UCF Professor Christopher Emrich, an expert in hazard science, social vulnerability, disaster recovery and community resiliency, has plenty of experience with hurricanes. He’s worked with FEMA and other federal agencies to identify vulnerabilities in communities affected by hurricanes and to develop resiliency strategies.

As part of UCF’s National Center for Integrated Coastal Research, Emrich conducts studies into planning for and responding to disasters.

Here he offers some do’s and don’t’s to help you get ready for hurricane season

The Do’s

1. Get flood insurance. If you do not live in a flood zone the average cost is $660 a year for $250,000 worth of coverage. One inch of flood water can cause more than $25,000 in damage.
2. Make sure you have enough supplies for seven days.
3. Start preparing as early as possible. Pick up an extra gallon of water every time you go to the grocery store until you have 7 gallons per person — 1 gallon per day for seven days. Or buy a WaterBob or similar product that will turn your bathtub into a storage tank.
4. Buy non-perishable foods that are full of protein, like peanut butter. Two tablespoons provide enough energy to get through a meal time during an emergency.
5. Get 5-gallon buckets with fitted lids from Home Depot, Walmart or similar stores. These are great for storing electronics, batteries, chargers, important documents, medicines and food. Properly closing the lids on these buckets also allows them to float.
6. Establish a designated shelter area where you’ll keep emergency supplies in your home so you’re not scrambling around to find them. Do not raid your supplies once you have them ready. You can use them and replenish after hurricane season.
7. Make an evacuation plan. Make sure you and everyone in your family knows where to meet in case anyone gets separated. Talk through the plan often so everyone is on the same page. DO NOT wait until an evacuation order is issued to create a plan. Failure to plan = planned failure.
8. Turn on emergency notifications on your mobile devices. Based on your location, new warning systems can send messages with weather updates, alerts and other useful information. These alerts can be more up-to-date than newscasts, so you should trust them for the most accurate information. Take shelter when instructed.
9. Keep an emergency escape tool in each of your vehicles. This may come in handy for cutting seatbelts or breaking glass in an emergency.
10. Check on neighbors, especially those who are elderly or need extra help before, during and after emergencies.

�ٴDz�’t’��

1. Don’t let your car’s gas tank get below half-full at any point during the summer.
2. Don’t think you know more than weather experts. Instead, listen to trained emergency management officials, meteorologists and other leaders whose job it is to keep you informed and safe.
3.  Don’t bother taping up your windows because it doesn’t reduce the risk of them blowing out. This is especially true for people living apartments. Plus, it will only cause problems when removing the tape.
4.  Don’t drive through flooded streets, even if you’re very familiar with the street. A few inches of water can move a vehicle. Sinkholes may also develop on flooded roads and you won’t be able to see them.

Resources

In the event of a storm, UCF will provide communication with instructions on closures, depending on the weather conditions pre-and post-hurricanes. Our priority it to keep you safe. All students and employees automatically are signed up to receive these messages, and settings can be updated via . A parent, spouse or other secondary contact’s email address also can be added, allowing them to receive the updates.

In the meantime, here’s some information we hope you find useful to help you prepare at home.

Florida Hurricane Preparedness Tax Free Holiday: June 1-14

Floridians can purchase qualified hurricane preparedness related items such as batteries and generators and will not be required to pay sales tax. This year the holiday is earlier to encourage people to plan early. Click for a list of qualified items.

Families with special needs are encouraged to sign up with the , which is a part of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, to get information about resources in preparation and during a storm emergency.

Personalized disaster plans are critical and .

Communicating with children about disasters can help alleviate stress. This website offers tips, games and age specific information for families.

Planning for pets is also important. Floridadisaster.org offers advice for pet and livestock management.

Emergency kits can make all the difference for riding out a storm. Do you have all the ?

The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season is estimated to be highly active. Projections suggest 24 named storms, with 11 anticipated to become hurricanes, according to The Weather Channel and Atmospheric G2. Six hurricanes are forecasted to become Category 3 or higher, presenting substantial threats to coastal and inland regions.

University and Personal Planning

At UCF, teams plan and train for hurricane season year-round. UCF’s Emergency Management team works hard to prevent, prepare for, manage and recover from a variety of threats to UCF, including severe weather.

