SUNY Chancellor King Visits UAlbany

ALBANY, NY (Jan. 19, 2023) — On Wednesday, UAlbany’s ETEC building was the third stop on new SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr.’s tour of the system’s 64 campuses.

King, who joined SUNY as chancellor on Jan. 9, met with President Havidán Rodríguez and his executive council, faculty, staff and students as he toured UAlbany’s newest, most advanced building.

The 90-minute tour showcased ETEC’s unique research and teaching spaces, including the Science on a Sphere room and the one-of-a-kind New York State Mesonet, as well as the complex’s sustainable building systems, which recently earned it LEED Platinum certification for energy efficiency.

King also met with students in ETEC’s maker/tinker space, where they demonstrated their projects in progress and spoke to the importance of applied learning as they prepare for careers in emerging fields like virtual and augmented reality and drone operation.

Following the tour, King attended a reception in the ETEC atrium and reflected on how his own life story — the son of public school teachers and great-grandson of a man who was enslaved, who rose to become a cabinet secretary in President Barack Obama’s administration — represented the profound power of education to dramatically change lives over the course of just a few generations. SUNY and UAlbany continue to play a critical role in those transformations as engines of economic and social mobility, he said.

“ETEC embodies so much of what makes UAlbany and SUNY great — an innovative place where our highly diverse student body can work collaboratively across disciplines, and with leading researchers in their fields, to tackle some of society’s greatest challenges,” President Rodríguez said. “As Albany’s hometown SUNY campus, we were honored to welcome Chancellor King home from the first leg of his tour. He will always be welcome at UAlbany.”