Famous authors. A campus as historic as Harvard’s. A renowned sex researcher. Fifteen UF factoids (you might not have known) to drop into holiday conversations.

by Barbara Drake (MFA ’04)

Your Top 5 alma mater is an endless fount of newsworthy events and life-changing innovations. As the family gathers, dish out a heaping helping of Gator pride.

Our campus is as historic as Harvard’s

UF ranks second among U.S. colleges and universities for the number of campus properties on the National Register of Historic Places. We’re tied with Harvard University and bested only by the University of California, Berkeley.

First added to the national registry in April 1989, UF’s historic district encompasses about 650 acres, bounded by West University Avenue, Southwest 13th Street, Stadium Road and Gale Lemerand Drive. Among its 17 registered buildings and 14 “contributing” properties, which date from 1905 to 1954, are Buckman Hall (1905-1906), the Women’s Gymnasium/Ustler Hall (1915), University Auditorium (1922), Smathers Library/Library East (1926) and Century Tower (1953).

Other UF buildings on the register that are outside the historic district include Norman Hall (1932) and The Hub (1949-1950).

The National Register also lists the Plaza of the Americas (1925), designed by American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead Jr. (1870-1957). His projects include the National Mall and the White House grounds, in Washington, D.C., and Olmsted Point, in Yosemite National Park.

They should call us Mount Olympus

UF students and alumni have won 143 Olympic medals, including 60 gold medals.

Gold medalists include long-distance runner Frank Shorter (JD ’74), who wowed fans at the 1972 Munich Games; Dara Torres (BSTEL ’90), the first American swimmer to compete in five Olympics (1984, 1988, 1992, 2000, 2008); basketball player DeLisha Milton-Jones (grad. ’97), who as a member of the American team won gold at both Sydney (2000) and Beijing (2008); Ryan Lochte (BSR ’11), the second most-decorated swimmer in Olympic history; and triple jumper Christian Taylor (BSSPM ’19), who took home the gold at both London (2012) and Rio de Janeiro (2016).

We’re the moon plant university!

In 2022, UF horticulturalists grew plants in soil from the moon, a first in human history and a milestone in lunar and space exploration. This work is a first step toward one day growing plants for food and oxygen on the moon or during space missions. More immediately, this research comes as NASA’s Artemis program is working to return humans to the moon and then land on Mars.

Give a shout-out to UF/IFAS for frozen OJ

Before WWII, frozen orange juice was a gloppy, turpentine-tasting product that didn’t pair well with morning eggs and bacon. It took a team of scientists working for UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences in 1945 to develop a much-improved frozen concentrate to nourish America’s troops. Their innovation was evaporating the fresh juice at a relatively lower temperature, thus preserving its citrusy flavor and vitamins, even in transit overseas.

Their efforts were quickly patented and released to the public under the brand that became Minute Maid in 1946.

The Swamp also spawns Rhodes Scholars

In its 116-year history, UF has spawned 13 Rhodes Scholars — outperforming six of its SEC rivals, including South Carolina, Tennessee, Auburn and Arkansas.

The most recent Gator Rhodes Scholar (and UF’s first woman) is Aimee Clesi (BA ’22, BA ‘22), a first-gen college student from Suwanee County who earned dual degrees in philosophy and history earlier this year. She is now working toward a Doctor of Philosophy in Criminology at Oxford University.

UF is (massively) pushing southward

The UF campus isn’t just Gainesville anymore. In addition to UF/IFAS extension offices in all 67 Florida counties and medical/pharmaceutical campuses in Jacksonville and Orlando, the university was recently gifted 27,000 pristine acres in Central Florida —the DeLuca Preserve — for conservation and scientific research. Now when you drive by Yeehaw Junction at the intersection of US-441 and SR 60, you’ll have reason to sing “We Are the Boys.”

In April 2022, UF Health and Jupiter-based Scripps Research merged to form a scientific powerhouse, recently named the Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology. And a graduate campus in downtown West Palm Beach is in the works, with other urban campus sites under consideration.

