UCF in the News

I am writing with excitement as UCF kicks off our inaugural season in the Big 12 Conference and as we look forward to the impact this exciting moment will have on our community. Since arriving in Orlando, I have come to learn that UCF’s rise to national prominence and incredible impact on our region are due in large part to this community’s unwavering commitment to our potential. Now, we are witnessing the results of this shared dedication. Orlando is the epicenter of Knight Nation, with more than 88,000 UCF alumni and their families calling Orange County home. Our alumni are among the business leaders driving regional engineering and technology innovation; they are the visionaries creating theme park experiences for our tourism industry that creates $67.1 billion in economic impact; they are the nurses and doctors caring for our friends and families; and they are the neighbors who contribute to the vibrant quality of life we all enjoy as Central Floridians. UCF has a proven track record of dreaming big, working hard, and delivering meaningful impact for our students, region, and community.

Mars, as we know it, is a frigid and lifeless world—but a new study reveals a fresh hint to a much more happening past. NASA’s Curiosity rover has found an array of medallion-sized, hexagonal mud cracks on the terrains of Mars’ Gale Crater. The distinctive shape of these patterns suggests the Red Planet was once much balmier and that it cycled through wet and dry episodes for millions of years, per the study published last week in Nature. These conditions are theorized to lead to the emergence of life. “Early Martian geology was not the result of a sudden transient warming event,” Ramses Ramirez, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida who was not involved in the study, says to Science.

The four astronauts heading to the moon have met the spacecraft that will get them there. The three NASA astronauts and one Canadian are set to launch to the moon on a flyby mission at the end of next year, part of NASA's new moon program called Artemis. From member station WMFE, Brendan Byrne reports the Artemis program represents a turning point in both where NASA is heading and how it's getting there. The lunar lander, set to fly with the Artemis III mission, will be built on a very different model. NASA won't own that lander. Instead, the agency is asking a commercial partner for a ride to the surface. It's like calling a lunar Uber instead of buying your own moon buggy. The paradigm shift started with the George W. Bush administration as it planned for the future of NASA after the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, which took astronauts to space for three decades, says University of Central Florida history professor Amy Foster.

UCF senior tackle Lokahi Pauole may be thousands of miles from his home in Hawaii, but the deadly wildfires that have ravaged part of his state haven’t been far from his mind. “My initial thoughts when I first saw the whole thing going on, it’s just a really sad day for the Hawaiian Islands and a sad day for the country,” Pauole said following the Knights’ second scrimmage Saturday. The wildfires on Hawaii’s Maui island have killed at least 80 people and forced thousands of residents and tourists to evacuate. The disaster claimed the historic resort city of Lahaina. The Big Island of Hawaii has also been impacted by wildfires as well.“In Hawaii, we’re all a family. Ohana is a real thing and even though I’m from O’ahu and I don’t have any immediate family there in Maui, you’re connected somehow,” said Pauole. “Prayers out to them. I’m praying for them every day, reaching out to who I can reach out to.”

The signs of hip-hop´s influence are everywhere - from Pharrell Williams becoming Louis Vuitton´s men´s creative director to billion-dollar brands like Dr. Dre´s Beats headphones and retail mainstays like Diddy´s Sean John and Jay-Z's Rocawear. It didn't start out that way. The music genre germinated 50 years ago as an escape from the poverty and violence of New York City´s most distressed borough, the Bronx, where few wanted to invest in its businesses or its people. "Hip-hop goes beyond the music," said C. Keith Harrison, a professor and founding director for the University of Central Florida´s Business of Hip-Hop Innovation & Creative Industries certificate program. "Hip-hop always knew, as Nipsey Hussle would say, how to get it out of the trunk, and so they´ve always had to have innovative business models."

The National Basketball Association set a league record for most head coaches of color in the past year, helping it earn high grades in an annual diversity report. The NBA earned a combined grade of A in the 2023 NBA Racial and Gender Report Card released by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida on Tuesday. In November 2022, the league reached new all-time highs for head coaches of color (17) and Black head coaches (16). The Milwaukee Bucks hired Adrian Griffin, who is Black, as a first-time head coach this offseason. Richard Lapchick, the director for TIDES, said it matters that so many of the league’s 30 teams are led by people of color because such hires lead to increased diversity in other positions. “When a league takes the initiative to set the kind of example that the NBA does, that’s not only good for sport, but good for society as well,” he said.

It takes millions - if not, billions - of dollars to take a drug from the lab to the pharmacy. Last year, out of thousands of drugs in clinical trials, the FDA approved only 37, the fewest to pass regulatory scrutiny since 2016. Now, artificial intelligence could soon help figure out which drugs will work and which ones will not. "We can cut down the experiments as well as cut down the time," said Dr. Sudipta Seal, a professor in the department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Central Florida. On average, it takes 10 years to develop a new drug. Now, computer scientists are aiming to speed up that process using an AI-based drug screening method that does the intensely difficult job of matching drug and protein interactions.

The success of the commercial space industry has brought in massive benefits for Florida's Brevard County, with billions of dollars in economic impact being directly linked to the industry. Since the retirement of NASA's space shuttle program, there have been more licensed launches in Florida than ever, at 50 in 2022 and 36 in 2023 as of Aug. 2. Below is a graph mapping every licensed launch since 1989. The University of Central Florida contributes to the space industry by supplying these educated employees to aerospace companies. According to Aviation Week Network, the Orlando university has been the no. 1 supplier of graduates to the aerospace and defense industries for six years in a row. UCF reports that 27% of Lockheed Martin employees and 29% of Kennedy Space Center employees are UCF alumni.