The University of Florida’s Mike Nazareth has been bolstering graduate-student numbers – and quality – at the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering since his arrival in 2014.
The director of Graduate Recruiting and Undergraduate Research, Nazareth was honored recently by the National Association of Graduate Recruiting and Admissions Professionals (NAGAP) for developing a system that helps engineering colleges across the country find top candidates for master’s and doctoral programs.
The 2025 Promotion of Excellence Award celebrates the success of ENGINE – Engineering National Graduate Institutional Name Exchange, a program Nazareth started at the University of Florida that marked its 10th anniversary last fall. With ENGINE, colleges exchange student records so engineering programs can actively pursue individual candidates in a larger pool of qualified students.
The initial framework of the program started when Nazareth started exchanging list while he was at the University of Michigan.
Nazareth said 87 colleges now exchange more than 16,000 student records. That means UF can find and court more undergraduate students with higher GPAs; since the inception of ENGINE, UF has increased the minimum GPA to 3.75, Nazareth said.
“My task from the dean was to bring in the most academic and diverse Ph.D. cohort across all departments,” Nazareth said about starting the program at UF. “But there are tens of thousands of prospective graduate students everywhere, so we really weren’t getting the results we were needing. I was challenged to have more academic students, primarily higher undergraduate GPAs coming in.”
While at UM, Nazareth would attend conferences and other engineering student events but go back to campus with, at best, 50-100 potential candidates.
“So one day it just kind of dawned on me. I’m seeing some of these same colleagues everywhere, and they have lots of engineering undergrads at their schools, and so do we,” he said. “Maybe we could just swap those names.”
He started with a handful of willing universities – Cornell, Purdue, University of Maryland and Virginia Tech. They ended up with hundreds of viable graduate candidates between all colleges. Inspired, he doubled the number of participating colleges the following year.
In doing so, he won UM’s President’s Staff Innovation Award.
One year after he arrived at UF, he launched ENGINE with the blessing of then-College of Engineering Dean Cammy Abernathy and, later, Interim Dean Forrest Masters, who approved funding for an ENGINE assistant.
The program has not only been a boon for UF, but it continues to turn heads at top universities.
“I don’t think I’ve ever gone two weeks straight since I started ENGINE in which someone in this country is not contacting me about it,” Nazareth said. “I just had an associate dean from Princeton University contact me. Princeton’s never participated, but they said ‘We’ve heard about this. We want to participate. What do I do?”
Are colleges concerned about listing their best students for other grad-hungry schools to recruit?
“Absolutely,” Nazareth answered. “Some schools have tremendous concerns about that. It took eight years to get Georgia Tech to participate in. They viewed this as, ‘Well, you’re going to come after our best students.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, of course we will. But you’ll come after all the best of all the other schools in it.’ And that’s how it should be.”
NAGAP honored Nazareth at the 2025 NAGAP Annual Conference in San Francisco and will present his ENGINE work at the 2026 NAGAP GEM Summit in Baltimore.