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Florida Gator and its forerunners have covered the University of Florida.

This story was featured first in the Spring 2026 edition of the Florida Gator Magazine. Want to grab your copy? Print versions are mailed to all UF Alumni Association members three times a year.

For the three issues in our 100th anniversary year, we will take a look back at developments in UF’s history. In this issue, we look at advances in science.

How does a research powerhouse get its start? Read on.

· An Epic Journey · A Revolutionary Harvest · A vaccine for cancer? · The science & miracle of gene therapy · Touching a Nerve · Science you can use

An Epic Journey

By Cindy Spence (BS ’82, MA ’17)

The University of Florida’s earliest scientists likely had dirt under their fingernails.

Cows grazing on the Plaza of the Americas? Sure. Before it was the campus crossroads, it was a pasture for College of Agriculture cattle.

Rows of experimental crops on the doorstep of Newell Hall? The better to keep an eye on plant breeding trials.

When UF opened in 1906, the research enterprise was not much to brag about.

But as a land grant institution, chartered under the federal 1862 Morrill Act, UF had marching orders to provide studies in agriculture and the mechanic arts, hence the cows on the Plaza and row crops alongside classrooms. Even the early practitioners of the mechanic arts, the engineers, did double duty, helping with the construction plans for the growing campus, says UF historian emeritus Carl Van Ness (MA ’85).

The land grant charter kickstarted research, and the later addition of the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station under the federal 1887 Hatch Act kept agriculture “front and center,” says Betty Smocovitis, a scholar of science history, a biologist and a 2009–11 UF alumni professor.

“The history of the land grant mission and what it ends up doing is really epic,” Smocovitis says.

The agricultural experiment station was the center of UF’s research enterprise for decades, says Van Ness, who wrote “The Making of Florida’s Universities, Public Higher Education at the turn of the Twentieth Century.” UF’s Citrus Experiment Station, established in Lake Alfred in 1917, quickly grew to become the world’s largest research center devoted to one crop, and still is. UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, with a footprint in each of Florida’s 67 counties and 12 research centers, also grew out of the early agricultural focus.

Nuclear reactor on the UF Campus in 1962.

Research expanded beyond agriculture with the end of World War I, as young men began to return to UF, pushing enrollment over 1,000. Smocovitis says the war highlighted the need for scientific and technical skills, pushing UF and other universities to expand their curricula and develop ties with industries to boost funding. In 1934, Van Ness notes, UF awarded its first two Ph.D.s, one in chemistry and the other in pharmacy.

Another war, World War II, again pointed out a need to invest in science, Smocovitis says. In the post-war era, UF got a health center with the beginnings of a cancer research enterprise. Today, UF has National Cancer Institute status and is conducting studies on a breakthrough in cancer research.

In 1959, UF got a nuclear reactor for training as part of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program. Today, the research reactor is one of the five oldest university research reactors still licensed, a key tool for education in the nuclear sciences and a neutron source for experiments ranging from medical to archaeological.

The federal government realized in the post-war era that science and technology can help win wars, Smocovitis says. It “incentivizes research, and that transforms education.”

“If you trace the development of UF against that national backdrop, you’ll see that it’s keeping pace,” Smocovitis says. “And since the 1980s, the university has been in overdrive, with some fits and starts.”

The fourth generation of HiPerGator is considered the most powerful AI computer at any university in the U.S.

In 1988, as she was weighing a job offer from UF, Smocovitis read “The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876,” which said the South missed out on the institutionalization of science seen in Northeast schools. That regional bias was still present in the 1980s (and persists today), but she nevertheless joined UF that year.

“I was reading it and laughing because it said the South didn’t have much in the way of science because of the three F’s: flora, fauna and fever,” says Smocovitis, who is on sabbatical to research and write about Carl Sagan. “We do have excellence in botany, zoology and entomology.

“But take a look. Here’s a medical campus, next to museum and natural history collections, next to enterprises like IFAS, next to veterinary medicine, and more,” Smocovitis says. “There are only a couple of other places where you can see all of this under one roof, all in one place.”

Today, UF ranks 15th among all public universities in research expenditures. The research enterprise that started with rows of plant experiments and cows on the Plaza is now worth $1.3 billion and growing.

“We’ve got some bragging rights,” Smocovitis says. “It’s just taken a little while to get here.”

A Revolutionary Harvest

By Cindy Spence (BS ’82, MA ’17)

Artificial intelligence, robotics, automation, big data analytics, the internet of things. They sound like the tools of a Silicon Valley start-up, but in the midst of the fourth revolution in agriculture, they’re the newest tools on Florida farms.

