With more than 200 participating funds and so many opportunities for inspiration, activation and growth — we’re counting down to liftoff by highlighting unique areas to consider supporting with your gift this UCF Day of Giving.

As Knights, we challenge status quo. We charge boldly ahead toward industry evolutions and technological advancements. We dare to build a future the world has only begun to imagine. And it’s all driven through moments like this and individuals like you.

Together, we’re launching Knights to new heights.

When the unexpected arises, help sometimes comes in the form of . Created to support Knights facing hardship that may hinder their education, this fund provides financial support for textbooks, fees and other education-related expenses for qualifying students.

Your gift ensures that when life’s trials test our Knights, they pass with flying colors, securing the education and future they deserve.

The  provides services, programming and resources for thousands of military-connected students currently enrolled at UCF.

helps ensure that those who have served and their connected students are fully supported as they pursue their educational and career goals.

UCF has been recognized with a Gold Award on the Military Friendly Schools list, as a Florida Collegiate Purple Star Campus, a Best Military-Friendly Online College and on the Military Times’  2025 Best for Vets Colleges List. Help us continue that legacy of serving those who’ve served.

offers an intensive, comprehensive therapy program to those navigating Aphasia, a language disorder that can arise from health challenges such as stroke, brain cancer and brain injury, and affects an individual’s ability to read, write, speak and comprehend language.

Through the program, individuals are empowered to make progress on their long-held goals, like talking with their grandchildren or ordering their favorite restaurant meal.

 on UCF Day of Giving supports the continuation of this important service for our community, as well as the hands-on experience UCF student clinicians receive.

Support UCF College of Medicine researchers as they break into new realms of understanding around the country’s second leading cause of death — cancer. Through innovative science, they’re exploring key avenues of discovery including the role that genes play in determining a person’s cancer risk, what causes cancer to spread and how to harness the body’s immune system to kill cancer cells.

The goal: to prevent cancer and find new therapies that improve quality of life for patients.  brings us one step closer to lives saved, families unburdened and a cure realized.

Did you know that UCF has one of the top Moot Court teams in the nation, ranking among the top 15 overall by the American Moot Court Association? Supervised by the , these student advocates are challenged with arguing mock supreme court cases on constitutional amendments.

and national leadership by making a gift on UCF Day of Giving. Help cover competition travel expenses, as well as the cost of the annual tournament hosted at UCF Downtown each fall.

It’s time for launch, Knight Nation! Join us as we rally around our favorite causes, and maybe even uncover some new ones, during UCF Day of Giving. Find more areas of support by ������ǰ����Բ����ٳ����, and save the date to  on Thursday, April 9.  

It’s graduation day. But not for the students.

It’s a commencement ceremony for their patients. In this case, four adults with aphasia — a communication disorder that can occur suddenly following a stroke or head injury but may also develop slowly from a brain tumor or a progressive neurological disease. June is Aphasia Awareness Month.

One of these four patients is Kyle Burke, a constantly smiling 25-year-old who seemingly knows everyone in the room.

He arrives at the ceremony in an orange Clemson ����ֱ�� T-shirt. In May 2020, he was enrolled as a student and celebrating the completion of final exams and making the dean’s list when the pandemic brought him back home. It was there that a skateboarding accident would leave him with a traumatic brain injury and an inability to speak, write or understand language.

His family found the — one of just a few of its kind in the country and known for its intensive and highly-personalized treatment.

“Kyle’s a young guy and I just thought, ‘what a perfect environment,’ ” . “This is what he needs. He needs to be out with a bunch of people in a college environment. And he was excited.”

In October of 2021, Burke began his first delivery of the six-week program at UCF.

On April 21, 2023, he’s completed the program for what marks his eighth and final time.

