UCF in the News

U.S. News & World Report released its annual college and university rankings Monday. The list is one of the highest-regarded rankings in the nation, indicating a high graduation rate, strong faculty resources and student excellence. UCF was ranked No. 148 for overall top schools.

In late 2019, the UCF Business Incubation Program shifted strategy for its Lake Nona Business Incubator to attract more clients in line with the life-sciences industry of Medical City. This resulted in a nearly-full incubator that hosts companies that can directly benefit from the specialized resources UCF and other Lake Nona facilities offer. Plus, many of the companies are growing and creating local jobs. In fact, incubator companies in Lake Nona employed 10 people and generated $834,500 in revenue in fiscal year 2019, which leaped to 55 employees and $2.9 million in revenue in fiscal year 2021.

One study of 92 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and active duty military personnel suffering from PTSD found significant decreases in social isolation, depression and anger after six months of VR treatment. But that study also found the virtual reality component alone could not sustain long-term improvements for patients. VR treatment would need to be supplemented with CBT and talk therapy and in some cases with a regular prescription medicine regimen. One of the authors of that study, Deborah Beidel at the University of Central Florida’s UCF Restores intensive outpatients program, said using VR to help people overcome traumas, phobias and fears makes sense experientially and neurologically. “How you get over your fear of a dog? Well, I’ve gotta be around a dog,” said Beidel, executive director of UCF Restores. “You have to do it for a period of time. There are actually new neuronal connections that are being made in your brain, and what you’re learning is that just because a dog bit you once doesn’t mean every time you see a dog you’re going to get bit. Those new memories become stronger.”

The augmented reality (AR) market is expected to generate global revenue of $152 billion by the end of 2030, making it the hottest selling mobile device, according to a new report by GlobalData, a data analytics company. The increasing interest in AR is a sign that the technology is maturing, experts say. AR allows users to see useful or entertaining virtual things in the real world around them, said Gregory Welch, an IEEE senior member and co-director of the University of Central Florida Synthetic Reality Laboratory. "An example of a useful AR application for an average personal user is turn-by-turn navigation," Welch said. "With a traditional (non-AR) navigation app on a phone, the user has to switch between looking at the map on their phone and the real world. In some situations, this can be cumbersome or inconvenient."

“This is a landmark day for anyone ever associated with UCF,” athletics director Terry Mohajir declared on Friday when UCF, along with Cincinnati, Houston and BYU, were invited into the Big 12. It was, in fact, the most significant day in UCF sports history; a day that Dick Nunis, the inaugural chairman of UCF’s Board of Trustees and one of the school’s biggest financial boosters, said, “We’ve all been working for and dreaming of for a long time.”

Along Florida's Space Coast, east of Orlando, much of the attention is focused on flight and rockets taking off from the Kennedy Space Center. But adjacent to that very facility, scientists have a much more terrestrial concern: how to preserve a once-thriving population of oysters, which are vital to the health of the state's most beloved waterways. Pegasus Professor Linda Walters and her Coastal and Estuarine Ecology Lab work to save the oyster population found in the Indian River Lagoon.

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, were published this week in ACS Nano, a journal of the American Chemical Society. “Initially my thought was to develop a fast-acting disinfectant,” said Christina Drake, a UCF alumna and founder of Kismet Technologies. “but we spoke to consumers — like doctors and dentists — to find out what they really wanted from a disinfectant. What mattered the most to them was something long-lasting that would continue to disinfect high-touch areas like doorhandles and floors long after application.” Drake partnered with Dr. Sudipta Seal, a UCF materials engineer and nanosciences expert, and Dr. Griff Parks, a College of Medicine virologist who is also associate dean of research and director of the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences.

Human-caused climate change—including increased extreme weather and climate events—is here, according to the recently released United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2021 report, but the best way to communicate the concern is still debated. A new University of Central Florida study in the journal Environmental Communication finds that this deadline messaging may be effective after all. The panel's previous report in 2018 was widely reported by media as setting a 12-year deadline of 2030 to turn things around and start reducing the planet's temperature before the Earth reaches a tipping point of no-return. This messaging was sometimes criticized, including by the 2018 IPCC report's authors, as causing people to feel hopelessness, despair and disengagement. However, a new University of Central Florida study in the journal Environmental Communication finds that this deadline messaging may be effective after all.

The University of Central Florida is teaming up with Orlando Health to launch a national study to see how well video game-based training helps children learn to use prosthetic limbs. Limbitless Solutions, along with Orlando Health Arnold Parmer Hospital for Children, will work with families evaluating how well video games help children prepare muscles for using bionic arms created by students and the Limbitless team.