The futurist deploying these tools is UF agricultural engineer Yiannis Ampatzidis, a professor of agricultural and biological engineering in Immokalee at the Southwest Florida Research and Education Center, a part of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, and he says these ultramodern tools are keys to healthy harvests in fields, groves and greenhouses.

“Revolution is the perfect word,” Ampatzidis says. “This is no doubt the fourth agricultural revolution.”

Agriculture’s first revolution was mechanization — tractors, harvesters and such. Its second, chemicals like fertilizers and pesticides, drastically increased crop yields. The third, hybrids produced by genetics, boosted yields yet again. The fourth, Ampatzidis says, will use AI to harvest the explosion of data collected with new tools:

Drones fly over citrus groves, counting and categorizing trees.

On the ground, robotic arms collect pests from leaves to determine which trees need to be treated.

Multispectral imaging detects diseases like bacterial spot on row crops before entire fields are infected.

Ground-based remote sensing equipment scours groves, up one row and down the next, to survey for green vs. ripe fruit.

Machines straddle row crops, sensors spotting and spraying weeds only as they encounter them, saving money and chemicals, helping the farmers and the consumers who buy the produce.

And behind the scenes a cloud-based software developed by Ampatzidis and his colleagues sucks up all the data, analyzing it and synthesizing it into chunks that scientists — and farmers — can use to make better decisions. Agroview was named the Invention of the Year by UF Innovate in 2020.

AI and HiPerGator will leverage the capabilities of technologies like mechanization that have been around a long time. For example, a machine has long been able to pick an orange and throw it into a basket. But is the orange ripe enough to pick? Can the machine apply enough pressure to secure the orange but not so much that it squishes the orange? AI can tackle those questions.

AI also will be the great equalizer. Access to more knowledge will lead to better decisionmaking and level the playing field for all farmers, big and small.

Agricultural engineer Yiannis Ampatzidis says AI and other technologies have kicked the fourth revolution of agriculture into high gear.

Automating chores and adding AI pays off. For example, just creating a tree inventory for a grove is expensive and time-consuming. Manually counting trees on just 1,000 acres can cost up to $14 an acre. Using drones, the time can be reduced by 90 percent and the cost by 60 to 70 %, Ampatzidis says.

Once the drone images are uploaded into Agroview, the grower can access much more than just a tree count. Agroview processes and analyzes the images to provide information such as tree height, canopy size, stress condition, and gaps where trees need to be replanted. The grower can also search for specific categories, for example, all the trees less than 7 feet tall.

Agroview, a cloud-based application, aggregates data from drones, satellites, sensors and imaging equipment. Agroview can take disparate information and produce maps of fields or groves, showing trees and gaps between trees, tree height, canopy size and leaf density. It can also estimate plant nutrient concentration and — i n the near future — predict yield and fruit quality. In row crops, it can also show spacing and overlay data about where pests have been detected, allowing it to create a tool called a prescription map, which offers detailed instructions on where to apply fertilizers and pesticides to best effect. And with 12 UF/IFAS research and education centers throughout the state and 67 extension offices, the advances will quickly get into the hands of farmers and growers and eventually onto Floridians’ kitchen tables.

Prescription mapping and smart sprayers are not only good for growers’ budgets, they are good for the environment, too, because reducing pesticides and fertilizers means less chemicals seeping into Florida water supplies. Growers will be able to treat tree-by-tree instead of acres at a time.

Ampatzidis says the AI revolution will act as a multiplier effect for all the previous agricultural revolutions.

“The strength of UF is that we have all these faculty from different disciplines that can help us to better develop these AI models,” Ampatzidis says.

In the Fourth Agricultural Revolution, soil and water and weather still matter. But data — and data-based decision-making — is king.

A vaccine for cancer?

Cancer immunotherapy research yields surprising finding

By Michelle Jaffee

A UF and MD Anderson Cancer Center team co-led by Elias Sayour, MD, Ph.D. (left), and Christiano Marconi (middle) discovered that cancer patients who received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine within 100 days of starting an immunotherapy treatment for advanced forms of lung cancer or melanoma lived significantly longer than those who didn’t get the vaccine. (Photo by Jackie Hart/UF Health)

The look in her eyes and her next words would be etched forever in the mind of Dr. Elias Sayour.

Months earlier, the girl’s right leg was amputated, the best chance to rid her body of cancer. But the cancer came back, this time in her lung.