��AV is a designated StormReady university through the National Weather Service.

In addition to the work being done at the central level, led by the Department of Emergency Management, we encourage all departments to evaluate their own hurricane procedures and staffing plans at this time, in advance of an imminent storm.

When tropical weather systems are threatening, Emergency Management is in communication with our local National Weather Service office in Melbourne, NOAA and the National Hurricane Center. If a serious storm or hurricane threatens our region, Governor Ron DeSantis and UCF President Alexander N. Cartwright have the authority to cancel classes or close campuses. UCF often does so in consultation with other area colleges, school districts and government officials.

We encourage students and UCF employees to put together their own hurricane safety kits and to create a plan with their families and loved ones should a storm impact Central Florida.

Prepping a Hurricane Kit

Knights should assemble a hurricane kit, which should provide enough essentials to survive at least three days. Kits should include:

• Water
• Nonperishable food
• Weather radio
• Flashlight
• First aid kit
• Batteries
• Can opener
• Cash
• Cell phone charge
• Identification cards
• Any necessary prescription medications

This year’s Disaster Preparedness Sales Tax Holiday extends June 1-14. This two-week tax holiday allows Floridians to prepare for hurricane season while saving money on essential disaster preparedness items.

How to Stay Informed

The UCF Alert text and email message system will be used to keep the university community notified of severe weather threats. All students and employees automatically are signed up to receive these messages, and settings can be updated via . A parent, spouse or other secondary contact’s email address also can be added, allowing them to receive the updates.

In addition to UCF Alert messages, details about any class cancelations, impact to services or campus closures will be shared on the UCF homepage, and @UCF and @UCFPolice on social media. Faculty members also are encouraged to post any changes to class assignments due to campus closures on Webcourses.

UCF has been impacted by hurricanes before, and we have been able to weather those storms while maintaining our strong commitment to academic excellence and student success.

While we hope for a hurricane-free season, it is always best to prepare and educate yourself in advance of a storm, especially in time such as now that requires extra considerations and flexibility.

Let’s each do our part by staying aware and prepared, and together, we’ll make UCF a safer place for all of us.

Often, it also means giving people a way to find closure. After the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people in Haiti, UCF Associate Professor Abdul-Akeem Sadiq worked with a team to figure out how to manage all the unidentified bodies recovered from the rubble.

“My colleagues and I developed a new strategy that involves taking photographs of the deceased, burying the deceased in shallow graves, and creating a numbering system that matches pictures of the deceased to their respective graves where they were temporarily buried,” he says. “When a deceased individual is identified by their loved ones through the picture, his or her body can be exhumed from the corresponding grave and properly buried or cremated. This strategy helps to prevent burying unidentified bodies in mass graves and making it difficult for victims’ families to have closure.”

It’s remembering that human beings are at the heart of disasters that motivates Sadiq, an emergency management expert who specializes in mass fatality incidents and in helping governments, companies, and nonprofits prepare for emergencies.

“I’m fueled by wanting to make a difference in people’s lives,” he says. “Most of my publications provide practical recommendations to public, nonprofit, and private organizations with the hope that if those recommendations are implemented, they will lead to a better society.”

Sadiq recently published a study that looks at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Community Rating System (CRS) program and why less than 5% of eligible communities participate. The voluntary program is aimed at reducing flood impacts.

“We found that a major obstacle to participating in the CRS is a lack of resources, like the staff needed to fill out the paperwork and apply to join the CRS,” Sadiq says. “So, we recommended that FEMA should provide free staff support to communities that are not participating to help them with their paperwork and application process. In doing so, we may be able to increase participation and reduce disaster impacts on communities.”

Sadiq’s career in emergency management almost didn’t happen.

“I actually stumbled onto the field of emergency management,” Sadiq says. “Initially, my interest as a Ph.D. student was in environmental policy and health policy. Unfortunately, I could not find an assistantship in either area. One of my professors, who received a (U.S.) National Science Foundation grant to study earthquake preparedness among organizations in Memphis, Tennessee, interviewed me and offered me a graduate research assistantship. This was how I fell in love with emergency management.

