News

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty were recently awarded funding for proposals to advance racial justice and further the university’s standing as a national leader in artificial intelligence. You can find summaries of their projects below.

Racial Justice Awards

The following four CLAS faculty were awarded through the Advancing Racial Justice call for proposals.

Sharon Austin, Professor of Political Science: Recruitment, Retention, of Black Faculty

“Our project seeks to assess reasons for the lack of Black faculty at UF and how our community can address this problem. Our project will provide vital information about the need for Black faculty as well as effective recruitment and retention methods.

I am the principal investigator (Sharon Austin, Professor of Political Science, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,). The co-investigators are: David Canton, Director of African American Studies and Associate Professor of History, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Paul Ortiz, Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and Professor of History, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Michele Manuel, Chair in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Rolf E. Hummel Professor of Electronic Materials, College of Engineering; Robert L. Stevenson Jr., Visiting Assistant Professor of African American Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; and Bernell Tripp, Associate Professor of Journalism, College of Journalism and Communication. We also benefited from the assistance of Dr. Hazel Levy (Assistant Professor of Biology), Dr. Kishmar Best (Director of the Office of Graduate Diversity Initiatives), Yewande Addie (Doctoral Student in the College of Journalism), and Dr. Nicholas Kerr (Assistant Professor of Political Science). All of us have served on various diversity committees.

Our first objective is to conduct oral histories with current and former Black faculty so that we can determine their perceptions of the campus climate. Second, we want to examine the various tactics individual colleges at UF are using to recruit and retain faculty. Third, we plan to host the National Council for Black Studies Meeting in 2022 so that Black faculty will visit our university. Hopefully, we can use this as a recruitment tool. Also, our undergraduate and graduate students will be able to present their research at the conference. Third, we are planning to host info sessions among Black faculty and graduate students so that faculty can educate students about their experiences. In this way, students will have a better understanding of what to expect when they become professors. Finally, we are planning to host a town hall meeting with the members of the campus and Gainesville communities. At this meeting, we can address the question of why it is important for there to be a Black faculty presence on our campus and why we have had so much difficulty retaining the faculty we have recruited over the years. This is a very exciting project that we believe will greatly benefit UF as it continues to try to recruit and retain Black faculty.

David Canton, Associate Professor of History and Director of African American Studies: Research, Education and Transformation: Furthering Investigation of the University of Florida and its Legacies to Indigenous Removal and Slavery

Our research project investigates UF’s origin, legacy and impact on the present and future experiences of people of color on campus.

In 2018, the University of Florida received an “F” in racial representation. This was due to a gap in Black enrollment and graduation rates at UF despite a jump in Florida’s Black population since 2000.

To remedy the disparity, and earn an “A” in representation (i.e., in numbers of admittance, in numbers of graduates and in feeling a sense of belonging), we propose the university start by reevaluating its past, including its connections to Indigenous expropriation of land and slavery. We accomplish this through analyzing Samuel Proctor Oral History’s interviews of Black students, faculty, staff and community members, conducting interviews, creating an interactive timeline and digital walking tour that integrates video, photographs, sounds, and interviews publicly available on the website, facilitating university classes (in African American Studies and in History), conducting Decolonizing Representations: Past, Present and Future workshops, hosting speakers, translating the research into lesson-ready modules for k-12 classrooms, and crafting public humanities exhibitions at the Harn and in local community centers like the Cotton Club.

Through interpreting underrepresented histories and experiences at UF, we hope to transform the future of the UF campus.”

Brenda Chalfin, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for African Studies: Black Students Sharing Stories for an Equitable UF

Lauding the power of first-person narrative, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009) warns against “the danger of a single story.” In her words, “The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.” The proposed research seeks to collect a multiplicity of stories regarding Black student lives at UF, including what Adichie calls “the stories that we prefer to forget,” whether due to depiction of suffering and violence, or because they unsettle conventional narratives and assumptions.

Drawing on faculty in education, journalism, history, and anthropology, and empowering a peer research team made up of graduate and undergraduate student researchers, the project will elicit, analyze and archive the personal narratives (‘stories’) of a cross-section of Black students at UF using a multi-media “story portal”. We ask, how do Black students at UF experience anti-black racism and what solutions do they envision? The goal is to 1. formulate a grounded understanding of Black student experience regarding opportunities and impediments to educational attainment and campus representation, inclusion and accountability; 2. generate a slate of actionable interventions to UF policy and practice to foster Black student well-being; 3. include black students in university research and publicly recognize their voices and experiences through UF media.

