April 19, 2024
Feature
All Children's Hospital's 2-day event helps boost morale of patients during the holidays
For the past 10 years, Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg has staged All Kids' Wonderland, a two-day December event intended to brighten the holiday season for hospitalized children and their families.
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Published on 12/21/2022
Giving a Lift: David Garfunkel
Born and raised in Minnesota, David Garfunkel was a junior at Gustavus Adolphus College when a professor and mentor suggested he consider joining the Peace Corps. “He said, ‘Listen, it sounds like you're interested in other cultures. You like Spanish. It seems like you want to be helpful. You should do the Peace Corps.' And I said, ‘OK, yes, sir.' That was really the extent of it,” Garfunkel recalls.
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Published on 12/19/2022
ChemTech opens plant in Fort Pierce to showcase environmentally friendly wood treatments
Lumber treatment company ChemTech opened an eight-employee plant in Fort Pierce to showcase to sawmills, lumber dealers and others its “environmentally friendly” protective treatments for soft woods, plywood and engineered wood.
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Published on 12/15/2022
America's first solar-powered town relies on infrastructure after Hurricane Ian devastation
In the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, an estimated 2.7 million Florida homes and businesses lost power. For customers of LCEC, which provides electricity to more than 240,000 homes and businesses in hard-hit towns including North Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Marco Island, Pine Island and Sanibel, more than 90% of the utility's customers lost power. But about 20 miles west of where the storm came ashore, Babcock Ranch, which bills itself as “America's first solar-powered town,” has a different story to tell. None of its nearly 2,000 homes lost power.
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Published on 12/14/2022
Face Forward: Suhay Gonzalez
Growing up in New York, Suhay Gonzalez learned many lessons from her mother, Cesarina: One was to never leave the house without a little lipstick. Another: Don't give up.
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Published on 12/14/2022
Growth Management: LaShawn Bates
LaShawn Bates took over in May as market director for North and Central Florida for commercial real estate firm JLL. Her task, she says, is straightforward: “My goal is to double the revenue every four to five years and continue to make JLL a great place to work.”
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Published on 12/13/2022
Taking Flight: Luciano Macagno
At least 30 multinational corporations have their Latin America headquarters in South Florida, and as global economists look at the decades to come, Latin America's relatively young population and entrepreneurial talent make a compelling long-term case for future growth, with Miami the natural entry point to the U.S.
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Published on 12/12/2022
Fashion tech startup Fit:Match makes shopping experience more efficient with 3-D body twin avatars
Fit:Match's technology can find a customer's body twin in its digital database, accommodate for shape differences and give recommendations on what will fit and what the customer will like — in about a minute.
The Backs
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Published on 12/8/2022
UF's YEAH high school partnership program helps foster young talent in health careers
UF Health Jacksonville is reaching out to prospective employees as early as high school. Since last year, the hospital has formed a partnership with Darnell-Cookman School of the Medical Arts, a nearby magnet school, to select 25 students each year for its YEAH program — Youth Education for Advancing in Health.
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Published on 12/7/2022
Florida Icon: Craig Waters
When the internet came along, just as a personal hobby, I decided I was going to figure out how to create web pages. Later, I set up the first set of web pages for the Florida Supreme Court, and I continued to expand these web pages, which was very novel at the time. I knew I was innovating but didn't really understand the full extent of where it was going. A lot of the judges and attorneys at the time took a very dim view of the web, but Bush v. Gore was an event that started to change people's minds.
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Published on 12/7/2022
The Advocate: Yolanda Cash Jackson
The first time Yolanda Cash Jackson saw the sculpture of Mary McLeod Bethune was in 2021 in Pietrasanta, a small town along the Tuscan coast where master sculptor Nilda Comas had carved the three-ton figure out of marble from the same quarry Michelangelo used to create David and other masterpieces. Bethune is known as the “First Lady of the Struggle” for her efforts to pave the way for Blacks in education and civil rights; the towering stone figure depicts Bethune in academic regalia adorned with a simple pearl necklace and holding a single black rose.
