About the cover: Researchers at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience collect and analyze shards of plastic recovered from the digestive tracts of sea turtles.
Cover photo by John Jernigan Spring 2025, Vol. 30, No.1
Christine Schmidt has spent her career developing treatments that matter 14 Secrets of the Seas
Design and Illustration: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger
Writers: Douglas Bennett
Joe Kays Jiayu Liang
Social Media: Phillip Frohm
Hunter Altman
Copy Editor: Bruce Mastron
Printing: RR Donnelley, Orlando
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We begin the 30th year of Explore magazine with a collection of stories that illustrate the strong interdisciplinary spirit that guides our research at the University of Florida.
At the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, biologists, chemists and neuroscientists work together to understand our marine environments and the creatures that live there and to explore whether nature can provide new treatments for human illnesses.
Two XPRIZE projects illustrate how teams of scientists come together to address very specific challenges. In the case of wildfires, the GatorX team is working on systems that extinguish fires before they can grow large enough to devastate communities and endanger residents and first responders. In the rainforest, the Limelight team has shown how researchers can use new technologies to revolutionize environmental monitoring and conservation efforts.
Researchers from a wide variety of disciplines at UF’s Emerging Pathogens Institute are using AI and other tools to predict disease outbreaks and optimize public health interventions. By analyzing large datasets and identifying patterns that traditional methods might miss, these researchers are paving the way for more effective public health strategies and disease prevention.
Biomedical Engineer Christine Schmidt has spent her career pursuing new ways of regenerating injured nerves in patients who had all but lost hope for a return to normal life after injury. Schmidt’s work, which was recognized last year with two of the highest honors in science, underscores the importance of integrating engineering, medicine and patient care to develop innovative solutions that improve lives.
As the tools of science have gotten more complicated, specialists at UF’s George A. Smathers Libraries are helping researchers to use everything from large language models to geographic information systems to their full potential.
Along the path from idea to innovation, all of this research has benefited from support by the federal government. Sometimes that support is in the form of direct grants for specific research by people like Christine Schmidt, other times it’s indirect support to the libraries that will benefit any researcher who needs access to a scientific journal. But all of it is vital to securing the United States’ position as the world leader in science and innovation.
The University of Florida always strives to be a good steward of the funding public and private agencies entrust to us, and our record shows a significant return on that investment over many years with new discoveries, new treatments and new companies. We look forward to continuing this important partnership in the future.
David P. Norton, Ph.D. Vice President for Research
Florida universities growing collaborations with Kennedy Space Center
NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is entering a new era of collaboration that will propel the nation’s space exploration by leveraging the world-class expertise at UF and other Florida universities. An agreement formalized in early January will have the institutions provide critical research and development support for NASA’s Moon to Mars Initiative, which aims to advance human presence and exploration throughout the solar system.
UF, the University of Central Florida and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University are the charter members of the Florida University Space Research Consortium, designated in 2024 as the state’s official space research entity. The one-of-a-kind partnership is meant to advance research, technology development, education and communication between KSC and the state’s growing space industry.
Florida is the only state with a university consortium affiliated with one of NASA’s centers.
“Looking to the future, our students and faculty will benefit from the opportunities this new consortium promises,” Interim UF President Kent Fuchs said. “We will give back by generating new discoveries and new technologies, growing Florida’s high-skill, high-wage workforce, and nurturing industry partnerships. We look forward to the time when Florida’s other universities join the consortium, providing an even broader base of support and talent.”
UF and other universities in Florida have long been leaders in space research and workforce development, UF Vice President for Research David Norton said.
“This agreement between Kennedy and our universities will greatly accelerate the prominence of Florida university research and development, forging opportunities as we advance the state and nation in space exploration, defense and industry through collaborative research,” he said.
UF researchers and leaders gathered in early January for the signing of an agreement to boost collaborations between NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and three Florida universities.
The mission of the consortium is to foster a symbiotic relationship between NASA Kennedy and Florida’s universities, to drive innovation in space exploration, research and technology through academic collaboration, joint projects and workforce development.
The agreement marks the dawn of a new era of cooperation between the Florida spaceport and the state’s university system. NASA plans to expand beyond the three charter universities to other state universities. The push to enhance research and technological collaboration with universities has been a priority at NASA for years and has seen success at the agency’s other centers across the country.
“This agreement is a shining example of what it looks like when we link arms and create a space for the whole to be greater than all our parts,” said Janet Petro, Kennedy Space Center director. “This symbiotic partnership makes way for collaborative research opportunities and increased exposure to advanced
technology, significantly enhancing NASA’s research output in fields such as aerospace engineering, materials science, robotics and environmental science all of which are necessary for long-term human exploration as we learn to live and work deeper into space than ever before.”
The agreement is also a significant milestone for the UF Astraeus Space Institute, which launched in 2024 and is bringing together researchers from across the university, as well as world-class leaders in space science and technology, to promote human capabilities in space mission innovation.
“Florida’s universities have long been prodigious sources of talent, skill and audacious thinking,” said Mori Hosseini, chair of UF’s Board of Trustees. “This consortium is a perfect way to harness those assets to help lift the great state of Florida and our nation in their quest to keep us at the forefront of space exploration and advance America’s global leadership.”
Tracking pythons with eDNA
University of Florida scientists have developed a pioneering tool to bolster Florida’s defenses against invasive species: a DNA-based environmental monitoring test that can pinpoint where they’ve been, aiding eradication efforts.
Once a non-native species gets into an environment, it is often too late to get rid of it, and the focus shifts to containment or long-term management. Both approaches come with heavy costs concerning native wildlife and funding, said Melissa Miller, lead author of the recent study and an invasion ecologist at the UF/IFAS Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center.
“We hope this novel eDNA sampling tool we have designed will help increase efficiency in invasive species management, allowing for early detection and rapid removal of nonnative species,” she said.
Known as a tetraplex digital PCR assay, this method of testing allows researchers to use water or soil samples for rapid and precise identification of Burmese pythons, northern African pythons, boa constrictors and rainbow boas from environmental DNA, or eDNA, collected in the wild.
That eDNA refers to genetic material shed by organisms into their surroundings. Published in the journal of Ecology and Evolution , scientists at UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences tout the findings as a significant advancement in detecting invasive snakes and a strategic tool for protecting Florida’s ecosystems.
“Cryptic species, like most snakes, are problematic when introduced outside of their range, as detectability is low, even in high densities. With this new method, we increase our ability to detect these cryptic species tremendously, no matter how many there are,” said Sergio Balaguera-Reina, a co-author of the study and a research assistant scientist.
Florida is home to over 500 nonnative species, with reptiles leading the way. More than 50 non-native reptile species are established, with many posing severe threats to agriculture and native ecosystems.
Current monitoring methods depend on visual surveys by scientists, which often fail to detect invasive constrictors because they’re elusive. Traditional survey techniques are estimated to identify less than 5% of Burmese pythons. In contrast, the new assay can identify DNA traces of these snakes even weeks after they have left an area.
This breakthrough offers wildlife managers a crucial tool to verify the presence of hidden species and assess the success of removal efforts.
“While eDNA sampling has been applied to detect non-native wildlife, the benefit of our methodology is that we can now sample for numerous target species within a single sample,” Miller said.
Developing the tool required considerable work and significant technical advancements to ensure each target snake species’ DNA is precisely identified.
Once the researchers got the molecular test working, they conducted controlled experiments using known concentrations of DNA placed in water. Then, they placed a Burmese python in water and took water samples at different times to
demonstrate the method’s effectiveness. The data estimated the amount of snake DNA present in the water if sampled nearby. A field experiment also showed that snake DNA could be detected in soil where a snake had been resting up to two weeks after its removal.
“These concentration estimates are the first steps in a larger monitoring effort, with further experimentation needed to determine the effects of time, distance and environmental factors on DNA detection rates,” said Brian Bahder, a senior author of the study and an associate professor of vector entomology. “Ultimately, this technology will be used to monitor and locate these invasive snakes, thereby validating removal efforts.”
The new assay aligns with ongoing efforts by state and federal agencies, which have invested more than $10 million from 2004 to 2021 to manage the Burmese pythons alone.
“Successful detection and monitoring programs for invasive wildlife hinge on rapid detection and accurate identification of nonnative species,” said Miller.
The UF team plans to further explore the tool’s potential by expanding the assay to include additional invasive species and applications for monitoring ecological restoration outcomes.
Lourdes Mederos
UF researchers simulated the aquatic environment pythons typically inhabit. The water samples they collected were used to establish the eDNA analysis.
Citrus tree genes modified to kill destructive insects
Scientists at the University of Florida are testing a new type of citrus tree that can fight off the tiny insects responsible for citrus greening.
While the genetically edited tree has only been tested so far in the lab and the greenhouse, it is one of the most promising discoveries to date in a challenge that has plagued growers, researchers and consumers as Florida’s citrus industry has plummeted over the past two decades.
The approach involves inserting a gene into a citrus tree that produces a protein that can kill baby Asian citrus psyllids, the bugs that transmit the greening disease.
That gene normally occurs in a soilborne bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt.
This gene provides instructions for the new citrus tree on how to make this protein. Thus, when the gene is inserted, the tree produces the protein that kills psyllids.
While this approach can kill baby psyllids, UF/IFAS scientists are close to finding a solution to control the adult pests.
“We are trying to deploy a biotechnological solution that is sustainable, easy for growers to deploy and replaces the need for spraying insecticides,” said Lukasz Stelinski, an entomology professor at the UF/IFAS Citrus Research and Education Center. “That can’t be done completely with the current Bt trees and thus it might require some additional, albeit reduced, insecticide spraying for adults.”
After the successes in the lab and greenhouse, scientists must now prove this method works in the field and they’re still a few years away from perhaps reaching that conclusion, Stelinski said. They hope to begin testing the trees in about a year.
Since it was reported in Florida in 2005, greening has damaged most of the state’s citrus trees and the fruit they bear, leaving growers and scientists seeking answers to the disease.
UF receives funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for citrus greening research, which plays a key role in advancing and accelerating breakthroughs.
Through the new research, scientists have found that the tree is protected because all juvenile psyllids that feed on the tree are killed, Stelinski said.
“A citrus tree that produces its own potent defense against the Asian citrus psyllid by preventing this insect from reproducing would reduce or possibly eliminate vector populations,” Stelinski said. “In terms of stopping greening, this approach could curtail the ability of an otherwise very effective vector from spreading the pathogen.”