The young teenager understood exactly what this meant.

“If you knew the cancer was gonna come back,” she asked Sayour, “why’d you cut off my leg?”

He’d made the best decision he could with the information he had. But such experiences during his pediatric oncology fellowship shifted something deep inside Sayour. He saw preschoolers with permanent brain damage from radiation or surgery. Kids who died of infections or other complications after chemotherapy.

Framed photos of patients lost began taking up permanent residence on his office bookshelves.

Everything he’d dreamt about and worked toward for years had led to this point, but now, he wasn’t so sure about this path and its pain. He viewed the treatments he was dispensing as crude. Even when they cured, the cost seemed too great.

Sayour couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d learned during his residency about the gold standard of disease prevention in children, the guardian angel: Vaccines.

“I wish,” he told a colleague, “there was a cancer vaccine.”

From treatment to research

A career pivot took Sayour to Duke University, where he worked in the lab of Dr. Duane Mitchell, who listened when he talked about the anguish of delivering cancer treatments with brutal side effects.

For once, Sayour says, “I actually felt seen.”

In Mitchell’s lab, Sayour first learned about the concept of RNA vaccines for cancer. Soon, he would focus on a type called mRNA — long before those four letters would become a household term during the COVID pandemic.

For Sayour, the plan was to spend a year in the lab while continuing to care for patients. But a few months in, he asked if he could stay on and start a Ph.D.

“There are a lot of people who pursue research because they love science, and they like the idea of discovery,” Mitchell says. “And then there are a smaller number who really believe that ‘if I dedicate my life to this endeavor, we might be able to make a difference for other people.’

“Elias had that drive.”

Mitchell brought Sayour with him to UF to build a new Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program within the Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy. At UF’s McKnight Brain Institute, Sayour dove into developing personalized mRNA cancer vaccines, using an individual’s own extracted tumor cells to create custom vaccines. Early results in mouse models showed that his high-tech method could quickly reprogram the immune system to attack glioblastoma, the most aggressive and lethal brain tumor.

It was during these preclinical experiments that Sayour stumbled upon an incredible discovery: The mRNA vaccines didn’t have to be personalized. To his surprise, completely nonspecific mRNA vaccines, which were used in a control group, could, in Sayour’s words, “wake up the sleeping giant that is the immune system to fight cancer.”

co-A real-world experiment

For three decades, two main ideas have dominated cancer-vaccine development: to identify a specific target expressed in many people with cancer, or to tailor a personalized vaccine that’s specific to proteins expressed within a patient’s own tumor.

Sayour’s work suggested a third emerging paradigm.

By pairing his patented experimental “nonspecific” vaccine with standard anticancer drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors, Sayour found he could trigger a strong antitumor response in lab mice. His formulation was “nonspecific” in that it was designed not to target cancer specifically, but rather just to mobilize a strong immune response.

This discovery laid the groundwork for the idea that mRNA vaccines — even those not specific to any tumor or virus — could boost the effects of immunotherapy drugs designed to “release the brakes” of the immune system to attack cancer cells.

In contrast to the significant expense of personalized vaccines, Sayour’s discovery would bring the research field one step closer to a universal, off-the-shelf cancer vaccine.

Then a global pandemic provided a natural experiment.

The advent of the mRNA COVID vaccines during Operation Warp Speed sparked a hypothesis from Dr. Adam Grippin, who worked with Sayour’s lab as a graduate student and is now at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Grippin asked: If nonspecific mRNA vaccines can wake up the immune system against cancer, what happens to patients who receive the COVID vaccine while also undergoing conventional immunotherapies?

UF and MD Anderson researchers analyzed over 1,000 medical records, retrospectively studying whether MD Anderson cancer patients who received COVID shots lived longer than those who didn’t.

Their findings, published in Nature in October 2025, made headlines around the world:

• “Study finds mRNA coronavirus vaccines prolonged life of cancer patients” — The Washington Post
• “Is this the beginning of the end for cancer? mRNA breakthrough hints at universal vaccine” — The Times of India
• “mRNA Covid vaccines may help some cancer patients fight tumors” — France24

The researchers found that patients with advanced lung or skin cancer who received a COVID vaccine within 100 days of starting immunotherapy drugs lived significantly longer than those who did not receive the vaccine. For example, in lung cancer patients, getting the vaccine was associated with a near doubling of median survival, from 20.6 months to 37.3 months.

