Professor Ann Christiano, the Frank Karel Chair in Public Interest Communications and the director of the Center for Public Interest Communications at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, won this year’s Faculty Entrepreneurship Award from the UF Warrington College of Business Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center (EIC).
The Entrepreneurship Award is given annually to one of the EIC’s Entrepreneurship Faculty Fellows, who represent faculty across the UF campus. The award was announced at a dinner on April 26, 2019.
“We were impressed by Ann’s endeavors over nearly a decade to essentially develop a new discipline in academia, ‘public interest communications’,” said Dr. Kristin Joys, director of Social Impact and Sustainability Initiatives at Warrington. “Not only did she build a team to create a new field of study, they utilized an entrepreneurial approach — bootstrapping — cleverly leveraging the resources at hand by creating revenue-generating offerings, including the annual frank gathering, trainings and workshops, and consulting with clients as impressive as the UN High Commission on Refugees, the U.S. Department of State, and the Gates Foundation.”
The Fellows Program was created to foster and celebrate inter-disciplinary collaboration around creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. The program is focused on the role of entrepreneurial thinking and acting within any discipline or academic area on the University of Florida campus.