Before UF/IFAS scientists started this research a few years ago, they knew that certain Bt proteins could kill other sap-sucking insects, but none were known to kill Asian citrus psyllids.
This protein eliminates psyllids by binding to specific receptors on the gut wall, causing pores to form. That disrupts the gut-wall cells, ultimately killing the insect.
In their experiments, scientists inserted a gene from Bt into citrus trees. The gene yields a protein in the
phloem the vascular part of a leaf where the psyllid feeds. Ultimately, that protein protects the tree from the psyllid.
Bryony Bonning, an eminent scholar and entomology professor, led the research to identify the bacterial proteins that kill psyllids.
In their recent study, UF/IFAS researchers found that the protein derived from Bt can kill the vast majority of the psyllids in their earliest stages. Additionally, no new adults can emerge on the tree. That means adults laying eggs will not perpetuate the population.
Adult psyllids remain an issue that scientists hope to solve in future research. For now, they’re working on controlling the baby psyllids on citrus trees.
“Given the widespread use of Bt proteins for protection of other crops against insect pests, we think we’re on the right track for control of the Asian citrus psyllid,” Bonning said. “The next step is to prove this method works in the field, so that citrus growers everywhere will no longer have to contend with the insect that transmits this deadly disease. The next stage is to grow these trees in the ground into a more mature stage under natural field conditions.”
Brad Buck
UF/IFAS File Photo
Small lopsided fruit from a greening-infected citrus tree.
UF leading regional hub for semiconductor advancements
The University of Florida will lead one of seven regional hubs of a new, $285 million nationwide institute dedicated to advancing America’s semiconductor industry through next-generation simulations known as digital twins.
Volker Sorger, a professor of electrical and computer engineering in UF’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, will direct the Florida/Caribbean hub of the SMART USA Institute. Led by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the institute is focused on creating and using digital twins to advance, accelerate and optimize manufacturing in the semiconductor industry.
Digital twins are virtual models that mimic the structure, context and behavior of a physical counterpart. In semiconductor chip manufacturing, a digital twin can provide a replica of a production line that simulates and optimizes processes, allowing researchers to test new designs and manufacturing techniques without having to build them first. The process results in significant savings in time and money and speeds innovation.
The SMART USA Institute was chosen through the U.S. Department of Commerce’s CHIPS Manufacturing
USA Institute competition, which sought to create a new, nationwide network of researchers to support domestic manufacturing of semiconductor chips. The institute is headquartered in North Carolina.
“This is a signature R&D program of the CHIPS Act of 2022” said engineering Professor David Arnold, director of the Florida Semiconductor Institute. “Combining UF’s semiconductor expertise with cutting-edge AI capabilities and the power of HiPerGator provided a winning recipe that will allow our region to drive groundbreaking advancements in semiconductor technology and meet the growing demands of the industry.”
The winning proposal was supported by funding from the Florida legislature.
In collaboration with the Florida Semiconductor Institute, UF will lead the Florida/Caribbean Digital Innovations Semiconductor Center and will receive roughly $20 million in funding.
“As the leader of one of seven national centers, UF will oversee regional research and development initiatives, facilitate the commercialization of new technologies, and drive workforce development programs,” Sorger said.
“As the leader of one of seven national centers, UF will oversee regional research and development initiatives, facilitate the commercialization of new technologies, and drive workforce development programs.”
Volker Sorger
The project will leverage UF’s strengths in artificial intelligence and its unique access to UF’s HiPerGator, one of the nation’s most powerful supercomputers, to develop faster and less-costly approaches to improve chip manufacturing.
“Creating chips is extremely expensive and making improvements can take years,” Sorger said. “The vision for the SMART USA Institute is to boost the semiconductor industry by establishing a new system where we are creating virtual copies of the manufacturing process, allowing companies to test and improve designs before making physical chips. This helps reduce errors, speeds up production, and leads to better, more efficient chips. In essence, we are creating an entire new industry sector via a ‘TwinStore’ marketplace the first in the U.S. and in the world.”
The SMART USA consortium comprises more than 140 organizations at this initial stage, including large corporations, small and medium-sized businesses, national labs, government entities, trade organizations, and academic institutions.
UF Health scientists exploring how combinations of antibiotics can fight resistant bacteria have been awarded an $11.8 million grant for work that could help save the tens of thousands of lives lost yearly to infections that are increasingly plaguing humanity.
The National Institutes of Health grant to the College of Medicine and the College of Pharmacy will support scientists working to uncover the mechanics of how bacteria and antibiotics interact, down to the molecular level.
That mechanistic knowledge has become crucial as bacteria become ever-more resistant to antibiotics. Few pharmaceutical companies are developing new antibiotics, leaving scientists to find novel methods to make older drugs more effective when used in combination.
“It’s very clear on these serious infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria that monotherapy cannot work,” said Jürgen Bulitta, a co-principal investigator on the project at the UF Research and Academic Center at Lake Nona in Orlando. “Using one antibiotic at a time, you cannot win. You must tag-team with more than one drug to have any chance against serious infections.”
The hope is to “dial in” these antibiotics using newfound insight from the laboratory. It’s like understanding an enemy’s weaknesses to form a battle plan that takes advantage of those chinks in the armor. What receptors on bacteria are best targeted by antibiotics? What precise dosages in a drug cocktail will kill a bacterial population without resistant stragglers surviving to multiply?
Bulitta and UF Health researcher and co-principal investigator George L. Drusano, a professor and director of the College of Medicine’s Institute of Therapeutic Innovation, will examine two of the deadliest resistant bacteria, Acinetobacter baumannii and Klebsiella pneumoniae
The bacteria, sometimes called “superbugs,” are often found in hospitals, usually infecting patients with weakened immune systems. They are adept at finding genetic adaptations to elude the drugs hunting them.
“These bacteria are not only multiresistant to antibiotics, they’re also hypervirulent,” said Drusano. “They have turned into really nasty, nasty bugs that wreak havoc on patients’ bodies and too often kill them. We have some great antibiotics, but we need to optimize them and find new approaches that will cure people and get them out of the hospital.”
These bacteria reproduce and evolve in rapid cycles of life and death as short as 20 to 30 minutes, and generations of reproduction are achieved in days. A severe infection might generate billions
of bacteria in the lungs, making it highly probable that a beneficial bacterial adaptation will get a toehold, defanging an antibiotic.
Even with a patient’s natural immune defense and antibiotics, Bulitta said, bacteria are reproducing so rapidly, “it’s a near certainty you will still have 100 to 1,000 resistant bacteria remaining in severe lung infections.”
Multidrug therapy seeks to reduce the population of that bacteria with one antibiotic regimen, then hitting it with a second or third using different drugs. This can reduce bacterial numbers before the superbugs can again adapt new protections.
Bill Levesque
A 3D illustration of Acinetobacter baumannii, one of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria being studied by UF Health researchers.
Hurricane Sentinels provide vital data
With Hurricane Helene bearing down on Florida’s Big Bend region, about a dozen faculty members, staff and graduate students from the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering descended on Cedar Key in late September to install a UF-developed storm monitoring tower called a Sentinel. The device collects real-time data on wind, storm surge and water quality. The data can be used to mitigate coastal damage, property destruction and identify lifethreatening structural vulnerabilities.
Sneaker shape can impact runners
Runners wearing thick-heeled sneakers were more likely to get injured than those wearing flatter shoes, a recent UF study found.
The study, one of the largest and most comprehensive of its kind, also found that runners with thicker heels could not accurately identify how their foot landed with each step, a likely factor in the high injury rates.
Because flatter shoes are associated with less injury, the researchers say they are likely the best option for most
runners to help improve sensation with the ground and learn to land in a controlled manner. But, transitioning to a different shoe type or foot strike pattern can also risk injury and must be done gradually, something that lead author Heather Vincent knows from personal experience.
“I had to teach myself to get out of the big, high-heeled shoes down to something with more moderate cushioning and to work on foot strengthening,” said Vincent, director of the UF Health Sports Performance Center. “It
may take up to six months for it to feel natural. It’s a process.”
Both foot strike patterns and shoe type have been linked to running injuries in past studies, but the interaction between the two has been difficult to identify from small groups of runners. UF Health’s Sports Performance Center and Running Medicine Clinic see hundreds of runners a year. That allowed the researchers to pull from more than 700 runners and six years of information on runners’ shoe type and injury history as well as objective data about running gait acquired with specialized treadmills and motion capture videos.
What became clear after controlling for factors like age, weight, running
Dave Schlenker
Therapy restores gene needed for vision
After the treatment, one patient saw her first star. Another saw snowflakes for the first time. Other patients were newly able to navigate outside of the home or read the labels on their food.
The science behind these milestones? A gene therapy developed by University of Florida researchers which restored useful vision to most patients in a small clinical trial with the rare, inherited blindness known as Leber congenital amaurosis type I, or LCA1.
Those who received the highest dose of the gene therapy saw up to a 10,000fold improvement in their light sensitivity, were able to read more lines on an eye chart, and improved in their ability to navigate a standardized maze. For many patients, it was akin to finally turning on dim lights after trying to navigate their homes in the pitch black for years, the researchers said.
The trial also tested the safety of the treatment. Side effects were largely limited to minor surgical complications. The gene therapy itself caused mild inflammation that was treated with steroids.
“This is the first time that anyone with LCA1 has ever been treated, and we showed a very clean safety profile, and we also showed efficacy. These results pave the way for advancing the therapy in a phase 3 clinical trial and eventually commercializing it,” said Shannon Boye, chief of the Division of Cellular and Molecular Therapy and a co-author of the study. Boye is also co-founder of Atsena Therapeutics, the UF spinoff that developed the gene therapy.
LCA1 is rare. Only about 3,000 people in the U.S. and Europe have the condition. It is caused by having two defective copies of the gene GUCY2D, which is required for the light-sensitive cells in the eyes to function properly. People with the disease tend to have severely impaired vision that makes it difficult or impossible to drive, read or navigate the world visually.
Shannon Boye has been developing the gene therapy targeting LCA1 for more than 20 years, since she enrolled as a graduate student at UF in 2001. The Boyes collaborated on the development of a virus-based transport system that is essential for delivering functioning copies of the GUCY2D gene into the correct cells in the eyes.
“Most pharmaceutical companies are not interested in treating these rare diseases, because they are not strong revenue generators,” Sanford Boye said. “But we think these patients deserve attention, because we have treatments that work and provide really meaningful improvements to their quality of life.”
volume and competitiveness was that shoes with thicker heels confused runners about their gait confusion that was strongly linked to injury.
