Category: News

Dr. Walden “Wally” Rhines, son of the founding chair of the UF Department of Materials Science & Engineering (MSE) Dr. Frederick N. Rhines, is providing an endowment for a professorship in fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a field in which Cornami, Inc., the AI company of which he is President and CEO, holds a leading edge position.

Three leading researchers at the Warren B. Nelms institute for the Connected World are using artificial intelligence (AI) to make the Internet of Things (IoT) more secure and more efficient. They have invited us into their laboratories to take a peek at the leading edge of AI applications.

Edward Phelps, Ph.D., assistant professor & J. Crayton Pruitt Family Term Fellow at the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, has received a $1.8M R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to further his studies of the role of gamma Aminobutyric Acid (GABA) in the islet cells of the pancreas.

Josephine Allen, Ph.D., MSE, and her team comprised of MSE Ph.D. candidate and NIH Predoctoral Fellow Bryan James and J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering undergrad Paxton Guerrin observed that biomedical and biomaterials researchers and the journals publishing their papers rarely mentioned the sex of the cells involved in the studies. They knew how that data could potentially affect research results, and so they conducted their own analysis by surveying the literature of several top biomedical journals and found that cell sex was reported in only a small fraction (roughly 3%) of papers. That information and several other notable results prompted their own paper highlighting the findings entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex – Biological Sex is Underreported in Biomaterials Studies.”

Amanda Krause, Ph.D., MSE, is employing artificial intelligence methods to track and catalogue data for her abnormal grain growth research, and thanks to new a $1.2 million research award from the NSF, she will bring a cutting-edge, 3D X-ray microscope system to campus to generate even better data for her algorithms.

Ruogu Fang, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Smart Medical Informatics Learning and Evaluation Lab, was quoted in a Forbes article about an AI-assisted method for diagnosing Parkinson’s disease with, essentially, an eye exam.

Five years ago, Dr. Herbert and Nicole Wertheim and the Herbert & Nicole Wertheim Family Foundation gave a $50 million gift that catalyzed a $300 million public-private partnership, leveraging support from the state, the university and from private donors to bring about the biggest transformation in the history of our college.

UF engineers reach semi-finals in XPRIZE Contest for new COVID-19 test methods; their CRISPR-ENHANCE methodology published in Nature Communications journal

Faculty and students at the Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World went to work to invent wearable, smart, connected devices to fight COVID-19 and future viruses.

Backed by a nearly $11 million award from the Department of Energy, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Advanced Manufacturing Office, Michele Manuel, Ph.D., professor and chair of the UF Department of Materials Science & Engineering, is leading an industry-national laboratory-university consortium in developing an Induction-coupled Thermomagnetic Processing (ITMP) method to help increase the efficiency of alloy manufacturing.