UCF in the News

As the COVID pandemic took hold in March 2020, Valerie Contreras lost her jobs as a Disney hotel concierge and server at a Kissimmee restaurant, both within five days. Like her fellow students at UCF’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management, 25-year-old Contreras from Mesa, Ariz., worried about the future of the hospitality industry and her career prospects within it. But in October, she landed a year-long salaried internship with the Four Seasons Hotel in Atlanta through networking at Rosen. She starts it later this month. Despite hospitality jobs remaining below pre-pandemic levels, the 315 undergraduate students who graduated from Rosen in December reported around a 95% expected employment rate by their commencement. Alan Fyall, associate dean of academic affairs at Rosen, said the employment figures for fall 2021 graduates have been “excellent.” He said the college’s data shows recent graduates are working around 30 hours per week, on average. Additionally, 60% of them are working for companies they interned with while at Rosen, he said.

On Wednesday, the Journal of Infectious Diseases published a study from researchers at the University of Central Florida that found face masks could cut the distance that COVID-19 spreads by more than half the distance. UCF researchers found that standing three feet apart with a mask is safer than social distance six feet apart without one. “We’ve been finding that the CDC guidelines, the recommendation of six feet social distance could be further to three feet or even two or one feet on the condition that masks are being worn,” the study's co-author Bernhard Stiehl said. “It’s a very big deal because the CDC keeps revising guidelines.”

As the space industry continues to soar, it’s being filled with homegrown talent. Thanks to a NASA Pathways Internship program, a recent UCF graduate is going straight from the classroom to managing Kennedy Space Center’s 3D-printing center for space missions. Since 2016, 47 UCF students have interned in the program and earned full-time employment at Kennedy Space Center.

For many Americans who witnessed the attack on the Capitol last Jan. 6, the idea of mobs of people storming a bedrock of democracy was unthinkable. For the data scientists who watched it unfold, the reaction was a little different: We’ve been thinking about this for a long time. The sentiment comes from a small group working in a cutting-edge field known as unrest prediction. The group takes a promising if fraught approach that applies the complex methods of machine-learning to the mysterious roots of political violence. Centered since its inception a number of years ago on the developing world, its systems since last Jan. 6 are slowly being retooled with a new goal: predicting the next Jan. 6. “We now have the data — and opportunity — to pursue a very different path than we did before,” said Clayton Besaw, who helps run CoupCast, a machine-learning-driven program based at the University of Central Florida that predicts the likelihood of coups and electoral violence for dozens of countries each month.

Thomas Cavanagh, vice provost for digital learning at the University of Central Florida, oversees the highly regarded UCF Online platform and takes issue with assertions that in-person learning is superior. UCF Online has a 25-year history and offers more than 100 online programs to about 6,600 students who are not able to attend in person. Additionally, 75 percent of UCF’s 70,000 in-person students also take at least one online course. Cavanagh sees the increasing use of rhetoric diminishing online education as the result of “pent-up demand” for normalcy and the social aspects of in-person education, particularly for students who sought an in-person experience and had online learning foisted on them because of the pandemic. But he said that rhetoric is simply inaccurate. “I don’t think any particular modality is superior or inferior based just on modality,” he said. “It’s all based on design and faculty engagement.”

A team of scientists wants Pluto classified as a planet again — along with dozens of similar bodies in the solar system and any found around distant stars. The call goes against a controversial resolution from 2006 by the International Astronomical Union that decided Pluto is only a “dwarf planet” — but the researchers say a rethink will put science back on the right path. But a study announced in December from a team of researchers in the journal Icarus now claims the IAU’s definition was based on astrology — a type of folklore, not science — and that it’s harming both scientific research and the popular understanding of the solar system. “We think there’s probably over 150 planets in our solar system,” said Philip Metzger, the study’s lead author and a planetary physicist at the University of Central Florida.

Only 37 places in the U.S. offer focused ultrasound technology to treat essential tremor and tremor-dominant Parkinson’s disease, according to the Focused Ultrasound Foundation, including two added to Central Florida this year at HCA Healthcare’s University of Central Florida Lake Nona Medical Center and AdventHealth Celebration. The UCF Lake Nona Medical Center is booked until February as people flock to these two Central Florida medical centers from across the country.

More than 95-percent of fall 2021 Rosen College graduates have secured employment following commencement. The percentage is part of a dramatic turnaround that is due to Rosen’s efforts to help students through the pandemic recession. One fall graduate, Valerie Contreras, will be entering a year-long salaried internship program with Four Seasons.

NASA's research focus on sustainable aviation will get some big help from teams of university faculty and students recently selected to participate in the agency's University Leadership Initiative (ULI). ULI gives the academic community an opportunity to support NASA's aeronautical research goals and provide students with valuable experience in solving real-world technical challenges. "Aviation of the future has to be climate friendly to keep the world flying, and a great way to do that is to allow tomorrow's top minds to begin making contributions to these goals while still in school," said Koushik Datta, ULI project manager. Three of the four teams are working toward lowering or eliminating aircraft emissions, with each team approaching the problem from a slightly different perspective. The fourth team's autonomy research is in support of NASA's Advanced Air Mobility campaign. A total of four teams were selected for final negotiations that could lead to awards of up to $31.5 million during the next five years. The University of Central Florida team will explore using liquid ammonia as fuel for a jet engine and generating electricity from the engine’s exhaust heat, reducing emissions, and saving on fuel. Team members include Georgia Tech, Purdue University, Boeing, GE Research, ANSYS, Southwest Research Institute, and the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority.