UCF in the News

Picture it: After years of fantasizing and months of planning, you finally arrive at the destination you've always dreamed about. Except, it's just not how you pictured it. You spend three hours in traffic just to pull into Yosemite National Park. The Venice Canal bridges are overrun with strangers scrambling for the same selfies. You can barely see Yellowstone's Old Faithful through the rows of people trying to get a good view. And beneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris, you are dodging tour groups and cheap souvenir stalls. "At the end of the day, there's roughly 8 billion people on the planet. In the next 20 to 30 years, there's going to be another billion people on the planet. A lot of those people will travel. Where are they going to go? Well, the same places as everybody else," Alan Fyall, the Visit Orlando endowed chair of tourism marketing at the University of Central Florida's Rosen College of Hospitality Management who studies sustainable tourism, told Insider. "There's a lot of people with sufficient money and time to travel, so it's not going to get any easier." "Instagram is really compounding the problem," Fyall said, explaining that social media is part of the reason so many people want to go to the exact same spot when they visit a destination. "Everybody wants to get that shot."

A statewide approach to supporting undergraduate research in Florida offers valuable opportunities for students to showcase their work beyond campus — and a model for other regions to replicate.

When Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015, planetary geologists expected a few dull images of a cold, dark icy body on the edge of the Solar System. But Pluto surprised everyone. What astronomers discovered was a complex dwarf planet with a surprisingly varied landscape potted with huge cliffs, deep ravines, enormous mountains all battered by a curious kind of weather with evidence of water plus much more. But the scale of this volcanic activity has been hard to pin down. Now Dale Cruikshank at the University of Central Florida, and colleagues, who have been analyzing the data from New Horizons, say they have found evidence of a supervolcano on Pluto called Kiladze.

University of Central Florida student Ben Briggs sometimes waits six minutes or longer to cross Alafaya Trail. Briggs, 21, majoring in emerging media, a degree blending art and technology, said he occasionally gets impatient on the opposite side of the high-volume, state road in an area where nine pedestrians have died in the past decade. “But I always make sure to just wait it out because of the stories I’ve heard,” he said. Those stories — of young people maimed or killed by speeding cars — have made him wary at the crossing and spurred Orange County with UCF and the Florida Department of Transportation to begin a $13.2 million safety project.

When it comes to missions to Mars, NASA has been on a winning streak in recent decades. Its Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix, Curiosity, InSight, and Perseverance missions have all landed successfully on the Martian surface, and we’re learning more than ever before about how to land on and explore the planet safely. The agency’s next plans for Mars, however, are a whole new level of ambitious. With a rocket firing its engines hard enough to take off from the ground, “the amount of energy that you have to blow out the back is gigantic,” explained Phil Metzger of the University of Central Florida, a launch pad expert who worked for NASA for many years. When that energy hits the surface of Mars, which is covered in a dusty material called regolith, the material being thrown up can cause serious problems and even damage the rocket itself.

About 5,000 Hispanic students graduate from the University of Central Florida (UCF) annually — many with bachelor’s degrees — and per the monthly magazine Hispanic Outlook on Higher Education, that makes UCF No. 4 in the nation in awarding four-year diplomas to Hispanic students. Hispanic Outlook released rankings Monday that put UCF among the top in the nation for Hispanic students. The UCF numbers are representative of the geographic area it serves and the nation at large, according to UCF President Alexander N. Cartwright. “UCF looks like the future of America,” Cartwright said. “We are proud to have the tremendous opportunity to help our Hispanic and Latino students succeed and fuel the talent pipeline for industry.”

A new partnership at the University of Central Florida plans to unleash the potential of Hispanic graduate students who want to become leaders in the tech workforce. Thanks to a $250,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the academic consortium wants to cultivate engineering and science opportunities plans to increase the success rates of Latino graduate students in stem majors. UCF wants to increase the number of Latinos in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) programs to raise the number of Hispanics working in tech around the country.

For the first time, a NASA mission is setting off on a distant journey to visit a metal world in our solar system. Getting up close with the asteroid known as Psyche is the only way to determine whether it’s the rare exposed core of an early planetary building block, according to scientists. “Psyche is something of the poster child of the M-type asteroids,” said Dr. Zoe Landsman, science adviser to the Exolith Laboratory at the University of Central Florida, via email. “Of a group of weird and mysterious asteroids, it is the biggest, weirdest, and most mysterious.”

Last week, the Orlando Sentinel published an article referencing a report that I recently authored (“Opioid overdoses fall in Central Florida for the first time in years”). This report detailed how overdose deaths in Central Florida declined 11% between 2021 and 2022, but this only tells part of the story. As a researcher deeply entrenched in the field of addiction and overdose, I have witnessed the devastating impact of the opioid crisis up close. In my role as a researcher, I am driven by a profound sense of purpose. The overdose crisis is not just a statistic; it’s a harrowing reality that demands our unwavering dedication. With medical advancements and harm reduction initiatives on the horizon, my mission is to contribute to the knowledge base that will save lives. I devote my efforts to educating and bringing awareness and expertise to help inform the public health response for prevention and treatment to save lives. I encourage others to do the same, get involved to prevent overdoses, and save lives. The media must play its part, shedding light on the magnitude of this crisis and pushing for the changes needed to combat it effectively. Together, we can make a difference and turn the tide on this silent epidemic. - Kendall Cortelyou is the interim director of the School of Global Health Management and Informatics at UCF.