Pegasus Professors are selected by the president and provost and are recognized for excellence in the teaching, research and service. This year’s honorees include innovative researchers who have not only made a difference at UCF, but nationally and internationally.

Stephen Fiore’s classrooms and cognitive science gatherings have birthed hundreds of ideas for dissertations, publications, research projects and even apps, in settings he calls “anti-disciplinarian.”

Jane Gibson is a medical geneticist and molecular pathologist who uses genomic technology to improve patient diagnostics and treatment, and shares a career of knowledge with the next generation of medical professionals.

Jennifer Kent-Walsh built a center from the ground up at UCF to help people of all ages who live with barriers caused by communication disorders.

Marianna Pensky opened new doors 28 years ago as the first woman faculty in UCF’s Department of Mathematics, and has influenced the field through research and mentorship.

The four professors will be recognized Wednesday during the Founders’ Day Faculty Honors Celebration from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. in the Student Union Pegasus Ballroom.

Stephen Fiore

Professor, cognitive sciences
Director, ,
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Few people know: He spent so much time working in restaurants during college that he once considered a career in the restaurant business.

Stephen Fiore arrives 30 minutes early to move the furniture for the classes he leads. A handwritten note sometimes greets him. “Please put the chairs where you found them when you’re finished.”

Fiore is half-tempted to ask, “Why?”

The circular format he employs has proven to open the gates to some of the most constructive conversations about some of the strangest questions you can imagine. Do dogs think about the future? What does a tick experience when landing on a person’s flesh?

If the topics sound odd, that’s perfect.

“The best ideas across every discipline start with a little mind wandering,” Fiore says. “Then we move from wandering to actual ideas. The best discussions lead to the most important phase: how to do something with the idea.”

His students have done plenty with their off-the-wall questions over the years. They’ve pursued research projects, published papers and written dissertations. Two students recently joined Fiore’s Cognitive Science Lab, helping work on grants studying social cognition in human-robot interaction and how AI affects teamwork.

The common denominator is the questions that no one would dare ask out loud anywhere other than Fiore’s group settings. He calls his classes “gatherings.” He says they are “anti-disciplinary.” He never lectures.

“My role is to create the right environment for conversation,” he says, “and then I shut up and listen.”

The computer scientist learns perspectives from the anthropologist. The sociology graduate listens to the biology graduate. Together, they dig deeper than they could ever dig within their own colleges or own heads.

Does the ocean have a memory? The question could, and has, led to ideas to study beach erosion. How about ants … does the shape of their nests alter social behavior? This one has spawned theories about architecture.

“When we’re specialists in a field, we might not see the big picture, what I call ‘disciplinary myopia,’” Fiore says. “Or we might look down on ideas from other fields, what I call ‘disciplinary disdain.’ I try to help others avoid these see me practicing what I preach.”

Fiore’s methods are so intriguing that he’s been invited to give more than 120 presentations around the world and co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed papers. He’s played a role in securing more than $30 million in grants. One question, however, causes him to stumble when it comes up: “How did he get here?”

“That’s not so easy to answer,” he says.

To summarize, Fiore attended junior college out of high school “for the heck of it.” He realized he enjoyed learning and studied at the ����ֱ�� of Maryland before moving to the beach with two degrees and a craving for fun.

“I experienced the retirement life at 21 years old,” he says, “and got tired of it pretty quickly. It was time to find a real job.”

Fiore happened to pick up a brochure describing a seminar on the brain. A little more research led him to a field called “cognitive psychology.” He quit his job and went back to school to study how people think, remember, and solve problems. He also volunteered in labs where he worked with researchers from all fields of expertise.

“That’s where I learned how productive we can be when we work across disciplines,” Fiore says, “because no one is afraid to ask the ‘out there’ questions.”

Like, what new knowledge can be created from the collisions of ideas from people with vastly different perspectives?

“You know the saying, ‘Many hands lighten the load?’ It works with minds, too. We need to invite more of it.”

Jane Gibson

Professor, pathology
Chair,
Associate dean for Faculty Affairs
Director, Molecular Diagnostics

Few people know: She was a candidate for the astronaut program in the 1990s before realizing claustrophobia “probably wouldn’t bode well in a spaceship.”

As one of the foremost researchers and clinicians in medical genomics and genetics, Gibson knows the literal definition of “groundbreaking.” In fact, 15 years ago she could have taken her expertise anywhere in the country. She’d already set up the genetics program for Orlando Health and directed another for Ameripath (before it became Quest Diagnostics). But in 2008 she chose to take all her expertise  to an empty field in Lake Nona.