“The shoe lies between the foot and the ground, and features like a large heelto-toe drop make it more challenging for runners to identify how they’re striking the ground. That clouds how we retrain people or determine if someone is at risk for future injury,” Vincent said. “The runners who correctly detected mid- or fore-foot striking had very different shoes: lower heel-to-toe drop; lighter; wider toe box.”
The research was published in the journal Frontiers in Sports and Active Living Eric Hamilton
Boye, who is a professor of pediatrics, and her husband, Sanford Boye, an associate scientist in pediatrics, and their collaborators at the University of Pennsylvania and Oregon Health and Science University published the results of the clinical trial last fall in the journal The Lancet
“Atsena is pleased to advance the foundational work that Shannon and Sanford Boye developed in their laboratory many years ago and thrilled that the 12-month data from our ongoing clinical trial have been published in a prestigious medical journal,” said Kenji Fujita, chief medical officer of Atsena Therapeutics and co-author of the study. “We look forward to sharing further results from this program as we continue progressing what has the potential to be a breakthrough in treating blindness in children and adults with LCA1.”
The 15 study participants received one of three different doses of the therapy to identify the safest and most effective dose for future trials. All patients received the treatment in one eye, which involved a surgical injection in the retina.
Researchers followed the patients for a year to test their vision in the treated eye compared with the untreated eye. Subjects who received higher doses saw greater improvements in their vision.
The researchers expect the gene therapy to last indefinitely, requiring just a single treatment per eye. So far, they have seen visual improvements last at least five years.
Broad access to the treatment will require federal approval following a phase 3 clinical trial, which tests the therapy in a larger population of patients.
Eric Hamilton
Mining federal data for new insights
characteristics such as race, gender, education and job duties. However, there has been a recent shift toward analyzing the employer, which controls employees’ income, and what role organizational structure plays in the income gap.
“What is really driving income inequality is that most highly paid people are increasingly found in workplaces that are exclusively occupied by highly paid people,” Navot said.
At a secure lab on UF’s East Gainesville campus, Florida researchers are mining troves of data that are driving discoveries in medicine, education and a host of other disciplines.
Founded in 2022, the Florida Research Data Center (FLRDC) is the only location in Florida offering researchers secure access to otherwise restricted data from the U.S. Census Bureau and 20 federal agencies.
In partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau, the FLRDC gives UF faculty access to a vast amount of government data and high-capacity servers, allowing for complex computational analyses of millions of data points about populations and industries throughout the United States. The data used by FLRDC is anonymized to remove any information that identifies individuals.
Research at the FLRDC is driving statistical findings that might otherwise go undiscovered in mountains of federal information. In addition to detailed micro-data from the Census Bureau, the FLRDC provides access to restricted data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Currently, UF researchers are investigating the impact of trade shocks on
trade activities, stock prices and investment; the role that workplace structure plays in income inequality; the influence of energy types on manufacturing locations; and the value of registered dieticians on childhood obesity.
“Our mission is to support data-intensive research and education as well as drive evidence-based policy decision making,” said Jaclyn Hall, the FLRDC’s executive director and a medical geographer in the UF College of Medicine.
As one of 34 RDC sites nationwide, the Gainesville location was launched with support from UF Research, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the Business and Economic Research Institute, and the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics. In addition to economics and business, the access to data provided by the FLRDC’s data accessibility is valuable to researchers in public health; pharmacy; agriculture; the liberal arts and sciences; and housing studies, Hall said.
One current project is a first-of-itskind study to find the root causes of income inequality. Edo Navot, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal law, is leading the effort through a $395,000 National Science Foundation grant.
Historically, research on income inequality has focused on individual
Compared to today, a manufacturing company in the 1950s was more likely to be running multiple facilities, more likely to be unionized, and more vertically integrated. Within one building, there were individuals holding positions with varying income levels.
Today, organizations are far more likely to have a headquarters that almost exclusively houses executives and very high-level managers. A much more separated workforce in a smaller facility is likely to have lower-level employees and a single supervisor.
Research has found that the separation of people at different pay grades drives income inequality. The UF study will investigate why and how inequality between workplaces increased in the U.S. Studies involving massive amounts of data would have been completely impossible without the FLRDC, Navot said. That’s because the center “democratizes data” by giving researchers access to confidential and protected data that would otherwise be unavailable and allowing them to create unique data sets and make novel connections between them.
This access allows Navot’s team to be the first set of researchers to systematically test multiple potential mechanisms, including changes in corporate structure, so they can say with confidence what factors are really driving income inequality growth.
Kathryn Pizzurro and Doug Bennett
Presentation and pricing can cut grocers’ food waste
Supermarkets could significantly reduce food waste while increasing their profits through smarter product display and pricing strategies, recent UF research shows. The study found that retailers could cut food waste by more than 20% while increasing profits by 6% on average.
“It’s rare to find solutions that benefit both business and the environment, but this appears to be one of them,” said Amy Pan, the study’s co-author and an associate professor of business. “Our findings highlight that strategically selling older products alongside fresh ones can simultaneously boost profits and minimize waste by leveraging the right product display, discounting rate and discount time.”
The findings provide crucial insight into a growing global challenge. Recent estimates suggest that 17% of global food production goes to waste, with retail accounting for 13% of what is lost. In the United States alone, up to 40% of food produced is wasted, while one in eight Americans faces food insecurity.
The researchers identified two effective strategies for retailers, depending on the predictability of store traffic. When store traffic is predictable, the researchers found two optimal solutions: Unsold products are swapped with a new batch
In the U.S.
17% global food production waste of all food produced is wasted
13% of all waste produced by retail
when the current products are due to be replaced, so that there is only one batch on shelves at a time. Newer batch products are displayed on shelves alongside older products that are sold at a discount
In contrast, when store traffic isn’t predictable, the display depends on the characteristics of the product, store and consumers. Specifically, the researchers found that for products that spoil quickly and have a low disposal cost, such as fresh pastries, the best approach is to remove unsold items when new stock arrives. However, for items with longer shelf lives and high disposal cost, like dairy products, stores can sell older items at discounted prices at the front of shelves while keeping fresher items at their full price on the back of shelves.
HiPerGator Expansion
40%
Even stores that prefer not to discount their products can benefit from simply optimizing their display strategies. The study found that thoughtful product placement alone can significantly improve profits while reducing waste.
The researchers emphasize that while their findings focus on retail-level waste, the benefits extend throughout the supply chain. Farmers are helped by increased orders, retailers save money by reducing waste and consumers get more affordable access to healthy food options.
“What’s particularly exciting about these findings is that everyone wins,” Pan said. “Retailers make more money, consumers get more affordable options and we reduce the environmental impact of food waste.”
Allison Alsup
UF is investing $24 million to build an even more advanced version of its HiPerGator supercomputer, cementing the university’s position as owning one of the nation’s most powerful machines.The upgrade will feature the newest processors from NVIDIA, which was co-founded by UF alumnus Chris Malachowsky. The new iteration of HiPerGator will significantly broaden UF’s ability to collaborate with other universities, support their researchers, and fuel many more important new discoveries, Interim UF President Kent Fuchs said.
David Duffy holds up a half-full vial of multicolored plastic shards, each one smaller than a grain of rice. In a drawer in Duffy’s lab, rows of other plastic-filled vials line a tray.
All the plastic came from sea turtles treated at the University of Florida’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience. For Duffy, a molecular biologist, it vividly illustrates the urgency and importance of Whitney’s mission.
Necropsies on the young turtles that washed back to shore and didn’t survive tell the grim tale. Almost all of them had plastic in their intestinal tracts.
“It wasn’t just one or two pieces of microplastic. Some of them had hundreds of pieces, sometimes one-quarter of their body length,” Duffy says.
David Duffy
As the Whitney Lab enters its sixth decade and a new $41.2 million, 38,000-square-foot research facility nears completion at its waterfront campus south of St. Augustine, Duffy and his colleagues see a pivotal moment. Whitney, they say, is poised to build on its world-class reputation for developmental biology and the genetics of marine animals. The lab has added to its scientific portfolio in recent years, bringing in Duffy along with experts in aquaculture and natural-products drug discovery. Veronica Hinman, a renowned expert in the biology of regeneration in marine animals, joined the lab in January as its new director.
Whitney, Duffy says, is distinguished by its location and ability to do both field research and advanced molecular biology a capability matched by few other marine labs. Its facilities are nestled at the edge of more than 75,000 pristine acres of marine estuary and just steps from the Atlantic Ocean.
“We’re based in the same environments we are studying and the same habitats where our sea turtle patients live. We’re right there at the intersection of some big issues in the environment,” Duffy says.
The driving force behind the Whitney Lab was Sam Gurin, a UF biochemistry professor who realized in the 1960s that much of the important research into embryo development and nerve function was taking place at marine labs. His vision for a year-round, marine biomedical research facility was shared by Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, one of the founders of the adjacent Marineland oceanarium. Whitney noted marine animals didn’t seem to suffer from the same ailments as humans. He posed a big question: What can marine animals teach us about the origins of human diseases?
Whitney donated two acres of land in the town of Marineland and half of the construction costs to UF. With that, his namesake lab debuted in 1974.
Detecting DNA, tracking cancer
Duffy brings a specialized skill set to the Whitney Lab that includes proficiency in sea turtle tumors and plastic ingestion. He also has expertise in environmental DNA, or eDNA, which reveals troves of new information about wildlife populations.
While Whitney is steeped in a tradition of developmental biology, Duffy says he was attracted to its pioneering spirit. When he arrived as a postdoctoral researcher in 2015, the sea turtle hospital was brand new. He floated an ambitious idea: Take what was known about human cancer treatment and apply it to sea turtles.
Duffy and his colleagues eventually found genetic similarities between the proteins in fibropapilloma, which causes fast-growing tumors in turtles, and the proteins that spawn basal cell skin cancer in humans. An anticancer drug used in humans knocked down the tumor recurrence in turtles from 60% to 18%, the researchers found in 2018.
“It was very much a case of ‘Let’s see how this goes,’” Duffy says. “And it went very well.”
Now, he’s using genomic sequencing to sort through the many factors that drive tumor growth in sea turtles. One of those elements is the environment: In open areas with good water flow, tumors might occur in about 10% of turtles. Just a few miles away in water that’s more contaminated or less free flowing, tumor prevalence can reach 80%. Duffy’s tumor research involves profiling those growths in individual turtles, determining common mutations and identifying the genes that are responsible.