Today, he and a team of students are working on research related to COVID-19. The researchers are looking at managing mass fatalities during COVID-19 and how to promote community resilience during these kinds of global pandemics.

Sadiq, of Nigeria, joined Ů��AV in 2017. Previously he worked at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (a partnership between Indiana University and Purdue University) and as a research and policy analyst for various universities. He holds a doctorate in public policy from a program run jointly by Georgia State University and Georgia Tech. He also has master’s degrees in economics and business administration in addition to a �����������ǰ�’s degree in agricultural economics and farm management. He has more than 40 published journal articles, is a reviewer for several academic journals and is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences. In 2021 he was elected Chair of American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) Section on Crisis and Emergency Management. ASPA is the main professional association for the discipline.

Each year, the National Weather Service (NWS) WeatherReady Nation (WRN) requests each branch across the country to nominate a partner who has “shown exemplary efforts toward helping build a WeatherReady Nation.”

This year, NWS Melbourne chose to recognize UCF’s Emergency Management team for their efforts in promoting hazardous weather safety on campus, holding several weather-related exercises and participating and hosting several SKYWARN training classes annually.

“Ů��AV Emergency Management is incredibly grateful for the opportunity to work so closely with the NWS Melbourne,” says Ů��AV Emergency Management Director Joe Thalheimer. “The UCF Community and all of Central Florida are better prepared, safer and more resilient as a result of the collaboration between our emergency mangers and their meteorologists. Our team is really honored to be selected as this year’s Weather-Ready Nation Ambassador of Excellence.”

The recognition includes being featured on the National Weather Service’s website and shoutouts on NWS Melbourne’s social media pages.

The Emergency Management team has a long, successful partnership with NWS Melbourne, including renewing its designation as a StormReady university in 2019. The recognition will remain in effect until May 28, 2022.

The Department of Emergency Management prepares UCF by enhancing partnerships and coordinating all activities necessary to build, sustain, and improve the university’s ability to mitigate, protect, and prevent against; respond to; and recover from natural, technological, and human-caused threats and hazards.

Hurricane Isaias is forecast to move northward along or near the East Central Florida coastline Saturday and Sunday, bringing heavy rain and inland wind gusts of 35-55 miles per hour.

The Emergency Management team is in communication with our local National Weather Service office in Melbourne, NOAA and the National Hurricane Center to ensure the university has the latest information.

It’s always a good idea to have a hurricane kit ready for the season, which lasts through November. Include enough food and water for three days, and don’t forget medications, identification and a weather radio.

The #UCFAlert text and email message system will be used to keep the university community notified of severe weather threats. All students and employees automatically are signed up to receive these messages, and settings can be updated via .

Additionally, updates will be shared on UCF’s official social media channels, primarily Facebook (�����Ի���) and Twitter ( and ), and at ucf.edu

Let’s each do our part by staying aware and prepared, and together, we’ll make UCF a safer place for all of us.

The announcement comes after an exhaustive search. Metzger is confident in Thalheimer, who has led the department in an interim role since July 2019.

“Joe has done an incredible job since stepping into the role of interim director,” says Metzger. “Since then, he’s been handling his old job duties, along with leading the Emergency Management team during Hurricane Dorian, the coronavirus pandemic and preparing for the 2020 hurricane season. I’m extremely impressed by what he’s accomplished so far and can’t wait to see what ideas he has for the future.”

Thalheimer, who graduated from UCF with a �����������ǰ�’s degree in criminal justice, has been a part of UCF’s Emergency Management team since 2014, where he was hired as the first warning and communication coordinator. He was later promoted to the manager of Operations and Technology before assuming the role of interim director of Emergency Management.

He was a founding staff member and senior operations coordinator at UCF’s College of Medicine prior to joining the Emergency Management team.

From 2005 to 2012, he also served as the assistant security supervisor for the Orange County Convention Center, where he was responsible for physical security, transportation planning and emergency preparedness. While in this role, he represented the convention center at the Orange County Emergency Operations Center, which is where his love of Emergency Management started.

“I’m very excited and honored to be chosen for this role,” says Thalheimer. “Working at UCF has been enjoyable, thanks in large part to the people I work with. They make what can be a very stressful job fun, and there’s no where else I’d rather be.”

