History
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) was founded in 1947 as a multipurpose research laboratory intended to house large, state-of-the-art research facilities and make them available to scientific (and industrial) users from all over the world. BNL is located in eastern Long Island on the former site of the U.S. Army Camp Upton, which served as a training facility for soldiers during both WWI and WWII. The operation of the laboratory was originally managed by the Ivy League universities of the East Coast and MIT. In 1997, the U.S. Department of Energy sought new management for the Laboratory. Stony Brook partnered with Battelle Memorial Institute to create Brookhaven Science Associates LLC (BSA), which competed for and won the contract to manage and operate BNL for the Department of Energy. BSA has managed the Lab since 1998.
Over its history, BNL has built and operated numerous reactors, accelerators, colliders, and other facilities that have supported basic and applied research in areas such as nuculear and high-energy physics; materials science; nanoscience; energy and environmental research; national security and nonproliferation; neuroscience; structural biology; and computational sciences. Seven Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work done at BNL's facilities, and BNL scientists have been recognized for many important discoveries.
Today, BNL has a staff size greater than 2,500 and supports a user community as large as 5,000 investigators from around the U.S. and the world. Some of BNL's most widely used facilities include the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the National Syncrotron Light Source II (NSLS II), and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN). BNL was recently selected for the construction of an Electron Ion Collider (EIC), with completion expected early in the 2030s. BNL also offers STEM education and workforce development programs that draw more than 30,000 participants annually.
In addition to Stony Brook's role in management of BNL, many of our faculty, postdocs, and students use the Lab's research facilities. Stony Brook and BNL share numerous joint faculty appointments, and collaborate through joint institutes, such as the Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science (CFNS) and the Center for Accelerator Science and Education (CASE).