UAlbany's University Libraries: the Science Library. Further growth occurred on the Uptown Campus in the fall of 2004, when a new Life Sciences Building opened, dedicated to basic research and education. New residence halls, Empire Commons and Liberty Terrace, opened in 2001 and 2012, housing up to 1,200 and 500 students, respectively, Ground was broken for a new School of Business building in October 2008. The 80,000-square-foot facility, located on the west side of Collins Circle, opened in August 2013.

The Downtown Campus, located at 135 Western Ave., Albany, just one mile (1.6 km) from the New York State Capitol building and Empire State Plaza, is the site of the original New York State College for Teachers. Construction began in 1909 on the first three buildings: Draper, Husted and Hawley halls, after the previous location on Willett Street burned down. Later additions to the campus were Richardson Hall, Page Hall and The Milne School (all in 1929), as well as 1960s' additions to Draper and Richardson halls. Husted Hall underwent major renovations in 2009. A subsequent energy efficiency project at Husted Hall was awarded a High Performance Building Plaque from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).

The Downtown Campus is home to the University's Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, School of Criminal Justice, College of Computing and Information, and School of Social Welfare. It also houses one of the University's three libraries, the Thomas E. Dewey Graduate Library, located in Hawley Hall.

>> East Campus

The University's 87-acre (350,000 m2) East Campus, located in the City of Rensselaer, is home to UAlbany’s School of Public Health and the Cancer Research Center (CRC) which opened in 2005. Located also on the campus — which contains 350,000 square feet (33,000 m2) of lab, support and associated office space — is the Center for Functional Genomics, which does research in the areas of microarrays, proteomics, molecular biology and transgenics. Also based at the campus are 15 private biotechnology companies, both established and those which form part of the University’s business incubator program. Biopharmaceutical giant Regeneron has a large-scale biologics manufacturing facility adjacent to the campus where it produces investigational products for all its clinical trials.

UAlbany and Albany Medical Center in July 2008 entered into a memorandum of understanding to create the 110,000-square-foot (10,000 m2) Institute for Biomedical Education and Research at UAlbany’s East Campus. The institute focuses research efforts on cancer, cardiology and neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer’s Disease.

Beginning with the 2009-10 high school year, Tech Valley High School, a local high-tech, public consortium high school, began renting 20,000 square feet (1,900 m2) of East Campus space at an annual cost of $450,000 per year.