Their first names are Sun and Ossyris. It’s hard to imagine two more perfectly fitting recipients of the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship, which honors select students nationwide pursuing careers in STEM fields. However, Sun Latt and Ossyris Bury didn’t win the award because of their names but rather their character traits: Curiosity, humility and drive. Latt is determined to use science to help people heal more completely from bone injuries while Bury wants to take her inquisitiveness to Mars.

With all of the above, you might be tempted to believe their achievements were laid out for them from birth. Latt corrects any such assumption.

“Anyone can earn a Goldwater Scholarship,” he says, seeming to ignore the fact that for 2025 only 441 sophomores and juniors from a pool of 5,000 applicants earned the scholarship, worth $7,500 for each remaining undergraduate year and, more importantly, validation of their work. Latt clarifies. “I say ‘anyone’ can do it because if you knew my background, you would not expect to be interviewing me today.”

Sun Latt

Major: Biomedical sciences
Mentors: Mehdi Razavi, Sanjeev Gurshaney ’23, Pedram Sotoudehbagha, Robert Borgon and Natalia Leal Toro ’17EdD
Ultimate Goal: Complete medical school and earn a doctoral degree in tissue engineering en route to creating new therapeutic devices while also mentoring students.

The guy sitting in the coffee shop with his laptop and a pile of notes makes multitasking look effortless. He cannot possibly be studying for the MCAT while also finishing a presentation on an engineering solution to help bones heal better — can he? This is Sun Latt and that’s exactly what he’s doing. The research project involves a novel nanoparticle incorporated into magnesium orthopedic implants. His goal is to find a sweet spot where the bone heals faster and the implant dissolves without leaching toxins.

“It might sound super advanced,” says Latt, a Burnett Honors Scholar. “If I were talking like this to my freshman self, I wouldn’t believe it’s me. I didn’t even know the meaning of research until I met mentors at UCF.”

During Latt’s freshman year, Associate Professor of Medicine Mehdi Razavi asked Latt to help his team research a nanoparticle he was studying. Latt’s first discovery was seeing what interdisciplinary research looks like. Razavi’s projects included 13 undergraduates, graduates and postdoctoral scholars, specializing in engineering, biology, chemistry and materials science.

“I had no expectations about the impact I could make, but quickly I fell in love with research,” Latt says. “That’s how science came into my life.”

Latt is the son of parents who moved to U.S. to escape conflict in Myanmar where family farming skills were passed down for generations. Despite limited formal education, Latt’s father found a path into medical school so he could help sick people in his hometown.

“Then, when he moved to Lakeland, Florida, he wanted to serve people with the same approach — by listening and treating them like the families in his home village,” Latt says.

When Latt was 10 years old, he traveled to Myanmar with his father and watched him provide life-changing medical care for patients.

“My dad instilled a desire to create a positive impact through medicine,” he says. “My exposure to science at UCF instilled an additional desire: to use science as a tool to drive innovation in medicine.”

Three years ago, when Latt still wrestled with some self-doubt, he read a UCF Today story about a Goldwater Scholarship recipient, Angela Shar ’22. Latt knew Shar from the research lab but didn’t know until reading the story that Shar’s parents also immigrated from Myanmar and that she’d also overcome self-doubt.

“I thought, ‘Hey, if I share a background and a lab with someone as successful as her, then maybe I can be a Goldwater recipient someday, too,’ ” he says.

In that same story, Latt read about another Goldwater scholar, Sanjeev Gurshaney ’23, who happened to live in the same housing complex. Gurshaney became another mentor, encouraging Latt to aim for a Goldwater Scholarship.

“Angela and Sanjeev said to use my time at UCF to focus on what I really want to do,” Latt says.

That means helping to develop therapeutics that solve unsolved problems and cure diseases that don’t have cures yet. But there’s something more important to Latt.

“Being a mentor to others,” he says. “Who knows? Maybe someone will read my story and think about possibilities they never knew existed.”

Ossyris Bury

Major: Aerospace engineering
Mentors: Jeffrey Kauffman, Maxwell Booth ’21 ’24MS, Jacqueline Sullivan, Germayne Graham
Ultimate Goal: Earn a doctoral degree, research new spacecraft for missions to the moon and Mars and be among the first researchers to live on the red planet.

When she was growing up in Broward County, Ossyris Bury’s favorite spots were wherever she could read a book in peace. Her parents signed her up for softball, dance and cheerleading to learn social skills. But the morning of Sept. 8, 2016, is when Bury says she truly came alive.

NASA launched a spacecraft as part of an asteroid mission called OSIRIS. During news reports, Bury heard the name pronounced Oh-Sie-Ris, the same as hers.

“Oh my gosh, it was like I could see my future self written in the stars,” says Bury, a Burnett Honors Scholar.

Space exploration wasn’t necessarily on the mind of Bury’s father when he named his daughter. He and Bury’s mother, both Panamanian, wanted to raise their children in the U.S., where they would be free to creatively reach as high as they wanted. To feed the imagination of young Ossyris, dad would bring home empty boxes from his work as an air conditioning specialist and watch her turn them into intricate little houses. That imagination piqued when Bury heard her name associated with deep space.

“I researched the mission, NASA and everything about spacecrafts,” she says, “And I knew that I wanted to send something into space someday — or maybe send myself.”

Bury could have gone to any college in Florida to pursue her goals, but she chose UCF for a very down-to-earth reason.

“When I visited, I noticed how students treated each other. They were collaborative instead of competitive,” she says. “They were happy. I can proudly say I’ve become one of those happy UCF students.”

Bury’s interest in research accelerated when a graduate assistant, Maxwell Booth ’21 ’24MS, invited her to help investigate adaptive structures. The work led to the first of two publications she’s co-authored.

“I realized that I enjoy research enough to do it for a long time,” Bury says.

For her Honors Undergraduate Thesis  , Bury launched her own project on the dynamics of hovering flight — think of hummingbirds and dragonflies — which could perhaps be applied to spacecraft design. Then, in May, she was chosen from more than 400 applicants to begin a deep-space research project on Earth-bound asteroids, funded by U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense.

“The Goldwater Scholarship helped me stand out,” Bury says. “The benefits of the Goldwater are unquantifiable. I came into research in an unorthodox way, so I could have told myself that everything was just luck. But the Goldwater [Scholarship is] an ‘I made it’ moment. As much as I appreciate friends and mentors saying, ‘Nice job,’ this comes from people I’ve never met acknowledging that I belong in this field.”

Bury plans to pursue a doctoral degree and continue mentoring others, just as she’s done as a teaching assistant with 500 first-year engineering students.

“Mentorship is why, ideally, I’d like to be a NASA astronaut,” she says. “I want to do TED Talks and share my experiences with kids. Hopefully, one of those experiences will be from living in a small habitat on Mars for a year. I can’t think of a better way to go out and then give back.”

Students interested in applying for the Goldwater Scholarship or other major national awards should contact the Office of Prestigious Awards at opa@ucf.edu.