Dear UAlbany Community,
As we begin another academic year, I am delighted to welcome you back to campus. I hope you had an enjoyable summer and are recharged for the coming year.
There is so much to celebrate on campus, and I want to highlight some of our recent good news and some of the things to look forward to this semester.
Last week, we welcomed our largest first-year class in university history – more than 3,500 new Great Danes – with Welcome Week festivities that included a carnival, Great Danetopia, and a truly outstanding Convocation by Candlelight ceremony. Kudos to all those who made these events possible.
I hope you will take a moment to watch this moving recap video that highlights our incoming class and their hopes for their time at UAlbany.
We are making important investments in our campus. This week, we held a ribbon cutting for our newest residence hall, the Great Dane Apartments. Our Great Dane Hospitality team has opened several new and exciting dining options in the Campus Center, and the student-run café, Saxbys, will hold a grand opening in the Massry School of Business next week.
In order to continue to expand our academic offerings, this year we welcomed 32 tenure-track faculty and 48 non-tenure-track faculty to UAlbany. We look forward to the amazing work they will do to support our goals to educate engaged global citizens and produce research and scholarship with public impact.
On the research side, this year’s Strategic Allocation of Resources (StAR) Program has officially launched, and faculty, staff, and students are invited to submit proposals focused on either Public Impact Research or International Partnerships and Collaborative Research. And later this semester, you can expect to hear much more about Catalyst 2030, a multi-pronged initiative that aims to expand and enhance our research enterprise through seed grants, a talent acquisition program, and much more.
Next month, I will lead a UAlbany delegation to Bengaluru, India to celebrate the groundbreaking of a state-of-the-art campus for our partner institution, the Ramaiah Institute of Science and Management (RISM).
This Friday, the Great Danes football team will take on the University of New Hampshire. I hope to see you there! Go Great Danes!
I also hope that you have an outstanding semester and I look forward to hearing about your accomplishments.
Sincerely,
Havidán Rodríguez
President