Stony Brook offers an excellent environment for students and faculty with research interests in the life sciences. Evidence that Stony Brook has become established as a premier research institution comes from a recent citation impact study that ranks Stony Brook as one of the top ten universities in America with respect to the quality of research in molecular biology done over the last decade. One advantage is that the undergraduate and medical schools are located on the same campus. This promotes interactions between the faculties of these two schools, especially in areas of common interest. In fact, the graduate program in Molecular and Cell Biology at Stony Brook was formed both in response to the tremendous overlaps in the scientific interests of several different individual graduate programs and in response to their shared goal of providing a high-quality graduate training program.

The educational experience at Stony Brook is not defined solely by courses and individual research projects. All of the departments at Stony Brook that are affiliated with the program as well as the Brookhaven National Laboratory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory sponsor seminar series in which outstanding visiting scientists present recent research findings. These seminars provide students with the opportunity to enrich and broaden their learning experience and to meet with these visitors. Students can also take advantage of several major international symposia each year. These include, for example, an annual Stony Brook Symposium on Molecular Biology, an annual M.D./Ph.D. Symposium, an annual Symposium on Molecular Medicine, and several internationally renowned meetings at Cold Spring Harbor.

Students in the Graduate Programs in Molecular and Cell Biology, and in Biochemistry and Structural Biology, have access to state of the art research facilities and equipment. Core facilities on the Stony Brook campus for monoclonal antibody production, transgenic mouse generation, protein and nucleic acid sequencing, peptide synthesis, analytical and preparative HPLC, mass spectrometry, and confocal, and scanning and transmission electron microscopy are available to all program participants. State-of-the-art facilities are also available for biochemistry and structural biology. The Center for Structural Biology has several high-field NMR instruments and facilities for x-ray crystallography. With close ties to the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Stony Brook takes advantage of the high-energy beam lines for diffraction studies. Throughout the programs there are state-of-the-art equipment for protein purification and analysis, including Raman, infrared, fluorescence and CD spectrophotometers.