America’s most beloved poet wandered under our live oaks

Poet Laureate Robert Frost (1874-1963) spent his winters in Gainesville and gave readings on the UF campus from 1946 to 1960. Frost, who possessed a real affinity for the countryside, loved to walk in the Gainesville woods and frequently strolled UF’s expansive campus. The university awarded him an honorary doctorate in January 1960.

Thank UF for saving sea turtles

First writing in the 1950s, longtime UF zoologist Archie Carr (BS ’36, MS ‘42)’s early discoveries about the plight of sea turtles spurred a worldwide effort to save the species from extinction. Today the Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research at UF continues his work, striving to understand and protect these amazing animals.

UF researchers made the vital discovery that lighting on beaches disorients turtle hatchlings, causing them to move to the light (and probable death) rather than to the sea. They also found that a specific wavelength of yellow light (the same as that in low-pressure sodium lights) does not attract hatchlings. As a result, hundreds of these sodium lights are now used along the Florida coast, saving countless hatchlings each year.

We’ve invented more than Gatorade

A few groundbreaking inventions by UF researchers and alumni:

We were first to prove Einstein’s theory right — 100 years later

On Sept. 14, 2015, UF physicists helped confirm part of Einstein’s 1915 theory of relativity when they observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, a historic first.

The physicists were part of a brilliant team working at the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory detectors, in Louisiana and Washington.

Two UF physics professors developed the real-time search program, Coherent WaveBurst, used that day to reveal a spectacular signature of two black holes colliding, producing an even larger, single spinning black hole. Such a collision had been predicted but never previously observed.

Our students are large and in charge

Since its founding, UF has given students opportunities to lead major enterprises on campus and in the community. Some that are still going strong include:

Gators have the write stuff

Among the many UF alumni who have achieved literary fame:

This Gator’s sex research broke taboos

In 1976, feminist researcher Dr. Shere Hite (BA ’63, MA ’66) was catapulted to fame with her groundbreaking study into the female sexual response, “The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality.” Described as “a sexual revolution in 600 pages,” the book became a huge international bestseller, totaling 50 million copies worldwide.

Based on the responses of 3,500 women to questions about their own experiences of sex and pleasure, “The Hite Report” debunked Freud’s theory of the vaginal orgasm, which claimed that women who could not climax through penetration alone were “immature” and “frigid.” Hite’s study indicated that 70% of women require clitoral stimulation.

“All too many men still seem to believe, in a rather naive and egocentric way, that what feels good to them is automatically what feels good to women,” wrote Hite, who suffered considerable backlash for her work.

She went on to author “The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality” (1981) and “The Hite Report on Love, Passion and Emotional Violence” (1987).

A Gator cracked the genetic code

UF alum Dr. Marshall Nirenberg (BS ’48, MS ’52) was a leading member of the elite team that deciphered the entire human code in 1966. Two years later, he and two fellow scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for that achievement.

A passionate observer of Florida’s wetlands, Nirenberg earned degrees in zoology and biological chemistry; he had no formal training in molecular genetics when he undertook the monumental task of determining whether DNA or RNA, copied from DNA, was the template for protein synthesis.

Working as postdoc fellows at the National Institutes of Health, Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthaei made history on May 27, 1961, when their “poly U” experiment demonstrated that messenger RNA transcribes genetic information from DNA, deciphering the first of the 64 triplet sequences in the genetic code.

We’re crazy for bats, butterflies and fireflies

Our campus is home to the world’s largest bat houses, a trio of raised structures across from Lake Alice. Two of these shelter an estimated 500,000 bats, and staff are currently trying to coax the critters to relocate to the newer, sturdier house, something bats are typically reluctant to do.

You’ve probably had a zen moment at the Butterfly Rainforest in the Florida Museum of Natural History, but did you know that the museum’s McGuire Center houses one of the world’s largest Lepidoptera collections? It’s 10 million+ specimens represent most of the world’s 20,000 butterfly species and 245,00 moth species.
UF scientists are also doing a hero’s job with firefly research. Entomologist Dr. Marc Branham is helping the Smithsonian Institution curate its massive, long-untouched firefly collection from 1940, whose specimens date to the late 1800s and include notes written with a quill pen.