Thalheimer is the first in his family to graduate from college, and his oldest daughter is a second-generation Knight. When he’s not in the Emergency Operations Center, he enjoys spending time with his wife and three kids in their RV, watching any UCF sport, and cheering on the New York Mets.

“Emergency management is essential in the aviation world,” says Keila Walker-Denis ’07, assistant director of airport operations in emergency management for the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, which oversees Orlando International Airport and Orlando Executive Airport. “We demonstrated that we have a sound foundation for an emergency-management program.”

Walker-Denis, whose background is in emergency management, says the process was an opportunity to take the airport where it needed to be, especially now in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. “This event has further highlighted the importance of communication, cooperation, coordination and collaboration,” she says. The accreditation program used 64 industry standards to determine the top rating.

Her industry contacts — such as Osceola County Emergency Management, Orlando Health, Florida’s State Medical Response Team, the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange, and the Incident Management Team for Central Florida — have proven valuable in her current role.

‘We may not be the experts in any one area, but we know a lot about everything and where to get resources.’ — Keila Walker-Denis

“We may not be the experts in any one area, but we know a lot about everything and where to get resources,” Walker-Denis says.

The airport authority’s emergency management team has been assigned with tasks such as collecting and analyzing information related to COVID-19; ensuring personal protective equipment is provided to necessary employees; supporting local, state and federal executive orders; and a host of other responsibilities to maintain the safety, health and wellbeing of employees and passengers, Walker-Denis says.

Beyond the coronavirus, her role always includes a lot of planning and preparing, ensuring all teams and decision-makers at the airports work together effectively and communicate the same message.

“Once we identify what hazards we are prone to, the goal first is to try and prevent them. And if we can’t prevent them, the next step is to identify how to mitigate or lessen the impact to our operations,” Walker-Denis says. “Of course, our ultimate goal is to keep flying.”

Before her career in emergency management, Walker-Denis started at ��AV in the business program but switched to major in public administration because she was intrigued by the process that went into decision making during emergencies, such as for hurricanes when she was a child in Miami.

During an internship with the Osceola County Emergency Management Department, she participated in emergency operations during tropical storm Ernesto in 2006. Witnessing the controlled chaos of agencies, community stakeholders and departments coming together “ignited that passion, that flame,” she says.

“It all opened my eyes and ignited the fire I had back then to do what I do today. It’s truly a passion. It’s the best thing. It’s a very rewarding career field, mentally and emotionally, knowing that you’re able to make a change.”

Walker-Denis also serves on UCF’s emergency-management advisory board, which helps ensure UCF courses teach up-to-date content and expose students to the realities of the emergency management world beyond the classroom.

“Someone did it for me when I was in college, as far as that internship,” says Walker-Denis. “It opened my eyes, and I want to do the same. It feels right to do the same, to pay that forward.”

He began in the middle of hurricane season, just as the emergency operation center was activated in preparation for Hurricane Dorian. Now, he’s working full-time as a manager in charge of a team of 10, who spend their workdays contacting all the households in the county with confirmed COVID-19 cases and with individuals who are awaiting test results.

“Once COVID-19 started, everyone’s day-to-day roles and responsibilities changed into specific roles that were needed in order to respond to and mitigate the impact of the virus on the community,” says Acosta, who graduates this May with his �����������ǰ�’s degree in emergency management.

Acosta was promoted to emergency management associate in February, moving him from unpaid to paid intern. Not even a month later, after finishing an active shooter exercise at a local elementary school, the department learned of Seminole County’s first confirmed positive case of the new coronavirus, so the emergency operations center was activated again.

“I think the impact this experience will have on my career will be massive.” – Andres Acosta, UCF student

The activation means that everyone is assigned additional duties, some quite different than their normal roles, in an effort to cover all the needed areas for whatever the hazard or emergency might be. In Acosta’s case, the team realized they needed to set up a call center. Quickly adapting to the new position, Acosta was promoted to a managerial position after only a couple days; he now oversees the Well Check Unit and will continue to work for the department after graduation.

“I wasn’t planning to have him keep that position,” says Alan Harris, chief administrator of Seminole County’s Office of Emergency Management. “But he has done so well, we are keeping him.”

