Stony Brook President Andrea Goldsmith was the featured guest on a recent episode of iHeart Media’s CEOs You Should Know podcast, discussing her successful career that spans engineering, entrepreneurship, academic leadership and her vision of Stony Brook’s future. The episode premiered on September 3.
Goldsmith told listeners the story of her career as an engineer, researcher, entrepreneur and now president of Stony Brook, an experience she described as “a long, winding and ultimately, fulfilling journey.”
“I wasn’t sure I was going to be an engineer at first,” she said. “I just kind of ended up there because I thought it’d be a good foundation for whatever I did next.”
That vision proved accurate. After finishing her undergraduate degree in 1986 and joining a Silicon Valley startup, she had an epiphany that would define the rest of her career.
“I fell in love with wireless communication and wanted to learn more, so I went back for a master’s degree and ultimately a PhD,” she said. “I had a choice of going into industry during a booming time for wireless communication, but my heart was in the university.”
Goldsmith began her academic career at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and then Stanford during the height of a tech bubble that would crash two years later. She stayed at Stanford for 21 years, serving as chair of the faculty senate, and on the school’s task force on women and leadership. She also started two companies along the way, leaving in 2020 to become dean of engineering at Princeton University.
“That’s what brought me east,” she said. “I moved from being a faculty member, researcher and teacher, which I loved, to academic leadership because I thought I could have a bigger impact in that role.”
At Princeton, she served as dean for five years before taking the helm of Stony Brook as its seventh president. Goldsmith described for listeners her leap from academia to business and back, as well as her move from the classroom to administration and leadership, and the lessons she’s learned along the way.
“The first time I returned to academia was because I realized I didn’t know enough to have the impact on the wireless communication revolution that I saw coming,” she said. “I was working with people who had doctoral degrees and they approached problems differently, so I went back to the university to learn more.”
Years later she would cofound a chip company, Quantenna Communications, which would challenge her in different ways.
“At that point we needed millions of dollars to build our first chip and it was a very risky endeavor,” she said. “But I did it because I wanted to see if the 20 years that I had spent doing research in wireless communication actually mattered in practice. Could I take the ideas that I built up through my research and build a chip that would be better than any other chip because of the research?”
The answer to that was a resounding “yes,” as Quantenna would prove. However, despite that business success, academia remained closer to her heart.
“After two years I decided to go back to academia,” she said. “And now here at Stony Brook, I think we have an opportunity to turn Long Island into ‘Silicon Island’ and make it a catalyst for entrepreneurship and innovation, similar to what I saw at Stanford. That’s one of the things about Stony Brook that attracted me as an entrepreneur.”
Goldsmith also offered advice to young people, especially women and underserved students that seek a career in STEM or leadership.
“When I wanted to study engineering, I was unprepared because I’d left high school early,” she said, reflecting on her earliest experiences at Berkeley. “I didn’t have any of the background classes. I was also working full-time because I wanted to pay my own way through college. As one of the few women in my engineering classes, nobody thought I belonged there except my dad, who was a professor of mechanical engineering. That year was really hard. But I wasn’t going to listen to what anybody else thought. I was going to persevere and decide on my own if I should stay in engineering. I did, and I’ve had an amazing career.”
Goldsmith said that sadly, diverse people coming into STEM or other fields where they’re underrepresented face the same struggles she did in the early 1980s.
“If they’re struggling, people think they don’t belong, and you begin to wonder, ‘do I belong here?’” she said. “My message to young people, especially diverse people and women who think they want a STEM career, is that diversity is about excellence. What I’ve seen in my universities, in my startups, and in the boards I sit on is that having diverse people with diverse ideas and diverse experiences around the table to solve problems, whether it’s an engineering problem or a financial problem or another problem, leads to better outcomes. STEM needs those young people. We need your ideas and your experiences. Don’t worry if you struggle. We all struggle. There was a time when I got an F in calculus and physics. Find good mentors and supporters and know that the profession needs your diverse experiences and perspectives. Stick with it.”
President Goldsmith left listeners with a message about the value of higher education and why institutions like Stony Brook matter to our communities and their future. Universities, and especially public universities, she said, are about educating the whole person and preparing them not just for their first job, but for their personal and professional success over the course of their lives.
“On the education side, universities are about preparing young people for their professional interactions, their personal interactions, to be open to lifelong learning, to have the resilience and the human skills to thrive in whatever job they do,” she said. “On the research front, public and private universities have maintained American leadership in science and technology and the humanities and the arts since the foundation of this country. There is no substitute for the research that happens in American universities. It’s why we have the national prosperity and security that we have enjoyed since our founding. On the healthcare side, universities have contributed to breakthroughs in cancer, healthy aging of the brain, and in every disease. The reason I’ve stayed in universities my whole career is because we are educating future leaders and citizens of this country, we are keeping our country at the forefront of innovation in every area, and we create the fabric that has made America special throughout its 250 years.”
That, she said, is exactly what Stony Brook offers: an incredible education, matched by an equally incredible culture and experience.
“I talk to our students all the time, and they say ‘I found my place here. I found my people.’ Our faculty cares deeply about them. They have research opportunities. I believe that in 10 years we will be one of the top universities in the country. So for all the young people listening to this program and their parents, I say ‘take a look at Stony Brook.’”
— Robert Emproto
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