Building Connection and Leadership

How Stony Brook’s Alan Alda Center, DI3, Office for Research and SUNY Are Training Scientists to Lead and Communicate

“We’re going to play an exercise called ‘Affirmation Ball,'” said Josh Rice, a facilitator from the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science™ at Stony Brook University. 

At the State University of New York (SUNY) headquarters in New York City, Rice faced a crowded room of scientists and researchers. He raised his hands and began shaping the air into a ball.

“I’m going to say an affirmation about this journey,” he said. “Then, I’ll call someone’s name. You’ll catch the ball, share a reflection and throw it to someone else.”

As if the ball had weight, he tossed it overhead to his colleagues, Alda facilitators Radha Ganesan and Kim Stauffer, and then on it went to some 30 biomedical researchers, engineers, neuroscientists and climate scientists — now fellows of the inaugural SUNY Research Leadership Academy (SRLA). 

After a year-long training experience, the fellows gathered at SUNY Global Center for their final session with the Alda Center on March 30.

As the ball traveled from fellow to fellow, they reflected on challenges they worked through since the Academy’s start: the feeling of isolation in their work, difficulty in communicating research to funders and elected officials and the unlearning that communication is a gift you either have or don’t.

When the ball got to Susan Clark, associate professor at the University at Buffalo, she volleyed it into the air before catching it again. “This experience has been life-changing,” she said. “Coming into this, I was intimidated and self-conscious. But everyone has been so welcoming. It doesn’t get easier. But we’re going to get better.”

Long before the fellows gathered at SUNY Global and learned to toss imaginary balls into the air, what Clark felt was a sentiment all too familiar to one of the Academy’s founders.

A Founder’s Vision 

Before she cofounded SRLA, Laura Lindenfeld came to Stony Brook a decade ago to lead the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. From the start, she drew on the wisdom of Alan Alda, who founded the Center in 2009, and facilitators who teach the Alda Method®. “The listening tour took time,” she said, “It was worth every second.”

What she heard from facilitators shaped everything that came next for the center. Under Lindenfeld’s leadership, training and research in the Alda Method® expanded, infrastructure grew and the Alda Center’s work broke into the private and nonprofit industries, including NASA and the Gates Foundation. But for Lindenfeld, the Alda Center’s growth felt incomplete.  

“We help thousands and thousands in the sciences. We’ve travelled from Australia to Hawaii and back again,” she said. “Many on the Alda team asked, ‘How can we help more people?’ And that got me thinking. If we can do that for clients across the world, why not here in our own backyard?”

As the Alda Center grew, the answer that brought Lindenfeld back to SUNY took shape as a year-long academy for researchers in the university system. The program would train fellows to communicate their work with clarity and leadership, bridging science and society and bringing the Alda Center’s training to more than 10 SUNY campuses for the first time.

Setting Up the SUNY Research Leadership Academy for Success

In early 2025, Lindenfeld submitted a proposal to the Henry Luce Foundation, which backed the Academy with a seed grant. She brought the concept to Stony Brook University’s Office for Research and Innovation, then led by Kevin Gardner, who saw the Academy’s potential and helped pitch it to SUNY’s vice presidents for research.

From there, Shadi Shahedipour-Sandvik, senior vice chancellor of SUNY’s Office for Research, Innovation and Economic Development, brought the full weight of the SUNY system behind the Academy, and with it the support of SUNY’s Chancellor John B. King Jr. 

With SUNY’s help, the work of building a tangible program began. Brenda Hoffman, who leads curriculum and organizational strategy at the Alda Center, worked alongside Lindenfeld and Alda facilitators Radha Ganesan, Josh Rice, Kim Stauffer, Nancee Moes and Lydia Franco-Hodges to shape what the Academy would ask fellows to accomplish.

Lindenfeld then enlisted the expertise of another Stony Brook colleague to help launch the Academy: Judi Brown Clarke, vice president of DI3. Clarke contributed a specific teaching methodology to the Academy: lessons in leadership and emotional intelligence, explored through fables. “Leadership is measured not only by what we know, but by how we listen, uplift others and respond to challenges,” she said. “Fables provide a timeless foundation for difficult conversations and strategic thinking.”