“As we start to understand those mutations, we can better understand the causes and identify treatments that could be effective,” he says.
Duffy is also at the forefront of using eDNA to identify and count animals in the wild without ever seeing them. Traditional animal surveys are expensive and time consuming. Assessing individual sea turtles also requires enough good weather and luck to capture one. Now, about a quart of seawater is all that’s needed.
In
open areas with good water flow, tumors might occur in about 10% of turtles. Just a few miles away in water that’s more contaminated or less free flowing, tumor prevalence can reach 80%
The technique is similarly effective for land and air samples. With less than a half-pint of river water, Duffy has shown that thousands of species can be identified including enough detail to reveal the genetic ancestry of humans who have been in the area.
“The real benefit of eDNA for species identification is that you can take a water sample and see what’s in the area without ever having to observe a species. They’re leaving behind these tell-tale traces of DNA for us,” says Duffy, an assistant professor of wildlife disease genomics.
For Duffy, his work on microplastics in juvenile sea turtles is just as compelling and much more sobering. Nearly 93% of post-hatchling loggerhead turtles that were studied for a 2020 paper had plastic in their guts, typically rigid plastic and sheet fragments. The prevalence of plastic in young turtles far surpassed what had been found by other researchers.
“It was absolutely shocking,” Duffy says.
For juvenile turtles, their first haven can also be their downfall. After hatching, they make an exhausting swim to the Sargasso Sea, a floating seaweed mass east of Florida. The microplastic there is especially pernicious. In open water, plastic absorbs other chemicals from the environment as it breaks down into pieces that turtles mistake for food. Intestinal ruptures and stomachs crowded with plastic are common among Whitney’s turtle patients.
Duffy notes that the original idea to study the plastics issue came from the sea turtle hospital. That research, he says, was facilitated by the full range of Whitney’s capabilities, from providing a site to shelter stranded turtles to conducting necropsies and scientific analysis of the plastics.
“This is a huge problem and we are continuing to study it,” Duffy says.
David Duffy examines a sea turtle tumor.
Decoding nature’s healing powers
The world is Sandra Loesgen’s laboratory. From the Matanzas River that flows past the Whitney Lab to the farthest reaches of Antarctica, she samples the Earth for microbes that can become medicines.
Loesgen speaks passionately about the elegance, mystery and potential that nature bestows on chemical compounds. Still, it’s a career that almost didn’t happen. Loesgen initially planned to be a doctor, but a hospital internship delivered an epiphany.
“I thought about why I was really interested in medicine. I decided it was actually the science behind it — how the body functions and how we treat diseases,” she says.
Loesgen pivoted to chemistry and, before long, had another choice: Spend her years synthesizing organic molecules or parsing the compounds made by nature. She listened to her gut instinct.
“I decided I wanted to be the person discovering natural compounds,” she says.
Loesgen, an associate professor of chemistry, has spent nearly six years at Whitney. Unlike some scientists, her work doesn’t focus on one disease or disorder. Loesgen’s research cuts across cancer, viral infections and pain suppression. Her specimen library is immense, a room-sized cooler brimming with a technicolor collection of more than 8,000 strains of bacteria and fungi.
Loesgen pursues what she calls “chemically talented” microbes, particularly ones that live symbiotically within algae or other hosts. Interpreting the “chemical language” that drives that interaction is what can ultimately uncover medicinal compounds.
“Nature gives us these molecules and it’s up to us to determine what they can do,” Loesgen says.
That has included identifying a soil-dwelling bacterium that strongly inhibits the growth and movement of melanoma cells, a dangerous skin cancer that often spreads throughout the body. The bacterium kills the cells by attacking their energy metabolism. That work has now shifted from cell research to mice.
In mid-2024, Loesgen and her colleagues showed that a fungus derived from marine algae selectively targets triple-negative breast cancer cells. The disease accounts for only about 20% of all breast cancer cases but is difficult to treat and carries the highest mortality rate. Her team identified a chemical compound within the fungus that inhibited the cancer cells with varying potency. More broadly, the researchers concluded that the fungus and others like it are worthy of further study.
For Loesgen, the Whitney Lab is also a scientific asset because it fosters collaborations between researchers within its campus and throughout UF. One of her newest projects involves working with James Strother, an assistant professor of biology at Whitney, on pain research. Microbes from Loesgen’s lab are being studied for potential pain relief in Strother’s zebrafish. It’s the first step in a lengthy process of developing non-opioid painkillers for humans. In the lab, Loesgen’s experience with small molecules and chemistry meshes with Strother’s expertise in systems neuroscience.
“We need new painkillers without the addiction potential of opioids,” she says.
Nature gives us these molecules and it’s up to us to determine what they can do.”
Sandra Loesgen
New leadership
In the late 1980s, Veronica Hinman was deep into her mechanical engineering studies at the University of Queensland. She decided to take an introductory class in ecology and evolution. A string of professors, teaching a few weeks at a time, left an indelible impression.
“I was just blown away. This is someone’s job to go and do these incredible things with science,” Hinman says.
She finished the engineering degree and immediately went back to school for bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in zoology. Her work at a marine biology research station on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef validated the academic pivot.
“I was pulling up plankton and the embryonic forms of corals and worms and sea cucumbers. It felt like a whole different planet. I became really fascinated by animal diversity and its origins,” she said.
Hinman went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, working with one of the world’s most pioneering and renowned developmental biologists. That led to a nearly 20-year career at Carnegie Mellon University, where she eventually led the biology department and specialized in evolutionary development how genes control the progression of embryos and how those processes evolve. She’s also worked extensively on gene regulatory networks, the complex molecular machinery that controls the minutia of gene expression in cells.
In January, Hinman added a new title to her resume: the sixth director of the Whitney Lab.
Whitney, Hinman says, has everything she was looking for: A faculty that’s strong in her scientific specialties, an ideal location for marine research and deep connections to the community. Like her predecessor, Hinman will serve as an administrator and researcher. Her lab uses advanced imaging and genetic tools to learn how starfish “reprogram” their cells to enable tissue regeneration a key step in developing wound healing techniques and new degenerative-disease treatments for humans.
Hinman says Whitney’s unique environment will also allow her to explore new research questions, such as how local marine species thrive in challenging conditions including major
Whitney’s location alone is a very powerful draw. There are many novel compounds that could boost drug discovery. The ocean is going to reveal a lot of secrets to us.”
Veronica Hinman
salinity and temperature changes. She’s especially curious about how embryos develop and stay healthy in difficult marine environments.
“This work is important because it can help us learn how marine life might cope with climate change and give us clues about protecting biodiversity in a changing world,” she says.
For Hinman, that means maintaining Whitney’s traditional strength in evolutionary and developmental biology while looking for new or growing research opportunities in fisheries, aquaculture and natural products drug discovery.
“Whitney’s location alone is a very powerful draw,” Hinman says. “There are many novel compounds that could boost drug discovery. The ocean is going to reveal a lot of secrets to us.”
Leaving his mark
Mark Q. Martindale, a developmental biologist, spent a dozen years in two key roles running his lab while also serving as Whitney’s director.
It didn’t take much to lure Martindale from the University of Hawaii. UF leadership showed an intense interest in the Whitney Lab from day one, Martindale says. Then, there was the location.
“The Whitney environment has a very different set of plants and animals along with tidal influences and water salinity issues. If you’re a biologist, this is like being a kid in a candy store. Every day, we feel like we’re in the middle of a living laboratory,” he says.
Martindale recruited nine of the 11 current faculty members, with a focus on diversifying Whitney’s research profile. Building on its early strengths in neurobiology sensory biology in particular Martindale helped broaden Whitney’s faculty to include specialists in aquaculture, environmental DNA and natural products drug discovery.
Soon, the Whitney Laboratory will be much larger and more state of the art. Martindale calls the Marine Research Institute building a “new front door” for Whitney: Many
researchers will have fresh space, trading their quarters in a low-slung, sprawling building for labs with sweeping views. It was seeded with a $5 million private donation, which was immediately matched by UF with the rest coming from the state and additional donations.
Whitney’s most public-facing asset the Sea Turtle Hospital is also moving into the new quarters. Visitors will be able to look into “sea turtle suites,” observing the animals as they undergo rehabilitation and medical treatments. Drop-in guests will get better views of the turtles while experiencing fresh displays explaining Whitney’s many scientific efforts. Gone are the days when an approaching hurricane meant evacuating all sea turtle patients, a complex ordeal that temporarily scattered them to other marine facilities or staff members’ homes.
For decades, Whitney’s faculty was well known for expertise in neurobiology the way sensory organs and neurons work together to help creatures navigate their environments. Yet its scientific legacy is also broad and distinctive: Barbara-Anne Battelle, an emeritus professor of neuroscience, used horseshoe crabs to understand how molecular “timers” help light-sensitive eye cells adapt to changing levels of brightness. Those mechanisms are crucial for normal vision in many animals. The late Michael J. Greenberg, a former Whitney director, made pioneering discoveries about specialized molecules that control heart rhythm in a common clam species.
Now, Martindale says, Whitney’s strengths also include developmental biology and learning how marine animals’ genes interact with each other and the environment.
With the new marine research building nearing completion, Martindale says it’s a good time for yet another change. At the end of 2024, he returned to full-time research.
In his lab, the gregarious Martindale hits a whole new level of ebullience. He points to a tank of jellyfish with a mix of awe and curiosity. The comb jellyfish, Martindale says, has remarkable regenerative powers. Learning more about how its cells behave and reorganize during wound repairs is a path to better understanding the biology of regeneration.
“I’m looking forward to spending more time with the people in my laboratory, brainstorming and thinking about the next big thing,” he says.
For now, that means using a particular jellyfish as an experimental model to study coral bleaching. He’s also intensely interested in biomineralization, the process that converts minerals into bones, teeth and shells.
Martindale has a three-year, $1 million National Science Foundation grant to develop Cassiopea xamachana , commonly known as the “upside down” jellyfish. During a bleaching event, a symbiotic alga that allows the coral to thrive is expelled. But even studying the problem is a challenge: Corals are endangered and don’t respond well to lab life. That’s where Martindale came in, developing a way to use the jellyfish’s gut to replicate the alga’s relationship with coral. Tracking that cooperative relationship could provide crucial information for restoring coral reefs.