Every morning, Acosta arrives at the office by 7:30 a.m. He then organizes the call logs for the day, dividing up all the households by jurisdiction. The team calls all the households in Seminole County with confirmed cases of the coronavirus, households where an individual has been tested or has reported coronavirus-like symptoms to the Department of Health, and households where individuals may have been in contact with COVID-19 positive cases, explains Acosta. They call to collect temperatures, make sure the people in the household are okay and ask about their needs.

Thanks to partnerships with local nonprofits, the emergency management department is able to provide a box of goods to people who can’t leave their homes. The boxes are filled with nonperishable foods, gloves, masks and toilet paper. Through the Florida Department of Health, quarantined individuals are also able to get their medications delivered. In both of these instances, the packages are delivered to the household without any direct, physical contact.

In addition to these deliveries, the county offers animal care and childcare; county services will care for the animals and children until the person recovers from COVID-19. The team has even helped people find temporary housing, which helped protect the area’s homeless population.

“If there’s a person who is being affected by COVID-19 and they give us a call, we’ll try to help out as best we can.” – Andres Acosta, UCF student

“We say food, water, medication, animal care, and childcare, but really, if there’s a person who is being affected by COVID-19 and they give us a call, we’ll try to help out as best we can,” says Acosta, referencing delivering live crickets to one woman for her pet.

If the team doesn’t make contact with a household after three attempts on three consecutive days, a law enforcement officer is dispatched to conduct a wellness check, explains Acosta.

By the end of the day, Acosta double checks the team’s work to confirm that their system is displaying accurate information and the collected temperatures are sent to the Department of Health.

The team’s job is a mix of customer service and enforcing the guidelines of both Seminole County and the Department of Health. Although staying at home has been tough on many individuals, especially those who have been laid off, Acosta reiterates in his phone calls that these rules are for the benefit of the community.

“A lot of the phone calls aren’t easy. You just have to be very understanding. You just have to try to come from a position where they might be and understand that it’s human or normal for them to be really frustrated and stressed out,” says Acosta.

For some, the calls Acosta’s teams make might be the only human interaction they have that day.

“It’s very awesome to see that we’re impacting the community and giving people hope,” Acosta says.

Acosta says he’s always been passionate about helping others and making an impact.

“I want to help people, and I want to help my community. … It feels good to know what you’re doing has real purpose.” – Andres Acosta, UCF student

“I like being hands on. I like being in the field,” he says.

When a degree in civil engineering wasn’t panning out the way he thought it would, an advisor at Ů��AV pointed him in the direction of the emergency management program.

“Emergency management just became natural,” says Acosta. “I want to help people, and I want to help my community. I think the impact this experience will have on my career will be massive. I’ve been put in a real-life situation that none of us have gone through before. I’m super grateful for the opportunity I’ve been given, and it feels good to know what you’re doing has real purpose.”

“Because the program is so young, we can adjust the lessons to reflect whatever is going on in real time.” – Claire Connolly Knox, director of the program.

“Students are attracted to the program because they’ve been directly impacted by recent disasters — , the BP oil spill, the Pulse Nightclub massacre, and now the pandemic,” says Claire Connolly Knox, director of the program. “Interest has taken off almost exponentially.”

Both the �����������ǰ�’s and master’s programs in emergency management launched in Fall 2018. Initial projections of 20 students taking up the major by 2020 has been raised to 150 for the coming fall. And U.S. News and World Report ranked UCF’s MECM program No. 2 in the nation.

The first three graduates, and Knox, provide a wide-lens picture of who is at the heart of emergency and crisis management.

The Director

It takes only a few seconds before Knox’s passion for the environment can be heard clearly. A minute later, the Louisiana Cajun accent also sneaks in.

“Growing up in the coastal wetlands, I understood how fragile our relationship is with nature, and the impact it can have when it breaks down. The wetlands are the first line of defense against hurricanes.”

Still, she had no idea how bad it could be. While studying for her master’s in public administration at Florida State University in 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated her beloved Bayou State. The scrambled response became a series of tragic lessons learned — communication, collaboration, basic preparedness. The aftermath also kick-started Knox on a path that drew her to UCF, in a region with more than its share of crises and at a school willing to adopt new ideas.

