By Giselle Mazur, October 2008
Photo By Zachary Bennett
When Nicole Cisneros McKeen decided to photograph the deans of the University of Florida College of Engineering mimicking the cover of The Beatles album With the Beatles for the college’s 2005 annual report, she never imagined she’d be making history. But to this day, people still call Dean Pramod P. Khargonekar “Ringo.”
McKeen applies this personalization to all her work as the editor of The Florida Engineer, where she said she has made it her goal to make the magazine less about the science and more about the people behind the research. “They hadn’t really explored their personalities before, and I wanted them to have fun,” she said.
McKeen is constantly dreaming up new ideas and said the magazine’s redesign is always evolving. Its alluring, newsstand look helped the staff earn the “Best Magazine at UF” award in February.
McKeen, a UF alumna and mother of four children and three step-children, moved to Gainesville from Key West in 2000 to attend the College of Journalism and Communications. Her first class at UF was the history of journalism taught by her future husband William McKeen. With so many ties to UF, McKeen is a natural when it comes to keeping engineering students and alumni interested in the college.
“Our job is to evoke strong feelings to [the reader’s] alma mater,” she said. “We want to make them care about engineering. So our job doesn’t stop when the magazine is in the mail.”