UCF in the News

UCF President Alexander Cartwright joined USF President Rhea Law and UF President Kent Fuchs at Synapse Summit 2022 to celebrate a 25-year legacy of innovation as partners in the Florida High Tech Corridor and unveil a commitment to “unleash the region’s ‘expotential.’” The three university presidents participated in a discussion moderated by The Corridor CEO Paul Sohl, retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, about the hallmark partnership approach, the role of universities in Florida’s innovation economy and how their universities are preparing the next generation of innovators.

Dr. Gulnora Hundley works in the Counselor Education Program at UCF and is making it her mission to give back and use her experience as a Russian speaker to better connect with therapists over in Ukraine.

If you’ve seen the Marvel movie Black Panther, you know all about the power suit. Now, researchers at University of Central Florida are taking a note, and making their own power suit – for electric vehicles and NASA space flights. "This is the exact ‘Black Panther' suit like you see in the movie," said Deepak Pandey, a student at UCF. Researchers at UCF have spent the last four years turning this super suit into reality. "What we are trying to do is to store energy on the outer shell of electric cars," said Dr. Jayan Thomas, a professor of nanoscience technology at UCF. "This material is lighter than steel. It is lighter than even aluminum. At the same time, it can store energy," Dr. Thomas said. It quite literally would encase the vehicle as a suit. "You can use it as the roof of your electric car and it can harvest energy this part. And energy could be stored into this composite," Dr. Thomas said. Dr. Thomas and his students are also working with NASA to add the technology to space flights.

UCF’s Limbitless Solutions will lead a new, first-of-its-kind clinical trial this spring to examine how the brain adapts to advanced, bionic arms in children born without a limb. Officials said its ultimate goal is to improve children’s control of their prosthetics. The research will be done in partnership with Wolfson Children’s Hospital of Jacksonville and Nemours Children’s Health, Jacksonville. Limbitless Solutions was one of Orlando Business Journal's 25 winners of the 2022 Orlando Inno Fire Awards. Winners were chosen based on major milestones like overall growth, innovative ways of doing things, funding rounds, product launches and social impact. These companies and the entrepreneurs who birthed them are developing innovative products, building Central Florida workforces and doing the hard work necessary to raise funds — all in an effort to bring their visions to fruition.

UCF political science/criminal justice student Ashley Cardona looks at the stats that show lack of representation of Latinos in law fields and wants to make a difference. Almost 20% of the U.S. population is Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census. But only about 5% of lawyers in America are Hispanic, data from the Florida Bar Association shows. Cardona hopes to be part of an uptick in those numbers and be the change in that representation by becoming a criminal defense attorney.

UCF’s Limbitless Solutions will lead a new, first-of-its-kind clinical trial this spring to examine how the brain adapts to advanced, bionic arms in children born without a limb. Officials said the four-month clinical trial will examine if Limbitless’ prosthetic, paired with its custom training video game, will impact the motor control center of the brain. Researchers will closely monitor any changes in the signals the brain sends to the muscle groups that direct the bionic arms’ movement. “It may provide new insight to how the brain’s motor cortex adapts to learning how to use our organic, or robotic, limbs,” said Albert Manero, executive director and co-founder of Limbitless Solutions.

Russia continues to degrade its role in the space industry, alienating itself from international customers it has long supplied space resources to because President Vladimir Putin refused to back down from the attack on Ukraine. Since Russia began its invasion last week, the head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin refused to launch a UK-satellite company's payloads and stopped supplying Russian-built rocket engines to U.S. customers and threatened to cut ties with its International Space Station partners, including NASA. University of Central Florida space policy expert Roger Handberg said Russia has lost its upper hand. "They’re not getting money because a good part of their space program had been selling seats on Soyuz missions to the United States," Handberg said. "The Russians have lost their leverage, as you say, over the United States because they provided the access. Now we have independent access."

College counseling centers are relying on data to guide support as student needs and campus operations continue to change drastically in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. To find the best way to support students facing unprecedented challenges while pursuing their degrees, colleges are tapping into robust data from electronic medical records and looking to a national research infrastructure to back requests for resources. But counseling centers can’t rely on data from previous years to guide current services because of the dramatic changes students faced both on and off campus during the pandemic, experts told EdScoop. “We really look at things like how many scheduled appointments we have, how many attended appointments, since there’s also no-shows and cancellations,” said Vanessa Stein, assistant director for outreach and prevention at the University of Central Florida. “[We look at] how clients are served, what the type of presenting concerns are — so is it anxiety, is it grief, is it trauma — and that helps us kind of determine our staffing needs.”

Imagine boarding a flight from Orlando to Los Angeles and instead of languishing on the plane for five and half hours, you arrive in about an hour, ready to enjoy the palm trees on the Pacific Coast six times faster. That may be decades away but the hypersonic propulsion technology that could make it possible is currently being developed in a University of Central Florida lab. UCF has been researching hypersonic propulsion for six years, funded by $7.86 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Defense, the Air Force, and other sources. A team of 33 students led by four faculty researchers is exploring and experimenting with this new technology. Hypersonic propulsion aims to send a yet-to-be-designed aircraft out of the atmosphere to travel at hypersonic speed, which is about six times faster than the speed of a commercial airplane. But this research goes beyond commercial travel and has become a competitive field among developed nations, said Subith Vasu, a professor in UCF’s department of mechanical and aerospace engineering. “Russia is working on it, China is working on it, and then other countries in the European Union, Japan, India,” he said. “It is very difficult, so nobody really has a real hypersonic vehicle. Some people claim that they have but it is only pretending they do because there are a lot of technical challenges.” One of those challenges could be the effect of rain droplets on a vehicle traveling at hypersonic speeds. Michael Kinzel, project co-investigator and assistant professor in UCF’s department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, said that every time speed is doubled, the impact force from a raindrop quadruples. With hypersonic speed, they are going six times faster. Researchers are trying to figure out how to design a vehicle that can withstand that kind of pressure as it travels through the rain.