Kendall Cortelyou, School of Global Health Management and Informatics Director, using the artificial intelligence-based drug overdose prevention system.
Courtesy of UCF Today/Natalie Fedor
A UCF professor is working to develop an artificial intelligence-based drug overdose prevention system that hopes to bring relief to communities affected by drug usage.
Dr. Kendall Cortelyou, associate professor of healthcare informatics and director of the School of Global Health Management at UCF, partnered with Project Overdose to create this system, which launched in 2025 across Florida.
DrugTRAC, the AI system, turns drug activity data into a trend-prediction system. The trends help community and healthcare leaders be prepared for spikes in drug usage, down to the zip code.
The goal of DrugTRAC is to reduce harm and anticipate life-saving procedures within a geographic location.
“With this line of research, I had the ability to impact the community today,” Cortelyou said.
When Cortelyou first started working with Project Overdose, she said, police officers were rarely carrying Naloxone, the drug that can reverse an opioid overdose. She said her early involvement entailed lots of community outreach with first responders to emphasize the importance of Naloxone as a life-saving tool.
“I literally get to see my research changing people’s lives every day,” Cortelyou said. “It’s the most fulfilling thing that I’ve ever done.”
Dr. Kendall Cortelyou, associate professor and director for the School of Global Health Management and Informatics at UCF, works out of the Dr. Phillips Academic Commons building at the UCF Downtown campus. Cortelyou launched DrugTRAC with partners Project Overdose and Social Innovation Technologies to help prevent community overdoses.
Rachel Jones
Cortelyou said the launch just before the Electric Daisy Carnival in November of 2025 allowed the team to notify the community of an increase in fentanyl presence along the Interstate-4 corridor.
Health care professionals and police officers were then able to have adequate supplies of Naloxone and community members could be more hyper-vigilant in knowing what they are taking based on live data, Cortelyou said.
Maintaining people’s interest, Cortelyou said, in the overdose crisis is still critical, and before the DrugTRAC technology was developed, drug data was only available from 12-18 months prior.
Within six months, the team aims to make DrugTRAC into a predictive trend model through the use of machine-learning algorithms.
Cortelyou said if there should be a spike in drug presence in any of the ZIP codes covered by UCFPD, the department would be briefed to better protect students.
“Make sure you know what you’re taking, and make sure you have Naloxone,” Cortelyou said as a final message to UCF students.
Craig Mora, AI entrepreneur and CEO at Social Innovation Technologies, developed DrugTRAC alongside Cortelyou. Mora said his role was developing the technology, but that the difficulty is making sure that the information is digestible.
“Kendall plays a critical role in translating complex toxicology data into meaningful intelligence,” Mora said. “Her understanding of substances, testing methodologies and public health context directly informs how we design and refine our algorithms, so the outputs are both accurate and actionable.”
Mora said his goal with developing this system, and the benefit of it being an AI model, is that it can learn the patterns drugs are likely to take and predict the trends.
He is hopeful the system can get to a point where it can predict these trends four to five weeks into the future — but at only nine months into the project, it hasn’t reached that point in its evolution.
“I have been in developing for about 25 years and have never found a way to give back until this project,” Mora said. “If we save one life, it’s all been worth it.”