“Because the program is so young, we can adjust the lessons to reflect whatever is going on in real time. That’s essential in this dynamic and complex profession,” she says.

At the moment, she and other program faculty are literally creating new teaching modules derived from the ongoing COVID-19 experience. The team in the MECM curriculum includes some of the most published and cited scholars in this discipline, as well as an advisory board of practitioners from every sector. Knox also points to a group just as valuable: the students.

“Something other than fancy titles and hats is driving them,” she says. “It’s their hearts. They make the program real because of their own experiences.”

The Security Specialist

Jaime Garcia first recognized a whole new world opening in his field of expertise, ironically the same day he had to close himself off.

On March 16, Garcia was thinking about graduation, job prospects, and finishing up his internship with the Osceola County Office of Emergency Management. At the door of the county building, he was asked if he’d been in any crowds the previous weekend. As a then part-time security guard at the Magic Kingdom, Garcia had. He spent the next 14 days in quarantine watching the news. What he saw and heard from Ecuador, where he was born and raised, only emboldened his reasons for pursuing his MECM.

“People were dying, the morgues were full, and they didn’t know what to do because there had been no planning,” says Garcia. “Here, even though I didn’t like being quarantined, I knew there was a good reason. The contrast proves why we need good people making decisions before and during a crisis.”

Garcia’s first lessons came from his father, a doctor. While many people in authority, including doctors, used their positions in Ecuador to hoard essentials and profit from them, Garcia’s father would drive into rural areas and distribute vaccines and treatments for free.

“He said helping people was always the right thing to do.”

As a teenager, Garcia coordinated a group of classmates to collect food and clothes for families following a mudslide. After moving to Charlotte, North Carolina, he took a group of security colleagues to deliver water to evacuees in the Superdome following Hurricane Katrina.

“We have so many blessings in the U.S., but that made me realize we can never take them for granted.”

All of these experiences led Garcia to enter the MECM program when it launched in 2018. “It’s a continuation of what I love doing,” he says. “We discuss how things are always changing and how to prepare for anything.”

At work he’s been in discussions about crises like water contamination or a second outbreak of COVID-19.

“We’re also preparing for the possibility of severe weather later this week.”

The Meteorologist

It’s 8:30 a.m. and Maureen McCann is in full stride. A meteorologist for Spectrum News 13, she’s already been on the air 20 times this morning to give weather updates. In the midst of Central Florida’s singular focus on COVID-19, McCann needs to find a way to alert us that, yes, a severe storm is a distinct possibility in the next 72 hours. Weather events pay no attention to lockdown orders.

“Our motto is, ‘Don’t be scared, be prepared,’ ”  she says. “That’s true in any emergency situation — the virus, the weather, a severe storm. The more I know about crisis management, the better I can communicate preparedness to viewers.”

“Watching the meteorologists on TV made me less scared,” she says. “I decided that’s what I wanted to do — warn people and calm them at the same time.”

After earning a �����������ǰ�’s degree from Cornell University, McCann’s television career led her around the country. Whether she was in Austin or Denver, something about Central Florida intrigued her. Specifically, the storms. When she moved here in 2013, she also had an unfinished master’s degree. The launch of UCF’s MECM in 2018 seemed fortuitous.

“I liked that it’s a fresh program and the instructors are willing to adjust so we can collaborate on real-time events.”

She and her cohorts have gleaned lessons from hurricanes Irma, Maria, Michael and Dorian. Even the meteorologist has had her light-bulb moments.

“I’m a scientist with an opportunity to communicate directly with people who will be impacted by an event. That’s a form of emergency management in itself.

“Another big takeaway is the need to network before a disaster, not during. My network has expanded through the program to include security, conservation, a first responder. The boots on the ground … that’s an interesting perspective.”

The Paramedic

Chris Goodson is catching his breath. He’s just finished a workout near his neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, and now he’s foraging for what we’ve all come to know in recent weeks as a PPE kit. A risk and safety specialist for Superior Ambulance, he’s waiting to find out where he’s needed next.

“I like to be on the move,” Goodson says.

He’ll transfer COVID-19 patients to rehab facilities or to McCormick Place, which FEMA has set up as a field hospital downtown. “The situation we’re facing isn’t one that I enjoy, but the chaos is putting my education into practice.”