For Martindale, decoding the secrets of biomineralization is a path toward sturdier materials and, perhaps someday, healthier people.
“No engineer can make a substance that’s as strong as a snail’s shell,” he says.
He recently started working with a Mayo Clinic cardiologist who studies calcium buildup in heart arteries. One idea is to use the same molecules Martindale studies in sea anemones to remove harmful, calcifying proteins from humans’ blood. That concept, Martindale says, embodies the founding spirit of the Whitney Lab.
“The idea is to learn from nature about how things work so that they can be utilized to impact human health,” he says.
Mark Q. Martindale
Humble beginnings
When Barry Ache joined the Whitney Lab in 1978, it was exactly what he wanted the chance to do full-time research in a marine lab. Back then, the Whitney Lab consisted of just three people: Ache, the part-time director and a zoology researcher from Gainesville.
Ache recalls his early years at Whitney as a “very, very fun place to be.” The lab was run by the UF Foundation and still some years away from being formally absorbed by the university. Its staff was young and close in age, leading to volleyball outings and nice parties.
Then, as now, scientific research was the priority. Faculty meetings and other duties were few. Whitney’s intense science focus allowed many faculty to gain national recognition and prominence, which Ache says allowed them to be more competitive in obtaining major research grants over the years.
“That was, and is, one of the beauties of the place. It lets you really do your science and excel in your field and that hasn’t changed over the years,” says Ache, an emeritus professor of biology and neuroscience who retired about three years ago.
For Ache, that meant freedom to explore chemical signaling in marine animals including the role odorants play in smell perception. Working with lobsters, Ache’s achievements include showing that odor perception is driven by conditions that excite some cells in the olfactory system while suppressing others.
Lobsters, Ache says, provided a gateway for him to also pursue research in insects, mice, and rats all so-called animal models of olfaction.
“People have olfactory disorders and you want to cure them. You want to know fundamentally how olfaction works so you can figure out why it’s malfunctioning in humans,” he says.
Ache believes some of the best validation of Whitney’s science is its ongoing funding.
“The work being done there then and now has really valuable implications for human health, as well as for industry,” he says.
While Ache would go on to start UF’s Center for Smell and Taste in 1998, he never left Whitney behind. While serving as the Gainesville center’s founding director, Ache maintained a robust, fully funded lab at Whitney.
His explanation is simple: “If you’re already in academic paradise, why leave?”
Barry W. Ache
Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biology and Neuroscience bwa@whitney.ufl.edu
David Duffy
Assistant Professor of Wildlife Disease Genomics duffy@whitney.ufl.edu
Veronica Hinman Professor of Biology veronica.hinman@whitney.ufl.edu
Sandra Loesgen
Associate Professor of Chemistry sandra.loesgen@whitney.ufl.edu
Mark Q. Martindale Professor of Biology mqmartin@whitney.ufl.edu
The Whitney Lab as it appeared in its early days (inset) and the current campus.
Saving Sea Turtles
Whitney Lab’s hospital treats sick, injured turtles while boosting research
By Doug Bennett
On the operating table, the patient fidgeted under bright lights as the anesthesia slowly took hold. Soon, the medical team would use a carbon dioxide laser to precisely explode dangerous eye tumor cells.
The patient that November day was Adrift, an 8-pound, juvenile green sea turtle. Left unchecked, the virus-driven tumors would eventually affect Adrift’s vision and perhaps the ability to swim effectively or avoid predators. An operating room whiteboard at the Whitney Lab’s Sea Turtle Hospital listed the recent cases: Adrift, Psycho, Beetlejuice and Pinocchio.
At the lab, sea turtles are its most iconic marine creatures. Residents scoop up stranded young turtles, dropping them off after hours into Tupperware containers left in a cooler. Schoolchildren get to know the turtles during educational visits. When a hurricane is looming, staff members shuttle the turtles to other facilities, the veterinarian’s house —or home with staff to ride out the storm
Among the staff and cadre of volunteers who keep the hospital running, nothing is overlooked. The turtles’ medical issues are documented in exceptional detail, including logging their stool habits. In the kitchen, a refrigerator is packed with cucumbers, green peppers and Romaine lettuce. Volunteers help to pump out precise, customized meals: 36 grams of seafood for Adrift in the mornings. Fish filets only for Psycho. For others, it’s mackerel, herring, squid or shrimp.
While most turtles spend six to nine months undergoing treatment and rehabilitation, program manager Catherine Eastman and four employees face a year-round onslaught. Hurricane season brings an influx of juvenile turtles that get washed back to shore. Summer is the season for net entanglements and fishing hook injuries.
In the winter, cold snaps can stun turtles. When a bitter weather front blasted Florida in late January, Whitney’s staff and volunteers met an unprecedented challenge. The Sea Turtle Hospital took in 119 cold-stunned turtles in three days, monitoring and treating them until they could be returned to the wild or sent to other facilities.
About a dozen years ago, Eastman pitched the idea of a sea turtle hospital. It was built on a shoestring “Home Depot-style” she says and now operates on a $350,000 annual budget. Eastman’s team makes the most of it, treating 199 injured or ill turtles and 243 hatchlings and post-hatchlings last year.
Over the years, Eastman’s team has gone to extraordinary lengths for her patients. Banana, a 70-pound turtle from Cocoa Beach, arrived in 2015 with severe neck injuries from a boat propeller. The gashed tendons kept Banana from supporting her head, but the team had a plan. They put out a public call for life jackets. The public responded with dozens of them.
The idea, Eastman says, was to sew a floating flap onto the life jacket and put it backwards onto Banana. Eastman just happens to be a big fan of MacGyver, the 1980s television series featuring an ingenious problem solver. Before long, Banana’s chin was bobbing, just like Eastman hoped.
“It worked and we were all happy, but we had to do so much problem solving,” she says.
Yet education and rehabilitation are just part of the equation, Eastman says. Having a sea turtle hospital embedded in a marine research lab benefits animals and humans alike. Whitney is the state’s only university-affiliated lab for
treating turtles’ fibropapilloma tumors. Later this year, the turtle caregivers and many scientists will be under the same roof when Whitney’s new $41.2 million Marine Research Institute and Sea Turtle Research Center and Hospital opens.
“It always feels good to rehabilitate and release animals back to the wild. But at the end of the day, research is where we can have a broader reach,” Eastman says.
That’s where David Duffy, a molecular biologist who researches fibropapillomatosis and other sea turtle issues, comes in. Duffy says he’s intensely interested in the factors that are driving a prolonged uptick in fibropapilloma tumors, which share some traits with human herpes viruses. He also collaborated with Eastman to reveal the prevalence of plastic ingestion in sea turtles a project they say was facilitated by the sea turtle hospital being at Whitney.
Since 2015, Duffy has been using state-of-the-art genomic approaches from human cancer research and applying it to sea turtles to better understand their tumors. Some of the same types of genes are involved in human and turtle cancers, he found. He is also exploring new drug treatments for sea turtle tumors, particularly internal ones that are currently untreatable.
“The hope is that some of our findings can actually translate back from humans to sea turtles,” Duffy said. Due to their relative longevity, sea turtles are an excellent, natural model for studying cancer.
“Sea turtles enable us to study cancers that form over prolonged periods of time and understand the contribution of environmental exposures to the tumor formation, all while treating their tumors and returning our recovered patients to the wild,” Duffy says.
Another concern is plastic’s toxic impact on sea turtles – not just the direct, physical effects of eating it but also whether chemicals are leaching into the animals. Whitney, Duffy says, catalyzes that kind of research by having turtle patients supply biological samples at the same site as cutting-edge microscope imaging, advanced molecular biology techniques and genomic research. Cancer normally isn’t common in sea turtles but they become more susceptible to tumors if their environment gets polluted enough.
“That should be a big lesson for humans, as we continue to contaminate our homes and environments with an ever-increasing amount of diverse contaminants,” Duffy says.
Ultimately, Duffy wants his work to be about healing habitats rather than just affected animals.
“I wish I didn’t have to be interested in wildlife diseases,” he says. “We get many sea turtle patients every year that need a lot of hands-on care. Restoring their environment means they’ll need a lot less help from humans.”
Catherine Eastman Sea Turtle Hospital Program Manager cbeastman@whitney.ufl.edu
David Duffy Assistant Professor of Wildlife Disease Genomics duffy@whitney.ufl.edu
Sea Turtle Hospital Manager Devon Ramia (left) and Veterinarian Brooke Burkhalter treat a turtle stunned by a January cold snap.
A green sea turtle receives fluids as part of its treatment during a January cold snap.
Catherine Eastman, Sea Turtle Hospital Program Manager
Eastman tends to cold-stunned sea turtles.
Calculating Diseases
AI helps Emerging Pathogens Institute researchers model risks
By Jiayu Liang
In southwest Texas, the soil-dwelling bacteria Bacillus anthracis can persist in the environment. Every year, it puts livestock, wildlife and humans at risk of contracting the often-fatal disease anthrax.
But some years are more severe than others. Is there a way to know the likelihood of an outbreak beforehand? Jason Blackburn, a member of UF’s Emerging Pathogens Institute, is searching for patterns to help predict risk.
And like many other researchers at UF, Blackburn, a professor in the UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Department of Geography, has transformed his work with artificial intelligence.
Blackburn’s extensive experience tracking wildlife has perfectly prepared him for studying anthrax in Texas, where disease transmission is intertwined with how animals interact with the landscape.
“We’re kind of looking at it from the bookends. So, from the cellular level out, and from the landscape level in.” Blackburn says. On one end, the researchers characterize the pathogen by sequencing its genome and growing the bacteria to learn about key genes.
“So we’re starting to take some of our descriptive studies where we identified some patterns like, hey, the first hundred days of the year tell us something about the next hundred days and now, we’re developing some AI-based models to try and forecast phenology.”
Jason
Blackburn
Then, on the other end, Blackburn’s lab studies the environments where hosts come in contact with pathogens. Here, machine learning makes a world of difference. This type of computer model mimics the human brain’s ability to learn and is trained on examples, so it can essentially teach itself general patterns. When a researcher presents the model with real data, the algorithm finds an answer based on what it learned in training.
Blackburn’s lab monitors the disease in collaboration with veterinarians and ranchers in Texas, who receive diagnostic services for their animals in return. The state’s three biggest anthrax outbreaks of the century all occurred while Blackburn and his collaborators have been working in the region: 2001, 2005 and 2019.
