Stony Brook graduate student Joe Sertich
and Kenyan undergraduate student
Caroline Mukiri with a newly discovered
dinosaur bone from West Turkana.

Stony Brook University serves as the academic base affiliated with the Turkana Basin Institute. It provides facilities and support for lecture series, symposia, outreach, and fundraising activities; an academic home for graduate and postdoctoral students from both America and Africa; and Internet library access for the research centers at Turkana.

For nearly three decades Stony Brook has been an international center of excellence in research and training in paleontology and paleoanthropology, specifically in the areas of primate and human evolution. Stony Brook faculty have research programs all over the world and are repeatedly recognized as international leaders in the field. The Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences, which draws faculty from many departments on campus including Anatomical Sciences, Anthropology, Ecology and Evolution, and Geosciences, has been recognized as the premier program in the country based on faculty scholarly productivity in several studies during the past decade. The program has placed its graduates in the best postdoctoral and faculty positions in the world.

With the addition of Drs. Richard, Meave, and Louise Leakey to the Stony Brook faculty, and the establishment of the Turkana Basin Institute, there is now an extraordinary opportunity to integrate Stony Brook’s strengths in academic research and education with the Leakeys’ renowned experience and history of field research in East Africa.

The director of the Turkana Basin Institute is Lawrence Martin, Dean of the Graduate School at Stony Brook University. He will coordinate Turkana Basin Institute activities at Stony Brook, including recruitment, hiring, and evaluation of Institute faculty and postdoctoral researchers; development of facilities; and responsibility for communicating the Institute’s fundraising priorities. Subsequent directors of the Turkana Basin Institute will be appointed by the president of Stony Brook University in consultation with the Institute’s board of trustees.

The Stony Brook Foundation will receive all contributions for the Turkana Basin Institute. Established in 1965 as the sole official fundraising and private gift-receiving agency for Stony Brook University, the Foundation is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation. All contributions to the Institute are tax deductible to the fullest extent allowed by law.

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