The Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook was founded in 1969 and was one of the first departments of its kind in the world. The department and graduate program has an international reputation in the fields of evolutionary biology and ecology. Particular areas of strength in our graduate program include population genetics, conservation ecology, molecular evolution and phylogenetics, ecosystem ecology, evolutionary genomics, species interactions, invasion ecology, marine and freshwater ecology, and primate evolution and behavior. The faculty includes one member of the National Academy of Sciences, 5 fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, five past presidents of the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Society of Naturalists, past president of the American Malacological Society, and past president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. Faculty members are active in a variety of major professional societies and have served as Editors, Associate Editors and members of editorial boards of major scientific journals.

A number of text books written by our current and emeritus faculty members are the standards in their field, including Sokal and Rohlf's Biometry, Futuyma’s two texts, Evolution and Evolutionary Biology, Gurevitch et al.’s The Ecology of Plants, and Levinton's Marine Biology. Faculty members from our department have written classic books that helped shape modern ecology and evolution: George William's Adaptation and Natural Selection, Slobodkin's Growth and Regulation of Animal Populations, and Sokal and Sneath's Numerical Taxonomy. More recent books written or edited by faculty members include Demographic Toxicity: Methods in Ecological Risk Assessment and Species Conservation and Management: Case Studies by Akçakaya and colleagues, Bell and Foster’s Evolutionary Biology of the Threespine Stickleback, Ginzburg and Colyvan’s Ecological Orbits: how planets move and populations grow, Design and Analysis of Ecological Experiments by Scheiner and Gurevitch, Levinton’s The Hudson River Ecosystem and Genetics, Paleontology and Macroevolution, and Pigliucci’s Making Sense of Evolution and Phenotypic Evolution, among others.

Stony Brook has been the home of the Quarterly Review of Biology since its inception.

Graduates of the Ph.D. Program at Stony Brook have gone on to a variety of successful careers, including faculty positions at a variety of prominent research institutions in the U.S. and abroad, as well as positions with conservation organizations, small colleges, consulting firms, and various governmental agencies.

The Program faculty currently consists of the 19 current faculty members of the Department of Ecology and Evolution, as well as 13 members of other Departments on campus, including Anatomy, Anthropology, Biochemistry, Chemistry, Marine Sciences, Neurobiology and Behavior, Psychology, and Sociology. At any one time, there are about 50 graduate students in the Program.