“There was nothing but dirt, bulldozers and cows,” Gibson says of the site that would become UCF’s College of Medicine. “We didn’t even have running water. But that’s what excited us: we had a blank slate to create something extraordinary.”

Gibson’s mother always encouraged her to “shoot for the stars,” to look beyond what is and see what could be. Instead of seeing a field of cows and the shell of a building, Gibson and half a dozen other doctors envisioned the home of a world-class medical center. There would be a hospital, labs and freedom to extend the boundaries of medical science. Most important, there would be students with equally big dreams.

“It comes down to this: We want to expose them to the latest discoveries and technologies of a precision medicine and genomics era and then send them into the world to make lives better,” Gibson says.

She doesn’t simply talk about discoveries in genomics and precision medicine. She makes them. Her dad did the same thing as a plant geneticist. Gibson would watch him crossbreed vegetables to find more resilient varieties in his greenhouses. Early in her career, Gibson attended a conference in Colorado and happened to sit around a campfire with Mary-Claire King, who said she’d been researching how breast cancer and ovarian cancer ran in families. Her groundbreaking research is now legendary: A mutation of the gene called BRCA1, which causes hereditary breast cancer and is now tested along with other genes as a standard of patient care

“The genetic cause of cancer was mostly unproven at the time,” Gibson says. “But right after that, the field just exploded. Now we use the genomic testing every day in patient care. I’m blessed to have been on the leading edge of it.”

It all fits her decision to choose a pasture over an established institution 15 years ago. “To whom much is given, much is expected,” she says, quoting a verse that directs her life. Gibson and her colleagues consider the College of Medicine a gift to the Orlando community. From it, more than 1,000 graduates have gone out to advance research and to care for patients who need something more tangible than a ray of hope: they need smart practitioners.

A week before learning she had been selected as a 2023 Pegasus Professor, Gibson went to a doctor’s appointment — this time as a patient. In the office, she saw a reminder of why she chose this path: a former student, now a doctor, making lives better in our community.

“That’s what we envisioned when we entered uncharted waters,” Gibson says, “and it still inspires me every day.”

Jennifer Kent-Walsh

Professor, communication sciences and disorders
Founder and director,

Associate dean of Research,

Few people know: She was a Highland dancer and traveled across Canada and to Scotland to compete and perform in festivals representing her Scottish heritage.

Before she dove into speech-language pathology as her calling and before she developed the FAAST Assistive Technology Center at UCF from scratch, Jennifer Kent-Walsh learned to pay attention. She grew up in communities on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, where people expected an honest answer when asked, “How are you?” And they’d listen.

“People looked out for one another,” Kent-Walsh says.

Her father was a minister, and her mother was a teacher and vice principal. Not surprisingly, Kent-Walsh started her career in classrooms, teaching in England and Canada. Something kept grabbing her attention.

“The students,” she says. “Some had communication disorders that created barriers to the power of education. In math, for example, the numbers weren’t necessarily the problem. It was often the words and understanding the language that caused students challenges.”

Her interest shifted to speech-language pathology for her graduate education. During a clinical placement, she met a young woman who completely lost the ability to speak due to complications during a routine surgery. Kent-Walsh saw it as another example of the profound impact communication disorders can have on patients and their families.

“When a person is unable to effectively communicate, it affects everything in life. I realized that I wanted to be involved in research so I could help find meaningful solutions to provide every person with effective ways of communicating, whether or not they have functional speech.”

Turns out, Kent-Walsh would build a place to do just that at UCF, where she was offered the opportunity to create an advanced research and educational center focused on assistive technology.

“The university had an openness to innovating and developing new curriculum and clinical experiences for students. For me, it was exciting and intimidating at the same time,” she says.

With encouragement from the department chair, Jane Lieberman, Kent-Walsh wrote the first research and service-delivery grants to get things started. She pulled together clinical faculty, academic faculty, students and community stakeholders, and together they began to work with clients and families to help break communication barriers experienced by adults and children with significant speech impairments. Along with her primary research collaborator at the ����ֱ�� of New Mexico, Cathy Binger, the UCF team paired language therapy with augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technologies to support clients, their loved ones, and service providers. Since then, Kent-Walsh and her team have secured millions of dollars in funding from local, state and federal sources to advance their research and service-delivery missions.