To back up their observational findings, Sayour’s lab used mouse models to pair immunotherapy drugs with an mRNA vaccine targeted specifically at COVID spike protein. Those experiments showed they could turn unresponsive cancers into responsive ones, thwarting tumor growth.

“Dr. Sayour has made a groundbreaking contribution in how to promote immune responses against tumors, which is the holy grail of cancer immunotherapy research,” says Dr. Eli Gilboa, a pioneer in the field of cancer immunotherapy and director of the Dodson Interdisciplinary Immunotherapy Institute at the University of Miami.

The findings still need to be confirmed, and Sayour and his team are currently designing a large randomized clinical trial, planned to start this year. If effective in a prospective trial, it would mean that a widely available vaccine capable of jump-starting a patient’s response to immunotherapy already exists — and that scientists could start developing an even better universal cancer vaccine.

The ‘why’ behind research

Sayour and parents of his patients often stay in touch, like Cole Dooley, who lost his 6-year-old daughter Phoebe in 2018 to diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG, a childhood brain tumor with a median survival of less than a year.

One day last summer, amid changes to funding mechanisms at the National Institutes of Health, Sayour learned that a grant he had anticipated to support a clinical trial for patients with DIPG would not be awarded.

The news was deeply disappointing to him and to the families who turn to him in their darkest times.

“DIPG is such a difficult-to-treat tumor that they think finding out how to treat it could potentially lead to further treatments for many other diseases,” says Dooley.

The next day, Sayour headed back to the lab, his sights set on cures for children who are dying right now.

The science & miracle of gene therapy

Once a novel concept, now a life-saving therapy

By Cindy Spence (BS ’82, MA ’17)

Payton Lavoie listens to her mom speak at the celebration of the 100th gene therapy treatment. A team led by Dr. Barry Byrne shepherded the Lavoie family through the gene therapy procedure. (Photos courtesy of UF Health)

Amber Lavoie’s “mom gut” was churning. Something was wrong with her newborn baby girl; she could sense it.

It was March 2020. She was on maternity leave but preparing to go back to work just as the world shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. Home all day with Payton, barely 1 month old, she noticed unsettling things: Payton didn’t squirm or fidget, her legs barely moved, she felt almost limp in Amber’s arms.

“We couldn’t get a doctor’s appointment; no one would see her,” Amber recalls.

Over the phone, doctors and nurses assured the skittish new parents everything was fine. Still uneasy, the Orlando couple persisted as weeks went by until they finally got a neurology consult. The news was devastating.

“The doctor said, ‘mom and dad, sit down. I believe your daughter has SMA.’”

The Lavoies had never heard of Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a rare genetic disorder, and asked the doctor what the diagnosis meant.

“He said to take her home and love her while we could.”

SMA is often fatal by a child’s second birthday, and after the initial shock, desperation set in. Amber filmed a video of her daughter’s awkward movements and posted it on social media, hoping someone might see it and have some advice. A friend who works at the University of Florida saw the post and asked if she could share it.

Soon after, Amber got a call from the UF Powell Gene Therapy Center from a doctor who spent 30 minutes on the phone with her, answering a barrage of questions, but one most of all.

“I asked her if this was really SMA. She said, ‘SMA is what I do. Mom, I need you here tomorrow.’

“We packed up and headed for Gainesville.”

Working against time

The Lavoies had spent weeks looking for answers, and all the while SMA was stealing Payton’s muscle function, her body becoming ever more still in Amber’s arms. Her already limited leg and arm movements deteriorated. She didn’t smile.

“Days matter, and we had already lost weeks looking for answers,” Amber says. “Time was not on our side.”

The family was met at UF Health by a team of doctors, nurses and lab workers. Tests were rushed to confirm the diagnosis, and Payton was treated the next day, a Friday, surrounded by the medical and research team. That Saturday morning, Dr. Barry Byrne, director of the center, came in to do her lab work.

“Probably within 12 hours, we started noticing a change. She could lift her forearms,” Amber says. “We felt like we were in the middle of a miracle.

“It seemed like we opened the place and closed the place each day we were there, but we were never by ourselves.”

Dr. Barry Byrne

Treating the once untreatable

A century ago, the link between inheritance and some diseases was known, but the idea of delivering a new gene to take over for a defective gene was just an intriguing what if. Which gene is defective? How do you get a new gene into the body?

Advances in molecular biology accelerated in the 1970s, and by the late 1970s and early 1980s, a group of UF College of Medicine researchers were investigating an oddball little virus that seemed to travel with disease-causing adenoviruses but caused no harm itself. They called the sidekick adeno-associated virus, or AAV.

