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UCF Knights Are Part of NASA’s Artemis Program to Return to the Moon
As the nation looks on this week to see the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft blast into space on its test flight, UCF faculty, students and alumni will only momentarily pause to watch the historic milestone before returning to what they do best — scientific discovery and developing the next generation of technology […]
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UCF Doctoral Candidate Works to Create a ‘Bioassessment Toolkit’
Dedicated to preserving ocean life at every scale, UCF doctoral candidate Ashley Reaume is working to create an efficient and cost-effective “bioassessment toolkit” that can be used to evaluate the impact of water quality on plankton communities. “Both plankton and estuaries play important roles in sustaining human life, providing us with ecosystem services like nutrient […]
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Genetic Rescue of Florida Panthers May Have Had Unintended Consequences
The introduction of Texas pumas to Florida in the 1990s as part of a genetic rescue may have helped save Florida panthers from extinction, but it also brought some harmful mutations with it along the way. In a new study led by UCF, researchers show that nearly half of the harmful mutations found in recent […]
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Annual Belize Trip Trains Students, Assists International Community
Traveling to Hopkins Village, Belize, feels like a homecoming for Citizen Science GIS after six years of research and community work. Each summer brings a surprise, though. A new degree of urgency was injected into this year’s projects when Associate Professor Timothy Hawthorne, Ph.D., and the student team saw just how badly the beach had […]
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UCF Researchers Are Contributing to World Oceans Day
One of Florida’s most precious resources is its water from the aquifer to the 8,436 miles of coastline, boarded by the Gulf of Mexico, the Straits of Florida, and the Atlantic Ocean. Water is also a major player in the state’s economy, contributing $56 billion to the economy and generating 900,000 jobs according to a […]
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Artificial Intelligence Holds Promise to Revolutionize Pottery Reconstruction
The time-consuming process of piecing together broken pottery vessels found during archaeological excavations is getting a boost from artificial intelligence. Pottery provides key insights into how ancient people lived, but most archaeological sites uncover pottery in broken sherds. To use this evidence to its full potential requires piecing them back together like a jigsaw puzzle […]
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NASA Selects UCF for $35 Million Mission to the Moon’s Mysterious Gruithuisen Domes
NASA today tapped UCF’s dynamic duo, planetary scientists Kerri Donaldson Hanna and Adrienne Dove, to lead a $35 million science mission that will land a spacecraft on a part of the moon never visited before — the Gruithuisen Domes. The domes, located in the western portion of the Imbrium basin rim, remain a mystery to […]
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5 UCF Scholars to be Inducted into Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine of Florida
Five University of Central Florida scholars are among 15 honorees selected for induction to the Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine of Florida (ASEMFL), a group that brings together the nation’s most distinguished scholars who live and work in Florida. With the induction of Grace Bochenek ’98 PhD, UCF President Alexander N. Cartwright, Demetrios Christodoulides, […]
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Suicide Training for 911 Dispatchers Earns Psychology Professor Recognition From Sheriff
A four-hour course designed to help 911 dispatchers talk with individuals threatening suicide recently earned a UCF faculty member recognition from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office. Psychology Assistant Professor David Rozek, Ph.D., was given the 2022 Citizens Award for the work developed through his expertise in suicide prevention and post-traumatic stress disorder. “Dispatchers have been […]
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UCF Research Seeks to Give Families Closure by Developing Tools to Help Identify Individuals in Mass Graves
New research out of the University of Central Florida has the potential to give war crime investigators a new tool and the victims’ families closure. The National Institute of Justice has awarded UCF Associate Professor Matthieu Baudelet at the National Center for Forensic Science a grant to advance a technique that may help identify individual […]
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Researchers Develop Method to Determine Where Storm Surges Are Increasing Most
Extreme storms, like Sandy or Xaver, don’t happen often but when they do, cities need to be prepared. That’s why researchers have developed a new method, detailed in a study published this week in Nature, to determine where extreme events, like 100-year storm floods, are more likely to occur, whether the likelihood of such extremes […]
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Student Research Week: Preserving History Through Field Work and Technology
Alexander Nalewaik ’21 enrolled at UCF as an undergraduate with one thing in mind. He wanted to merge his love of history, people and the outdoors into a major that would lead to a great career. Fast forward a few years and the anthropology alum is now pursuing a master’s degree in the field while […]
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Mission to End Mental Health Misconceptions Takes Senior To Florida Capitol
Senior Katelyn Yarbrough of the UCF Department of Psychology has a mission to end the harmful misconceptions surrounding mental health diagnoses. That mission got a boost recently when she was invited to the Florida Capitol to present her research on anxiety, depression, eating disorders, ADHD and Autism Spectrum Disorder. “I’m looking to create dialogue about […]
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Recipients of the 2022 Seed Funding Program Announced
Thirty-two teams representing colleges across the university and several centers were selected for 2022 Seed Funding awards, the third year the program has been available to faculty. The program, a result of a collaboration between the Office of Research and the Office of the Provost, is aimed at facilitating research, which is likely to attract […]
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PHOTOS: Knights Celebrate World Wildlife Day
UCF Knights conduct research around the globe to help understand and conserve wildlife. To celebrate World Wildlife Day, launched on March 3 by the United Nations in 1973 to help raise awareness about how people benefit from “fauna and flora,” we asked our Knights and our faculty to share some pictures from their field work. The […]
