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Trendsetters: Today and Beyond
High-impact leaders who are making a difference in Florida and beyond -- but whose biggest contributions may be yet to come. The governors also make their picks.
Wind Gauge
Forrest Masters
 Forrest Masters |
» UF civil and coastal engineering assistant professor Forrest Masters, 31, studies what happens to buildings in hurricanes. Through simulators and field instruments set up just before hurricanes make landfall, he studies wind loading and rain intrusion to lead to advances in design and construction to lower property damage and insurance costs.
 Brian Dean |
Brian Dean
» A Wisconsin native with degrees in political science, Ibero-American studies and Portuguese, Brian Dean, 42, is well-positioned as executive director of Gateway Florida to affect trade and democratic development in the hemisphere. The mission of Gateway, the successor to Florida’s Free Trade of the Americas organization, is to “promote the Florida trade franchise writ large.” A former senior congressional staffer who speaks Spanish and Portuguese, Dean was a country director in Guatemala and Peru and then all of Latin America and the Caribbean for the democracy-promoting International Republican Institute, a John McCain-chaired organization supported by the federal government. There he built contacts throughout the hemisphere, pushed for the rule of law, free markets, democratic values and market-based approaches to alleviating poverty.
