Alumni

Soarce’s path to revolutionizing the world of material science grew from the ashes of a blown-up rocket experiment while Derek Saltzman ’23 and Mason Mincey ’23 were still engineering students at UCF. They had been tasked in a semester-long class assignment to build a carbon fiber rocket that would successfully carry the professor’s payload. While their design may…

Helicon Chemical Company, a company using UCF’s Business Incubation Program and founded by David Reid ’12PhD, was awarded a $1.9 million Tactical Funding Increase contract in May from the U.S. Air Force to accelerate its enhanced-performance solid rocket propellant research and production. Helicon is the second company to have been awarded a Tactical Funding Increase Contract while…

The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded a Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) Phase II award for $1 million to Kismet Technologies to further its research and development of a broad-spectrum residual antimicrobial technology that eradicates COVID-19 among other bacteria and viruses. The company, led by UCF materials science and engineering alumna Christina Drake ’07PhD,…

As an undergraduate student in Professor Raj Vaidyanathan’s Structures and Properties of Materials course, Othmane Benafan ‘08, ‘09MS, ‘12PhD became fascinated with the concept of metals with memory. The idea conjured up images of the shape-shifting T-1000 android assassin from Terminator. The intrigued mechanical engineering major had to learn more, so he joined Vaidyanathan’s research group. More…

Seven University of Central Florida graduate students are currently interning at Adobe and 3M, among other leading employers thanks to fellowships supported by the National Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering Fellowship (GEM) program. The GEM program began in 1976. The public-private partnership aims to connect students from underrepresented groups with the nation’s top employers…