“We’ve been intentional about leveraging the power of AAC technologies by employing both direct language interventions with clients and indirect interventions with the other significant people in their lives from day one,” Kent-Walsh says. “Parents of the children who participate in our research often tell us their kids are speaking more and they’re excited to use technology as one of many modes of communication — whether it’s a high-tech device like an iPad with a speech output application, picture symbols in a communication book, or gestures.”

Twenty years ago, Kent-Walsh had to convince others, one by one, to give these ideas a chance. Today, professionals from around the world access the published findings and contact her team of collaborators to learn how to apply them and to report the positive outcomes they have seen from implementing the AAC interventions developed at UCF. Thousands of undergraduate and graduate students have taken what they’ve learned into their own work. Some of them have returned to UCF after practicing clinically to join Kent-Walsh and her team to advance research.

“We’re light-years ahead of where we were, not because of me, but because so many people have invested themselves in this mission to ensure every person is able to communicate effectively. … And there is still much more work to be done to ensure every person enjoys the right to communicate and to achieve their full potential,” she says.

Marianna Pensky

Professor, mathematics
,

Few people know: She’s only had one job interview in her life — at UCF.

In 1995, Marianna Pensky, a single mother from Russia with two sons, interviewed at a university in Orlando she’d never heard of. Pensky was a good match for the Department of Mathematics since they needed redeveloping of the probability and statistics sequence for the newly approved mathematics Ph.D. program, and she was an expert. The job was hers if she wanted it. At the urging of her sons, Pensky accepted it.

“I had only four days to sign the offer commit to immigrating and be completely on my own with children. I was scared to death,” Pensky says. “But everything worked very well.”

Pensky’s hiring is a milestone in UCF history, as she’s the first woman faculty in the mathematics department.

“It is a huge mistake that many girls think that they have to choose between career and family, or that they cannot succeed in sciences,” she says. “Boys are not any better at sciences than girls.”

Pensky says the culture at UCF helped her to explore and experiment with her research. She’s authored more than 100 publications, including a major work on reliability theory and journal articles about statistical inverse problems, Bayesian statistics, statistical genetics, wavelets and signal analysis. She’s also received uninterrupted U.S. National Science Foundation funding for more than 20 years.

Her work has paved the way for more women to join the math and statistics faculty. They serve as role models for female students to pursue careers in science and teaching.

Pensky has also influenced dozens of graduate students as an advisor and by serving on Ph.D. committees. She’s developed a variety of special topic graduate courses that covered novel areas of statistics. And through these course materials she’s impacted the research of computer science, engineering, physics and statistics students.

UCF’s mathematics department carries significance to Pensky’s personal life, too. It was there she met her husband. Their daughter arrived the same week as Pensky’s tenure letter. Now, she is a grandmother, and her family keeps growing.

When asked what makes her most proud of the Pegasus honor, Pensky stumbles over the word “proud.” She’d rather use “happy” because she values the feeling over pride and achievements.

from UCF, Associate Professor Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Noa Pinter-Wollman from the ����ֱ�� of California at Los Angeles, Professor of Architectural and Urban Computing Alan Penn from ����ֱ�� College London, and Research Director Guy Theraulaz from the Université de Toulouse in France are co-editors of a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

The issue takes a broad and detailed interdisciplinary look at the interactions of human to human, mammal to mammal and insect to insect and how their built environments (from their offices to their nests) influence their behavior.

For humans, collective behavior is critical as they work on more and more complex tasks that require coordinating their varying forms of expertise by communicating and collaborating effectively to get their jobs done.

For example, companies often build “open floor plans” for their employees instead of smaller enclosed offices. Employers hope that these kinds of spaces will increase collaboration and communication because, for example, people can’t just hide in their offices. But research reported in this special issue shows that open-plan offices actually decrease face-to-face interactions. Another study in the special issue examined how an employee’s physical location in an organization changes collective behavior. That study found that an employee’s access to unique information might depend on the hallway paths around their desk (e.g., are they on the shortest path between other co-workers). This, in turn, can influence their status in the organization, or the prestige of the projects they are assigned.

“Working on this special issue was an exciting challenge and we hope it ignites interest in many others to pursue an interdisciplinary study of how the built environment influences collective behavior,” Fiore says. “We purposely designed the issue to introduce scholars to a variety of methods and concepts to spark ideas for adoption and adaption by others similarly interested in the broad topic of architecture and collective behavior.”

