Dr. W. Kent Fuchs

Dr. Kent Fuchs became the 12^th President of the University of Florida in January 2015.  Building on many years of excellence and focused leadership, the university has reached its goal of joining the nation’s top-ten public research universities. 

Dr. Fuchs has since set UF on a path to joining the top-five public research universities and becoming the nation’s number one university for comprehensive excellence. UF is working toward those goals through the creation of 500 new faculty positions, the addition of advanced and beautiful university facilities and an ongoing $3 billion fundraising campaign.

Previous to the UF presidency, Dr. Fuchs was provost of Cornell University. He has served in academic leadership positions and as a faculty member of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell, Purdue and the University of Illinois. 

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Association for Computing Machinery, and has received numerous awards for teaching and research.

President Fuchs earned his doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois, and a master of divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. 

Dr. Fuchs is married to Linda Fuchs. The Fuchses have three sons, a daughter, and three grandchildren.

Born on an Oklahoma farm in 1954, President Fuchs spent much of his youth in Alaska before moving to Miami, where he graduated from Miami Killian Senior High School.

Linda Fuchs

Linda Fuchs is an art historian and a former teacher of art, French and journalism. The daughter of Norwegian immigrants, she grew up on Long Island, New York, attended Wheaton College in Illinois, and moved to Florida to teach at The King’s Academy in West Palm Beach. Later, while pursuing a master’s degree in Biblical studies at Trinity, in Deerfield, Illinois, she met Kent Fuchs. Married since 1981, they have four children and two grandchildren. 

Since earning master’s degrees from the University of Chicago and Cornell University, Linda’s research in art history focuses on funerary art of the third and early fourth centuries, a transition from late Roman art to early Christian art, before Christianity became a legal religion of the Roman Empire. One of her contributions identifies the first-known sculptural depiction of the resurrected Jesus. Her essay on this scene, found on the Vatican Jonah sarcophagus, appears in Revisioning: Critical Methods of Seeing Christianity in the History of Art.