UCF researchers including professors Romain Gaume and Yongho Sohn are working on projects funded by grants from the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program. The University of Central Florida earned five research grants this week worth nearly $2 million from DURIP, placing UCF among the top three university award recipients in the nation. Awards totaling $39.9…

Graduate students Le Zhou and Shashank Saraf have been awarded UCF’s Graduate Research Excellence Fellowship. The UCF College of Graduate Studies presents the fellowship annually to outstanding graduate students who have excellent research backgrounds and proposals for the thesis or dissertation phase of their graduate degree programs. The fellowship is a supplement to the students’…

UCF students won two poster awards at the 225th Electrochemical Society Meeting in Orlando. The competition was highly competitive, and, after several rounds of judging, only 4 awards were presented among 84 posters from presenters around the country and abroad. The following UCF students and faculty were honored: 1st Place, Solid State “Room temperature hydrogen…

Ph.D. candidate Swetha Barkam is a winner of the 2013-2014 SGA Campus Student Involvement Scholarship. The $250 award is presented to outstanding students who demonstrate exceptional involvement in the UCF community. Swetha is a member of Dr. Sudipta Seal’s research group. Her research focus includes interaction and application of nanoparticles in biology. Swetha previously won…

People have dreamed about the possibility of invisibility for centuries. It’s the subject of countless books and Hollywood movies, but is the real thing really possible? Researchers at the University of Central Florida may be on the cusp of creating a type of invisibility. FOX 35’s Tom Johnson takes you inside Dr. Debashis Chanda’s Nano-Optics…

Controlling and bending light around an object so it appears invisible to the naked eye is the theory behind fictional invisibility cloaks. It may seem easy in Hollywood movies, but is hard to create in real life because no material in nature has the properties necessary to bend light in such a way. Scientists have…

The new nanotechnology master’s degree offered by the University of Central Florida will have a “huge economic impact” on Central Florida, said Sudipta Seal, the director of the Nanoscience Technology Center and the Advanced Materials Processing & Analysis Center at UCF. UCF’s board of trustees on March 27 approved a new nanocscience technology master’s degree…

The UCF Board of Trustees Thursday approved a new interdisciplinary professional science master’s degree program that will expand UCF’s offerings in the rapidly growing field of nanotechnology. Nanoscience and nanotechnology are the study of extremely small things — detectable only with very strong microscopes — and how they can be used in a variety of…

Nanoprinting techniques from Jayan Thomas’s research group are currently featured on the IEEE Spectrum homepage. Thomas’s team has developed a technique that produces highly ordered nanoelectrodes without the need for templates or expensive tools. The result appears to be a supercapacitor with a significantly higher energy storage capacity. Thomas believes that this process may lead…

Dr. Richard Blair’s groundbreaking technique for producing graphene is featured in the Orlando Business Journal. Graphene is an ultra-thin derivative of graphite that can be added to rubbers, plastics and metal to make the materials lighter and stronger. It also is a conductor of electricity. Previously, the manufacture of graphene was prohibitively expensive and created…