To survey the landscape, Blackburn uses remotely sensed data from Google Earth Engine, a massive catalog of information that is easy to access thanks
to its powerful cloud-based server. This resource lets the researchers partially automate the process of gathering environmental data.
Blackburn’s lab still runs relatively small studies on desktop computers. But larger projects that need more computing power get pushed to the HiPerGator, UF’s supercomputer, which is one of the most powerful in higher education. HiPerGator has made it possible for labs like Blackburn’s to process vast amounts of data in a reasonably short time.
Armed with information about animal movement, vegetation density and where a pathogen has been found, Blackburn’s team proceeds to conduct space-time analyses. Are there peaks? Is there any seasonality to the disease? If so, does it thrive in the wet or dry seasons?
In Texas, anthrax is most common between May and August.
“So, it’s got seasonality, but it’s also episodic,” Blackburn says. “Some years
Jason Blackburn at the end of a long sampling day in West Texas.
you just get a few cases here and there, and some years you get an explosion of 10,000 animal cases, and then it fades out again.”
To pinpoint an element that can predict that explosion, Blackburn is developing an AI-based model that can forecast the likelihood of an outbreak based on what the first few months looked like.
“So we’re starting to take some of our descriptive studies where we identified some patterns like, hey, the first hundred days of the year tell us something about the next hundred days and now, we’re developing some AI-based models to try and forecast phenology,” Blackburn says, referring to the study of cyclical patterns like how a landscape’s vegetation
grows and dies back with each year’s changing of the seasons.
These are known as the green-up and brown-down phases, respectively, and can be tracked in satellite images. Pixels with varying levels of greenness correspond to the amount of vegetation in an area.
Blackburn feeds an AI model over 20 years of such data, training it to become familiar with the cycle. Then, he gives the algorithm partial green-up data and asks it to find matches in previous years. Does the green-up resemble that of a high-outbreak year? Or is it more comparable to a low-activity year?
The research aims to develop a way to determine the likelihood of an outbreak with two months’ notice. A major
strength of AI, Blackburn noted, is its ability to find patterns in green-up trajectories even with incomplete data.
As part of UF’s growing AI initiatives, Blackburn’s home Department of Geography has developed a new certificate program and a growing set of courses for undergraduates and graduates interested in AI. He also observed that many UF researchers are retooling their machine learning algorithms to run more efficiently on GPU-enabled cluster computers like the HiPerGator.
“You’ll see lots of us collaborating to pull together AI for remote sensing and disease prediction,” Blackburn says. “And also, EPI is so supportive of our labs and the costs associated with this program.”
SEER lab staff collecting diagnostic samples during an outbreak (top left); assisting with an animal carcass cleanup (bottom left); Samples are collected in the field and transported to the laboratory for diagnostic testing (above).
Crunching Big Data
Because Florida’s population includes many different ethnic groups with varied lifestyles, it is nearly impossible for public health officials to develop a single set of interventions that simultaneously reach everyone who needs it.
Thankfully, AI can help experts find ways to tailor and optimize their strategies.
In treating HIV, for example, public health officials have a few different options. These include pre-exposure prophylaxis, a preventative medicine known as PrEP, and campaigns that promote safe sex and testing.
EPI Director Marco Salemi aims to understand what specific geographic areas or conditions correlate with high-risk populations.
Salemi is currently studying Miami and Fort Lauderdale, which both have a high incidence of HIV. This project is in collaboration with EPI members Simone Marini, an assistant professor at the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions (PHHP), and Mattia Prosperi, the Associate Dean for AI and Innovation at PHHP. With grants from the National Institutes of Health, the team is testing
what public health measures are most likely to succeed.
“AI can give us a rational way to make public health decisions,” explains Salemi, also a professor in the UF College of Medicine. “When we run possible future scenarios, the algorithm can show us which are most likely to happen and what happens if we put in different measures.”
Artificial intelligence helps not only because it can analyze large amounts of data, but also because it can incorporate heterogeneous datasets. These include different types of information all at once, such as clinic stages, environmental conditions and viral genetic diversity.
“So, all these things can be analyzed simultaneously by AI,” Salemi says. “We can also look at financial parameters, for example, because clearly any kind of public health intervention costs money and requires resources.”
This information helps Salemi, Marini and Prosperi conduct a cost-benefit analysis and ultimately devise practical solutions that make the most of public health resources.
Artificial intelligence has also proven
to be a major boon in processing the overwhelming amount of data biomedical researchers have to work with. In the past, simply collecting data was a significant hurdle. Obtaining the first complete human genome cost billions of dollars. Now, it can be done for only a few thousand dollars.
“Our ability to produce data has increased beyond our wildest dreams,” Salemi says. “We have essentially too much information to be analyzed with the statistical tools we have used in the past.”
The scientific community generated nearly 20 million viral sequences over four years of the COVID-19 pandemic. For comparison, it took 15 years to sequence 50,000 genomes of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
Throughout the pandemic, SARSCoV-2 demonstrated its adaptability. Even as various public health measures were implemented, this virus, which causes COVID-19, has mutated and spread worldwide.
Fortunately, Salemi, Marini and Prosperi have developed algorithms that track how the virus evolves. If a mutation in
“What really excites me right now is having an algorithm that can very quickly predict new and
more aggressive variants. That’s obviously a good safeguard for the future.”
— Marco Salemi
the genetic code forms a new strain that is more pathogenic or transmissible, the model flags it.
“What really excites me right now is having an algorithm that can very quickly predict new and more aggressive variants,” Salemi says. “That’s obviously a good safeguard for the future.”
Salemi says the strengths of AI its ability to analyze large amounts of data and be taught by example make it perfect for this application. Classic statistical analysis techniques are tedious and require the analyst to know what they’re looking for and what kinds of questions to ask of the data.
In other words, they need to already have a theory or idea. But “you don’t always know what you don’t know,” Salemi adds. When there are millions and millions of data points, the human brain might not ask the right questions to find any interesting patterns lurking in that sea of information.
“And if we use statistical methods to try all the possible combinations, even with our supercomputers we would be lost forever,” he says.
But the team’s machine learning models don’t stop at identifying dangerous new strains; he also has algorithms that can find weak spots, helping scientists develop specific drugs that target the latest variations.
“When we understand exactly how these mutations impact the pathogen structure, for example, we can find ways to develop drugs that will specifically target that particular mutated protein,” Salemi explains. The researchers can even build dynamic models that simulate what happens when a virus encounters different drugs.
This, Salemi says, highlights the importance of working across disciplines. After they’ve finished modeling, the task of developing the drug belongs to the chemist.
“Everything that we do in terms of facing and tackling the challenges of infectious diseases needs to be comprehensive and multidisciplinary. Because it’s not just about finding a cure or vaccine,” Salemi says. “It’s about making sure that whatever we find can be implemented at the societal level.”
Salemi says EPI is especially well-positioned for this kind of work because it can leverage the enormous number of resources UF has invested in building a strong AI community. He adds that putting together a multidisciplinary team including molecular biologists, epidemiologists and computer scientists through the EPI has been the key researchers’ success.
“This integration of disciplines is necessary to face the challenges of the twenty-first century,” he says.
Related website: https://epi.ufl.edu/
Marco Salemi
Director, Emerging Pathogens Institute salemi@pathology.ufl.edu
Jason Blackburn
Professor of Medical Geography jkblackburn@ufl.edu
GatorXPRIZE
High-Tech Solutions to High-Risk Wildfires
By Joseph Kays
Wildfires like the ones that recently devastated Southern California burn an average of 7 million acres a year in the United States, taking dozens of lives and causing billions of dollars in damage.
While 2025 is off to a bad start, the 2020 wildfires are still the worst on record in the United States, consuming 10 million acres. That year, fires burned 4.3 million acres in California, where they killed 25 people, caused over $12 billion in damage and wiped out nearly 20 years of progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Only about 10% of wildfires are caused by lightning, but those fires are, on average, nine times larger because they can smolder for days until weather conditions become right for them to explode, says Istvan Kereszy, CEO and co-founder of Fire Neural Network, or FNN, a Gainesville-based company that is taking a high-tech approach to the problem.
Kereszy became interested in wildfires after Imre Bartos, an associate professor of physics at UF who spends most of his time studying collisions among black holes, took a trip to California and got an up-close look at the devastation caused by wildfires.
“As a scientist, I wondered why it took days to spot a fire once it was sparked, giving it time to become catastrophic,” says Bartos, FNN’s chief technology officer.
Bartos took his question to Kereszy, a doctoral student in the physics department at the time who was studying lightning properties at UF’s International Center for Lightning Research and Testing.
“Imre’s question struck a chord with me,” Kereszy says. “He and his astrophysics colleagues could look back millions of years and map out distant galaxies, but we cannot find a fire that’s 20 miles away.”
UF has a long history of lightning research, so Bartos, Kereszy and their colleagues started looking at how they could apply their expertise to the lightning-ignited wildfire challenge. Around the same time, the XPRIZE Foundation, a non-profit organization that has hosted large-scale competitions to solve numerous global challenges since it was established in 1994, announced XPRIZE Wildfire. The 4-year, $11 million competition is meant to incentivize the innovation of wildfire fighting technologies.
“The prize aims to transform current wildfire management approaches through the development of new technologies that can rapidly and accurately detect, characterize, and respond to
wildfires before they become destructive,” according to the organization’s website.
The researchers saw XPRIZE Wildfire as an opportunity to leverage even more technology from UF and beyond to address wildfires, so they created GatorX, a team that includes UF, Fire Neural Network, AI-industry leader NVIDIA and Satlantis, a UF spinoff that uses high-resolution satellites to monitor environmental conditions on Earth.
GatorX is developing a fully autonomous solution that combines FNN’s proprietary lightning detection technology with AI-optimized drones to detect, evaluate and extinguish fires in a matter of minutes, before they have a chance to grow out of control. Eventually, they hope to integrate data from Satlantis’ satellites.
Out of nearly 150 initial teams, GatorX was one of only 28 chosen to advance to the next round this spring, where each team will have 10 minutes to autonomously detect and suppress a high-risk fire in a 1,000-square-kilometer, environmentally challenging area.
“With wildfires, it’s all about speed the faster you find them, the easier they are to fight,” Kereszy says.
GatorX is focusing on high-risk lightning in which the electric current flows for a thousand times longer compared to regular lightning, says FNN co-founder Caroline Comeau.
“It’s high risk because of its extra-long duration and extrahigh heat,” she says. “Imagine you’re waving your hand above a candle. You’re fine for half a second, but if you leave it there for 500 seconds you’re going to get burned.”
