Mon Oct 18
Sharlene (Wendel) Martin ’86 ’93MS cradles a UCF football helmet in her hand as her son Stephen, a redshirt freshman wide receiver on the team, huddles next to her closely examining it. “There it is: Sharlene Wendel Martin,” Stephen says proudly as he points to the name listed on the center stripe of this year’s space game…
Tue Oct 12
Our quest for high speed travel, the kind that will one day have us zipping across continents in just a few hours, began almost immediately after the first powered flight, a little over a century ago. It started with better engines, accompanied by sleek and strong airframes, as designs eventually evolved to achieve a breakthrough…
Mon Oct 11
UCF’s Programming Team again showed they are among the best on the planet, finishing 17th overall and among the top four teams from North America in the 2020 World Finals of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). The competition, held in Moscow on Oct. 5, was originally scheduled to take place in June 2020 but was…
Thu Oct 7
When Perla Latorre-Suarez ’21 was a child, she remembers holding her brother’s hand in the mountainous Orocovis region in Puerto Rico where she grew up and looking up on a clear night as the International Space Station flew overhead. “That day, my parents explained to me its purpose and all the experiments and investigations conducted;…
Thu Sep 30
When Peter Delfyett first fell in love with science during elementary school, he imagined he would grow up to be a paleontologist. Instead, the Pegasus Professor of optics and photonics has spent his career developing futuristic technology. From lasers that are used to cut Gorilla Glass for Samsung phones to fiber-optic cable technology that allows the internet…
Wed Sep 29
A University of Central Florida researcher is part of a new, nearly $20 million award from the U.S. National Science Foundation that will develop a Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub. The hub, known as MACH, will be led by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and will involve multiple universities and experts from across disciplines.…
Wed Sep 29
The Army Research Lab has awarded the University of Central Florida a $4.5 million grant to develop a smart, computer vision-based navigation system for when GPS is unavailable or jammed. The system will be like a cyber co-pilot that supports navigation of ground vehicles by using artificial intelligence and machine learning to assess computer imaging…
Wed Sep 29
The University of Central Florida has joined a new, national consortium that will advance scholarship of Latinx students and the field of Latino studies, and an alliance that supports the growth and success of women and Latinos in computing fields. The consortium includes 16 U.S. Hispanic Serving Institutions that are top-tier doctoral universities with very…
Fri Sep 24
Face masks and social distancing are both well-known ways to keep airborne pathogens, like COVID-19, at bay, but University of Central Florida researchers Michael Kinzel and Kareem Ahmed are working on a possible new one — a combination of food products that alters people’s saliva. The concept is based on new work from the researchers showing that…
Fri Sep 24
The Directed Energy Professional Society (DEPS) recently awarded three UCF graduate students scholarships worth up to $10,000 to continue their work in the area of directed energy. The students, Jessica Peña ’19, Owen Thome and Nicholas Vail are all part of the Laser Plasma Laboratory, which is part of UCF’s Center for Directed Energy. The students…
Thu Sep 23
The University of Central Florida is helping to lead the country’s charge of obtaining 100% clean electricity by 2035 with a new $800,000 award from the U.S. Department of Energy to advance hydrogen fuel research. The award is through the DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management’s University Turbine Systems Research program and is…
Thu Sep 23
This year’s five UCF National Science Foundation CAREER grant recipients are finding innovative and bold new ways to solve challenges that could be game changers in healthcare and engineering. For example, one researcher is tracking down what triggers harmless microorganisms into going rogue and turning into deadly pathogens such as flesh-eating bacteria. Another faculty member…
Fri Sep 10
UCF researchers have developed a nanoparticle-based disinfectant that can continuously kill viruses on a surface for up to seven days – a discovery that could be a powerful weapon against COVID-19 and other emerging pathogenic viruses. The findings, by a multidisciplinary team of the university’s virus and engineering experts and the leader of an Orlando technology firm,…
Thu Sep 9
Gonzalo Sauri ’18 was a middle school student in the Orange County Public School System the day his world of possibilities opened up. Para la versión en Español, oprima aquÃ. Growing up as a kid who loved science and engineering but never saw scientists who looked like him, the Peruvian American tried to heed his father’s…
Wed Sep 1
Mitsubishi Power Americas and the University of Central Florida have formed an industry-education partnership to establish a reliable and accessible source of information that tracks nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions as the U.S. power generation industry undergoes an energy transformation to decarbonize. The online Power Generation NOx Tracker uses data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency database as…
Wed Sep 1
From fraudulent COVID-19 small business loans to security breaches that leak shoppers’ credit card data, the exploitation of the complex nature of corporate relationships continues to be a major concern. For instance, the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 28,000 complaints related to COVID-19 fraud in 2020 and a record number of complaints…
Thu Aug 26
A new study from the University of Central Florida suggests that masks and a good ventilation system are more important than social distancing for reducing the airborne spread of COVID-19 in classrooms. The research, published recently in the journal Physics of Fluids, comes at a critical time when schools and universities are considering returning to more…
Tue Aug 24
UCF will be a player in developing innovative technologies needed to support NASA’s Artemis program, which will return people to the moon and create a robust presence there over the next decade. The university has been awarded a $500,000 grant to create transformative space technologies by bringing together interdisciplinary teams of faculty and students to…
Tue Aug 24
Disagreement seems to spread online posts faster and further than agreement, according to a new study from the University of Central Florida. The finding comes from an examination of posts labeled controversial on social news aggregation site Reddit. To perform the study, the researchers analyzed more than 47,000 posts about cybersecurity in a Reddit dataset…
Tue Aug 24
Storm surges can be deadly coastal hazards but the current historical tide gauge data that is needed to better understand them, and perhaps predict their impacts, doesn’t go far back enough in time. That’s why University of Central Florida researchers are working to reconstruct the missing data and compile the information in a newly created…