UF in the Community

Office of Community Relations

UF Government and Community Relations

We present UF in the Community to spotlight the positive impact of UF in our region. Across our 16 colleges and numerous institutes and health care facilities, our shared mission includes outreach and service to improve and enrich our community, nation and the world.

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 seek to create 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.

UF Health Shands Hospital ranked best in Florida, among nation’s elite in wide range of specialties

University of Florida Health Shands Hospital emerged as Florida’s top health center and one of the nation’s elite in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2020-21 Best Hospitals survey, with a remarkable nine medical specialties placing in the nation’s Top 50 — more than any other hospital in the Sunshine State.

Having nine specialties rank among the best in the United States is a feat seldom achieved by the vast majority of the 5,000 hospitals around the nation analyzed in the annual U.S. News report.

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UF Health surgeons perform historic double-lung transplant on COVID-19 survivor

A man who battled back from COVID-19 only to face a life-threatening crisis when his lungs began to fail has become the first person in the Southeast to receive a double-lung transplant after beating the coronavirus, thanks to the nationally ranked lung transplant team at UF Health Shands Hospital .

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Members of UF Health’s lung transplant team, shown performing a procedure in a 2019 photo, have been recognized as an elite program by U.S. News & World Report.

UF Athletic Director Scott Stricklin talks about the 2020 football season

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Alachua San Felasco Parkway opening highlights UF and City of Alachua cooperative efforts

Residents of the City of Alachua, city officials and honored guests gathered to witness the historic moment of the official opening of Alachua’s San Felasco Parkway. Guests cheerfully joined in counting down together, as University of Florida’s President Kent Fuchs and the City of Alachua’s mayor Gib Coerper cut the ribbon.

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For UF researchers, pausing and resuming work has brought major challenges, sparked innovation

David P. Norton, Ph.D. , has spent nearly a decade building a collaborative, leading-edge research environment at the University of Florida. But as the number of coronavirus cases began to swell in Florida this spring, Norton and his leadership colleagues faced a daunting challenge: how to pause — and then restart — research at UF’s 16 colleges in Gainesville and dozens of facilities statewide.

For Norton, UF’s vice president for research, March was a blur of complicated questions and big decisions. What kinds of research activities needed to, and could, continue? How could more than 4,000 students, faculty, staff and postdoctoral associates stay engaged and productive? How can valuable scientific work in progress be preserved?

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The COVID-19 pandemic brought many challenges to the research community at UF. In this May 29 photo, researchers in the lab of Barry Byrne, M.D., Ph.D., work on experiments aimed at developing a COVID-19 vaccine that uses a gene therapy technique to stimulate an immune system reaction to fight off the virus. (Jesse Jones/UF Health)

S omething's in the Water: UF Engineering professor wrote amicus brief for US Supreme Court that will have a lasting impact on public policy

David Kaplan, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Engineering School of Sustainable Infrastructure & Environment (ESSIE) within the University of Florida Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, along with a team of scientists, wrote an amicus curiae brief for the U.S. Supreme Court about a case regarding the Clean Water Act (CWA) that will have a lasting impact on public policy.

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Peacock Springs in 2019. Photo by John Moran.

UF Geology Professor Discusses Next Mars Rover Mission in NASA Video

Professor Amy Williams, from the UF Department of Geological Sciences and a member of NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover science team, was interviewed by NASA Astrobiology for its “Countdown to Mars” video series.

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From the UF Warrington College of Business faculty and staff: Summer reading in the business arena

Faculty and staff across the Warrington College of Business selected their recommendations for books to read this summer. See their selections and what you’ll get out of reading each in the list provided at the link below.