Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the SUNY Eye Institute

The State University of New York (SUNY) Eye Institute (SEI) celebrated its fifth anniversary this past year, and this bold adventure in a wall-less institute spread across the geographic diversity of the State of New York remains fundamentally healthy. Since its inception as a cross-campus collaboration between the two stand-alone medical centers in the SUNY system, 1 the SEI has grown to an impressive statewide consortium. Our principle scientists, originally drawn from the founding health science centers: have now grown to include faculty from a wide-variety of other campuses including the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at SUNY Albany, SUNY Geneseo, and SUNY Institute of Technology. Thus, our reach extends the full breadth of New York State. Since the inception of the SEI, our 45 principle investigators have received over 52 R01 research grants, 4 training grants, and 5 K awards from the National Institutes of Health among a variety of other awards. The total awarded funds exceed 46 million dollars in federal funding for vision research. Were the SEI in a single building on one campus, it would indeed be one of the largest vision centered research institutes in the United States. However, the power of the institute lies precisely in its ability to join forces across New York State and uniting the strengths of our component campuses. Simply put, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and similar to the nervous system that many of us study, the complementary properties and combinatorial power of our group far exceeds what any one institution could achieve. During the frequent air raids over England in the 1940's, the great English Universities protected their intellectual capital by mixing faculty and scientists into different shelters. Thus, if one bunker were hit, a whole discipline would not be lost. The resultant admixture of scientific expertise had a profound and lasting effect on one of the great pioneers of neuroscience, A.L Hodgkin, 2 who helped unlock the basic mechanisms of the action potential. None of our campuses could afford the concentration of faculty and expertise that is enabled by the cross-campus collaboration the SEI represents. One tangible result of our consortium is the creation of the only pharmacology research center devoted to the development of agents to treat retinopathy of prematurity. This effort is headed up by Professor Jacob Aranda, director of neonatology at SUNY Downstate along with Assistant Professor Kay …