Lon Vance – University of Florida

There is a moment, Lon Vance will tell you, when a room stops being a room and starts being a tool. It happens the second someone walks in, taps a single button, and the displays wake up, the audio balances itself, and the cameras find their angles—all without a second thought from the person standing at the front of the class. That moment is invisible by design and making it invisible is the whole point.

Lon Vance | University of Florida | IT Project Manager II

Vance is an IT Project Manager II for Academic Technology at the University of Florida, where he has spent more than 14 years quietly building the audiovisual infrastructure that keeps one of the nation’s largest research universities running. His path to Gainesville was personal before it was professional. He had built a reputation working for a large AV integrator in the Sarasota area, designing high-end residential systems, but with young children at home, he deliberately chose to relocate to his wife’s hometown and trade the volatility of residential work for something more sustainable.

“I came from high-end audio video in residential, which is cutthroat,” he says. “In higher education, we are much more collaborative.”

That shift shaped everything that followed.

Building systems that disappear

The University of Florida is a flagship public research institution in Gainesville that educates tens of thousands of students each year while competing nationally for research funding, faculty talent, and rankings recognition. Vance’s department sits within Academic Technology, under the broader IT umbrella, and is responsible for AV design and integration across the entire campus ecosystem—classrooms, conference rooms, study spaces, collaboration environments, and specialized research facilities. The team numbers eight direct reports, and the work is constant.

“We finish one project, and we have five others ready to go,” Vance says.

The philosophy governing his department is rooted in standardization. No matter which building a faculty member walks into, no matter what backend technology powers a given room, the user interface is consistent. The goal is that an instructor should never have to relearn a system simply because they crossed a courtyard. That consistency is both an operational principle and a financial one—by handling design, installation, and long-term support internally, the department delivers a better product than outside integrators while reducing total cost of ownership for the university.

Every classroom on campus carries AV technology: displays, audio systems, Crestron control infrastructure, cameras, and microphones. When the pandemic forced a statewide mandate for distance learning, Vance’s team absorbed the surge and kept it running—and recognized that the shift was permanent.

“The toothpaste couldn’t be put back in the tube,” he says. “I knew we’d have to support them forever.”

Translating ambition into architecture

The most visible expression of his team’s work is Malachowsky Hall for Data Science and Information Technology, a six-story facility that brought the Colleges of Engineering, Pharmacy, and Medicine together under one roof to accelerate AI-driven research and interdisciplinary collaboration. The building required over 250 integrated displays, direct-view LED video walls, digital signage, collaboration pods, and immersive learning environments—including a digital twin space for neurosurgery training where students can virtually walk a surgical floor and interact with an AI-driven avatar. The CAT6a cable infrastructure installed throughout the building spans a distance equivalent to running from Gainesville to Orlando and back.

Vance describes the scope as anything but routine. The challenge was not just technical scale—it was translating highly specialized, often abstract needs from multiple disciplines with very different workflows into systems that felt unified and intuitive to every person who would use them. His approach was the same one he applies to every project: get involved early, identify all the stakeholders, and build around how people actually need to use a space rather than what equipment is available.

“My goal, and with our department, is to facilitate the research, share the data,” he says.

That stakeholder-first methodology is now being applied to the Bruno E. and Maritza F. Ramos Collaboratory for the College of Design, Construction, and Planning—a facility currently under construction and expected to open in the summer of 2026. The space will include divisible classrooms, acoustics and lighting design labs, a 3D modeling lab, a Virtual Design and Construction workspace, and a social stair that doubles as an auditorium. It will be equipped with direct-view LED video walls and a 30,000-lumen projection system—well above standard classroom specifications—because the disciplines it serves demand environments that mirror real-world professional settings.

Carefully pushing technology forward

Vance is not simply a consumer of AV technology—he is an active participant in shaping its direction. He serves on manufacturer advisory councils and attends industry conferences, including InfoComm, where he engages in roundtable discussions with peers and vendors about where the technology is heading and what institutions like UF will need from it. His involvement allows him to bring back real-time intelligence while ensuring that the practical demands of higher education are represented in conversations that influence product development.

His philosophy on adoption is deliberate. Knowing what is coming matters as much as knowing what is available today, but deploying too early carries its own risk.

“You always want to push the cutting edge, but you don’t want to deploy stuff too soon because you don’t want it to fail,” he says.

That patience is matched by a clear-eyed understanding of what the university is ultimately competing for. Student enrollment, faculty recruitment, and research funding all flow toward institutions that can offer environments where serious work is possible. The AV infrastructure his team builds is, in that sense, part of the university’s value proposition—a quiet argument, made in every room on campus, that this is a place equipped for the work that matters.

A system built on people

Vance manages the full arc of his team’s work—from early-stage planning conversations with architects and construction teams through final deployment and long-term support. He describes the role as akin to that of a firefighter, responsive to whatever the campus needs on any given day. He is equally candid about the challenge of measuring his own output.

“I do a lot, but sometimes it feels like I didn’t get a lot done,” he says. That tension is familiar to anyone managing complex, multi-stakeholder infrastructure at scale.

His approach to hiring reflects the same pragmatism that runs through everything else. He partners with the university’s HR team for initial screening and compliance, then takes over the process himself—reviewing candidates, conducting interviews, and making final selections. Technical skills, he believes, can be taught. What cannot be taught is work ethic and attitude, and those are what he looks for first.

UF likes to call itself a top-five public university, and Vance is quick to note what that ranking actually implies: there are still four schools ahead of them. The work, in other words, is not finished. For him, that is not a source of frustration—it is a reason to keep building.