UCF in the News

The University of Central Florida (UCF) and Nemours Children’s Hospital jointly announced a significant partnership on Wednesday to train future pediatric doctors. The partnership will address a projected shortage of physicians across Florida by 2035. Since UCF’s College of Medicine was established in 2007, medical students have gained invaluable hands-on experience at Nemours Children’s Health, progressing from students to residents and pediatricians on the hospital floor.

Beyond thrilled to welcome Deputy Chief Robin Griffin-Kitzerow into Results-1 today. She joined UCF Police as deputy chief in March 2022 as the highest-ranking woman in the agency's history. Prior to UCF, she served the residents of Palm Beach County in several law enforcement capacities dating back to 1987, where she spent nearly three years as deputy chief at Florida Atlantic University Police Department and 20 years with the Palm Beach County School District. Griffin-Kitzerow is particularly passionate about school safety and threat management.

Years of hard work led up to the opening of a long-awaited envelope at the University of Central Florida Friday. It was Match Day, the day when medical students learned where they'll be spending the next few years of their life in a residency program.

It happens to every woman and there’s no way of stopping it! Menopause causes women to gain weight, break out in sweat and most importantly, it contributes to bone loss. Now, a new drug may be a gamechanger for older women who are going through menopause. The three biggies when it comes to menopause: brittle bones, weight gain and hot flashes! Biomedical engineer at University of Central Florida, Melanie Coathup, PhD said, “With the brittle bones, that is a significant concern, and also, the weight gain as well.” Coathup’s research is targeting the first two. “There’s some kind of connection, I think, between bone and fat that’s gradually becoming more and more interesting,” she added. One in 10 women over the age of 60 is affected by osteoporosis and research shows that up to 20 percent of bone loss happens during menopause. Osteoporosis is related to over-activity of bone-absorbing cells in the body. Coathup’s team found that a drug now being called P7C3 stopped these cells from being overactive, reduced inflammation, and drove stem cells to form bone tissue. Not only that, but as an extra benefit. Coathup said, “What was remarkable with our animals was that they were not putting on this fat weight gain, they were remaining quite slim.”

We are economic nerds here at Marketplace, certified federal Reserve fan-followers, so we get pretty excited when the Fed releases its Beige Book. That publication comes out eight times a year, two weeks before each meeting of the central bank’s monetary policymaking committee. The latest one came out Wednesday. The Beige Book has reports on economic conditions from the Fed’s 12 regional banks, with comments from community bankers, real estate brokers, farm-implement suppliers — you name it. Farther south and east, Sean Snaith directs the Institute for Economic Forecasting at the University of Central Florida. “Many were certain that there would be a recession,” he said. “There’s nothing resembling a recession right now happening in Florida, quite the opposite.” Tourism is strong across the region, which is Fed District 6. Consumers, though, are stretched. “We’re expecting some slowing in Florida’s economy because of the erosion of household budgets. But the strength in the labor market is allowing people to at least come up and get their head above water,” Snaith said.

When the robotic lander Odysseus last month became the first U.S.-built spacecraft to touch down on the moon in more than 50 years, it toppled over at an angle. That limited the amount of science it could do on the lunar surface, because its antennas and solar panels were not pointed in the correct directions. Just a month earlier, another spacecraft, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, sent by the Japanese space agency, had also tipped during landing, ending up on its head. Philip Metzger, a former NASA engineer who is now a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, explained the math and the physics of why it is more difficult to remain standing on the moon. “I’ve actually gone through calculations, and it’s really scary,” Metzger said last week on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter. “The side motion that can tip a lander of that size is only a few meters per second in lunar gravity.” (One meter per second is a bit more than 2 mph.) Odysseus was supposed to land vertically with zero horizontal velocity, but because of problems with the navigation system, it was still moving sideways when it hit the ground. Dr. Metzger’s calculations suggested that for a spacecraft like Odysseus, the landing legs need to be splayed about two and a half times as wide on the moon as on the Earth to counteract the same amount of sideways motion. If, for example, six feet wide were enough for landing on Earth at the maximum horizontal speed, then the legs would have to be 15 feet apart in order not to tip on the moon at the same sideways speed. For simplicity of design, the landing legs of Odysseus did not fold up, and the diameter of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that lifted it to space limited how wide the landing legs could spread out.“So, on the moon, you have to design to keep the sideways velocities very low at touchdown, much lower than you would if landing the vehicle in Earth’s gravity,” Dr. Metzger wrote on X.