Credit: Samuel Fabian / Imperial College London

The Future of FIU: Experience Impact 2030

By Elizabeth M. Béjar & Andrés G. Gil

January 17, 2025 at 11:00am

Last fall, FIU completed its latest strategic plan: Experience Impact 2030. The process necessitated that we evaluate honestly our current state and our desired destination. It required a clear- eyed assessment of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges, not only internally but in our community, region and beyond.

Much like the last strategic plan, we knew this one must be relevant and position FIU and our students for long-term success. We knew that our next strategic plan must provide direction for the university community to move forward with clarity. As this stunning photo illustrates, moths lose their bearings around artificial light at night. Confusion reigns. We needed to make sure there was no confusion among our FIU community about where we were headed and how we were going to get there.

Experience Impact 2030 is focused on expanding our accomplishments in student success, research excellence, national and international recognition, continued recognition as a leading Hispanic-Serving Institution, leadership in arts and culture, and dozens of leading initiatives addressing great challenges facing our global community. It presents an opportunity to continue our momentum and strategically redefine the role and impact of the public research university.

As part of this 18-month collaboration that involved university leaders, faculty and staff, students, alumni and community leaders, FIU identified three strategic areas of research focus: Environment & Environmental Resilience, Health, and Technology & Innovation.

This issue is filled with the important work of our researchers and students tackling critical issues in these focus areas and beyond. We highlight the work of a marine ecologist whose decades of research around predator-prey interactions and the ecological importance of sharks has yielded greater understanding of the role of these creatures in the ocean’s ecosystem. We offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse into a cancer researcher’s lab, in the process gaining a sense of what drives her and the members of her team. And we introduce our readers to some of the climate tech innovations being developed by our faculty and students.

We hope you enjoy these articles and this publication. Please be sure to visit researchmag.fiu.edu for videos and additional information that accompanies many of these stories.

Elizabeth M. Béjar
Provost
Executive Vice President
Chief Operating Officer
Email: bejare@fiu.edu

Andrés G. Gil
Senior Vice President, Research and Economic Development
Dean, University Graduate School
Professor, Robert Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work
Email: gila@fiu.edu

Why do insects behave so bizarrely around light at night?

As part of FIU’s global research collaborations, an international team provided a new explanation for a millennia-old mystery. A combination of motion capture tech and high-speed cameras revealed an important clue: In flight, insects keep their back turned toward the light source. According to the data, published in Nature Communications, this is because they evolved to rely on the brightest thing they see (the sky) to know which way is “up” and maintain control in the air. Artificial light at night throws these instincts for a loop and insects get trapped in an exhausting cycle trying to stay orientated — a futile effort that causes clumsy maneuvers and occasional crashes directly into the light. This study received national and international coverage, appearing in The New York Times, CNN, Scientific American, The Guardian and more.