Mission statement

The mission of the FLORIDA FIRST Health Science Brigade (aka The FLORIDA FIRST Brigade) is to transform institutional culture at Florida State University to generate a self-sustaining scientific community dedicated to inclusive excellence.

The program recruits new tenure-track assistant professors from diverse backgrounds using a cohort-based model and invests in the development, mentorship, advancement, and retention of new faculty in two broad domains of research excellence: (1) chronic disease prevention and management; and (2) mental health. The FLORIDA FIRST Brigade implements a systems-level approach to support individual faculty research and career development (micro), within their cohort and collaborative networks (meso), that can be replicated through sustainable changes to university culture (macro).