Gratitude to the Stony Brook University faculty.

Thank you for a lifetime that reshaped modern mathematics, from exotic 7-spheres to the maps of dynamical systems, and for winning the Fields Medal, the Wolf Prize, the Abel Prize, and all three Steele Prizes while still teaching at Stony Brook.

Thank you for the surgery theory, rational homotopy, and dynamics ideas that a generation builds on, honored with the 2010 Wolf Prize and the 2022 Abel Prize, and shared so generously from your Stony Brook classroom.

Thank you for decades of foundational work on minimal surfaces, calibrated geometry, and algebraic cycles, recognized with the American Mathematical Society 2026 Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

Thank you for illuminating the Riemannian geometry of four-manifolds and Einstein metrics, carried forward at Stony Brook since 1980 in the spirit of your teacher Roger Penrose.

Thank you for bringing quantum field theory to bear on geometry, algebra, and analysis, and for teaching mathematical physics with rare depth at Stony Brook.

Thank you for the factorization theorems that let us read high-energy collisions in the language of QCD, and for stewarding C.N. Yang's institute as its director.

Thank you for foundational work on superspace and supersymmetry that shaped how physicists think about supergravity, taught for decades at the Yang Institute.

Thank you for a wide-ranging career in particle physics, field theory, and statistical mechanics, and for helping keep the Yang Institute a home for deep theory.

Thank you for pioneering contributions to string field theory and dimensional regularization, and for the open lecture notes that have taught quantum field theory to many.

Thank you for helping discover the quark-gluon plasma with the PHENIX experiment at Brookhaven, and for teaching physics with a warmth that earned you a Distinguished Teaching chair.

Thank you for chasing the origin of the proton's spin and for leading the science of the Electron-Ion Collider, a landmark facility taking shape at Brookhaven.

Thank you for the chiral magnetic effect and bold ideas connecting quark-gluon matter to quantum anomalies, work that bridges nuclear physics and condensed matter.

Thank you for a prolific career in medicinal and organic chemistry and for founding Stony Brook's Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery to turn molecules into medicines.

Thank you for advancing the chemistry of nanomaterials for energy and medicine, and for leading the Stony Brook chemistry department as its chair.

Thank you for probing how enzymes tune small molecules and for pursuing new antibiotics and imaging tools at the interface of chemistry and biology.

As director of the Center for Game Theory, he has kept Stony Brook a world gathering place for the mathematics of strategy, generous in convening the field year after year.

A game theorist of deep originality, his work on markets and strategic behavior has enriched mathematical economics and mentored generations at Stony Brook.

His self-expansion research and the famous 36 questions that build closeness have shown, with real science, how human beings grow through love and connection.

Her research on group identity, partisanship, and polarization helps us understand, honestly and empirically, why politics feels the way it does.

A Bancroft Prize winning historian of medicine, she writes with humanity about germs, patients, and the everyday history of American health.

His careful global histories of cocaine and commodities turned an overlooked subject into serious scholarship, edited and mentored with real generosity.

A scholar of modernism who reads literature through law and material culture, she also champions graduate students across the whole university as dean.

A philosopher and historian of physics who writes clearly for the public, he leads the philosophy department and bridges the sciences and the humanities.

His work on cosmopolitan and collective memory helps societies reckon honestly with their pasts across borders and generations.

Her book on truth and human rights in Ghana insists that marginalized histories matter, teaching justice with rigor and heart.

A leading scholar of how words are built, his work on morphology and writing systems has shaped modern linguistics and Stony Brook's renowned department.

His research on syntax and meaning, from double objects to clause structure, is core reading for anyone learning how sentences carry sense.

An interdisciplinary artist whose site-specific public works listen to the ecology, history, and psychology of a place, she teaches art as a form of civic care.

A celebrated jazz trombonist and bandleader, he brings a working artist's joy and craft to teaching improvisation at Stony Brook.

A composer whose music embraces blues, jazz, and spirituals, he has led and taught in Stony Brook's music department with warmth since 1992.

Thank you for a lifetime studying how herbivorous insects and their host plants evolve together, and for the evolution textbook that taught generations to see the living world clearly.

Thank you for tracing the deep history of biodiversity and fighting to conserve it, bringing bats, genomes, and the fate of tropical forests into the same honest picture.

Thank you for counting the penguins of Antarctica from space and turning satellite data into protection for wildlife, a Golden Goose reminder that patient science saves real places.

Thank you for building Stony Brook's high-pressure laboratory and squeezing minerals to the conditions of the deep Earth, so we can read what the planet's interior is truly made of.

Thank you for reading the mineralogy of Mars and the Moon from their light, and for leading the Geosciences department while keeping the wonder of other worlds in view.

Thank you for helping the Mars rovers understand the rocks beneath their wheels, and for a career in sedimentary geochemistry that connects ancient Earth to the red planet.

Thank you for chasing neutrinos across giant underground detectors and leading the physics department, patiently pursuing the particles that quietly shape our universe.

