Campus Life
Campus Overview
Rockefeller’s 14 acres and 22 buildings, set along the East River, serve as its students’ home base for their scientific explorations. Nearly all students, along with most postdocs and many faculty, live on or adjacent to campus, and their proximity keeps the grounds — and many of the labs — buzzing with activity late into the night.
Because science isn’t only about lab work, the university offers numerous spaces for impromptu conversations that spur creative thought. For more than 50 years, the university’s Faculty and Students Club has been a relaxed setting for late-night interactions among scientists of all ages and disciplines.
The campus also offers athletic facilities — including a fitness center and tennis and squash courts — a cafeteria, dining room and coffee cart, a child care facility, campus-wide wireless internet access, an impressive art collection and numerous places, both indoor and out, to simply sit and think. The university’s library, which maintains an extensive archive of books and journals and provides campuswide online access to over 50 electronic databases, is currently undergoing a top-to-bottom renovation; when finished it will have new indoor and outdoor spaces for reading and study as well as meeting areas, a computer facility and a coffee room.
Finally, to further enhance interactions and collaborations on campus, the university is constructing new state-ofthe- art open-plan laboratory space in two historic buildings located on the north part of its campus. About half of the Collaborative Research Center’s 125,000 square feet of lab space has already been completed, and new common areas for meeting and working are in use. These developments, which will be fully complete in 2012, will facilitate communication between laboratories that wish to work together and will provide a collegial environment in which new interactions can prosper.
Lectures
The university's Caspary Auditorium, a blue-domed neighborhood landmark, hosts several lecture series that bring in the world’s foremost scientists and thinkers for lectures and informal conversations. In addition to twice-weekly scientific lectures (Rockefeller faculty speak on Mondays; acclaimed researchers from outside institutions speak on Fridays), the university’s Insight Lecture Series brings speakers in public health, policy, arts and humanities. There is also a student- and postdoc-sponsored lecture series and a variety of specialized student- and postdoc-sponsored seminar talks, as well as concerts and a film series.
Recent speakers have included Alan Alda, Michael Bloomberg, Harry Frankfurt, Frank Gehry, Murray Gell-Mann, David Nathan, Martin Rees, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Robert Sapolsky, Nicholas Wade, Jonathan Weiner, E.O. Wilson, Tadataka Yamada and Elias A. Zerhouni.
