UCF in the News

A former University of Central Florida rower with epilepsy who won Lithuania’s first medal at the Paris Olympics on Saturday hopes her achievement will help motivate others with the disorder. Viktorija Senkute, who attended the Florida college from 2015-18, won the bronze medal in the women’s singles class. It was also the first medal for any Baltic country at the 2024 Paris Games. “This is insane, I still feel like I’m dreaming,” Senkute said. “It’s a very big day for Lithuania, for all Baltic countries and for UCF.

Over the past three years, holograms have become a vital tool for faculty teaching future healthcare professionals at the University of Central Florida. “We use the technology to engage our students to learn more in the area of patients' lived experiences to expose students to a wide variety of patient conditions,” says Dr. Bari Hoffman, associate dean for Clinical Affairs at the College of Health Professions and Sciences at the university. This takes the form of live beaming in expert speakers or having a hologram video taken of a patient with a rare condition, which allows students to see how these conditions present in the real world. It's an experience to which previous generations of students might never have been exposed. “The gap we're trying to close is how do we really train our students to be workforce-ready and to engage at a higher level as they're just coming out and entering into these clinical careers,” Hoffman says. Hologram technology, though still rare, is increasingly being used to teach students in various STEM fields at colleges, hospitals, and other areas in which professional training might be necessary. Modern hologram technology is not a true hologram 3D projection — instead, hologram devices, some of which can sit on a desk and others that are larger than a fridge, create the illusion of 3D people and objects. A person “beamed” into a large hologram display seems as if they are really in the room, Hoffman says. This provides a much more immersive experience for students than a mere video or Zoom-style call could.

A ribbon cutting event Saturday at Boston Hill Cemetery in Oviedo marked the official completion of a road repaving project which revealed a dozen unmarked graves. A ribbon cutting event Saturday at Boston Hill Cemetery in Oviedo marked the official completion of a road repaving project which revealed a dozen unmarked graves. The cemetery, noted by Oviedo as a significant part of its Black history dating back to the 1920s, was annexed into the city in 2023 after previously being under Seminole County’s jurisdiction. The annexation was some years in the making, following a request in 2021 from Oviedo Citizens in Action, Inc. and the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church to pave the road leading into the cemetery off of Alexandria Boulevard, the city said in a news release. According to RICHES, which is billed as “an interdisciplinary digital project that partners with multiple academic units at UCF, six Florida universities, and commercial and nonprofit sectors of the community” in order to document regional history and to develop new digital tools for historians, Boston Hill Cemetery came to exist amid the area’s rising need for a place to bury African Americans, who were forbidden from being buried in the town’s cemetery. Prince Butler Boston — the son of a Georgia slave owner, Dr. Alexander Atkinson, who moved to the area in 1885 — donated some five acres of land to the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church and made funeral costs free of charge, RICHES reported.

Jim Kingsley of Orange County (Calif.), who recently flew Southwest on a two-leg journey from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, likened the budget-friendly airline to In-N-Out Burger. Both brands are affordable, consistent and more simplistic compared with competitors, Kingsley said. “They’re not trying to offer all the things everybody else offers,” he said, “but they get the quality right and it’s a good value.” Change, however, is in the air. An even bigger draw of Southwest, according to Kingsley, is its policy of including two free checked bags per ticket. This perk often makes Southwest a better bargain, especially for longer trips or bigger groups, he said. The free bags are a big deal to customers, experts said, and contribute to the airline’s consumer-friendly brand. The airline hasn’t indicated any plan to change its bag policy. “Southwest has always had a really good, positive vibe,” said Alan Fyall, chair of Tourism Marketing at the University of Central Florida’s College of Hospitality. “It’s free bags, good prices and point-to-point routes. That’s what they stand for and that’s what people love about them.” Southwest’s change to assigned seating doesn’t mean it’s no longer a budget-friendly airline, Fyall said, but it does differentiate the carrier from the lowest-cost, lowest-amenity options such as Frontier and Spirit.

WKMG Lisa Bell talks with UCF Engineering Prof. Yang Yang, of the Nanoscience Technology Center, about raw materials, including lithium, used in batteries that could be causing a shortage in the supply chain, and are made outside the U.S. Prof. Yang provides advice to consumers about extending the life of batteries. “We still highly rely on some of the material,” said Yang Yang, Ph.D., associate professor at UCF’s NanoScience Technology Center. “Supply chain is still outside of the U.S.”

The University of Central Florida’s College of Optics and Photonics, or CREOL, is only one of six such engineering programs nationwide. CREOL hosted three week-long summer camps for students in 10th through 12th grade interested in physics and engineering. News 6’s Julie Broughton asked Dr. David Hagan, CREOL’s dean, to tell us more about what happens at the school.

The long-awaited return of EA Sports’ college football series happens this week, ushering in a new gaming era that reflects the changing landscape of college athletics and allows users to play as their favorite players. The game, EA Sports’ first college football offering since 2013, was developed in Orlando and, for the first time, will feature the names, images and likenesses of actual players at their respective institutions. Customers who purchased the deluxe edition or have an EA Play membership could play College Football 25 on Monday afternoon, but it will be widely released on Friday. Andrew Barr, 17, bought the deluxe edition and then for his first try played the University of Central Florida against cross-state rival the University of South Florida. The game exceeded his expectations. “The crowd reactions, hearing the band and the specific college cheers definitely makes the game very fun,” said Andrew, a student at Lake Brantley High School in Altamonte Springs. “Once I heard the band drums go off and the loading screen came up, it brought up so much joy and excitement.” Ben Noel, executive director of the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy at UCF and former chief operating officer of EA Studios in Orlando, said “pent-up demand” has fueled excitement for the release of the game this week. The academy is a partner with EA and plenty of its graduates are now company employees. Noel said several UCF students intern at EA Sports every year and some end up employees of the company also called EA Tiburon. “We’ve got over 100 of our alumni there at Tiburon and so obviously there’s dozens of our alumni that are on college football and Madden football both,” Noel added.

A fully constructed rover that was due to blast off to the moon next year will instead be dismantled due to budgetary issues, NASA has announced – leading researchers to question whether the space agency is truly committed to landing a crewed spacecraft on the moon in 2026, as it currently claims. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) was scheduled to be sent to the moon’s south pole in September 2025 to hunt for water ice. Equipped with a drill, the rover would have looked for ice under the lunar surface in multiple locations, including in some permanently shadowed craters. Phil Metzger at the University of Central Florida says the cancellation is a “very bad mistake” for NASA, especially in light of the agency’s broader goal to land humans at the south pole of the moon in 2026 as part of its Artemis programme. Plans to potentially use the moon’s water ice as a resource for rocket fuel could also be under threat. “Having a rover with a drill is an absolutely vital part of the mission,” says Metzger. “There definitely will be some effect on planning the human missions.”

UCF‘s football practice fields will be renamed the Wayne Densch Practice Complex in honor of a $2.5 million pledge from the Wayne Densch Charitable Trust. It’s all part of a commitment from the former Knights supporter and Orlando businessman, who passed away in 1994 through his charitable trust. “Mr. Densch’s handshake commitment to former Athletic Director Gene McDowell to donate $1M dollars to help save the UCF football team in 1985 is a key cornerstone of his legacy in our community,” John, Michael and Len Williams, trustees of the Wayne Densch Charitable Trust said in a statement. “Our father rightfully continued this legacy of support, and our family is honored by the opportunity we have to continue Mr. Densch’s generosity and dedication to UCF.”