Stony Brook University: A Legacy of Notable Alumni

Stony Brook University (SBU), a public research university in Stony Brook, New York, has produced a diverse array of accomplished alumni who have made significant contributions in various fields. From arts and sciences to business and technology, SBU graduates have left their mark on the world. This article highlights some of the most notable alumni, showcasing the breadth and depth of talent nurtured at Stony Brook.

Arts and Entertainment

Stony Brook University boasts a strong presence in the arts and entertainment industry, with alumni achieving recognition as actors, comedians, writers, and musicians.

Adrien Brody

Adrien Nicholas Brody is an American actor known for his portrayal of Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski's war drama The Pianist (2002), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor at age 29, becoming the youngest actor to win in that category. He also became the second American male actor to win the César Award for Best Actor for the same film. For his role as a Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the United States in The Brutalist (2024), he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, and received his second Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

Pat Benatar

Patricia Mae Giraldo, known professionally as Pat Benatar, is an American singer and songwriter. She has two multi-platinum albums, five platinum albums, and 15 US Billboard top 40 singles in the United States, while in Canada, she had eight straight platinum albums and has sold over 36 million albums worldwide. A four-time Grammy Award winner, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in November 2022.

Joy Behar

Josephine Victoria "Joy" Behar is an American comedian, television host, and actress. She co-hosts the ABC talk show The View, on which she has appeared since the beginning of the series. Behar won a Daytime Emmy Award in 2009 for her work on The View. She hosted The Joy Behar Show on HLN from 2009 to 2011 and Joy Behar: Say Anything! on Current TV from 2012 until the channel switched formats in August 2013. Behar's latest weekly late-night talk show, Late Night Joy, aired on TLC in 2015. She also wrote The Great Gasbag: An A-Z Study Guide to Surviving Trump World. Behar received her MA from Stony Brook University in 1966.

Read also: Alumni of Stony Brook University

Colin Quinn

Colin Edward Quinn is an American stand-up comedian, actor, and writer. He first gained widespread attention for his work as a cast member and writer on Saturday Night Live from 1995 to 2000, and he became known for anchoring Weekend Update, the show's news parody segment. Prior to SNL, he was best known as the announcer/sidekick/co-host on MTV's 1980s game show Remote Control. Following his departure from SNL, Quinn went on to host Comedy Central's late-night panel show Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn, where he and a panel of New York's big names in stand-up comedy discussed and debated news stories of the day. Notable film work includes his role as Dooey in A Night at the Roxbury, Dickey Bailey in the Grown Ups films, and playing Amy Schumer's father in the film Trainwreck. Comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld, Tina Fey, Chris Rock, and Dave Attell have cited Quinn as the quintessential "comic's comic" and New York comedian.

Momina Mustehsan

Momina Mustehsan is a Pakistani-American singer-songwriter. In 2017, BBC named her one of the 100 most influential women, and the following year, Forbes featured her among its "30 Under 30" Asia list along with nine other Pakistani individuals. That same year, Mustehsan was honored by Stony Brook University, which named her among their "40 most successful graduates." She earned two majors-Applied Mathematics and Biomedical Engineering-from Stony Brook University.

Buck Dharma

Donald Roeser, known professionally as Buck Dharma, is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He is the sole constant member of hard rock band Blue Öyster Cult since the group's formation in 1967. He wrote and sang vocals on several of the band's best-known hits, including "(Don't Fear) The Reaper", "Godzilla" and "Burnin' for You".

Charles R. Johnson

Charles Richard Johnson is an American scholar and the author of novels, short stories, screen-and-teleplays, and essays, most often with a philosophical orientation. Johnson has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Dreamer and Middle Passage. Johnson graduated from Stony Brook University with a Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy and phenomenology.

Vi Hart

Victoria "Vi" Hart is an American mathematician and YouTuber. They describe themself as a "recreational mathemusician" and are well-known for creating mathematical videos on YouTube and popularizing mathematics. Hart founded the virtual reality research group eleVR and has co-authored several research papers on computational geometry and the mathematics of paper folding.