Thank you for inventing clever, low-cost ways to hunt for light dark matter, proving that big questions about the cosmos can be chased with ingenuity, not just size.

Thank you for pioneering the laser cooling of atoms and founding the Laser Teaching Center, giving students the rare joy of doing real optics research with their own hands.

Thank you for co-discovering supergravity, the theory that folds gravity into the language of quantum fields, and for leading the Yang Institute and teaching there as its Yang Lecturer.

Thank you for classic work on the two-dimensional Ising model and exactly solvable systems that became a cornerstone of statistical mechanics, all from your long home at Stony Brook.

Thank you for a curious, wide-ranging life in theory spanning particles, magnetic monopoles, nuclear matter, and cosmology, shared generously with Stony Brook students.

A founder of psychotherapy integration and helper of countless clinicians, he built Stony Brook's clinical program and still gives back through teaching and his podcast.

His attitudinal model reshaped how scholars understand the Supreme Court, and his decades of teaching made Stony Brook a home for the rigorous study of law and politics.

A beloved essayist and memoirist who taught writing at Stony Brook Southampton for sixteen years, he showed students how honest sentences can hold grief and joy.

His phenomenology of place and landscape gave language to how deeply where we are shapes who we are, a gift to continental philosophy and beyond.

Thank you for opening the strange world of four-dimensional geometry through gauge theory, work that earned the Fields Medal, and for anchoring the Simons Center as one of its permanent members.

Thank you for the Fukaya category and the deep bridge you built between symplectic geometry and mirror symmetry, brought to Stony Brook as a permanent member of the Simons Center.

Thank you for the Nekrasov partition function and a body of work that ties supersymmetric gauge theory to deep mathematics, a gift to both physics and geometry at the Simons Center.

Thank you for bringing the rigor of physics to protein folding and for founding the Laufer Center as a place where physics, math, and biology solve problems together.

Thank you for building the algorithms and force fields that let us simulate biomolecules in motion, helping the world understand how proteins and DNA truly work.

Thank you for the elastic network models that reveal how proteins flex and function, and for leading the Laufer Center's mission at the meeting point of physics and biology.

Thank you, Arie, for decades pioneering volume visualization and virtual reality, and for building the Reality Deck immersive facility that lets people literally walk inside their data.

Thank you, Steven, for The Algorithm Design Manual that has taught a whole generation to think clearly about algorithms, and for leading Stony Brook's AI Institute with the same generosity.

Thank you, Scott, for advancing model checking and the formal verification of safety-critical medical devices, work that quietly makes the systems people trust with their lives more dependable.

Thank you, Dimitris, for computer vision and machine learning research that reaches into medical imaging and human behavior, always in service of understanding people better.

Thank you, Klaus, for interactive visual analytics and explainable AI that keep humans in the loop, and for years of service editing the field's leading visualization journal.

Thank you, Serge, for pioneering high-speed electronic and photonic devices and for founding New York's Center for Advanced Technology in Sensor Systems, turning deep physics into real sensors.

Thank you, Emre, for your work on energy-efficient integrated circuits and heterogeneous integration, and for leading the ECE department with steady, thoughtful hands.

Thank you, Petar, for foundational work in statistical signal processing and Monte Carlo methods, and for years of leadership that shaped Stony Brook's ECE department.

Thank you, Yuanyuan, for advancing edge computing, data center networking, and wireless systems, and for mentoring and championing diversity across the College of Engineering.

Thank you, James, for a lifetime of mathematics from quantum field theory to shock waves and fluid dynamics, honored with the National Medal of Science and still teaching at Stony Brook.

Thank you, Joseph, for elegant results in computational geometry and optimization, including approximation schemes for hard routing problems, and for leading the AMS department with care.

Thank you, Minghua, for improving how we model clouds, convection, and climate, work that helps the whole world reason more honestly about the atmosphere we share.

Thank you, Clinton, for founding Stony Brook's Biomedical Engineering department and for discovering how gentle mechanical signals help bone heal, turning biophysics into real therapies.

Thank you, Yi-Xian, for advancing bone tissue engineering and ultrasound-based diagnostics, and for leading the Biomedical Engineering department with generosity and vision.

Thank you, Stefan, for illuminating how mechanical loading shapes bone and how low-magnitude vibration can protect the skeleton, work that matters for aging and for astronauts alike.

Thank you, Scott, for deep work in optics and computational imaging, and for bringing that applied-theory clarity to leading Stony Brook's Mechanical Engineering department.

Thank you, Fu-Pen, for a career in experimental solid mechanics and optical techniques like moire and laser speckle that let engineers actually see stress and strain in materials.

Thank you, Imin, for research on robotic grasping with soft fingers and on wafer manufacturing, and for years of dedicated service to students across Stony Brook and SUNY Korea.

Thank you, Dimitris, for pursuing cleaner power generation and propulsion through advanced combustion and alternative fuels, engineering toward a more sustainable energy future.

Thank you, Dilip, for computational insight into self-assembling polymers and complex chemical systems, and for leading Materials Science and Chemical Engineering and advocating for research.

