Category: Stories

Ruogu Fang, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, was recently interviewed by the Washington Post about her research into using retinal imaging to predict Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

Warren E. Dixon, Ph.D., Newton C. Ebaugh Professor in the UF Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (MAE) and director of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Center of Excellence in Assured Autonomy in Contested Environments, has been named the new chair of MAE in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering.

UF continues to climb in online education as seen in the 2021 U.S. News & World Report rankings. The Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering graduate engineering online program climbed four spots to No. 11 nationally, and it is now ranked No. 9 among public universities.

Dr. Walden “Wally” Rhines, son of the founding chair of the UF Department of Materials Science & Engineering (MSE) Dr. Frederick N. Rhines, is providing an endowment for a professorship in fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a field in which Cornami, Inc., the AI company of which he is President and CEO, holds a leading edge position.

Three leading researchers at the Warren B. Nelms institute for the Connected World are using artificial intelligence (AI) to make the Internet of Things (IoT) more secure and more efficient. They have invited us into their laboratories to take a peek at the leading edge of AI applications.

Edward Phelps, Ph.D., assistant professor & J. Crayton Pruitt Family Term Fellow at the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, has received a $1.8M R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to further his studies of the role of gamma Aminobutyric Acid (GABA) in the islet cells of the pancreas.

Josephine Allen, Ph.D., MSE, and her team comprised of MSE Ph.D. candidate and NIH Predoctoral Fellow Bryan James and J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering undergrad Paxton Guerrin observed that biomedical and biomaterials researchers and the journals publishing their papers rarely mentioned the sex of the cells involved in the studies. They knew how that data could potentially affect research results, and so they conducted their own analysis by surveying the literature of several top biomedical journals and found that cell sex was reported in only a small fraction (roughly 3%) of papers. That information and several other notable results prompted their own paper highlighting the findings entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex – Biological Sex is Underreported in Biomaterials Studies.”

Amanda Krause, Ph.D., MSE, is employing artificial intelligence methods to track and catalogue data for her abnormal grain growth research, and thanks to new a $1.2 million research award from the NSF, she will bring a cutting-edge, 3D X-ray microscope system to campus to generate even better data for her algorithms.

Ruogu Fang, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Smart Medical Informatics Learning and Evaluation Lab, was quoted in a Forbes article about an AI-assisted method for diagnosing Parkinson’s disease with, essentially, an eye exam.

UF engineers reach semi-finals in XPRIZE Contest for new COVID-19 test methods; their CRISPR-ENHANCE methodology published in Nature Communications journal