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Published on 12/1/2022
$3.6 million nursing program grants put UF on track to double enrollment by 2025
With $3.6 million in grants from the state, the University of Florida is hiring 20 faculty members at both the graduate and undergraduate levels to increase enrollment in its nursing programs.
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Published on 11/30/2022
University of Miami partners with Chile to establish first official nurse practitioner program
Nurse practitioner was a foreign role in Chile — until a plea for help from the Chilean government. A rising number of cancer cases in that country sparked a collaboration between the University of Miami School of Nursing and Health Sciences and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
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Published on 11/30/2022
Beverly Raphael Altman and Robyn Raphael-Dynan
When RCC Associates, the Deerfield Beach construction company known for its high-end projects, recently took on the renovations of the iconic Mayfair Hotel in Coconut Grove, the $50-million job was something bigger and more complex than the firm had attempted before. But jumping into the unknown is something the mother-daughter duo of CEO and chairwoman Beverly Raphael Altman and President Robyn Raphael-Dynan have done plenty of times before.
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Published on 11/30/2022
Barbara Brown
Just a two-hour drive from where Barbara Brown grew up, the Space Coast seemed light-years away from the small, rural city of Palatka. But Brown could feel its gravitational pull.
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Published on 11/30/2022
Hillsborough Community College's new bachelor in nursing program helps close nursing shortage gap
Three years ago, when Hillsborough Community College started the process of becoming accredited to award baccalaureate degrees, the college was motivated by a troublesome gap in Hillsborough County's workforce: A shortage of nurses.
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Published on 11/28/2022
UCF's future plans for College of Nursing help address nursing shortage
The University of Central Florida is planning to build a new home for its College of Nursing adjacent to the UCF College of Medicine on the school's 50-acre health sciences campus in Lake Nona.
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Published on 11/28/2022
Award-winning filmmaker Todd Thompson produces movies he hopes will inspire, enlighten audiences
Todd Thompson knew at a young age that he wanted to make films. He caught the bug when he was about 8, when his father took him to see Star Wars. After that, he started experimenting with his grandfather's 8mm camera and making his own “homemade, independent” films using the money he earned cutting grass to buy film. “It would take me months because it was expensive for a little kid back then,” recalls Thompson.
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Published on 11/25/2022
Ybor City's Gas Worx project plans to develop homes, retail and office space on former site of Peoples Gas
For the last several years, much of downtown Tampa's redevelopment focus has been on Water Street, the $3.5-billion, 70-acre mixed-use project from Strategic Property Partners, a partnership between Tampa's Jeff Vinik and Bill Gates' Cascade Investment.
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Published on 11/23/2022
Felecia Hatcher
When her high school guidance counselor said college wasn't in the picture because of academic reasons, Felecia Hatcher applied for and received more than $100,000 in scholarships, prompting her mother's friends, her church and high schools to ask her to help other students. So she created a company to do just that.
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Published on 11/22/2022
FSU's nursing dean Jing Wang addresses salaries, the shortage and more
Jing Wang became the dean of the College of Nursing at Florida State University last year. She is a board member of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and recently was named one of 10 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine by the National Academy of Medicine.
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Published on 11/22/2022
Michelle Abbs
Michelle Abbs' leadership journey started 16 years ago in a fifth-grade Miami classroom.
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Published on 11/17/2022
UNF's Brooks College of Health boosts hands-on training with new simulation center
Nursing students at the University of North Florida Brooks College of Health have a new simulation center for hands-on training.
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Published on 11/16/2022
New program developed to help Florida job seekers find new careers based on location
CareerSource North Central Florida in Gainesville has been testing a program designed to help job seekers more easily find out location-specific information about jobs, salaries and demand.
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Published on 11/16/2022
Cristie Besu
Nurse and sports nutritionist Cristie Besu started her Eat Me Guilt Free line of high-protein, low-carb baked goods in her kitchen a decade ago when her clients would confess to cheating on their diets. Besu, a Miami native, realized there was a business opportunity in making healthier treats.
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Published on 11/16/2022