His winding route involved uprooting from his home to enter a brand-new graduate program 1,200 miles away at UCF. “I’m glad I took the chance,” he says. “Leaders in Central Florida have been at the forefront of disasters in terms of coordination, action, protocols, leadership. I’d like to use those lessons here at home.”

Goodson grew up in “The Hole,” the most oppressive section of Chicago’s notorious Robert Taylor Homes public housing project. Gunshots became everyday noise. “Police might come or they might not. At some point I thought, ‘Chris, you could provide the help.’ ”

After high school, he completed two years at Eastern Illinois University before enlisting in the Army, spent time in Afghanistan, delivered aid to Haiti, helped the recovery following Hurricane Sandy, and eventually moved to Roseland in the south-side of Chicago as a paramedic. At UCF he learned about cultural competency as a central concept in crisis management. Back home, it’s more than a concept.

“Hospitals near my neighborhood are underfunded and understaffed. More black people are dying because of underlying health conditions, a lack of resources, and slow response. You have to know how things work at the local level to effectively help.”

Goodson plans to take a grant writing class to round out his credentials. In five years, he sees himself in a role with FEMA or a local governing body. But for now, he’s checking his gloves and mask. He doesn’t know where he’ll be 20 minutes from now. And that’s just fine with Goodson. He’s ready for anything.

“The new rankings reflect our focus on student success and faculty excellence and puts us one step closer to reaching our goal of becoming a 21st-century university committed to fueling the talent, ideas and innovation that will drive our community and state forward.”

The list shows the university’s upward trajectory in the number of programs on the top 100 list; there were 18 programs ranked in 2017. The rankings measure the quality of 800 schools’ faculty, research and students, and are based on peer and expert opinions.

“From our growing academic reputation to our successful athletic programs, the Ů��AV has made impressive gains over the last decade,” says Elizabeth A. Dooley, provost and vice president for academic affairs. “The new rankings reflect our focus on student success and faculty excellence and puts us one step closer to reaching our goal of becoming a 21st-century university committed to fueling the talent, ideas and innovation that will drive our community and state forward.”

UCF’s top-ranked program this year, Emergency and Crisis Management, tied for No. 7, above programs at Texas A&M University, American University and George Washington University. The program is under the direction of Associate Professor Claire Connolly Knox, who says the course builds on the strength of the faculty, advisory board and alumni who mentor students.

“Effective emergency and crisis management is vital for every community,” Knox says. “Since 2016, four hurricanes — Matthew, Irma, Maria and Michael — and three mass casualty events — Pulse nightclub, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School and Fort Lauderdale Airport — have greatly impacted Florida communities. There is an increasing need for emergency management specialists to expand their knowledge, skills and abilities through an advanced degree so they can more ethically manage emergencies and crises.”

The next highest UCF rankings are the Nonprofit Management at No. 8 (moving up from 12) and Counselor Education at No. 9 (moving up from 10).

Other programs ranked in the top 50 are: Optics and Photonics (No. 12), Elementary Education (No. 22), Public Administration (No. 23), Criminal Justice (No. 26), Industrial Engineering (No. 36) and Health Administration (No. 46).

Ů��AV programs with the biggest point-gain improvements this year were in nursing. UCF’s master’s nursing school ranked No. 61 overall, moving up 26 points, and the Doctor of Nursing Practice ranked No. 72, improving by 29 points.

Other programs in the top 100 are:
Computer Engineering (No. 52)
Communication Sciences and Disorders (No. 53)
Electrical Engineering (No. 53)
Overall best public administration graduate school (No. 53)
Materials Science and Engineering (No. 57)
Physics (No. 61)
Environmental Engineering (No. 63)
Civil Engineering (No. 65)
Mechanical Engineering (No. 65)
Social Work (No. 70)
Overall best graduate engineering school (No. 75)
Overall best graduate education school (No. 78)
Computer Science (No. 82)
Overall medical research school (No. 88)
Part-time MBA (No. 89)

This was the first time in the top 100 for the part-time MBA, which includes both the ��AV Evening MBA and the UCF Part-time Professional MBA.