The largest individual gift in UF history will name the Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology and launch a $1 billion public-private partnership that will drive the future of biomedical research and innovation.
Building the American Dream
The University of Florida’s Association of Hispanic Alumni (AHA) recently selected Carlos A. Penin, PE, (CCE, ‘77) to receive the 2022 Gran Caimán of the Year award for his passion, commitment and leadership beyond engineering.
Erika Moore Receives $1.85 million from NIH to Investigate How Ancestry Affects Wound Healing
Erika Moore, Ph.D., holder of the Rhines Rising Star Larry Hench Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, has received the prestigious National Institutes of Health Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Dr. Moore and her team will use the five-year, $1.85 million award to address critical gaps in understanding the relationship between ancestry and cell responses in wound healing. In the long term, this research will lead to biomaterial models of health disparities for the improved identification of wound healing risks and outcomes.
For Scientists, Hurricane Ian is Posing Threats—and Opportunities
For scientists, Hurricane Ian, which roared onto Florida’s southwest coast on September 28, 2022, as a Category 4 storm with winds of 250 kilometers per hour, has been both a research opportunity and an ordeal.
UF Helps State Launch AI Curriculum in Florida Public Schools
Florida is among the first states to adopt a K-12 artificial intelligence, or AI, education program designed to prepare its youth for the growing global demand for an AI-enabled workforce. The framework for the public school coursework was designed with help from UF faculty, including Christina Gardner-McCune, who modeled it after the Artificial Intelligence for K-12 Initiative, or AI4K12.
Deepfake Audio Has a Tell – Researchers Use Fluid Dynamics to Spot Artificial Imposter Voices
Patrick Traynor, Ph.D., Professor and John H. and Mary Lou Dasburg Preeminent Chair in Engineering in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), and Logan Blue, a Ph.D. student in CISE, write in The Conversation about why detecting audio deepfakes may be even more important than catching video deepfakes.
UF Receives Award for Diversity and Inclusion Work
Insight Into Diversity magazine has named the University of Florida as a recipient of the 2022 Higher Education Excellence in Diversity Award. The award measures the efforts made by universities to expand upon diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). The award also assesses the initiatives, student recruitment and hiring practices at an institution.
New HiPerGator Simulations “Solve Mother Nature” to Address Real-World Problems
In one of the most intensive uses yet of the University of Florida’s HiPerGator supercomputer, UF engineers have faithfully reproduced the turbulence and complexity of hot air rising along a wall — a previously impossible simulation with applications in home fire safety and heating and cooling. Thanks to dedicated use of 90% of the HiPerGator’s AI cluster over several days, the research team led by UF engineering professor Sivaramakrishnan “Bala” Balachandar was able to track turbulent eddies of air twisting and swirling on the sub-millimeter level.
Engineering the Hi-Fi Brain
Through a $4.5 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), two researchers in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering are working to advance the therapeutic intervention known as “neuromodulation,” fine-tuning electronic stimulation inside the body by creating next-generation electrodes that will deliver the equivalent of high fidelity for the central nervous system.
UF Researchers Enhance Defense Readiness Through the Language of Mathematics
A multidisciplinary team of researchers led by engineering faculty including James Fairbanks, Ph.D., an assistant professor in CISE, hopes to build software that will relate data from one scientific problem to another, with the goal of providing valuable applications for defense readiness.