End of year message from President Rosenberg

FIU President Mark B. Rosenberg sent the following message to the university community on Friday, June 1, 2012

Dear FIU family:

The joy and exuberance of our six on-campus commencements a few weeks ago and our law commencement just last week stand as metaphors for this past academic year at FIU.

There are so many highlights that I would like to mention: We hired a near-record number of new faculty this past year. We brought in two new deans – Ora Strickland to lead the College of Nursing and Health Sciences and Raul Reis to lead the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Our students continue to travel to national competitions and excel – in Utah, New York, and Washington, D.C., among other locations, where they demonstrate that they are well prepared and competitive.

Our faculty and students continue to engage in Worlds Ahead research that impacts people and communities locally and globally. Researchers in the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine have identified new ways that arsenic enters human cells. Collaborators from our colleges of medicine and engineering have developed a patented groundbreaking nanotechnology capable of non-invasive neural network stimulation and real-time monitoring of the brains of patients suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. Researchers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering have developed a prototype of a low-cost hand-held optical imager for the detection of cancer tumors. Also in biomedical engineering, researchers have received funding from the U.S. Department of Defense for testing of devices they have developed for neural interfaces for prosthetic control in upper limb amputees. Finally, researchers in the School of Environment, Arts and Society completed groundbreaking research on the ability of seagrass to mitigate global climate change. These are but a few examples of research being conducted at FIU impacting the health and well-being of our communities and environments. Our faculty received many accolades as well. Here are a few examples:

• Public Administration’s Meredith Newman received the Lifetime Achievement in Public Human Resources Scholarship Award from the American Society for Public Administration.
• Creative Writing’s John Dufresne was named a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow.
• Psychology’s William Pelham received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for the Science of Clinical Psychology.

We opened our new FIU Downtown on Brickell site, which is fully subscribed with graduate programs offered through the College of Business Administration and the School of International & Public Affairs. The College of Architecture + The Arts inaugurated its Miami Beach Urban Studios at  420 Lincoln Road as well – giving our students a new venue to develop their design talents and giving the university a bountiful window to one of the most energetic and creative areas of our community.

We completed the new signature entrance and expanded meeting areas at our U.S. Century Bank Arena. We also broke ground on new major facilities: our Academic Health Center IV building framing the 109^th Avenue campus entrance off Tamiami Trail, and a new 600-bed, state-of-the-art residence hall facility, just north of FIU Stadium, which itself is now under construction again as we complete the modernization of our lower bowl. Soon to be rising from the ground is the new astrophysics observatory thanks to a generous gift from Carl Stocker, and at the Biscayne Bay Campus an expanded and spiffy restaurant is being constructed for our Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management.

We formally announced the creation of Life Sciences South Florida, a collaboration with FAU, UM, FGCU, state colleges, bioscience research centers, and economic development agencies. This partnership is focused on expanding life sciences related jobs, research, workforce training and investment opportunities!

Our partnership with the Miami-Dade County Public Schools was hailed by the M-DCPS School Board for its leading role in helping the schools to enhance student achievement, particularly through our dual enrollment initiative. With the support of JPMorgan Chase, we inaugurated a three-year “community school” initiative in  Northwestern High School.

As one of the positive outputs of this new partnership, we expect a record number of academically-qualified graduates of Northwestern High School to enroll in FIU in the next few months.

We continue to move forward in discussions with neighbors about enhancing our campus environments. With the City of Sweetwater, we have developed a plan to improve neighborhoods fronting FIU. With the City of North Miami, we are focused on finding a new secondary access to the Biscayne Bay Campus to ensure more timely and secure ingress and egress to the site.

We believe that progress is being made in locating an alternative site for the Youth Fair so that we may develop expansion plans for the Maidique Campus. We are pleased that Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez has made this one of his priorities.

FIU’s reach continues to be global. This past year, we celebrated offshore graduations in Jamaica (education and business administration), Panama (business administration), and Tianjin, China (hospitality and tourism management). Our partners in that Asian country have asked us to expand our program offerings there and to grow the number of Chinese students studying at FIU. As we consolidate and expand our programs in China, it will be clear that the sun never sets on FIU!

In early May, we announced that we will be changing athletics conferences in the summer of 2013. We will move from the Sun Belt Conference to Conference USA. We are grateful to the former for welcoming us in the late 1990s and providing a platform upon which our intercollegiate athletics program was able to grow. The new conference will provide our student athletes and fans with an enhanced intercollegiate athletics experience.

We took major strides in building and expanding our alumni base this past year. We hosted major Alumni Association initiatives in San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Nashville, Atlanta; Kingston, Jamaica; and Beijing, China. What a special feeling to meet so many FIU graduates who are proud of their alma mater and want to keep their ties to our institution so strong. And, we ensured continuity of forward-thinking leadership as Duane Wiles was asked to succeed Bill Draughon as the executive director of the FIU Alumni Association.

Finally, we have every reason to believe that this year will be particularly strong in fundraising. We are so excited that our faculty/staff campaign, the first-ever at FIU, has already raised more than $2 million, even though it has only been operational for five months! Our overall fundraising goal for the year is $37 million and we expect to exceed it!

I want to tell you more – but I am already infringing on your time and patience. We see ourselves as a solutions center for our community and hope that you will appreciate that our Worlds Ahead momentum can only continue with your high expectations and support! I can’t wait for the new academic year to start later this summer, and hope that you will be with us for our Homecoming, Oct. 13.

Mark B. Rosenberg
President