May 20, 2024

Mike Brassfield

Florida Trend Associate Editor • mbrassfield@floridatrend.com

Laura Lyon

Mike Brassfield has been a reporter, editor and copywriter for more than 30 years. After graduating from the University of Kansas, he worked as a reporter in Kansas, Georgia and South Carolina before joining the Tampa Bay Times. During a 17-year career at the Times, he was an editor and reporter who covered government, business, law enforcement and transportation. After leaving the Times, he worked for a military magazine and a personal finance website before joining Florida Trend.

Articles by Brassfield:

Sky-High Ambitions
From The Jetsons to Back to the Future to The Fifth Element, flying cars have always been the stuff of science fiction, but they might be soaring through Florida's skies sooner than you think. The state has become a hotbed for flying car companies who view it as an appealing location for their emerging industry.
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Transatlantic Ties
Florida and the United Kingdom have a close relationship — and it's not just because the state is a magnet for British tourists. The U.K. is Florida's top foreign investor. The state supplies the U.K. with a wide range of goods and commodities, including aviation and aerospace products. British affiliates have total holdings of more than $18 billion in Florida, with more than 350 British companies employing 70,000 Floridians, according to the Florida Department of Commerce.
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A Call to Action
Construction crews are expected to break ground later this year on what will be the largest Holocaust museum in Florida. The 45,000-sq.-ft. Holocaust Museum for Hope & Humanity will be built just north of downtown Orlando near I-4, on the site of the former Orlando Regional Chamber of Commerce building.
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A Labor of Love
Growing up in farm country along the Florida-Georgia state line, Martha McGill always wanted to work with children. It was a calling, and she was also a bit of a workaholic. Her first job was as a pediatric nurse at a hospital in Valdosta, Georgia. “I worked 7 (days) on, 7 (days) off, and on my week off I got a job at a different medical center caring for children,” she says.
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The Night Nurse
Lisa Nummi's pediatrician encouraged her to go into nursing. “So I went to nursing school and immediately fell in love. I was hooked,” she says. At Tampa General Hospital she kept ratcheting up the intensity, working in pediatrics, then pediatric intensive care, then the pediatric emergency room. Eventually she became a flight nurse paramedic, treating injured patients in a helicopter whirring through the sky.
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The Most Trusted
Recently, Wendi Goodson-Celerin was going through her late mother's things when she came across something that Wendi had scribbled in little-girl handwriting way back in elementary school: I want to be a nurse. I want to help people.
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Running the Railroad
By the time she was 12, Kelly Cullen knew what she wanted to do: “I wanted to help people.” Since she was 8, she had been helping her beloved Aunt Claire, a nurse, take care of Cullen's grandmother who was paralyzed by a stroke.
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The Son of Immigrants
Growing up in Miami, David Zambrana was the child of Cuban immigrants. “Working hard and making a difference was at the root of what we heard at the dinner table,” he recalls. “My mom used to say, ‘Don't walk into a room and walk out unless you leave it better than you found it.' You know — ‘It's a gift to be in this country. Don't be a burden on anyone. You're going to go to school because you're going to do better than I did,' was basically the mantra of how my sister and I were raised.”
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From Bedside to C-Suite
Audrey Gregory knows how to treat an alligator bite. Stephanie Conners learned fast that being a nurse takes guts. Martha McGill held two pediatric nursing jobs at the same time. And Lisa Nummi knows all the ways a hospital is different at night than it is during the day.
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The Air Traffic Controller
Audrey Gregory married her high school boyfriend, who was in the military. She needed a career where she could be mobile and work anywhere. Her first nursing job was in a small hospital near Fort Stewart, Georgia, where her husband was stationed.
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