March 2020
Featured Article
Host University Spotlight: University of Central Florida
By: Zhihua Qu, Professor and Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Computing, University of Central Florida
The University of Central Florida welcomes you to beautiful Orlando, the host city of the 2020 ECEDHA Annual Conference and ECExpo. UCF is thrilled to co-host this event with our partner universities in the sunshine state.
Founded in 1963, UCF is a public research university located in metropolitan Orlando, the heart of one of the nation’s fastest growing economies and top regions for job growth.
Major industries in Orlando and the central Florida region include aviation, aerospace, defense, modeling and simulation, renewable energy, advanced manufacturing, turbomachinery, agriculture, biomedicine, entertainment, hospitality and tourism.
As one of six departments in the University of Central Florida’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, the UCF Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is uniquely positioned to provide the highest quality engineering education to our 1,900+ students that is enhanced with abundant opportunities for real-world experiences in internships, jobs and research projects.
UCF’s ECE Department is housed in the L3Harris Engineering Center, a modern, 113,866 square-foot facility. Our faculty are members and fellows of prestigious professional societies, including the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, IEEE, AAAS, American Society of Engineering Education, and more. Zhihua Qu, SAIC Endowed Professor and Chair, has led the department since 2010.
Our students benefit from the close proximity of hundreds of companies nearby. Central Florida Research Park, the nation’s 7th largest with close to 150 companies, and 10,000 employees, is adjacent to UCF’s main campus. And Florida’s Space Coast, home to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and an expanding list of newer commercial space companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, are an hour’s drive from UCF’s main campus.
The University of Central Florida is one of the nation’s top producers of engineers, and is the nation’s no. 1 workforce supplier to the aerospace and defense industry. UCF supplies more employees to Lockheed Martin, Siemens and L3Harris Technologies than any other university globally. Our ECE graduates represent a significant component of this critical workforce pipeline, with 1,680 undergraduate students (896 computer engineering and 784 electrical engineering); 59 master’s students and 173 ECE doctoral students enrolled.
Robust Industry Partnerships
The UCF College of Engineering and Computer Science deeply values its strong partnerships with industry, including Lockheed Martin, Siemens, L3Harris Technologies, Northop Grumman, Texas Instruments, Leidos, Duke Energy, Orlando Utilities Commission, Mitsubishi Power Systems, NASA, Advent Health, and many more.
UCF’s industry partnerships fuel innovation, propel ideas forward, and provide students with endless opportunities for hands-on learning and research experiences.
A perfect example is the Siemens Digital Grid Lab, a state-of-the-art facility located in the L3Harris Engineering Center. This nationally unique lab space is equipped with the same cutting-edge technology used by many private and public utilities to manage the nation’s power systems. Longtime partners UCF and Siemens opened the lab in 2018 to produce the next generation of engineers to modernize the nation’s energy grid. Students get hands-on training with real-world software and hardware to design and manage self-healing power-distribution grids to quickly recover from outages; and to manage and operate dynamic generation assets such as solar, wind power and electric vehicles.
And in 2019, the Lockheed Martin Cyber Innovation Lab opened its doors to provide hundreds of cyber security students a dedicated space to learn and practice and ultimately supply a skilled workforce to the high-growth field. UCF is home to the highly-decorated Cyber Defense Competition Team, also known as Hack@UCF, with 250 student members, many of whom are ECE students. The club’s successful competition record includes four national championships in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018.
UCF’s ECE Research
UCF is a leader in smart-grid energy research and education, and an integral partner in the nation’s critical effort to modernize grid technology and educate the smart grid workforce. The U.S. Department of Energy recently awarded UCF and project partners two awards of $3.75 million each to develop automatic grid-forming inverter controls and secure autonomous building technologies that will keep the nation’s power grid operations resilient and secure, particularly as solar and other distributed energy resources increasingly supply power to the grid and buildings. Since August 2019, our power and energy system research cluster has received over 12 million dollars of federal funding, plus collaborative research projects and support from Duke Energy, Orlando Utilities Commission, Siemens, Florida Power & Light, and GE.
In addition to power and energy systems, our students work with distinguished faculty on a variety of focus areas, including smart sensors, antenna and RF, radar and navigation systems, computer systems, hardware security, and wireless networks.