The Academy’s third partner was the Office of Research and Innovation at Stony Brook, now led by Mónica Bugallo, who stepped into the interim vice president role in January. 

“Including the Office of Research and Innovation in the design and implementation of the Academy elevates it beyond many traditional leadership programs,” she said. “The Academy focuses on essential communication skills that researchers need today — from conveying complex knowledge to students, to securing critical funding from legislators, to translating societal impact for the media.”

Bringing the Academy to life was a cross-collaborative effort between the Alda Center, DI3 and the Office of Research, including key Stony Brook colleagues who helped project manage the Academy across SUNY: Jawaad Sheriff, a biomedical engineer and research development associate, and Nina Maung-Gaona, senior associate vice president for research administration.

From proposal to application and now more than a year later, Lindenfeld, Clarke and Bugallo stood together at SUNY Global Center to witness the final session of the Academy.

The Final Session: Three-Minute Doses of Hope

“Welcome to another day of growth,” said Judi Brown Clarke, looking out at the SRLA cohort. She reflected on how far fellows had come since their first session in August. “We knew this was going to be something special, and the culmination is today.”

During their final day, fellows moved through keynotes, warm-up exercises with Alda facilitators and panel discussions covering philanthropy and patents, including a session on research commercialization and entrepreneurship led by Joy Goswami, director of intellectual property and licensing at SUNY Research Foundation.

That afternoon, the fellows took the stage for the Alda Spotlight presentations. Each had three minutes to deliver a clear and vivid talk connecting their research to a layperson.

But first, they heard from the Academy’s leadership.

Bugallo brought the morning into sharp focus on research leadership.

“The work starts in your labs, when you mentor students, when you write a grant,” she said. “But today is about more than that. We need to share with the world the importance of what we do, and help people connect to the advances and complex problems we are working to address.”

Lindenfeld was the last of the Academy’s leaders to address the fellows.

“We didn’t ask you to simplify your expertise or perform in a certain way,” she said. “But rather to make genuine human connections. This is the core of the Alda Method — being more present, more human, more connected. We need more leaders just like the ones here.”

Before introducing Chancellor John B. King Jr., Lindenfeld signaled for a surprise at the close of her address: a recorded message from Alan Alda played for the room. He left the fellows with a message that’s at the heart of what the center teaches. “Don’t forget,” he said. “Connect.”

SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. took the podium last. Rather than a lesson on leadership, he offered the fellows a story about a particular painting from the 1960s — and what its context reveals.

He described Norman Rockwell’s painting of Ruby Bridges, who at six years old, walked into a segregated New Orleans school surrounded by U.S. Marshals. Most people’s eyes go straight to Ruby, he told them. But he asked the fellows to “zoom out” — to look at who else was in that painting. The federal agents in the background, he explained, provide the context that reveals the stakes of that moment in history. He invited the fellows to see their own work through the same lens.

“You know all the parts — every nook and cranny of your research,” King said. “You know what’s in the abstract and what’s in every footnote. But sometimes the nugget that unlocks understanding for the audience you are trying to reach is in the background, not the foreground.”

For the fellows, the moment to find that nugget had arrived later that day.  

One by one, researchers took the floor of SUNY Global and put their Alda training into practice. They distilled years of expertise into a short talk that a stranger could understand and care about. A guest in the room that afternoon described what he witnessed as “three-minute doses of hope.”

In their talks, SRLA fellows offered an inside look at research that holds promise for bio-printed organs to shorten transplant waiting lists; identified early warning signs of high-risk pregnancy to keep newborns out of the NICU; explored solutions for cardiac health in patients at risk of arrest; and pushed new frontiers in Alzheimer’s research, glaucoma and more. 

With a dash of improv and newfound confidence, they talked about their research with excitement and laughter. “In some ways, we’ve untrained them from leading with facts only,” said Lindenfeld, “We’re asking them to find the connection first. All of us need community, scientists and engineers, too. But to build community, you must connect.”

The SUNY Research Leadership Academy aims to return in the fall. “I hope to continue growing the Academy with the amazing team that made this program possible,” Lindenfeld said. “We are building a broad community where researchers link arms across differences and institutions, forget the boundaries between them and do important work together.”