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Thursday, October 22, 2026
Alachua County Public Schools has contracted a Nebraska-based firm, McPherson and Jacobson, for $47,000 to lead the search for a new superintendent to replace Kamela Patton, whose contract expires in June. The school board voted unanimously in August to hire the firm. Residents can participate through an online survey and community discussions held this week.
Sources: WCJB TV20
Kaylee Cunningham, a 26-year-old UF doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering, has earned 2.8 million TikTok likes by making nuclear energy topics accessible to a broad online audience. She will be the first in her family to earn a doctorate and the first student to complete an online Ph.D. from UF’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, finishing this December. Cunningham earned her undergraduate degree in nuclear engineering from UF in 2022, went on to earn a master’s from MIT, and conducted her doctoral research on nuclear fuel materials while working remotely at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Sources: UF News
Santa Fe College has received a $3 million federal grant to grow its artificial intelligence education offerings. The funding is intended to build out AI-focused programs at the Gainesville community college.
Sources: The Gainesville Sun
Middle school teacher Hunter Miller and governor-appointed board member Janine Plavac are competing in a runoff election for Seat 1 on the Alachua County School Board after neither candidate surpassed 50% in the August primary. The race opened when Tina Certain left the contest to run for Alachua County Commission, and Plavac’s seat was originally filled by appointment from Governor Ron DeSantis following Kay Abbitt’s December 2024 resignation. Both candidates have discussed school rezoning, teacher pay, stadium funding, and the ongoing superintendent search as central issues in the race.
Sources: WCJB TV20
A University of Florida associate professor of geology helped uncover evidence of a massive floating ice shelf that once spanned Baffin Bay roughly 20,000 years ago, holding back three major ice sheets across Greenland and northern Canada. When the shelf vanished over a span of roughly 500 to 1,000 years, the glaciers it had restrained accelerated into the sea, contributing to hundreds of feet of sea level rise. The findings, published in Nature Geoscience, offer scientists new data to model how today’s Antarctic ice shelves might behave and how quickly their loss could raise modern sea levels.
Sources: UF News
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