Beginning with 29 students and four faculty in an abandoned railroad depot on State Street in the heart of the city, the Normal School was the first New York State-chartered public institution of higher education.

By 1913, the institution was home to 590 students and 44 faculty members, offered a master's degree for the first time, and bore a new name—the New York State College for Teachers at Albany.

SUNY, including the Albany campus, became a manifestation of the vision of Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, who wanted a public university system to accommodate the college students of the post–World War II baby boom.

Its visual effect has been described as "Dazzling one-of-a-kind" by architectural critic Thomas A. Gaines, who called it "a formal masterpiece" and "a study in classical romanticism.

The Podium's showpiece is a central pool with fountains and an off-center circular bell tower, or "Carillon", which also serves as a water storage reservoir.

[29] On the west end of the Uptown Campus is the university's meteorology and characterization tools, the National Weather Service (NWS), and the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center (ASRC).

New residence halls, Empire Commons and Liberty Terrace, opened in 2002 and 2012, housing up to 1,200 and 500 students, respectively, Ground was broken for a new School of Business building in October 2008.

Located also on the campus—which contains 350,000 square feet (33,000 m2) of lab, support and associated office space—is the Center for Functional Genomics, which does research in the areas of microarrays, proteomics, molecular biology and transgenics.

Biopharmaceutical giant Regeneron Pharmaceuticals has a large-scale biologics manufacturing facility adjacent to the campus where it produces investigational products for all its clinical trials.

These are "apartment-style" residences and include kitchens, furnished living rooms, and, on Empire Commons, washers, dryers, dishwashers, single bedrooms, and central air conditioning.

[36] In fall 2021, UAlbany unveiled ETEC (Emerging Technology and Entrepreneurship Complex) located on the Eastern portion of the main Uptown campus.

It receives annual appropriations as a part of the SUNY budget, and the New York State University Construction Fund manages and finances buildings and capital improvements.

A focus of study is the social and personal forces that lead to criminal conduct and the analysis of the organization and operation of crime control systems.

The College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity (CEHC), created in 2015, offers interdisciplinary academic programs for undergraduate and graduate students in fields designed to protect against, respond to, and recover from a growing array of natural and man-made risks and threats in New York State and around the world.

Awards for life scientists at the DOH's Wadsworth Center make up roughly a third of UAlbany's total of $391.7 million In September 2023, the School of Public Health expanded to include a Department of Nursing.

Multiple partnerships with Italy, South Africa and Scotland were active until 2019 before the COVID pandemic, and are planned for re-engagement at an appropriate time in the near future.

The school has a history of dedication in the area of gerontological social work, the creation of aging friendly communities in 2006 and improving pathways to higher education for inner city youth and families through the New York State-funded Liberty Partnership Program.

Features of SSW include the Internships in Aging Program, the Center for Innovations in Mental Health, and the Social Work Education Consortium.

The Honors College offers special lectures, tours, retreats to Camp Dippikill, and other trips to expand their learning opportunities, and also student social events.

The second, called the Science Library, is located on the south side of the Campus Center and focuses on strictly scientific literature and media used in much of the university's research.

The university's libraries offer a program of information literacy with instruction that ranges from a focus on traditional bibliographic access to collaborative classes integrated into the curriculum.

Located on the university East Campus in Rensselaer, N.Y., the center combines UAlbany research expertise in genomics and biomedical sciences with technology in a new 117,000-square-foot (10,900 m2) facility.

Reliene, who received her doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in Switzerland, expands the scientific portfolio of the Center in the genetic and environmental causes of cancer.

Established on February 16, 1961, by the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York, its mission is to promote programs in basic and applied sciences, especially as they relate to the atmospheric environment.

In addition the center has a large "jungle research group" exploring atmosphere and biosphere relationships in the Amazon rainforest, the Alaskan Tundra, the Canadian Boreal Forest, and the Eastern U.S.

It highlighted the campus's alternative transportation options, which include hybrid buses, global electric motorcars (GEMs), public bus systems, carpooling, and bike-and-ride sharing programs.

Modeled after the U.S. government, SA consists of three branches: executive, legislative (unicameral Student Association Senate), and judicial (Supreme Court).

Tennis remained a constant from 1898 on and men's basketball dates back to 1909, but attempts to field teams in football (1922), baseball (1896–1901), swimming, and ice hockey were aborted.

Expansion into men's and women's sports increased after World War II, and then expanded greatly in the 1960s (men's sports of lacrosse, track and field, cross-country, and swimming moved from club to varsity status, and women's tennis, softball, field hockey, basketball and swimming were introduced), a direct result of the introduction of the new Uptown campus and its expanded athletic facilities.

[79] The university has been home to scholars, scientists, and writers, including 2017 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry Joachim Frank; 2018 Wolf Prize co-recipient Omar Yaghi, a University of California, Berkeley chemist; Herman Aguinis, a George Washington University School of Business professor and president of the Academy of Management; Alanna Schepartz, a Yale University chemist and a National Academy of Arts and Sciences inductee; Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison; Pulitzer Prize winner William Kennedy; gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk;[80] Broadway actress and three-time Tony Award nominee Carolee Carmello;[81] Turing Award winner Richard E. Stearns; Harvard sociologist[82] Robert J. Sampson and Scott Waldman (biochemist, MD) Samuel M.V.