At the University of Florida (Gainesville) where the retirement age was 70, Slater was able to enjoy another five years of active research and publication as a Research Professor in the Quantum Theory Project (QTP). In 1975, in his scientific autobiography, he wrote: ""The Florida Physics Department was a congenial one, with main emphasis on solid state physics, statistical physics and related fields. It reminded me of the MIT department in the days when I had been department head there. It was a far cry from the MIT Physics Department which I was leaving; by then it had been literally captured by the nuclear theorists." Slater published to the end of his life: his final journal paper, published with John Connolly in 1976, was on a novel approach to molecular orbital theory.