Thriving Through Therapy

“Kyle came to us with severe expressive and receptive language deficits making understanding what people said to him in speech and in writing severely impaired, as well as being severely impaired in his ability to express himself,” says Angela Ziegler, an instructor in communication sciences and disorders and licensed clinical aphasia educator. “He initially didn’t know many of the errors he made while trying to communicate because he couldn’t hear his own errors.”

Burke’s treatment plan called for working on expressive and receptive language, making sure he could accurately understand what people say to him and easily formulate into words what he wants to say to others. His program consisted of individual therapy administered four hours a day, four days a week for six weeks. His therapists: a team of trained student clinicians —aspiring speech language pathologists, operating under the close supervision of a faculty clinician and themselves approaching graduation from UCF.

Communication sciences and disorders graduate student Nathalie Espinal ’21 served as Burke’s clinician in the summer of 2022 and then again in the fall. She focused heavily on conversation-based therapy treatments.

“Originally, he didn’t know any of his clinicians’ names,” Espinal says. “He would recognize us, of course, and we had a relationship, but he had trouble with that recall. By the second semester, he knew all the names and was able to get our attention and engage in more verbal conversation.”

By design, therapy was conducted in settings Burke would expect to be in naturally, like cooking, playing games and socializing with peers. Espinal coached Burke in Response Elaboration Training, or RET, a therapy technique that allows a patient to make a simple statement, and with a therapist’s assistance, expand on the original statement into something much richer and deeper.

“We did a lot of therapy in open areas interacting with other people,” Espinal says. “He would have a conversation and say a few words that were maybe not grammatically correct, but we would build on that sentence and add more details to it.”

Progress was steady, says Espinal, who personally worked with Burke up to seven hours a week over a 12-week period and drew from common interests in therapy sessions.  Conversations covered movies, music and pop culture. Espinal also helped Burke improve his ability to use his phone to communicate with his friends.

“Initially, I worked with him on some ways to help him with texting some friends,” says Espinal. “He was using Snapchat a lot. We worked on spelling for texts and building his vocabulary on certain topics and areas of interest.”

“It genuinely felt like it was becoming a friendship,” Espinal says. “He was so adamant about working. He would ask about my life and my family, and we definitely bonded a lot.”

A Graduation Speech

The tradition at Aphasia House graduation is for the students to make speeches, sharing reflections on the progress of their clients and personal words of hope and encouragement.

On his graduation day, Burke also made a speech. He is the only one in his cohort of four to do so.

Since arriving, he has changed out of his Clemson T-shirt into a black polo shirt — the same one worn by student clinicians. It’s a graduation gift and a souvenir of his time at the Aphasia House.

His parents look on. The room is silent.

“Hi, I am Kyle. I have a brain injury. And I’m….I’m….phasia. I went to Clemson ����ֱ��, and I am from Greer, South Carolina.”

His speech is slow and deliberate. He uses his finger as a guide along the words of the paper.

“I love that Clemson won a bunch of football ACC championships.”

The room erupts in laughter.

He goes on to discuss his time at the Aphasia House. At times pausing. Sometimes reversing words. But the communication is clear.

“In the hospital, I cannot really speak or understand anything. Now I am…can talk and understanding the news, sports and TVs. I can read and understand song lyrics.”

“The students and I play mini basketball together. Watching movies…reading…talking and listening to songs is fun. Also, we had community outings such as bowling.”

He carefully acknowledges his parents, the students, their supervisors and — ever playful — his dog.

“Thank you for everyone helped me.”

Burke’s graduation speech is four minutes long.

Moving Forward

Research has shown that people with aphasia have higher rates of recovery when therapy is intensive, and at the Aphasia House, therapy spaces are designed to evoke a sense of home and belonging. The rooms are themed to help remind patients of favorite things: a garden room, a music room, a game room, and a garage room. Patients, students and faculty gather together in a working kitchen and a cozy living room.

“Our personal hope for Kyle is that he finds his way in this world that allows him to live well following a TBI and aphasia in whatever manner ‘living well’ feels for him,” Ziegler says.

