About Florida Tech

15th Annual NCSSSMST Student Research Symposium

Florida Institute of Technology is located on the Space Coast of Florida; 3.5 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, 40 miles from the Kennedy Space Center, and 80 miles from Walt Disney World in Orlando. Florida Tech’s first students were engineers who worked at Cape Canaveral, now known as the Kennedy Space Center. Not only is the area home to NASA and many high-tech companies, it just happens to be minutes from beautiful beaches in Central Florida, the world’s leading vacation destination.

At Florida Tech, we believe learning is a lifelong process. As the southeast’s only private technological university, we are responsive to the needs of each individual student. It is our goal to instill in each of our students a love of knowledge that can be created by personal involvement in leading edge research.

At Florida Tech, you will find strong major programs, challenging academics, a faculty that puts students first, and countless opportunities for innovation and discovery. In addition, Florida Tech offers small classes, a beautiful campus, modern facilities, an unbeatable location, and a diverse international community of scholars.

The Research Symposium will be co-hosted by the Office of Admission and the College of Science. The Florida Tech College of Science is evolving as a national-class teaching and research arm of the university in the sciences.
Each department within the college has significant areas of strength and expertise in both teaching and research. For instance, Florida Tech was one of just two Florida institutions of higher learning listed in Peterson's Top Colleges for Science.

• The Biological Sciences Department has a marine biology program ranked in the top 7 in the nation. Cellular and molecular biology is also a strength with funding for research in the areas of gene regulation and leprosy.
• The Chemistry Department is strong in synthetic organic chemistry and in particular medicinal chemistry and marine natural products.
• The Mathematical Sciences Department has active areas of research in methods of nonlinear analysis, spectral theory of operators, sequential analysis, operations research, queuing theory, neural networks, computational mathematics for ordinary and partial differential equations, and parallel processing.
• The Physics and Space Sciences Department is the home of the first Space Science degree program in the U.S. and has the largest undergraduate enrollment in this area in the nation. The department is also one of a handful awarding an undergraduate Astrophysics degree. Experimental High-Energy Physics has recently been added as a new research focus area.
• The Science and Mathematics Education Department is extremely unique among education programs because it is highly specialized and deals in only science and math education. In addition, all programs are approved by the Florida Department of Education. The department also has award-winning graduates like Tracey Bailey, the 1993 National Teacher of the Year.