UCF in the News

Most college students take a local job or relax during the summer. Not Megan O'Grady. The Cape Coral resident will again spend her break traveling for her cause. The founder and president of Blue Line Bears, which makes and distributes bears to the families of fallen police officers (including from COVID-19), will spend the time between her sophomore and junior years at the University of Central Florida participating in special events honoring local police departments and area families via a partnership with the national nonprofit Beyond the Call of Duty.

UCF women’s golfer Jess Baker made history Saturday winning the 119th British Women’s Amateur Championship, becoming the first in school history to accomplish such a feat. Baker won the event, which was played in Hunstanton, England, by defeating University of South Carolina golfer Louise Rydqvist in two rounds of match-play golf in the final round. “It’s an amazing feeling, just incredible,” Baker told The R&A, which organizes the event. “I can’t believe it." With the win, the 19-year-old junior from Newcastle, England, earned access to the AIG Women’s Open, U.S. Women’s Open and the Amundi Evian Championship plus an invitation to compete at Augusta National Women’s Amateur Championship.

UCF, the nation’s Space University, has signed an agreement with the US Space Force to assist in the development of space-ready technology and a flexible workforce. After numerous Space Force officials visited UCF in March, the two organisations recently inked an Educational Partnership Agreement (EPA). “We have a lot of strengths in areas that are of interest to Space Force such as modeling and simulation, engineering and interdisciplinary research,” says Grace Bochenek ’98PhD, director of UCF’s School for Modeling, Simulation and Training who led efforts to broker the agreement. “The EPA allows us a lot of flexibility so we can work together and help drive the kind of innovation that the Space Force is looking for while also developing an agile workforce that’s got the right stuff and is ready to go.”

The University of Central Florida Police Department held a training session designed to help identify and support young people facing mental health challenges. Educators, first responders and others who interact with youth took part in the "Youth Mental Health First Aid" course at UCF Downtown.

Lunar research is not only taking one giant leap—but two—as a team sends a spacecraft to a geological mystery and another grows plants in lunar soil brought back to Earth. As a team from the University of Central Florida is sending a mission to an uncharted area of the moon, researchers from the University of Florida worked with NASA to successfully grow plants in lunar soil. At UCF, planetary scientists Addie Dove and Kerri Donaldson Hanna will use $35 million from NASA to send a lander and rover to the Gruithuisen Domes, the dark volcanic plains on the side of the moon nearest to Earth. Spacecraft that have flown over the region show they are made from cooled and hardened magma—much like Mount Saint Helens here on Earth. “These domes are really of interest because their composition and shape are really distinct from the surrounding volcanic plains,” Donaldson Hanna said. “This uniqueness tells us that perhaps the moon was warmer for longer than we anticipated, and maybe there was even some water in its interior to help create those compositions.”

NASA has green-lit a mission to explore a region of the Moon never before visited in an effort to understand a geological mystery—and help future lunar colonists. The Lunar-VISE (Lunar Vulkan Imaging and Spectroscopy Explorer) robotic rover mission will cost $35 million and launch in 2026 to study the chemical composition of the Gruithuisen Domes, two mysterious volcanic features that appear to be made of rock hardened from cooled magma—possibly like Mount St. Helens in Washington State. “There’s potentially a treasure trove of knowledge waiting to be discovered, which will not only help us inform future robotic and human exploration of the Moon, but may also help us better understand the history of our own planet as well as other planets in the solar system,” said Donaldson Hanna, the principal investigator of Lunar-VISE, at the University of Central Florida.

On June 2, NASA revealed it is funding two landmark science projects under the umbrella of its ambitious Artemis Program. Artemis aims to send humans back to the Moon by the mid-2020s and, eventually, humans to Mars a couple of decades later. But to get there, NASA and its science partners must answer several fundamental questions about the Moon, including these two: What’s going on in the Moon’s interior? How can humans survive the harsh space environment? The Lunar Vulkan Imaging and Spectroscopy Explorer (or Lunar-VISE, for short) is a two-part mission consisting of a stationary lander equipped with a camera and a rover designed to study the Moon’s geology. “Most of the volcanic activity on the Moon happened billions of years ago,” Kerri Donaldson Hanna, a planetary geologist at the University of Central Florida and lead researcher on the project, tells Inverse. “But there is evidence in a couple of locations on the surface that suggest that there could have been volcanic activity maybe a billion years ago.” In cosmic terms, fairly recent.

Cincinnati, Houston and UCF will officially join the Big 12 on July 1, 2023, after reaching an exit agreement with the American Athletic Conference, the league and schools announced. All three institutions enjoyed tremendous success under the American Athletic Conference banner.

The University of Central Florida community teamed up with OneBlood Wednesday for a blood drive to honor the lives lost in the 2016 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. The blood drive was organized as the school marks six years since 49 people were killed in the shooting that also took the lives of UCF student Juan Ramon Guerrero and two-time alumnus Christopher Andrew "Drew" Leinonen. UCF Police Chief Carl Metzger was the first to donate in the blood drive that took place outside the UCF Student Union from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. Wednesday. “It’s important for everyone in our community to come out and donate because they’ll be saving someone with that donation,” Metzger said. “We do that to honor those in our community who lost their lives and it was a terrible tragedy.”