Only by understanding the full range of experience of Black students at our institution — graduate and undergraduate, those born in Africa and across its vast diasporas, Latin, Caribbean, European, Muslim, Christian, Queer, straight, scientist, artist, humanist, engineer, agronomist, writer, all of the above, and more — can we comprehend commonalities and differences, including diverse visions of how to achieve a more equitable educational environment conducive to Black student attainment and well-being.

E. Christine Davis, Senior Lecturer and Undergraduate Coordinator of Biology: Cultivating equity in STEM classrooms at UF: A multidisciplinary collaboration to create a training course in inclusive, antiracist teaching practices for Learning Assistants (LAs) in STEM courses

“To address current inequities in STEM courses and careers at UF and nationwide, our interdisciplinary project seeks to improve feelings of self-efficacy, STEM identity, and sense of belonging among Black students enrolled in UF’s foundational Biology, Biomedical Engineering, and Physics courses. To accomplish this, we will employ and empower a diverse team of undergraduate near-peer role models (Learning Assistants, or LAs) to work in our science classrooms, to facilitate collaborative activities with enrolled students.

This team of LAs will receive explicit training in inclusive, antiracist pedagogy in the context of the science disciplines. The training course will be developed collaboratively by our team of investigators, who are education and science content experts, and under the guidance and expertise of an Advisory Board composed of Black scholars and campus leaders. As a beginning step to developing this LA training program, we will hold a course development workshop, which will include all project investigators and LAs, our esteemed Advisory Board, and additional invited Black faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students at UF. The workshop will solicit and develop ideas on how faculty and LAs can move beyond outdated pedagogy and assessments of success to establish an inclusive, antiracist classroom.”

Artificial Intelligence Research

The two proposals below were funded through the Artificial Intelligence Catalyst Fund.

Brian Odegaard, Professor of Psychology: Combining Deep Neural Networks and Large-Scale Brain Data to Predict Human Cognition and Behavior

“In the last decade, Deep Neural Network models (DNNs) have facilitated remarkable advances in brain decoding, revealing how distinct patterns of neural activity correspond to different thoughts, sensations, and behaviors. From brain activity alone, these models can predict what images a person is seeing or imagining in each moment, current states of pain, specific auditory sensations, and many other mental states. When trained on sufficiently large data, they can not only be used to decode current mental states, but also predict specific phenotypes (e.g., average weekly alcohol intake, fluid intelligence, etc.).

In this investigation, we will combine DNNs with a “big data” approach to decode cognitive and behavioral phenotypes from existing brain data samples collected at UF. Specifically, by leveraging the computing power of the HiPerGator supercomputer, we will build predictive models from large, openly accessible MRI/fMRI datasets and then apply these algorithms to predict cognitive and behavioral phenotypes from specific populations of interest at UF (e.g., aging individuals). This work will (i) facilitate development of (and make publicly available) a new research algorithm for deep learning; (ii) provide insights into how brain structure and function are linked to different phenotypes; and (iii) identify brain regions of interest for future targeted interventions, such as using neurofeedback training to enhance cognition and behavior.”

Steven Weisberg, Assistant Professor of Psychology: What mind matters? Machine learning approaches to linking structural variation in the brain to individual differences in spatial behavior

“A foundational challenge in understanding the human brain is how macroscopic neural structure can be associated with cognitive function. Exploiting advances in AI and machine-learning in this area, we propose a data-driven approach to close this gap. Spatial navigation is a widely-studied problem in this area, in part because spatial navigation varies drastically across people, despite being an essential task everyone must solve. A prominent hypothesis about the neural instantiation of spatial navigation is that the cognitive map is constructed by the hippocampus, a structure in the medial temporal lobe of the human brain. But evidence on whether hippocampal volume relates to variability in navigation behavior is mixed. Expert navigators and patients with lesions to or atrophy in the temporal lobes support the hypothesis, but two recent experiments with large sample sizes of healthy young adults do not.

Here, we will apply a data-driven machine learning approach interrogating those datasets to 1) determine which regions of the brain covary with navigation ability and which structural properties of those regions that predict variability; and 2) create a pipeline for use with other structural MRI datasets for improved exploratory data analysis in neuroimaging. In the short-term, this research will provide evidence in favor (or against) the structure-function hypothesis – a critical question in human cognitive neuroscience. In the longer term, this research will promote the development of machine learning strategies that can be applied toward general cognitive traits, measured in different ways, across different populations. Such an approach could unlock exciting new avenues for disease diagnosis and prediction, new targets for clinical intervention, and new theories about brain-behavior associations.”