FNN combines data from its High-Risk-Lightning™ detectors that track the frequency and type of lightning in an area with environmental data such as temperature, precipitation, vegetation and fuel availability to determine fire risk.
“Using UF’s HiPerGator computer, we’re able to digest and analyze terabytes of data in seconds,” Comeau says. “Firefighters no longer have to spend hours doing this analysis. It allows us to find that single needle in the haystack to pinpoint where a high-risk strike has occurred, all in 40 seconds.”
For the XPRIZE competition, if the detectors spot a potential wildfire, they will send a signal to a squadron of drones hovering over the search area. The drones, equipped with multiple cameras and NVIDIA AI chips, will converge on the target area to take high-resolution images and determine if lightning has ignited a fire, or if someone is just lighting a campfire or a grill. If the drones determine the fire is a real threat, they signal a larger drone carrying water or other suppressant to descend over the fire and extinguish it.
“It all has to be autonomous, which is where NVIDIA and this kind of Jetson onboard computing can really help,
FNN team deploying the HRL sensor in the field, powered by its own solar panel and Wi-Fi router (top left); FireBird Drone with dual payload capacity outfitted to scout for the GatorX team during the Wildfire Challenge (bottom left); FNN HRL GIS-empowered dashboard displaying high-risk lightning strikes and prior wildfires. This data is provided to utility and forestry groups across the nation (above).
because there’s a lot of data to be processed,” says Comeau. “It’s not only video imaging processing, but also the communications between the video drones and the extinguishing drone. So, there are a lot of moving parts, and when you have a lot of data, you need a fast computer, which is where HiPerGator comes in.”
Chris Malachowsky, NVIDIA co-founder and a UF alumnus, has been watching the XPRIZE efforts closely.
“The newest generation of the HiPerGator is coming online this year and I am very proud that it is being used in the battle against wildfires,” Malachowsky says.
FNN works closely with local agencies that are most familiar with the fire risks of their region. The Florida Forest Service was one of the first groups FNN approached. They’ve also partnered with the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, the Australian National University-Optus Bushfire Research
Centre of Excellence, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Patrick Deren, deputy chief of field operations for the Florida Forest Service in North Florida, says the agency has been working with FNN to test their research and provide feedback regarding the accuracy of the technology in detecting wildfires.
“We are hopeful that this will result in another tool to detect fires early in order to reduce risks to our firefighters and the public,” says Deren.
“We want to help stop the devastation,” Kereszy says. “What’s cool is that we brought together two of UF’s strengths lightning research and artificial intelligence to advance our mission to help stop uncontrolled wildfires across the globe.”
Karen Dooley contributed to this story.
XPRIZERainforest
Tracking Biodiversity
Robert Guralnick, curator of bioinformatics at the Florida Museum of Natural History, is a member of an international team that won first place in the five-year XPRIZE Rainforest competition. The winners were announced in November at a summit held in Rio de Janeiro. More than $7 million was awarded to the top-ranked teams, with $5 million going to the first-place winner.
The XPRIZE Rainforest competition kicked off in 2019, hosting 300 teams across 70 countries. The collective goal of each participant was the acceleration of technological innovation to improve the speed and precision of biodiversity surveys in support of global conservation efforts.
In the last stage of the competition, six finalist teams had 24 hours to deploy their technologies, remotely survey a 100-hectare test plot of tropical rainforest without physically entering the test area, and produce a biodiversity analysis report within 48 hours following the deployment. To win the competition’s grand prize, teams were also tasked with demonstrating scalability to effectively disrupt the often lengthy, laborious and resource-intensive process of data collection and analysis.
Each Limelight raft was equipped with an arsenal of monitoring devices, including lights and camera systems that allowed the team to identify more than 250,000 insects over a 24-hour period during the XPrize finals.
Collecting data was just the first step; afterward, it had to be analyzed. The Limelight team set up a makeshift laboratory in the rainforest where they extracted and analyzed thousands of DNA samples and combined their results in a 137-page report, all within the span of 48 hours.
The team developed computer models that automatically identified insects photographed by cameras onboard the Limelight rafts, but meticulous work was also done by hand to verify many of the identifications with genetic sequencing and good, old-fashioned observation.
The team scored first place using 10 fully automated rafts, which they placed in the forest canopy using drones.
“
One of the questions we want to answer is not so much what’s out there, but what services the forest is providing to animals. For example, we can detect buzz feeding of bats in and around the site, which is an indication that it’s a high-quality area.”
Robert Guralnick
Drones served various functions during the competition, including the deployment of rafts, the collection of water samples from which the team extracted environmental
and canopy surveys to identify trees.
“It was such a massive collaborative effort,” Guralnick says. “I have never been involved in such a high-pressure situation, where one team does so much work to produce high-quality data, analytics and insights.”
Guralnick is a member of the Limelight Rainforest team, whose solution to the challenge was to create a monitoring device equipped with lights, audio recorders, cameras, insect traps and collection reservoirs. During the competition, 10 Limelight devices were transported by drone and deposited in the forest canopy. At sundown, the lights were activated, creating clear beacons that attracted insects within the 100-hectare plot.
During finals, the onboard camera systems photographed and automatically classified 250,000 insects in just 24 hours. Team members also used canopy mapping software to identify thousands of trees and piloted drones to collect water samples from the forest floor. Because organisms are constantly shedding genetic material into their environment, team members running an onsite genetic lab were able to sequence isolated strands of DNA suspended in the water samples and use it to identify many of the organisms that lived nearby.
Team members running the genetic lab also sequenced environmental DNA from air samples and from the surface of plant leaves. By the end of the 48-hour limit, the team produced more DNA sequences than any of their competitors.
“It was a challenging and thrilling experience to run a full molecular lab in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. But we did it, and it was amazing,” says Niyomi House, a postdoctoral associate at the Florida Museum.
The team used the Limelights’ audio recorders to automatically identify birds, using a birdsong database created in partnership with Indigenous bird guides in Ecuador.
When the results had been tallied, Limelight rainforest had collectively identified more than 250 species and 700 distinct taxa.
Though the express goal was to measure as much biodiversity as possible, Guralnick says devices like the Limelight and others developed for the rainforest competition have the potential to go far beyond static inventories.
“One of the questions we want to answer is not so much what’s out there, but what services the forest is providing to animals,” he says. “For example, we
can detect buzz feeding of bats in and around the site, which is an indication that it’s a high-quality area.”
By mapping the position of each monitoring device, the team could also triangulate the movement of birds and track bats as they searched for food.
The rainforest competition was developed to address the critical need for rapid biodiversity inventories in areas that remain poorly studied or are threatened by development. Devices like the Limelight will improve the accuracy of environmental assessments, make it easier to identify the ecosystem services provided within a plot of land and monitor ecosystem health in even the most remote areas.
“Our ability to deploy monitoring devices to explore the world is just in its infancy,” Guralnick says. “We’ve never before had the ability to get this type of dense, real-time, on-the-ground information on what’s happening in our ecosystems at this scale. ”
Other UF researchers who participated with Limelight included Florida Museum researchers Raphael LaFrance and Nick Gardner, and former UF doctoral students Caitlin Campbell and Julie Allen.
Jerald Pinson
DNA,
Biomedical Impact
Christine Schmidt has spent her career developing treatments that matter
biomedical engineering Professor Christine Schmidt has spent nearly three decades developing ways to heal damaged nerves so that people like Shirley Pincus could live pain-free lives.
Pincus, who suffered from polio as a child, developed benign masses called neuromas on nerves in her left leg as an adult. For six years she searched for a treatment for pain she described as a 9 on a scale of 1-10.
Finally, she found a doctor in Chicago who suggested removing the neuromas and bridging the resulting gap with the Avance nerve graft, based on technology Schmidt developed at the University of Texas and licensed to Alachua County-based Axogen.
Pincus says she awoke from the surgery pain free and, after physical therapy, was able to resume her active lifestyle.
“You do not have to live with pain,” Pincus says. “Find the right doctor, get the right diagnosis and get the right treatment.”
It’s rare for Schmidt to actually meet a patient who has benefited from her discoveries, so when she and Pincus ended up on the same panel hosted by Axogen in 2016, emotions ran high on both sides.
Photography by John Jernigan
“She spoke about her fears of amputation of her leg from the painful neuromas, her long quest to find a physician and surgeon who could help and finally learning about the nerve graft,” recalls Schmidt, UF’s J. Crayton Pruitt Family Endowed Chair in Biomedical Engineering.
“I spoke about my struggles getting funding and facing criticism for working on this research that was not as impactful in the academic world. After the panel, Shirley came up and gave me a hug and told me, ‘You are my hero.’ It was so emotional. I teared up.”
Nobody is questioning Schmidt’s impact these days. Last year, in the space of a few months, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine. For an academic to be chosen for either of these honors is a career milestone; to be elected to both is almost unprecedented. As a biomedical engineer, Schmidt says she listens carefully to what doctors tell her about their needs, and in the area of neural regeneration, the doctors were telling her that the tools they had for repairing severed nerves were not sufficient.
In the early 2000s, there were two primary options available for nerve damage synthetic grafts made from polymers or autologous grafts using a nerve from somewhere else in the patient’s body.
Nerve graft developed by Christine Schmidt in collaboration with biotech company Axogen.
It is truly humbling to see our laboratory research translate into meaningful advancements that have enhanced the lives of thousands of patients.”
Christine Schmidt
“The problem with the synthetic polymer grafts is that they were just hollow tubes. They did not promote nerve regeneration over longer distances, so a patient with a very large injury may have suffered amputation or other more dire consequences instead,” she said in an interview with Gainesville’s Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in 2022.
Schmidt added that autologous grafts “require two surgeries, which is more risky to the patient and causes the patient to lose some function from somewhere else in the body.”
So Schmidt worked with her students at the University of Texas to create something that filled a niche between those two options.
“We came up with this idea of taking donated nerve tissue and removing the cell components that caused immune response,” she said.
“We developed a nerve graft to function very similar to an autologous nerve graft, but instead of taking it from the patient themselves, we figured out a way to use donated cadaver tissue,” she said. “We used different types of chemicals and detergents to strip the cells out of nerve tissue and retain the intricate micro architecture of the nerve, which helped facilitate the axons of the nerves to regrow.”