Burke has set his sights on one day returning to school and driving a car.

“I want him to feel independent and successful,” Espinal says. “It’s so clear that he’s willing to put in so much work to get there. It’s only a matter of time before that ends up happening for him.”

Aphasia is a condition that stems from a brain injury, most commonly the result of an accident or stroke. People with aphasia may struggle with oral and written language, such as finding the words to express themselves. While all people forget the word they are trying to think of occasionally, this may be a daily struggle for people with aphasia.

The National Aphasia Association (NAA) estimates there are 2 million. Only 15% of the population know about the condition, according to a 2020 poll the NAA conducted. To the untrained eye, the symptoms are often mistaken for intoxication or an intellectual disability. Aphasia is neither.

Seva Reilly, a student earning her bachelor’s in communications sciences and disorders, took a theater class in 2020 and quickly realized the potential the performing arts could have on some of the families she works with at UCF’s . The house is a clinic staffed by UCF communication sciences and disorders faculty. Graduate students work as student clinicians and undergraduates may volunteer to work with community clients. Reilly is the president of the Adaptive Community, also known as UCF Aphasia Family. This is a free community group for individuals and their families living with aphasia.

“I took Professor (Sybil) St. Claire’s Theatre for Social Change honors course in 2020, where she introduced us to the Playback Theatre,” Reilly says. “I loved how Playback shared and honored the stories of the audience, and I invited them to perform for Aphasia Family. The collaboration has only grown since then, and I was thrilled to be part of (the production) Advocating for Aphasia and its mission to increase awareness of aphasia among first responders.”

St. Claire, a lecturer at UCF since 2002, was eager to collaborate. She introduced Playback UCF to the campus community and has worked with the group for years as the faculty mentor. The troupe performs improvisational theatre where actors listen to stories from the audience and play them back using theatre, music, and metaphor. Her class focuses on how the performing arts can be used to support positive social change.

“People underestimate the power of art to impact lives,” St. Claire says. “There is often a sense of isolation and loneliness with aphasia, and it was only exacerbated by the pandemic. Playback UCF empowered participants to share their stories and build community. That’s the power of art. It can bring people together and heal in a broad sense of the word.”

The troupe performs on campus and throughout the community during the school year. Throughout the pandemic they also found ways to perform remotely.

As St. Claire and Reilly began chatting, they added Sage Tokach, graduate student in the theatre for young audiences program and artistic director of Playback UCF, to the team. Soon they had a project they named Advocating for Aphasia: Using the Performing Arts to Raise a Conscious Community, which was funded by a Pabst-Steinmetz Arts and Wellness Innovation grant. The goal was to empower those with aphasia to self-advocate and to educate first responders about the condition.

That project culminated in a celebration called Aphasia Family Field Day held this past April at Lake Claire on UCF’s main campus. The day brought together UCF student volunteers, UCF faculty, stroke survivors and their caregivers, the UCF Police Department, and Playback UCF.

A key goal of the project was to create an educational video designed to increase awareness among first responders. The team, which also involved graduate students, including film major Sherry Dadgar and performance major Sterling Street, worked together to create an educational video to be shared with first responders and organizations devoted to advocating for aphasia. The video was completed in May and is actively being shared as part of Aphasia Awareness Month, which concludes on June 30.

Sharon Pierson, an Orlando resident who participated in the project, said she was happy to be part of it.

“It means that I can share my personal experiences and how Aphasia has impacted my life,” Pierson says. “Also, to let others know that Aphasia is not the end of the world. It does not mean we are not smart people. In fact, we are very smart. It’s just unfortunate that we can’t get our words out the way we want them to come out.”

St. Claire also is preparing journal articles with the faculty team from the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders (Amy Engelhoven and Lauren Bislick) and the Department of Psychology (Megan Sherrod) about the project and what was learned.

“Collaborations like these, are powerful,” St. Claire says. “I’m proud we could come together to showcase how art can make a difference.”

