SBU names Princeton’s Andrea Goldsmith as its new president
By Daniel Dunaief
Stony Brook University has named Andrea Goldsmith as the downstate flagship public university’s seventh president.
Goldsmith, who will start her tenure at Stony Brook on August 1st, has been the dean of engineering and applied sciences at Princeton University since 2020. She has been a dean, researcher in engineering, technology company founder and faculty member at Princeton and at Stanford University and Caltech.
Goldsmith will take over for Richard McCormick, who had been interim dean of the university after former president Maurie McInnis resigned last year to become president of Yale University.
”I would like to congratulate Goldsmith on her appointment as the next president of this prestigious university as I believe she will undoubtedly serve Stony Brook admirably,” Kathy Hochul (D), governor of New York, said in a statement.
Goldsmith’s research interests are in communications. control and signal processing and their application to wireless communications, interconnected systems and biomedical devices. She founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of Plume WiFi and of Quantenna Inc. and is on the board of Directors for Intel, Medtronic, Crown Castle and the Marconi Society. She has also served on the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology from 2021 to 2025.
At Princeton, Goldsmith helped establish the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute. She also developed interdisciplinary research in robotics, blockchain, wireless technologies and artificial intelligence.
Andrew Singer, the Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook, has known Goldsmith for over 25 years.
“She’s a fantastic choice,” Singer said in an interview. “She’s a community builder” and an innovator and has been a “highly visible and strong proponent for the intellectual communities she’s been a part of.”
The newly named SBU president was the founding chair of the IEEE Board of Directors Committee on Diversity and Inclusion and served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society, as founding Chair of the Student Committee and as founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory.
Goldsmith will be joining Stony Brook at a time when the school has developed significant momentum in a number of areas. The university has risen in the rankings of US News and World Reports, climbing to 58th among national universities and 26th among public universities.
The university also secured a $500 million commitment from Marilyn and the late Jim Simons through the Simons Foundation, which was the largest unrestricted gift ever made to a U.S. education institution.
The university is also in the process of leading the development of a $700 million climate center on Governors Island.
During McCormick’s tenure at Stony Brook, which started last August, he outlined ways to improve and build on the university’s success, while also recognizing the need for investment.
McCormick highlighted how Stony Brook had an estimated $2 billion in deferred maintenance.
In an oral history interview with Mary Ann Hellrigel of the IEEE History Cente conducted on February 2, 2022, Goldsmith shared that she grew up in California, where she lived with her mother Adrienne Goldsmith after her parents got divorced. Her mother was an animator for cartoon shows, including “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.”
She is married to Arturo Salz and the couple has two children.
Goldsmith spent part of what would have been her senior year in high school as a singer in Greek night clubs before starting college.
Goldsmith has a Bachelor’s in Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and an MS and PhD in electricity engineering from UC Berkeley.
