Across the University of Florida, our 16 colleges, numerous institutes, and health care facilities embrace our shared mission of outreach and service to improve and enrich our community, nation, and the world. UF in the Community spotlights the impact of UF in our region.

Although UF has students and employees throughout the state, North Central Florida is home to much of our faculty and staff and to our 50,000+ students. Like all area residents, we want a vibrant, safe, healthy, and equitable place in which to live and thrive. Here are some of the ways in which we are enhancing our shared community.​

The coronavirus continues to mutate and evolve, and the latest in a parade of variants is causing particular worry among infectious disease specialists.

The delta variant fueled a devastating surge of cases and deaths in India, and it has proved highly transmissible while circling the globe, according to scientists. The variant has a small but rapidly increasing foothold in the United States and is already dominant in the United Kingdom, where it has delayed the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions.

The University of Florida’s HiPerGator AI supercomputer has been named one of the most powerful worldwide, according to rankings just released by TOP500, the most referenced global ranking of high-performance computing systems. The rankings mean UF is home to the most powerful university-owned supercomputer in the nation.

UF ranked No. 1 in the U.S. on the Green500 list of energy-efficient supercomputers and No. 2 worldwide, making it the most efficient in higher education globally.

Can taking a statin a day keep heart disease and dementia away in seniors ages 75 and older? Researchers at UF Health and the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium have joined a nationwide clinical trial to find out whether taking a drug commonly used to lower cholesterol, can help prevent dementia, disability and heart disease in older adults who haven’t already been diagnosed with those ailments.

The 1Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, or 1Florida ADRC, a University of Florida-organized consortium of leading research institutions aimed at making Alzheimer’s and related dementias treatable, preventable and one day curable, has received a five-year, $15 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging. The award will enable the consortium to continue and expand its work, with a heightened focus on further understanding dementias in diverse populations.

The National Science Foundation has awarded iDigBio nearly $20 million to continue its mission of digitizing natural history collections nationwide, making them available online to researchers, educators and community scientists around the world.

For the past decade, iDigBio, a collaborative program based at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida, has led the push to digitize the estimated 1 billion biological specimens held in U.S. museums. These online records of animals, plants and other organisms serve as a searchable archive of life and help researchers identify species in danger of extinction, track the spread of invaders, study how climate change is reshaping ecosystems and possibly predict the next pandemic.

Visit the Florida Museum of Natural History. To learn more about exhibits, events and research go to https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu

COVID-19 brought national food supply-chain disruptions, increased pressure on food banks and struggle for families across the country. The statewide UF/IFAS Extension victory garden program began as an effort to empower those in need to grow their own food and resulted in participants harvesting more than 3,000 pounds of home-grown food.