Category: Research & Innovation

Jennifer Nichols, Ph.D., assistant professor in the J. Crayton Pruitt Department of Biomedical Engineering, and collaborators have been awarded a $2.2 million R01 grant from the NIH National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) for her project titled “Carpometacarpal Osteoarthritis: Understanding the Intersection of Muscle Mechanics, Joint Instability, and Pain.”

Damon Woodard, Ph.D., director of the Florida Institute for National Security and associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is leading a $1.2M research effort to use artificial intelligence for the purpose of hardware security.

A recent grant from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention will allow Benjamin Lok, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, to train healthcare students and practitioners on how to express empathy when interacting with patients who have suicidal ideation. The project is titled “Virtual Interaction Training in Emotional Self-Awareness for Working with Suicidal Patients.”

Vobile, the worldwide leading Software-as-a-Service provider in digital content protection and monetization, announced on April 21 the opening of a new R&D and Operations Center in Gainesville, FL, home to more than 75,000 college students between the University of Florida and Santa Fe College. This strategic move is part of the company’s rapid growth initiatives. This is the first step in Vobile’s plan to create hundreds of jobs in Gainesville.

A University of Florida Transportation Institute (UFTI) study funded by the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) found that advanced communication technologies and vehicle on-board units (OBUs) are effective in increasing driver awareness. These technologies provide information to drivers regarding their surroundings, such as the presence of pedestrians and traffic signal information.

Kristy Boyer, Ph.D., and Mehmet Celepkolu, Ph.D.Researchers from the University of Florida were recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore how to integrate AI learning into middle school science through natural language processing (NLP). Investigators will work with teachers and students at middle schools in Florida and Indiana.

With $3 million in government funding through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a team of UF researchers led by Christine Angelini, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Coastal Solutions, along with colleagues in ESSIE, is giving the Corps a sustainable framework for water resources engineering projects on Florida’s First Coast. The multidisciplinary team hopes to provide these ecosystems the protection necessary to withstand and even thrive under unpredictable climatic conditions and the burden of their many uses — commercial, residential, recreational and tourism.

Researchers at the University of Florida, including Fan Ren, Ph.D., a distinguished professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, have helped develop a COVID-19 testing device that can detect coronavirus infection in as little as 30 seconds as sensitively and accurately as a PCR.

University of Florida researchers have invented a test that can determine within 10-15 minutes whether patients test positive for COVID and, if so, which of the five known variants of concern they have.

On any given day, Gainesville’s Autonomous Shuttle (AV) can be seen driving around city streets. AV shuttle corridors across the country are mostly designed without traffic lights, or the shuttles are maneuvered through traffic lights manually by an attendant. However, the Gainesville AV can now communicate with traffic signals and make right or left turns without the assistance of a human operator.