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.​

This year, Gator Day will be virtual, creating an opportunity for Gators across the nation to participate. With help from our alumni and friends, we will strategically engage elected and appointed officials through social media to raise the profile of the Gator Nation. Succinctly, our goal is to have alumni from every corner of the U.S. show their support on Gator Day.

Here’s how you can help:

The University of Florida will attempt to vaccinate more than 1,000 students as part of a landmark national study to determine whether young people who have received a COVID-19 vaccine can still spread the coronavirus.

The study's findings could have a wide-ranging impact by providing important scientific information for government leaders and public health experts about the transmissibility of the virus after vaccination.

UF researchers will test a new artificial intelligence tool aimed at distinguishing the precise diagnosis for patients with early Parkinson’s disease or two related but distinct Parkinson’s-like syndromes under a new $5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. This study builds upon more than a decade of research in the laboratory of David Vaillancourt, Ph.D., a professor and chair of the UF College of Health & Human Performance’s department of applied physiology and kinesiology.

We invite you to join us for an Eye Opener Breakfast webinar with UF Athletic Director Scott Stricklin who will give us an update on Florida Gator athletics.

Hope to see you online!

Like so much of Florida, the Suwannee River Estuary is changing, with shifts in land- and water-use reshaping the area’s environment and economy in the next several decades.

But before that future arrives, a team of University of Florida researchers will be helping local communities understand how decisions made now will determine what that future looks like.

Just like people, dogs have diseases or injuries that require blood transfusions. Many of our canine patients receive transfusions, and dogs enrolled in the UFVH Canine Blood Donor Program provide the blood products for them. The demand for blood products for our patients increases every year. We need volunteer blood donors to ensure that every patient in need can be treated.

Most of the world’s coffee is grown in tropical regions. However, a changing climate could allow coffee to grow farther north — for example, in Florida.

To understand how that might work, scientists with the University of Florida are already growing coffee plants at the UF/IFAS Plant Science Research and Education Unit, about 30 minutes south of the main UF campus in Gainesville.