One of the youngest members of the State University System of Florida, FIU is one of America's most dynamic institutions of higher learning. Since opening in 1972, FIU has made enormous strides that are virtually unparalleled for such a young university. In 2000, FIU was ranked by the Carnegie Foundation as a Category I Doctoral/Research University-Extensive - the highest, most comprehensive ranking in the classification. As the newest of the State Universities to achieve to this status (and one of only four to do so), FIU now stand in the ranks of the nation's elite research universities.
From the very beginning the Psychology Department has been at the spearhead of the University’s strivings for outstanding teaching and cutting edge research. Always a leader in undergraduate teaching, the Psychology Department has also always been at the leading edge in graduate education at FIU, including being one of the first four doctoral programs to break ground at FIU. As FIU strives toward its goal emerging from the first decade of the new millennium as a well-established research university with a strong faculty-driven culture (FIU: Millennium Strategic Planning), the Psychology Department will continue to be in the forefront of this advance.
The Psychology Department at FIU not only affirms its commitment to taking the lead in the University’s strivings for outstanding teaching and cutting edge research. In doing so, we also affirm the goal of becoming a “flagship” psychology department, distinct in its approach to the unique issues that confront an urban teaching and research psychology department at the beginning of the 21st century. To this end, the Department has begun to identify and address issues and set goals that need to be addressed as a psychology department in an urban university in a global city with a multiethnic/multicultural population at the cutting edge of change in the 21st century.
As an urban university in a global city at the cutting edge of the 21st century change, the Department's goal is to continue to strive for a strong basic science orientation (and methodological rigor) that parallels the core basic science orientation that is the backbone of the discipline while drawing on the strengths and resources that are uniquely available in Southeast Florida to address the issues in an urban and multicultural region of the state. The Department's goal, in a word, is to strive for achieving an innovative and integrated balance between teaching and research in both the basic and applied areas in ways serve the people of Southeast Florida, the state, the nation, and the international community by imparting knowledge through excellent teaching and creating new knowledge through research.