The patient stories on the Axogen website are testament to the impact over 100,000 Avance grafts have had on people with a wide array of nerve injuries, like Jeffrey, who suffered severe damage to the ulnar nerve in his left arm when he was struck by gunfire while serving in Afghanistan; Jane, who lost sensation in her chest after a mastectomy; and Madie, a high school sophomore who lost feeling on one side of her tongue when a nerve was damaged during wisdom tooth surgery.
“It is truly humbling to see our laboratory research translate into meaningful advancements that have enhanced the lives of thousands of patients,” Schmidt says. “This type of impact means more to me than any publication or grant.”
Building on the success of the Avance graft, Schmidt’s team began looking at ways to apply similar approaches to other types of tissue.
“We had learned from Avance that structure is absolutely critical for any kind of healing tissue in general,” she said. “We were trying to understand how we could impart structure and micro architecture into other biomaterials so we could help guide cells and tissues to regenerate.”
One solution a student in her lab proposed was to use salt crystals to “lock in structural features within biomaterials.”
“When we wash out those crystals, they leave behind a template of pores and micro architecture that cells can follow and grow along for regeneration,” she said.
Schmidt’s lab originally intended to use the new process to make hydrogels for nerve regeneration, but while that didn’t work as well as intended, the materials had other useful properties, including the ability to slide across each other, like a lubricant.
“We found we could make thin films of these materials, almost like Saran Wrap, that could be used to promote healing after surgery,” she explained during her induction into the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame in 2021.
“After back surgery, for example, scars start to appear all over the place. It’s almost like weeds kind of growing in the body,” she said. “People have limited mobility because of that and a lot of pain, so surgeons will often have to go in and do multiple back surgeries.”
The result of this research is VersaWrap Hydrogel Sheet, which licensee Alafair Biosciences says has now been used in more than 25,000 patients to facilitate healing after surgery on tendons, ligaments, skeletal muscles and peripheral nerves.
“Alafair was founded to commercialize technology from Dr. Schmidt’s lab,” says Sarah Mayes, one of Schmidt’s former students at UT who is now chief scientific officer and co-founder of Alafair. “Christine is highly regarded as a revolutionary scientist among her peers. It is an honor to have graduated from her lab, and I am a better scientist because of her input. Christine is kind, brilliant, strong and cares not just deeply but thoughtfully. She is a great leader.”
While all of these discoveries were being made, UF was working to grow its biomedical research capabilities in the Herbert
Developed in Christine Schimdt’s lab, VersaWrap Hydrogel Sheet is the only Class II, plant-based medical device implant intended for tendon, ligament, skeletal muscle, and peripheral nerve.
Source: Alafair Biosciences.
Schmidt Lab team members Kennedy Moes, Amanda De Castro Juraski and Gopal Agarwal (from left)
We do our fundamental research in an academic setting ... and along the way, we have the goal of hopefully being able to create innovations that could help people.”
Christine Schmidt “
Wertheim College of Engineering, so when the position of department chair opened up, Schmidt was an obvious choice.
“We needed someone who had a clear vision of what biomedical sciences can be, someone who has a real eye for talent, is a good mentor and a good recruiter. Someone who knew what excellence looks like,” says former College of Engineering Dean Cammy Abernathy. “When Christine came across our radar, she clearly stood out as someone who would be an outstanding addition.”
During her 10 years as chair, from 2013 to 2023, Schmidt recruited 24 faculty members to the department and tripled research expenditures per faculty member. In addition, the graduate program ranking rose significantly during this time.
“She really put us on the radar,” Abernathy says. “She did an excellent job recruiting a diverse faculty. We were successfully competing against some of the top programs in the country for talent, which is a testament to her reputation, her eye for talent and her ability to recruit and mentor.”
These days, Schmidt’s lab is working to provide doctors with solutions for patients suffering from spinal cord injury. Much of her recent research at the University of Florida has focused on developing injectable biomaterials that can inherently promote neural regeneration and which can also be used to deliver cells and therapeutics for spinal cord repair.
“Spinal cord injury affects 15 million people worldwide, with devastating impact on quality of life,” she says. “Our research is focused on analyzing and designing biomaterials that can interface with neurons and specifically stimulate and guide nerves to regenerate.”
In addition to providing a scaffold and pathway in which spinal nerves can regenerate, Schmidt’s team is using the hydrogel as a delivery vehicle for small molecules that can digest scar tissue and mitigate inflammatory cells at the site of injury.
“We are exploring the delivery of Schwann cells, which are cells in healthy peripheral nerve tissue that can secrete proregenerative molecules,” she says. “We have shown in the lab that these materials can decrease inflammation that would normally inhibit repair after injury.”
Schmidt holds more than three dozen patents, which she says are a natural outgrowth of her basic research in biomedical engineering.
“We do our fundamental research in an academic setting and along the way, we have the goal of hopefully being able to create innovations that could help people,” she says. “With biomedical engineering, the whole goal is to have an application that’s going to help human health. It’s part of my training, part of my education of our students, that we do the research and then we always look at what we can patent.”
This translational approach to research earned Schmidt the Biomedical Engineering Society’s 2024 Athanasiou Medal of Excellence in Translational Bioengineering. This honor recognizes contributions to biomedical engineering, with a focus on translating research into practical applications, particularly treating nerve damage.
“Dr. Schmidt’s novel approaches in developing biomaterials and regenerative therapies have set new standards in medical research and treatment,” says Forrest Masters, interim dean of the College of Engineering. “Her work not only exemplifies scientific excellence but also demonstrates a deep commitment to addressing critical health challenges.”
Christine Schmidt J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering schmidt@bme.ufl.edu
Current Schmidt Lab trainees
UF Libraries follow Historical ARCS
ARCS was with us every step of the way, from helping to write our data management plans in the proposal, to completing the GIS work required for the design-build parts of the restoration, to tackling data on water quality and oyster projects throughout.”
Bill Pine
Whether it’s using geographic information systems to help IFAS researchers rebuild oyster reefs or computer vision and large language models to make collections at the Florida Museum of Natural History more accessible, UF’s George A. Smathers Libraries have come a long way since its first building opened a century ago with 40,000 books that could only be read in the building.
Today, the UF libraries are a state-of-the-art academic resource system that has evolved to play a pivotal role in advancing research across disciplines, leveraging cutting-edge technology and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration. With more than 5.5 million print volumes, 4 million e-books, 17 million digitized pages, 1,500 electronic databases and 320,000 full-text electronic journals, the UF libraries are the largest academic information resource system in Florida. More than 3.5 million faculty, students, staff and guests visit the libraries annually, and 4.5 million people visit the website.
Technological advancements have always been at the forefront of the libraries’ evolution. In 1966, UF was among the first institutions to collaborate with the Library of Congress on
“
Our newest department, ARCS, aggregates a number of very talented faculty from a wide variety of disciplines, like informatics, data science and AI, who support many departments and colleges. Much as the libraries support each unit on campus, ARCS does the same. This is an increasingly multidisciplinary team which reflects and responds to the collaborative nature of research.”
Judith Russell Dean of University Libraries
Over the last 15 years, UF researchers have documented large declines in oyster reefs in the Big Bend region of Florida. These declines, which likely began in the 1980s, have impacted not only the oyster populations, but also other parts of the coastal ecosystem which depend on oyster reefs for fish and wildlife habitat, and commercial harvest. Working with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a team of UF researchers secured funding to restore Lone Cabbage Reef, located at the mouth of the Suwannee River.
“We came to ARCS needing assistance tackling some really difficult design challenges with the project and also creating a modern data workflow to manage the data related to the oyster reef restoration,” says Bill Pine, a professor in the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation who led the project. “ARCS was with us every step of the way, from helping to write our data management plans in the proposal, to completing the GIS work required for the design-build parts of the restoration, to tackling data on water quality and oyster projects throughout.”
GIS librarian Joe Aufmuth says, “Working on projects like the Lone Cabbage Reef restoration has shown me the power of interdisciplinary collaboration. By combining our expertise in GIS with the knowledge of environmental scientists, we can achieve remarkable outcomes.”
When Borui Zhang, UF’s inaugural AI librarian, first met Nicolas Gauthier, the Florida Museum’s first curator of artificial intelligence, they immediately saw opportunities to transform how people interact with museum and library collections.
developing a computerized catalog information system. Consolidation of six smaller libraries into the Marston Science Library in 1987 reflected the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research and was a forward-thinking decision for the time. The dawn of the digital era saw the inauguration of the Digital Library in 2000 and in 2019 UF began a mass digitization project with Google Books.
As digital tools have become more varied and complex, the libraries have kept pace. The Academic Research Consulting & Services, or ARCS, team provides unique expertise and services to support research activities using artificial intelligence tools and the university’s HiPerGator supercomputer, geographic information systems and data visualization, and other technologies.
“Our newest department, ARCS, aggregates a number of very talented faculty from a wide variety of disciplines, like informatics, data science and AI, who support many departments and colleges,” says Judith Russell, dean of University Libraries. “Much as the libraries support each unit on campus, ARCS does the same. This is an increasingly multidisciplinary team which reflects and responds to the collaborative nature of research.”
“He specializes in image processing, while my expertise is in natural language processing,” Zhang says. “Both the library and museums have large ‘collections,’ but it can be difficult to find the right data.”
The two are exploring how advanced AI models can make vast museum and library collections more accessible. Their work combines computer vision and natural language processing to help people discover and explore artifacts using everyday language rather than technical terminology.
“The language models Borui works with make all this possible. They can adapt descriptions for different languages and knowledge levels, making our collections accessible to everyone from researchers to students to the public,” Gauthier says. “People can upload a picture, draw a sketch, or describe what they’re looking for like ‘pottery with spiral patterns in blue’ and have a conversation about what they find.”
“Integrating AI into our library services has opened up new possibilities for research and accessibility,” Zhang says. “It’s exciting to see how these technologies can transform the way we interact with and utilize our collections.”
Joseph Kays Related website: https://arcs.uflib.ufl.edu/
University of Florida researchers have a long, distinguished history of leveraging federal research funding to produce innovative, lifesaving therapies. Neurosurgery Professor Duane Mitchell (left) is an expert in innovative immunotherapy treatments for adults and children with malignant brain tumors. Shannon Boye, a pediatrics professor, develops gene therapies to treat inherited eye disorders. Barry Byrne, a pediatrics professor and gene therapy pioneer, has developed novel methods for delivering gene therapies to muscle cells. He focuses on genetic diseases that cause skeletal muscle weakness and abnormalities in heart and breathing functions.
