UCF in the News

Guaranteed and dual admissions — under which students are accepted to both two- and four-year programs at the same time — are designed to smooth their paths. They usually include additional advising that many need to help them make the leap. This simple but little-noticed innovation is designed to fix a system that has stymied the ambitions of a staggering number of students — a problem that has only been getting worse. Amoni Hall just finished a two-year program at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, which shares not only a guaranteed transfer agreement called DirectConnect with the University of Central Florida, but also a campus downtown.

In July 2019, the asteroid 2019 OK came screaming out of the glare of the Sun where astronomers find it difficult to detect such small, faint objects, and passed within 45,000 miles of Earth while traveling at 5487 miles per hour. That's well inside the Moon's average orbit of around 238,000 miles. Despite the close call, 2019 OK didn't pose a threat to life on Earth, but asteroids like it one day could. That’s why scientists at the Arecibo radio astronomy observatory in Puerto Rico raced to make as many radar observations of the space rock as they could in the half hour or so it would remain in range of their antennas. They wanted to learn as much as possible about an asteroid that passed the Earth that closely and quickly. “It was a real challenge,” Luisa Fernanda Zambrano-Marin, a University of Central Florida planetary scientist who was at Arecibo in 2019, said in a statement. “No one saw it until it was practically passing by, so when we got the alert, we had very little time to act. Even so, we were able to capture a lot of valuable information.” That information is now published in a new paper in the Planetary Science Journal.

Florida colleges and universities are poised for a big year, thanks to two key factors: Gov. Ron DeSantis' Freedom First budget that includes $1.5 billion for state colleges and $3 billion for state universities; and the ongoing growth of corporate partnerships that provide a secondary revenue stream to meet local workforce needs. The University of Central Florida has its sights set on growing its financial impact. The college’s latest strategic plan — which covers 2022 to 2027 — includes goals to add hundreds of faculty members and grow its profile as a research university. To help fund those goals, the college will look at diversifying its revenue beyond tuition revenue and state appropriations — which often can be unpredictable — by increasing its endowment value from $201 million to $350 million and growing annual fundraising from $70 million to $100 million by 2027.

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.