UCF in the News

Orlando Family Stage plans to expand its educational offerings for the 2026–2027 season with new classes, performance opportunities, and family-focused programs. The organization also continues its long-standing collaboration with the University of Central Florida’s nationally recognized Theatre for Young Audiences graduate program. Through the partnership, graduate students gain professional experience working on productions and educational programming while contributing to new play development and research. According to Orlando Family Stage, its education team includes full-time staff, professional teaching artists, classroom educators, working theatre professionals, and UCF graduate students, many of whom have served Central Florida families for more than a decade.

The University of Central Florida's Exolith Lab features a Regolith Bin to simulate the moon's surface for research. Simulated moon soil, or regolith, is extremely abrasive and poses significant challenges for equipment and astronauts. Lunar dust is considered a major hazard because it can damage spacesuits, clog mechanisms and interfere with electronics. Shielded by white protective suits and powered air-purifying respirators, four college students dug into dusty, sharp-edged simulated moon soil amid the otherworldly environment of the University of Central Florida's Regolith Bin. This airlock-equipped 10-by-10-meter enclosure at UCF's Exolith Lab serves as a rare space-hardware test bed where researchers can help refine NASA's vision of building humanity's first lunar base near the moon's south pole from ground level. Jared Long-Fox, a UCF planetary exploration research scientist, said simulated moon regolith feels like flour to the touch — but this material proves extremely abrasive.

NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will be the premier exoplanet-hunting space telescope once it launches sometime in the 2040s. This large infrared/optical/ultraviolet space telescope will be the first observatory specifically designed to search for rocky planets orbiting within their parent stars' circumsolar habitable zones (HZs) and characterize their atmospheres. Its powerful suite of instruments will also enable cutting-edge astrophysics research to address the greatest cosmological mysteries astronomers face today. To carry out its objectives, the HWO will require exceptional stability and precision, particularly in measuring and controlling the wavefront of light as it propagates through the telescope and coronagraph system. Researchers at the Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers (CREOL) at the University of Central Florida (UCF) are developing this technology to help the HWO and other next-generation telescopes detect habitable planets.

College student Ashley LaFlamme had been studying the Troubles when she got an opportunity to see history firsthand. She was one of the University of Central Florida students who recently returned from an eight-day trip through the school’s new Conflict Transformation Program to learn more about Northern Ireland’s peace. “Being in person and seeing the neighborhoods where this historical event was happening … it makes what you’ve learned real,” said LaFlamme, 19, a rising junior from Longwood. “That is a whole other level than just sitting in a classroom and learning about something. The UCF students got to meet and talk with Bertie Ahern, the former Irish Prime Minister, and hear from the people who fought on both sides.

Artificial intelligence is now emerging as a strategic priority across higher education, but many institutions are still determining how to move from experimentation to institution-wide adoption. According to the 2025 EDUCAUSE AI Landscape Study, 57 percent of institutions now view AI as a strategic priority, yet only 22 percent have implemented an institution-wide AI strategy. This gap reveals a broader challenge facing colleges and universities as they modernize technology and rethink the student experience. As institutional priorities, student expectations and AI capabilities continue changing, technology strategies also need to evolve. Governance works best when leaders revisit technology portfolios, evaluate adoption, clarify ownership, and retire tools no longer delivering meaningful value. Those conversations help institutions reduce complexity before it becomes technical debt and ensure new investments continue advancing the digital experience. The University of Central Florida expanded digital services across departments over time instead of treating implementation as the end of the journey. The ongoing review process helped the university build on existing investments while introducing new capabilities in a deliberate, coordinated way.

More than a decade after capturing national attention as the young boy who received a 3D-printed 'Iron Man' arm with help from actor Robert Downey Jr., Alex Pring is celebrating a new chapter. This January, Pring will attend the University of Central Florida, where he plans to study aerospace engineering — returning to the same campus where Limbitless Solutions helped change his life as a child. Born without part of his right arm, Pring received a custom-designed, 3D-printed bionic prosthetic from the UCF-based nonprofit. The moment became an international sensation when Downey, best known for portraying Iron Man, surprised Pring by delivering the device himself. Now, Pring is earning recognition for achievements beyond his childhood story. He recently set two national records at The Hartford Nationals, one of the nation's longest-running track and field championships for athletes with disabilities.

Space is one of the harshest places humans can experience. Beyond the protection of Earth’s atmosphere, the body faces powerful radiation, weightlessness, and other conditions it never evolved to handle. Scientists have long known these challenges affect muscles and bones, but new research suggests the liver may also reveal something important about how the body ages. Looking for answers in the liver The study was led by Professor Michal Masternak at the University of Central Florida.

At the University of Central Florida’s CREOL, the College of Optics and Photonics, Research Assistant Professor Joshua Kaufman’s work combines physics, materials science, and imagination. Few centers in the region represent the connectivity of academic and industry innovation with the scale and reach of CREOL, where Kaufman is part of a new generation of faculty leader whose students are gaining hands-on experience through the Corridor’s Matching Grants Research Program, just as he did when he earned his PhD at UCF more than a decade ago. Kaufman has been a part of projects that range from futuristic textiles to high-performance optical systems, including ambitious collaborations with longtime UCF partner L3Harris Technologies and research developing technology for military and medical applications. Having led seven MGRP projects as principal investigator, several of Kaufman’s students have gone on to work for the defense tech company or have taken on roles at other leading tech firms in the region.

Quantum computers could one day solve problems beyond the reach of even the world’s most powerful supercomputers, accelerating everything from drug discovery to the development of advanced materials and cleaner energy technologies. But the fragile quantum states that make such machines possible are notoriously easy to disrupt. Even tiny changes in the environment – such as stray radio waves, small fluctuations in temperature or slight physical vibrations – can interfere with calculations, introduce errors and disrupt quantum coherence. To help address this challenge, UCF Assistant Professor of Physics Han Zhao is developing a new approach that combines superconducting quantum systems with nanomechanical devices to make quantum operations more resistant to noise and errors.