Viruses are notoriously good at entering the human body. The researchers’ novel idea: Use the harmless AAV as a vehicle to deliver beneficial genes that could silence defective genes or replace them with healthy genes.

In the early days, the researchers would meet most Fridays over pizza and beer and discuss the rapidly advancing science (scan QR, right, for video). Two of the group’s leaders, Dr. Kenneth Berns and Dr. Nick Muzyczka, laid a foundation that attracted other scientists, including Byrne, while also educating the next generation of genetic medicine practitioners.

Muzyczka’s doctoral student, Jude Samulski, started his studies in 1978, investigating the potential of AAV and detailing in his 1982 dissertation how to clone it, a crucial first step to using it for gene therapy.

Samulski and Byrne were colleagues before Byrne came to UF, and Byrne said for all the potential that the scientists saw in AAV, gene therapies were decades away.

As genetic mapping picked up in the 1990s, the question of finding genes was answered. The Human Genome Project was completed in 2003. As Berns and Muzcyzka advanced the basic science of AAV, research began to focus on translating the science into clinical studies, and two clinician scientists — Byrne and Dr. Terry Flotte — came on board.

Today, thanks to the journey begun decades ago, UF is regarded as a legacy hub for gene therapy science and advances, and UF Health was the first institution in the U.S. to administer the gene therapy to treat children with SMA after it received FDA approval in May 2019. Payton was just the fourth patient.

A recent medical journal review of gene therapy research showed that UF is the world’s top-ranked institution for published gene therapy research and Byrne is among the world’s most-published authors in the field of AAV gene therapy research and holds 25 patents.

“In the late 1990s, Ken and Nick envisioned a collaborative group of scientists working both on the basic science and the translational work,” Byrne says. “This was the only place in the country that had conceived of partnering the basic science and the translational science to further human gene therapy.”

From proof of concept to manufacturing

The group confirmed that AAV could, in fact, reach a wide variety of different muscle cell types and correct them, essentially permanently, Byrne says. The next step was manufacturing therapies.

“That took at least 10 years to figure that out,” Byrne says.

Early on, researchers realized knowledge alone would not move clinical studies forward or, eventually, help patients, like Payton, with little time to waste waiting on a medical shipment. Byrne said the studies and the patients they aimed to help would both need ready access to therapies that could be infused.

UF solved that roadblock when the McKnight Brain Institute was built in 1998.

Founding director William Luttge had the foresight to include in the institute’s design a facility for manufacturing gene therapy products, a decision that created a unique advantage for work at the Powell Gene Therapy Center.

“Once we knew we had the programs that would be amenable to gene therapy, we had to know how to make gene therapies,” Byrne says. “There were no pharmaceutical companies, there were no biotechnology companies doing this, not even any other universities interested in manufacturing products for clinical trials. So, we built a facility.”

The American Society of Gene Therapy was founded in 1996. In the early meetings, AAV was pretty much ignored, but that didn’t last long.

“Now the majority of what is presented at the annual meeting — there’s now about 8,000 participants — is about AAV,” Byrne says.

“And it all started here.”

Parents say the UF gene therapy team became their village. (Left) Marty and Chad Harris with James, top, and David. (Right) Amber Lavoie with Payton.

How to save a life

During her pregnancy in 2021, Marty Harris and her husband were screened for multiple genetic traits, and she found out she was a carrier for SMA.

“I figured, what are the odds?” she recalls.

Bloodwork in newborn David’s first week of life came back positive for SMA, and Marty started Googling.

“I freaked out. He had this horrible disease,” Marty says.

Through her network of family and friends in her Atlanta community, Marty found a doctor in Utah who agreed to see David — but not for six long weeks, an eternity for a baby losing muscle function by the day. A friend put her in touch with a nurse at UF, who offered hope and an appointment.

“They opened the facility on a Saturday to get David dosed,” Marty says.

As David hit all the milestones for babies growing into toddlers, Marty says she felt she was watching a miracle. And, when she and her husband decided they wanted David to grow up with a sibling, David’s experience with gene therapy gave them the courage to try again.

The UF team set up a suite of appointments around James’ due date, and after his blood work showed SMA, there was no need to Google. The family packed up the car and drove to Gainesville.

“They moved mountains for us,” Marty said at a celebration in May of UF’s 100th gene therapy treatment. “This doesn’t happen at other institutions.”