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Dianne Farr

Dianne Farr is an American actress, writer, and producer, graduated from Stony Brook University, and then went on to write, co-host, and guest star on various shows.

Business and Technology

Stony Brook University has also produced notable alumni in the fields of business and technology, including entrepreneurs, investors, and computer scientists.

Jon Oringer

Jon Oringer is an American programmer, photographer, and billionaire businessman, best known as the founder and CEO of Shutterstock, a stock media company headquartered in New York City. Oringer started his career while a college student in the 1990s, when he created "one of the Web's first pop-up blockers." He went on to found about ten small startups that used a subscription method to sell "personal firewalls, accounting software, cookie blockers, trademark managers," and other small programs.

Glenn Dubin

Glenn Russell Dubin is an American billionaire hedge fund manager and the Principal of Dubin & Co. LP, a private investment company. He is the co-founder of Highbridge Capital Management, an alternative asset management company based in New York City, and a founding board member of the Robin Hood Foundation.

Jef Raskin

Jef Raskin was an American human-computer interface expert who conceived and began leading the Macintosh project at Apple in the late 1970s. Raskin earned both a B.A. and B.S. from Stony Brook University.

John L. Hennessy

John L. Hennessy is one of the founders of MIPS Technologies and Atheros, and also the tenth President of Stanford University. Hennessy announced that he would step down in the summer of 2016. He was succeeded as president by Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Marc Andreessen called him "the godfather of Silicon Valley."

David Gelernter

David Hillel Gelernter is an American computer scientist, artist, and writer. He is a professor of computer science at Yale University.

Science and Academia

Stony Brook University has a strong reputation in the sciences, and its alumni have made significant contributions to various fields, including physics, medicine, and mathematics.

Shoucheng Zhang

Shoucheng Zhang was a Chinese-American physicist who was the JG Jackson and CJ Wood professor of physics at Stanford University. He was a condensed matter theorist known for his work on topological insulators, the quantum Hall effect, the quantum spin Hall effect, spintronics, and high-temperature superconductivity.

Ashoke Sen

Ashoke Sen FRS is an Indian theoretical physicist and distinguished professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bangalore. A former distinguished professor at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Prayagraj, He is also an honorary fellow in National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) India he is also a Morningstar Visiting professor at MIT and a distinguished professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. His main area of work is string theory. He was among the first recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics "for opening the path to the realization that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory".

Carolyn Porco

Carolyn C. Porco is an American planetary scientist who explores the outer Solar System, beginning with her imaging work on the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s. She led the imaging science team on the Cassini mission in orbit around Saturn. She is an expert on planetary rings and the Saturnian moon, Enceladus. Porco graduated with Bachelor of Science from Stony Brook University in 1974.

Laura Schlessinger

Laura Catherine Schlessinger, commonly known as Dr. Laura, is an American talk radio host and author. The Dr. Laura Program, heard weekdays for three hours on Sirius XM Radio, consists mainly of her responses to callers' requests for personal advice and often features her short monologues on social and political topics.

Alia Sabur

Alia Sabur matriculated at Stony Brook University at the age of 10-she was in the fourth grade when it was decided that she will leave and go to Stony Brook University; additionally, the incredible girl graduated summa cum laude. Today, the scientist is known for being the world’s youngest professor.

Chen Ning Yang

Chen Ning Yang is a physicist.

Homer A. Neal

Homer A. Neal is a physicist.

John S. Toll

John S. Toll is a physicist from the University of Maryland. In 1965, the State University appointed John S. Toll, a physicist from the University of Maryland as the second president of Stony Brook.