As for Playback UCF, they are taking a break this summer, but plan to continue to perform in the community, on campus and with UCF’s Aphasia House again.

A new UCF Adaptive Community Project is seeking up to 70 participants to join sports teams, a theater production and/or a choir adapted to fit the needs of neuro-atypical conditions. Participants can join as many teams as they’d like for free.

The opportunity is open to greater Orlando residents and includes sitting volleyball, wheelchair basketball, softball, acting and script-writing positions in theater, and a choir for those with acquired speech disorders. Each activity will have modified equipment, such as beeping balls for those with visual impairments to detect where the ball is by sound, costumes made for those in wheelchairs, and more.

The Adaptive Community Project is an interdisciplinary effort developed and led by UCF neuropsychologist and clinical associate professor Megan Sherod. Her goal is to give members of the local neuro-atypical community a new outlet to socialize and exercise.

“What’s lacking in the community is this type of resource and opportunity for people who weren’t born with neuro-atypical conditions, but who’ve acquired them through accident, injury or disease,” she said.

Oftentimes, those diagnosed with neurological disorders end up feeling socially isolated from the rest of the community, she said.

Sherod consulted with Robert Pritchard, a former UCF football player who while at his home in Georgia, that led to speech and physical impairments. He helped guide Sherod in developing the sport aspect of the project.

Like Pritchard, survivors of strokes, traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis, West Nile Virus and other life-altering events that led to neurological disorders are the target of the program.

Participants will practice once a week for at least a semester, and will work up toward a tournament, concert or live theatrical performance.

Practices and script writing will begin by the end of September, but participants can join at any time. For more on how to join, see:

Through Sherod’s outreach, UCF Psychology, Theatre, Music, Student Health Services, Communications Sciences and Disorders, Physical Therapy, Student Development and Enrollment Services, and the Recreation and Wellness Center have all chipped in space and equipment, faculty expertise or student volunteers. For instance, graduate students studying how to become speech language pathologists will assist each team with communication.

“Students who volunteer in this initiative will have a better understanding of how acquired neurological impairments are more than just a label or a diagnosis. It affects the survivor’s bodily functions, their engagement with family, friends and the community,” said Amy Engelhoven, a lecturer in Communication Sciences and Disorders and director of the Aphasia House at UCF.

More than 60 volunteers from UCF, including students, faculty and staff, are needed to help run the program. Volunteers of all abilities are welcome.

Jonathan Trufant, for instance, will volunteer as coach for the wheelchair basketball team despite having cerebral palsy.

“When I was a kid, I needed a disabled role model to show me I can function in society, too,” said Trufant, a UCF psychology student. “It’s super important to have people within your community to connect with.”

A grant from the Office of the Quality Enhancement Plan at UCF will help Sherod purchase adaptive equipment for the program.

It’s intended that the program will be offered year-round. Ultimately, Sherod hopes to enhance UCF’s partnership with the local neurological community.

Some 140 researchers and practitioners from across the United States and Canada came to discuss ways to serve individuals who have aphasia, a condition caused by a stroke or brain injury that affects two million Americans. Their focus was the “life-participation approach to aphasia” to help clients regain their speech and meet their personal needs and goals.

AphasiaAccess, a Moorestown, N.J.-based nonprofit that promotes the approach, sponsored the 2017 Leadership Summit March 17-18 at FAIRWINDS Alumni Center.

“The life-participation approach is a paradigm shift in how we think about the kind of life a person with aphasia can have,” said AphasiaAccess President Kathryn Shelley. She learned of the approach after her father had a stroke and she was desperate to find a way to help him.

“A lot of people who have had strokes and have aphasia are sitting at home,” said Janet Whiteside, director and founder of UCF’s in the Communication Disorders Clinic and an inaugural member of AphasiaAccess. “We believe it’s possible for people with aphasia to fully participate in life.”

