UCF in the News

Three University of Central Florida researchers were awarded millions of dollars from the U.S. Department of Defense for the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative. The research projects are aimed at facilitating the growth of newly emerging technologies for the U.S. Department of Defense. The awards will support projects that range from advancing hypersonic propulsion to improving semiconductor performance, and will fund the work for the next five years, UCF said. The recipients are Kareem Ahmed, UCF mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor; Tania Roy, UCF nanoscience technology center assistant professor; and Kevin Coffey, UCF materials science and engineering professor.

UCF Lake Nona Medical Center professors are collaborating with Israeli researchers to better understand the human body in a microgravity environment by studying the four space participants, three of which paid for the flight and one of which is a former NASA astronaut. The quartet are set to blast off Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center hitching a ride on a SpaceX Crew Dragon, which has been contracted by Axiom Space making its first trip to the ISS on a 10-day mission. The studies could lead to huge leaps in space travel and medicinal knowledge bases, but for UCF the studies open an even larger opportunity for research and a nexus between its medical school and the Space Coast.

The University of Central Florida was recently awarded a grant worth $4.4 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to determine if a pre-packaged pod is an effective method to deploy very efficient heating, cooling and water heating systems to thousands of homes. The DOE awarded $32 million to seven teams that will manage 30 demonstration projects nationwide. Finding effective ways to retrofit existing and older buildings to be more energy efficient is critical considering there are 130 million buildings in the United States today and about 75% of them are expected to still be standing in 2050, according to the DOE.

Colleges need to play a role in ensuring that students are prepared to use technology in the classroom and later on in the workforce, higher education leaders say. Colleges and universities are taking multiple approaches to ensure students are ready for software and technology requirements, including exploring how to integrate those skills into general education. And those basic technology skills are changing, said UCF President Alex Cartwright. Cartwright said that employers who recruit at the 70,000-student Orlando school have told him that they need graduates with skills not just in English and humanities, but also basic tech knowledge.

When a natural or humanitarian disaster occurs halfway around the world, the U.S. Space Force (USSF) aims to send a rocket filled with food, water and other essential supplies to the site in one hour. With the help of UCF researchers, they may be able to achieve this goal within the next decade. UCF is one of seven universities to receive funding through the USSF’s University Consortium Research Opportunity, which connects higher education institutions with the U.S. Department of Defense’s space-related research opportunities. Engineering researchers Michael Kinzel, Tarek Elgohary and Luis Rabelo were awarded the $350,000 grant, which makes them the first UCF researchers to receive funding from the USSF. “Although

There’s an Oviedo warehouse just north of the University of Central Florida that looks normal enough on the outside, but inside its staff and students are creating something otherworldly. Alien dirt — or regolith simulant — is the main product of UCF’s Exolith Lab and is gaining huge demand as the next era of space exploration and projects like NASA’s moonshot Artemis missions prepare to blast off. In 2018 the lab produced a little more than 1,000 pounds of regolith to the scientific community.

The State of Florida is now home to over 1 million Puerto Ricans, the majority of whom live in Central Florida. UCF’S Puerto Rico Research Hub partnered with the MLB for the very first Puerto Rico Baseball Day. Hundreds of kids showed up to the event.

The University of Central Florida’s graduate game design program is getting some kudos as downtown Orlando is becoming a pipeline for video game developers. The Princeton Review and PC Gamer magazine rated UCF’s program, which is called the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, as the No. 1 in the world for the third straight year.

A new mission called Lunar Trailblazer is set to launch two satellites by 2025 with the goal of mapping the lunar surface and understanding the form and distribution of water on the moon. “It’s cold enough at the South Pole, and at the North Pole, to house ice and water,” says UCF planetary geologist Professor Kerri Donaldson Hanna. “But we’ve never actually made real detections of it. This will give us our first opportunities to do that.” Donaldson Hanna is the co-investigator of NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer mission which consists of two science instruments about the size of a desk. They’ll launch to the moon together and orbit the moon and collect data from above the lunar surface