University of Florida News

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Matthew Fajack, executive director of financial affairs at Kent State University in Ohio, has been named vice president and chief financial officer at the University of Florida, effective Jan. 1.
Matthew Fajack, 47, will be the first person to fill the newly established position, which will provide strategic leadership, analysis, planning and recommendations [...]

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The M.E. Rinker Sr. School of Building Construction at the University of Florida will induct William R. “Rick” Derrer, president of James A. Cummings Inc., into the school’s Construction Hall of Fame at 10:30 a.m. Nov. 3 as part of the school’s homecoming activities.
The Construction Hall of Fame was established in the [...]

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Subaru is sponsoring a unique program geared toward helping marketing students, professors and clients work together in order to apply real-world situations to classroom material. Students from eight U.S. universities, including the University of Florida, will promote the Subaru Impreza product line to a key target market, their fellow college peers.
The [...]

Ed Gilman, a professor of environmental horticulture, was recently named by the International Society of Arboriculture as the recipient of the 2007 L.C. Chadwick Award for Arboricultural Research. The award recognizes research that has contributed valuable information to arboriculture. Gilman has published more than 60 peer-reviewed research studies and authored six books; his current work [...]

The University of Florida College of Pharmacy has been named one of eight pharmacy schools to receive the Academic-Practice Partnership for Learning Excellence Award. Also called the Crystal Apple Award, the designation from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy was created to improve pharmacy education and practice by encouraging quality professional experience programs. UF [...]

Team Gator Nation recently won a spot in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge semi-finals after University of Florida engineers turned a 2006 Toyota Highlander Hybrid into a fully autonomous driving machine for this year’s competition.
On Oct. 26-31, Team Gator Nation will compete in the Urban Challenge National Qualification Event. If the team qualifies as a [...]

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Florida Museum of Natural History Distinguished Research Curator of Archaeology Kathleen Deagan was recently honored during a ceremony in St. Augustine with the prestigious Order of La Florida award.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Distinguished professor of physics Arthur Hebard, together with professors Jun Akimitsu of Aoyama-Gakuin University and Robert Haddon of the University of California-Riverside, has been named the 2008 recipient of the American Physical Society’s James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials for the discovery of high temperature superconductivity in non-oxide systems.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Recently, Mark McLellan, research dean for the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, was the keynote speaker at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Annual Science Day. McLellan told the group of approximately 200 scientists, regulators and policy makers, that he expects science to take quantum-leap strides in areas such as nanotechnology and bioinformatics. He also spoke about ways in which food science relates to national security.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Janaki Alavalapati, a professor of forest resource economics and policy, has been named a Jefferson Science Fellow with the U.S. Department of State. He will be an adviser on foreign policy and international relations matters during his 12-month appointment. Alavalapati is the first university faculty member from the state of Florida to receive this distinction.