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UCF Researcher to Collaborate with MIT on DARPA Night-vision Project
The four-year project is a collaboration between the laboratory of Michael Leuenberger at UCF and the laboratory of Dirk R. Englund ˙at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It’s funded by a $1.1 million-dollar grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “The goggles that currently exist in the field are too heavy and bulky,” […]
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UCF Joins Program to Strengthen Data-based Research at Minority-serving Institutions
UCF was recently tapped to participate in a national training program that strengthens the capacity for data-based research among historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic serving institutions (HSIs). This initiative builds evidence-based research through data analysis to promote the success of Black and Latino students in postsecondary education. The Leveraging Big Data to […]
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Computer and Political Science Mesh For Fresh Perspective on Redistricting
Politics has always been a point of passion for graduate Craig Wilding, M.S.’21, who is using his background in the computer sciences to make an impact on the local political landscape. Wilding recently won the Maps Across America “Redistricting Contest,” where he was tasked with redistributing a population of over 21.6 million people in a […]
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UCF Selected for New NSF Student Research Program in Conservation, Restoration, Communication
Beginning this summer 10 undergraduate students from across the nation will have the opportunity to get hands-on experience working with UCF biologists to see how they conserve, restore, and communicate what they do and why it matters. The U.S. National Science Foundation has recently awarded UCF $369,000 over three years to run the new program. […]
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UCF Researchers Share Their Insights into Innovation and Inspiration
Innovation at UCF is not an exception; It is the expectation. In 2021, U.S. News and World Report ranked the University of Central Florida as the 15th most innovative university in the United States — of the top 30, it was also the youngest. The classification drew from a survey of top college administrators, asking […]
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UCF Alumnus Ranked Among Top Laser Scientists in Global Communications Competition
Fiber optics and other communications channels continue to evolve toward faster speeds through the work of physicists like John Beetar, ’20, who was recently nominated for the Carl E. Anderson Division of Laser Science Dissertation Award. “The goal for the research was to take industrial laser technology and find a way to employ it for […]
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Associate Provost for UCF Downtown Named
The new associate provost for UCF Downtown is a seasoned academic leader and distinguished criminal justice scholar who helped launch the campus in Fall 2019. The appointment of Ross Wolf ’88 ’91MPA ’98EdD by Michael D. Johnson, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs, elevates his role from assistant provost for UCF Downtown that […]
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New Virtual Reality Lab Opens Fresh Psychology Research Avenues
A new advanced virtual reality system in the Department of Psychology expands the experimental capabilities of researchers studying human behavior. Virtual reality is prized for its capacity to recreate immersive real-world environments without compromising safety or the high costs linked to building and maintaining physical sets. It also offers the flexibility to quickly change parameters […]
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UCF Student Nanotech Team Designs Space Suit Material for NASA Competition
A group of six University of Central Florida students and alums from a range of fields designed and won the Best Technical Poster award as finalists in NASA’s recent Lunar Dust Challenge. They received the honor after NASA’s 2021 Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge Virtual Forum in November 2021. As part of NASA’s […]
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UCF Research in 60 Seconds: Understanding the Impact of Diversity
Whether it’s solving the world’s biggest problems or investigating the potential of novel discoveries, researchers at UCF are on the edge scientific breakthroughs that aim to make an impact. Through the Research in 60 Seconds series, student and faculty researchers condense their complex studies into bite-sized summaries so you can know how and why Knights […]
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UCF Develops the World’s First Optical Oscilloscope
A team from UCF has developed the world’s first optical oscilloscope, an instrument that is able to measure the electric field of light. The device converts light oscillations into electrical signals, much like hospital monitors convert a patient’s heartbeat into electrical oscillation. Until now, reading the electric field of light has been a challenge because […]
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4 UCF Researchers Named as Highly Cited Researchers for 2021
Four University of Central Florida researchers have been named highly cited researchers in their field for 2021 by analytics company Clarivate, based on data from Web of Science. The annual list identifies researchers who demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. […]
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Self-Assembly Landing Pads for the Moon — UCF Researchers Are Working on It
Imagine hitting a button and instantly creating a landing pad just moments before descending a rocket onto the moon or an asteroid. That’s the concept behind two research projects underway at the Florida Space Institute at UCF. FSI postdoctoral researcher Douglas Fontes worked with planetary scientist Phil Metzger and Masten Space Systems, a private company, […]
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NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test Mission Launching Today Aided by Arecibo Observatory
NASA’s mission to test out a technique to deflect asteroids is headed to a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) that the Arecibo Observatory helped identify. UCF manages the U.S. National Science Foundation facility under a cooperative agreement. Despite the telescope’s collapse in 2020, the data collected from Arecibo has played an invaluable role in past and ongoing […]
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UCF Names Its Microgravity Research Center in Honor of Stephen W. Hawking
The University of Central Florida today is one step closer to becoming the first American university to name a research center after the late, world-renowned theoretical physicist Stephen W. Hawking. The UCF’s Board of Trustees unanimously approved on Thursday that UCF’s Center for Microgravity Research, would now be known as the Stephen W. Hawking Center […]