Rohini Godbole

Rohini Godbole was an Indian physicist and academic specializing in elementary particle physics: field theory and phenomenology. She was professor at the Centre for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. She worked extensively on different aspects of particle phenomenology over three decades, in particular on exploring different aspects of the Standard Model of Particle Physics (SM) and the physics beyond it (BSM). Her work regarding hadronic structure of high-energy photons outlined a variety of ways in which to study it and has had implications for the design of next generation electron positron colliders.

Steven K. Galson

Steven Galson, an American public health physician, received his B.S. degree in 1978. He later became rear admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, served as the Surgeon General of the United States, was the Assistant Secretary for Health, and, finally, was the Deputy Director as well as the Director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration. Today, he is the Senior Vice President for Global Regulatory Affairs at a global biopharmaceutical company.

Politics and Public Service

Stony Brook University alumni have also made significant contributions to politics and public service, serving in various government positions and advocating for important causes.

Keiko Fujimori

Keiko Sofía Fujimori Higuchi is a Peruvian politician. Fujimori is the eldest daughter of former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori and Susana Higuchi. From August 1994 to November 2000, she held the role of First Lady of Peru, during her father's administrations. She has served as the leader of the Fujimorist political party Popular Force since 2010 and was a congresswoman representing the Lima Metropolitan Area, from 2006 to 2011. Fujimori ran for president in the 2011, 2016, and 2021 elections, but was defeated each time in the second round of voting. Fujimori enrolled in Stony Brook University in 1993-1994.

Carl Heastie

Carl Edward Heastie is an American politician from New York. Heastie has served in the New York State Assembly since January 2001 and was elected Speaker of the New York State Assembly on February 3, 2015.

Robert Gallucci

Robert Gallucci graduated from Stony Brook University to later become President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and served high positions at the Department of State and United Nations.

Athletics

Stony Brook University athletes have gone on to achieve success in professional sports, representing the university with pride.

Joe Nathan

Joseph Michael Nathan is an American former professional baseball pitcher. He played 16 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the San Francisco Giants, Minnesota Twins, Texas Rangers, Detroit Tigers, and Chicago Cubs. Nathan started out his baseball career as a shortstop in high school and in college for Stony Brook, but converted to a pitcher after being drafted by the Giants. He worked his way through the minor leagues, alternating between spots in the rotation and the bullpen.

Chris Algieri

Christopher Mark Algieri is an American professional boxer and former kickboxer. In boxing he held the WBO junior welterweight title in 2014 and challenged for the WBO welterweight title later that year; in kickboxing he was an undefeated ISKA World welterweight and WKA World super welterweight champion. Outside of boxing, Algieri works as a nutritionist.

Jameel Warney

Jameel Marcus Warney is an American professional basketball player for the Seoul SK Knights of the Korean Basketball League (KBL). He played college basketball for the Stony Brook Seawolves, leading the team to its first ever appearance in the NCAA Tournament and graduating as the school's all-time leader in several career categories.

Travis Jankowski

Travis Paul Jankowski is an American professional baseball outfielder who is a free agent. He has previously played in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the San Diego Padres, Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies, New York Mets, Seattle Mariners, and Texas Rangers.

Tom Koehler

Thomas R. Koehler is an American former professional baseball pitcher. Koehler played college baseball at Stony Brook University for the Stony Brook Seawolves and was drafted by the Florida Marlins in …

Dominick Reyes

Dominick Reyes is an American professional mixed martial artist. He currently competes in the Light Heavyweight division of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).

Kim Barnes Arico

Kimberly Ann Barnes Arico is an American basketball coach and the current head coach of the Michigan Wolverines women's basketball team. Previously, she was head coach of the St. John's Red Storm women's basketball team. She was inducted into the Suffolk Sports Hall of Fame in 2020.

Other Notable Alumni

In addition to the individuals highlighted above, Stony Brook University has a long list of other notable alumni who have made significant contributions in their respective fields. These include:

Michael Schudrich: An American-Polish rabbi and the current Chief Rabbi of Poland.
Ben Shneiderman: An American computer scientist and a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science.
Vinay Pathak: An Indian theater and film actor.

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