UCF in the News

For the past month, our most beloved eye on the universe has been closed, blinded by a computer glitch that NASA experts are still working to solve. UCF professor Theodora Karalidi was scheduled for observations to begin just days after Hubble experienced its glitch.

Future residents of Orlando’s newest continuing care retirement community, Legacy Pointeat UCF, gathered today for an exciting visit to their soon-to-be homes with a parade-style event to celebrate “topping off” the community’s final building.

A flip in a natural moon cycle combined with rising seas from climate change will cause rapid and "dramatic" increases in flooding along U.S. coastlines by the mid-2030s, according to a NASA study. Thomas Wahl, a UCF engineering professor, says the report should be a wake-up call for coastal communities.

Luis Martinez-Fernandez, a history professor at the University of Central Florida who specializes on Cuba, said it’s been about 30 years since protests erupted on the island — and even those were not to the scale of Sunday's protest.

UCF Restores, a nonprofit organization that helps people with trauma-related concerns, recently traveled down to Miami to offer their support to first responders at the site of the Champlain Towers South condominium collapse.

At UCF, Reddick was an administrator who founded a program to bring educational opportunities to veterans. Reddick was the first Black man hired to teach at Winter Park High School. He was the first Black administrator at Rollins College. He was the first Black man from Orlando elected to the state legislature since the Reconstruction Era.

When philanthropist MacKenzie Scott and her husband Dan Jewett gave $40 million to the University of Central Florida — the largest gift in school history — last month, she offered a reason. Social mobility. UCF rates highly in that measure of higher education: Giving opportunities to lower- income students, underrepresented students and first-generation-in-college students. The nonprofit advocacy organization Education Reform Now ranked universities using data, such as the number of undergraduates enrolled with Pell Grants, graduation rates and student loan default statistics. And UCF was No. 2, just behind California State University-Long Beach. Institutions like that — elevators of social mobility and equity — became Scott's focus as she, one of the world's richest women, went on a philanthropic mission.

During the pandemic, U.S. theme parks made use of a wide variety of touchless technologies, such as mobile transactions and advanced ride sign-ups. Carissa Baker, a UCF hospitality professor, studied the implementation of these technologies during a research trip to 16 theme parks around the country.

Costas Efthimiou, a UCF physics professor, took a look at the stunts in F9 for Screen Rant. The professor was able to analyze the stunts through various F9 trailers and footage released online, determining just how realistic they actually are.