Aphasia House was a perfect setting for the summit’s welcome reception March 16. The Central Florida Research Park facility offers therapy for clients with aphasia in a setting that simulates a home. Clients participate in therapy sessions in a comfortable living room, a spacious kitchen and thematically decorated rooms that evoke times in their lives and encourage communication.

For many of the summit participants it was the first opportunity to see Aphasia House in person.

“From the moment I walked in the front door, I was greeted with warmth and immediately recognized that the ‘house’ was welcoming, comfortable and perfectly appropriate for people with aphasia,” said Abbe Simon, a speech-language pathologist with Triangle Aphasia Project, a nonprofit in Cary, N.C.

“It’s thrilling to see it in living color,” said Elizabeth Hoover, clinical associate professor and clinical director of Aphasia Resource Center at Boston ����ֱ��. “Janet’s vision has been inspirational. You can’t exaggerate the influence she and this program have had on the aphasia therapy community.”

The summit participants also had an opportunity to meet Mark McEwen, a well-known CBS reporter who had a stroke and acquired aphasia in 2005. McEwen went through extensive speech, physical and occupational therapy to regain his speech and life. In recent years he’s spoken to clients at Aphasia House.

“You have to have someone say it’s going to be okay, that there’s hope,” McEwen said. “I want them to come away thinking, ‘If he can do it, I can do it.’ But you have to be stubborn and you have to stay focused.”

The reception launched two days of keynote presentations, breakout gatherings and poster sessions. Among the keynote topics were service operations and evaluation, client motivation in therapy, and using the media to influence communities. Seventeen roundtable discussions, 16 “share and care” sessions, and 39 poster presentations offered forums for the participants to present and learn about the latest strategies and activities that support life-participation therapy.

The schedule was effectively packed with content, but it also provided space for participants to build friendships and just be together, Shelley said.

Whiteside said she thought the summit was “synergistic.”

“It allowed researcher and practitioner to share collective thoughts to spawn new ideas,” she said. “It both energized and applauded the work of those who care for people with aphasia.”

Top two photos by Tim Berry/AphasiaAccess

Giffords was shot in 2011 losing her ability to speak. She resigned earlier this year and continues to recover.

Helm-Estabrooks, a national expert on aphasia, the loss of speech that results from a stroke or other neurologic injury, is consulting with UCF’s Janet Whiteside on the innovative techniques being used at The Aphasia House, a treatment facility at UCF.

The Aphasia House, one of only five intensive aphasia programs in the country, teams speech-language pathology graduate students with clients to work one-on-one for four hours a day every day for six-week to help improve their ability to speak after brain injuries.

The clinic, which resembles a house with a kitchen, garage and living room, provides a familiar setting. The rooms are decorated with photographs taken by some of the clients.

For the past two years, stroke survivors have worked with Whiteside and Dawn Roe, a professor of art at Rollins College to explore photography and help patients express themselves and their feelings.

“There is evidence that art helps in the rehabilitative process,” said Whiteside, chair of the Board of Clinical Educators at the UCF Communication Disorders Clinic.

Helm-Estabrooks is an advocate of using the arts as part of the rehabilitation process, which is why she is joining Whiteside in Orlando this week.

After visiting The Aphasia House on Friday morning, the two will visit the Albin Polasek Museum & Sculpture Gardens in Winter Park. Polasek was a stroke survivor and completed 29 sculptures after his stroke, many of which are showcased at the museum.

Whiteside is working with the museum to establish a pilot program that would connect stroke survivors to the world of art.

The facility will open its doors for tours from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m., Thursday, April 28.

The Aphasia House is located in the Research Pavilion at 12424 Research Parkway in the Central Florida Research Park in Orlando.

The event is free and open to the public.

The Open House will include a reception and presentations, beginning at 5:30 p.m, in the building’s main lobby. Among the invited speakers is Nancy Helm-Estabrooks, Sc.D., a nationally known expert on aphasia.