David, now 4½, and James, now 2½, are typical boys, with a little sister who did not have SMA, Marty says. David likes to brag that he’s faster than some of the kids in his class, and he loves soccer and baseball. His mom finds wonder in the ordinariness of his and James’ little boy lives.

“We get to forget that they have SMA,” Marty says. “Our kids shouldn’t be alive, but every birthday, we get to celebrate their lives. They’ll probably never know the significance of that.

“It’s changed us a lot. Every day is truly a gift we didn’t think we were going to get.”

Byrne says UF’s infrastructure and holistic approach to patient care is important when time is of the essence. Treatments can bog down if a drug isn’t available, or the medical financial system drags, or families can’t stay near the clinic for two months, or even don’t have gas money to travel to Gainesville. The UF team addresses all those things, Byrne says, because “the patient is our true north.”

Amber Lavoie says her experience at UF reminds her of the phrase “it takes a village to raise a child.”

“The team at UF became our village. These people were missing their own children’s soccer games, birthday parties, family dinners and working late so families like ours can have hope, have a future.”

The UF Powell Gene Therapy Center was established in 2001 with support from Earl and Christy Powell. In 2011, they established the chair in gene therapy and genetics research, held by Dr. Barry Byrne. Earl attended UF in 1961 and has been affiliated with the UFF Board of Directors, the UF Board of Trustees and the Bull Gator Club. Christy received her bachelor of science in zoology in 1971.

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Touching a Nerve

By Joseph Kays (MA ’02)

University of Florida 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 had 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 who suggested removing the neuromas and bridging the resulting gap with the Avance nerve graft.

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.

“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, who was then 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.”

Avance is an allograft, a cadaver nerve from which cells and tissue have been removed. The remaining structure provides a tunnel to guide the regrowth of peripheral nerves, which, unlike the central nervous system, can regenerate. Schmidt developed the decellularization procedure used in the nerve graft with her research group at the University of Texas at Austin. Alachua County-based Axogen licensed her technology and combined it with earlier discoveries by David Muir, a UF professor of pediatrics and neuroscience.

Based on her experience working with Axogen, when Schmidt was asked to lead the expanding biomedical engineering department at UF in 2013, she was quick to accept. The department, she said at the time, had everything her lab needed.

“At UT, I would have to go to Texas A&M to work with the veterinary school and go to San Antonio to work with the dental school and go to Houston to work with the medical school. Here, everything is co-localized, AND there is a strong innovation component. I know that because my technology got licensed here, as part of a UF startup. This is an exciting place to be.”

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.”

Today, back in the lab after 10 years as department chair, Schmidt’s team is turning its attention to solutions for patients suffering from spinal cord injury through work on developing injectable biomaterials that can promote neural regeneration and 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.”

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.”

Science you can use

Every time you take a swig out of a bottle of Gatorade — conveniently available in orange and blue — you’re tasting University of Florida research.

While Gatorade, now 60, is likely the most visible example of research that has jumped from the lab into the public domain, it’s only one of thousands of advances by UF researchers, who can turn to a robust innovation and technology licensing apparatus when their what if becomes real.

UF Innovate, the umbrella organization that oversees UF’s two business incubators, licensing and tech transfer, helps scientists focus on science while it turns discoveries into treatments and products. And UF is a global leader, setting new records last year with 446 technology disclosures, 339 licenses executed, 455 patent applications and nine startups created.

UF research is in places you may not expect. The Statue of Liberty, for example, keeps her robes termite-free by using UF entomologist Nan-Yao Su’s Sentricon Termite Colony Elimination System, which controls the subterranean pests.

Here are a few more examples of UF innovations:

• EnCor Biotechnology, antibodies to detect specific proteins
• Banyan Biomarkers, blood tests to aid in evaluation of concussions; now licensed by Abbott Labs
• Axogen, nerve grafts for nerve regeneration and repair
• Enterade, a glucose free drink to provide select amino acids
• Mako/Stryker, robotic arm-assisted knee and hip replacement surgery
• Sharklet, sharkskin-inspired surface texture to inhibit bacterial growth
• Atsena Therapeutics, a clinical-stage gene therapy company, focused on reversing or preventing blindness
• Mattrix Technologies, recycling LCD manufacturing lines for the production of enhanced OLED displays
• Agriculture Intelligence, providing actionable intelligence through AI technologies and data insights
• Shadow Health, health care simulation software for student practice, acquired by Elsevier

“When solutions are ready to move out of the lab and into the real world, our team is there to nurture them, driving economic development and realizing tangible impacts from our groundbreaking research,” said Vice President for Research David Norton.