University of Florida

The University of Florida (UF) traces its roots back to East Florida Seminary, which was founded in 1853 in the town of Ocala. The seminary, which was the first publicly supported institution of higher learning in the state, relocated to the city of Gainesville in 1858.

Another public institution, the Florida Agricultural College, was established in Lake City in 1884, while the St. Petersburg Normal and Industrial School was established in 1893.

In 1895, a fourth public institution, the South Florida Military and Educational Institute, was established in Bartow. Its name was changed to South Florida Military College in 1903.

That same year, the Lake City agricultural college’s remit was expanded and its name was changed to University of Florida.

Just two years later, in 1905, the state undertook a major reorganization of its publicly supported system of higher education, in which the four preceding schools were all abolished and merged into one which was called the University of the State of Florida.

For a short time, the newly consolidated state university held classes at the existing Lake City campus, while a new and more capacious campus was being built in Gainesville. The first classes opened there in the fall of 1906. In 1909, the school’s name was shortened to its present form.

Today, UF is the flagship campus of a vast state university system comprising 12 campuses with a total student body of over 341,000 individuals.

UF itself consists of 16 academic colleges and more than 150 research centers and institutes. Its student body (including online students) numbers more than 56,000 souls.

Among many prominent UF-associated individuals, we may mention the following:

• Mathematicians, John G. Thompson (winner of the Fields Medal), Eduardo Sontag & Malay Ghosh
• Computer scientists, Chris Malachowsky & James Hollan
• Novelists, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings & Michael Connelly
• Popular musician, singer, and songwriter, Stephen Stills
• Actors, Faye Dunaway, George Salazar, Allison Miller & Vincent Martella
• Physicists, John Vincent Atanasoff (also a digital computer pioneer) & Christina Marchetti
• Nuclear engineer, Nils J. Diaz
• Space engineers, John D. Anderson & Herbert Gursky
• Chemists, Robert Grubbs (Nobel laureate in chemistry), Rodney Bartlett, Jürgen Gauss, Gilbert Stork & Will Steffen
• Geneticists, Marshall Nirenberg (Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine) & Lewis Stadler
• Immunologist, Harald von Boehmer
• Mycologist, William Murrill
• Entomologists, Marston Bates (a pioneer in research on the transmission of yellow fever) & Michael C. Thomas
• Herpetologist and conservationist, Archie Carr
• Conservation biologists, David Ehrenfeld & K. Ullas Karanth
• Systems ecologist, William Mitsch
• Population geneticist, Martin Kreitman
• Psychologist, Sidney Bijou
• Forensic anthropologist, Karen Ramey Burns
• Economists, Robert Costanza, Preston McAfee, Ahn Seong-Eun & Paul Cootner
• TV journalists, Joe Scarborough & Laura Rutledge
• Former North Carolina Governor, Beverly Perdue
• Former US Senators, Bob Graham & Bill Nelson
• Current US Senator, Marco Rubio