The Aphasia House was established in UCF’s Communication Disoders Clinic in July 2010.  To learn more, visit /news/new-aphasia-house-offers-innovative-therapy-in-a-home-like-setting/.

For further information about the Open House, contact Stevy.Weathers@ucf.edu.

A new facility dedicated solely to innovative therapy for individuals with aphasia, or the loss of speech resulting from neurologic injury, has been established at the ����ֱ�� with an anonymous $25,000 donation.

The Aphasia House provides speech-language therapy in a setting distinct from a typical medical office. Each room is outfitted to resemble a familiar space in a home, including a kitchen, garden patio and garage. The rooms are designed to encourage natural conversations. UCF graduate students studying communication sciences and disorders provide individualized and group therapy under the supervision of certified clinical faculty.

This is the only intensive program for persons with aphasia in the Central Florida area.

Approximately one million people in the United States, or one out of every 275 adults, have some type of aphasia, according to the National Aphasia Association. The most common cause is a stroke.

The facility is a dream-come-true for its director, Janet Whiteside, a clinical educator at UCF and Chair of the Board of Clinical Educators at the UCF Communication Disorders Clinic. Whiteside is an expert in her field. She received the 2010 Honors of the Association Award from the Florida Association of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists.

“As a graduate student at Vanderbilt ����ֱ��, I saw how effective the use of a home environment was during therapy for children who were deaf or hard of hearing,” Whiteside recalled. “I’ve always wanted to create that type of environment for clients with aphasia.”

She is equally pleased that The Aphasia House is also an educational facility, where students gain experience implementing cutting-edge therapies for the condition. It is conveniently located in the Central Florida Research Park’s Research Pavilion. The UCF Communication Disorders Clinic is housed in the same building.

Thanks to the donation, Whiteside brought the first group of clients to the house this summer. Four individuals with aphasia resulting from either a stroke or brain injury are participating in a six-week Intensive Aphasia Program from June 21 to July 29.

Research has shown that personalized intensive therapy is especially effective in treating aphasia, so each client spends four hours a day, four days a week working directly with one or more student clinicians. The goal of the program is to increase the clients’ communication skills.

Whiteside closely monitors the therapy sessions, noting the clients’ progress and ways to adjust the therapies, which she shares with the students. She and the students also keep the clients and their family members well-informed by providing them with a copy of the protocol and explaining what is being done and why.

The Intensive Aphasia Program will be conducted six times a year in The Aphasia House. Whiteside is currently interviewing stroke survivors for the next session, which runs from Aug. 30 to Oct. 8. Treatment is not free, but the facility takes Medicare and will work with participants to fill out the paperwork for reimbursement.

The donation will help pay for running the intensive programs, education for those working at The Aphasia House and consultation with experts “to help us become the premier facility of its kind in the nation,” Whiteside said.

Those interested in learning more about the program at The Aphasia House may call 407-882-0468 or email www.ucfspeechlanguagetherapy.com for more information.

Approximately 1 million people in the U.S., or one out of every 275 adults, have some type of aphasia, according to the National Aphasia Association. The most common cause is a stroke.

The Aphasia House provides speech-language therapy in a setting different from a typical medical office. Each room is outfitted to resemble a familiar space in a home, including a kitchen, garden patio and garage, and is designed to encourage natural conversations, according to a UCF release. UCF graduate students, studying communication sciences and disorders, will provide individualized and group therapy under the supervision of certified clinical faculty.

The facility is located in the Central Florida Research Park’s Research Pavilion with the UCF Communication Disorders Clinic. The facility director is Janet Whiteside, a clinical educator at UCF and chair of the board of clinical educators at the UCF Communication Disorders Clinic.

An intensive aphasia program, which aims to increase clients’ communication skills, will be conducted six times a year in The Aphasia House. Treatment is not free, but the facility takes Medicare and will work with participants to fill out the paperwork for reimbursement.

Source: Orlando Business Journal, , July 14, 2010