Thank you, Miriam, for pioneering nanoscale polymer and biomaterials science, for directing the Garcia MRSEC, and for mentoring hundreds of students from high school through the PhD.

Thank you, David, for advancing laser-based micro and nano manufacturing, precise light-driven techniques that open new ways to build and diagnose at very small scales.

Thank you for the elegant algorithms and data structures that quietly make storage and big data faster, and for the many teaching awards that show how much you love sharing them.

Thank you for building real systems that defend software against real attackers, and for a Secure Systems Lab that has trained a generation of cybersecurity researchers.

Thank you for co-authoring the AODV routing protocol that helps wireless networks find their way, work now woven into how billions of devices quietly talk to each other.

Thank you for decades mapping how phospholipase D and lipid signals reshape cells, mitochondria, and membrane traffic, and for leading pharmacology at Stony Brook with such generosity.

Thank you for using brain imaging to reveal how dopamine goes awry in schizophrenia, giving millions of patients and families science built on real hope.

Thank you for discovering that sphingolipids like ceramide carry cell-signaling messages, opening a whole field and steering Stony Brook's fight against cancer.

Thank you for illuminating how cholesterol and sphingolipid domains organize our membranes, and how viruses and toxins exploit them, one careful fluorescence experiment at a time.

Thank you for more than thirty years unraveling how chromosomes pair and separate in meiosis, and for teaching so well that AAAS named you a Fellow.

Thank you for showing how nerve growth factor and signaling endosomes guide neurons to grow and connect, work that anchors how we understand the nervous system.

Thank you for patiently decoding the ion channels that set the electrical rhythm of nerve and heart cells, foundational biology that quietly touches everyone.

Thank you for studying the humble blink to understand how the brain controls movement and disorders like dystonia, turning a small reflex into deep insight.

Thank you for revealing how microglia and proteases like tPA shape neuron survival in the brain, and for mentoring the next generation as Vice Dean.

Thank you for inventing better ways to read tumors under the microscope, sharpening cancer diagnosis and leading pathology at Stony Brook with real care.

Thank you for your landmark discoveries about p53 at the mitochondria and mutant p53 in cancer, physician-scientist work that points toward new therapies.

Thank you for measuring the chemistry of our air from the Arctic to the coast, and for leading SoMAS while keeping climate science honest and useful.

Thank you for standing watch over Long Island's waters, tracing harmful algal blooms and dead zones so communities can protect the coasts they love.

Thank you for championing forage fish, sharks, and sturgeon, and for pioneering ecosystem-based fisheries management so the ocean is stewarded for the whole web of life.

Thank you for teaching us how seafloor sediments breathe and cycle carbon, work that reshaped how we read the chemistry of the ocean floor.

Thank you for tracing how metals and radionuclides move through marine life, science that guides food safety and our understanding of ocean contaminants.

Thank you for illuminating the hidden lives of marine microbes and their viruses, and for building the genetic tools that let others study them too.

Thank you for sharpening our forecasts of coastal storms, nor'easters, and extreme weather, research that helps people on Long Island and beyond stay safe.

Thank you for turning natural radionuclides into precise clocks for the ocean carbon cycle, a lifetime of work that lets us read the sea's own timekeeping.

Thank you for characterizing the very molecules that make up marine organic matter, foundational chemistry that underlies how we understand the ocean carbon cycle.

Thank you for modeling the storm surges that threaten New York and for tirelessly advocating protection for coastal communities in a rising-sea world.

A pioneering engineer of wireless information theory now leading Stony Brook as its seventh president, she carries a scientist's rigor and an entrepreneur's drive into the work of building a great public university.

A clinical psychologist turned chief academic officer, he stewards the whole academic mission with a researcher's care for people and evidence.

A historian of the American West who writes movingly about place and belonging, he leads the College of Arts and Sciences with a scholar's respect for the humanities and the sciences alike.

Thank you for decades of work on feedback, career motivation, and how people grow at work, and for building the College of Business while writing the books that guide leaders.

Thank you for the careful research on gender and negotiation that helps close real gaps, and for leading the College of Business with the same fairness you study.

Thank you for a career devoted to easing chronic pain and caring for older adults, from bedside nurse in 1981 to Dean, always keeping the patient at the center.

Thank you for studying how the mouth and the whole body speak to each other, and for teaching comprehensive care that treats the person, not just the tooth.

Thank you for more than thirty years helping children move and thrive through physical therapy, and for leading the School of Health Professions that trains the front line of care.

Thank you for research that protects and empowers people with disabilities, and for advancing social work that meets real families where they are.

Thank you for founding SUNY's first journalism school and pioneering news literacy, teaching a generation how to tell true stories and how to know which stories are true.

Thank you for turning a lifetime of curiosity into a movement, helping scientists speak to the rest of us with warmth, clarity, and real human connection.

Thank you for building the Alda Center into a global home for clearer science, and for showing researchers that connecting with people is a skill worth learning.

Thank you for reporting the world from Moscow for CBS and then teaching students the craft firsthand, so the next generation of correspondents learns from someone who was there.