Category: Stories

The University of Florida chapter of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society, “Florida Alpha,” was recognized as the R.C. Matthews Outstanding Chapter, an award which goes to the chapter determined to be the best out of over 250. Florida Alpha won the award because of its Gatortrax outreach program which educates young children about engineering.

As the University of Florida celebrates an ambitious landmark achievement of surpassing $1 billion in research expenditures, the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering would like to share how our eminent faculty and researchers—working side-by-side with our students—have helped contribute more than $131 million to that tally over the past year.

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.

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, 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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.