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.
D. Symposium, an annual Symposium on Molecular Medicine, and several internationally renowned meetings at Cold Spring Harbor. Students in the Graduate Program in Molecular and Cell Biology have access to state of the art research facilities and equipment. Core facilities on the Stony Brook campus that are available to all program faculty include a microscopy center equipped with confocal, scanning and transmission electron microscopes as well as the capabilities for fluorescence, phase contrast and differential interference microscopy. A Center for the Analysis and Synthesis of Macromolecules housed in the Stony Brook Health Sciences Center offers the ability to sequence and synthesize both proteins and nucleic acids. There is a core tissue culture facility in the Life Sciences Building, and several different networked mainframe computers are available.