Collective behavior is not limited to humans. Biologists have been studying how insect behavior, like ants, is largely driven by the nests they build. These nests are very sophisticated and designed to include chambers that serve as nurseries and gardens.  These rooms and their functions are very complex and not well understood by scientists. That’s why Fiore and colleagues wanted to dedicate a special issue to the topic.

“Some scientists create physical models of insect nests, while others might write software code to simulate what interactions look like in that nest,” says Fiore. “Still others put sensors on insects to track how they move in and around their nests, and even how humans move around in their office buildings. Our goal was to bring together the many different researchers to share their ideas with each other and with other scientists.”

The journal’s special issue was supported by a grant from the National Academies of Sciences “Keck Futures Initiative.” The initiative aims to “stimulate new modes of scientific inquiry and break down barriers to interdisciplinary research in funding agencies, academic and other research settings, publication and academia.”  Fiore hopes that these methods can be used by scholars in other fields to help us better understand how collective behavior across the animal kingdom is influenced by the environments they build.

Fiore is a professor of cognitive sciences with the and the , and the director of the . He joined UCF in 1998 and has multiple degrees including a doctorate in cognitive psychology from the ����ֱ�� of Pittsburgh.

The research is partially funded by grants from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research, agencies supporting research programs to develop technologies and training that make problem solving and decision making more effective.

Stephen Fiore, a professor with UCF’s cognitive science program in the Department of Philosophy, said the work is significant because it shows how our students are learning to conduct basic science in the context of complex societal problems.

“Decision making, whether it be in collaboration with robots, or under conditions of uncertainty, continues to challenge society,” Fiore said. Our Modeling and Simulation students are getting exposure to interdisciplinary research topics that will improve collaboration between people and machines.”

Robots

Katy Odette, a first-year doctoral student, was awarded first place in the Cognitive Engineering technical group of the Human Factors & Ergonomic Society (HFES). Odette, a student under the supervision of Florian Jentsch, professor of Psychology, said her research interests were inspired by the children’s toy Cozmo the robot.

Cozmo, a square-faced bulldozer of a robot toy, communicates with his young human collaborators by nodding his head, blinking and flashing his LED eyes and throwing building block-sized boxes with his bulldozer arms.

Odette said she was so inspired by the toy’s seeming ability to connect with its user that she wanted to study what it would take to equip a real autonomous robot with the ability to express such emotions as frustration or fear when confronted with a task or situation.

Her hope is that her research will one day support artificial intelligence that can aid in the development of a military robot capable of interacting with, and helping, its human teammates to save lives.

In her paper, she proposed doing so with techniques such as reinforcements for positive behaviors, guided learning, and emotional expressions. Although other roboticists have taken similar approaches, Odette’s research is one of the first to integrate learning and expression in a way that can regulate interaction within a human-robot team.

For example, since the research is partially funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance (RCTA), one could imagine a robot that has been tasked with finding and deactivating bombs.

The robot could be fed historic data on likely outcomes for specific scenarios and make decisions based on that data on how to most effectively proceed into a dangerous environment.

Or a human could teach a robot one-on-one what action to take if there is a potential for being fired upon.  The robot could be programmed to respond to a human’s cue to duck, push a button to attack or hide.  Or alternatively, the robot could pick up on external threats and warn the human via an expression of danger or confusion.

In her paper, Odette pointed out the specific challenges of training a robot to respond like a human to a human, including the need to reverse engineer the fundamentals of human learning and program those variables into a robot.  This work helps to develop a kind of artificial social intelligence to help robots understand how to collaborate with teammates. She said it is the challenge that makes her work exciting.

Visualization Tools

Olivia Newton, a second-year doctoral student, received second place from the same technical group of the society for her paper examining the development of visualization tools, such as color coded maps containing intelligence information, to help mitigate uncertainly when making decisions.

“Modern day operations such as the military or healthcare make up complex socio-technical systems,” Newton said. “There are lots of uncertain pieces of information that must be taken into account when solving problems and making decisions.  This research is studying the technology to support that kind of real-world decision making.”

Most people can relate to weather maps for major systems such as hurricanes that use a color coded method to illustrate the likelihood of such an extreme events happening in a particular area.

Newton is dealing with even more complicated data sets, with maps using differing visual aids to display a wide variety of information, such as locations of boat and air traffic around a port. The goal is to devise methods that could be used by decision makers to more effectively tell, at a glance, if there is, for example, illegal activity like drugs being offloaded in the area.

Fiore, who serves as Newton’s advisor on the project, said the overriding objective in the work is the improvement of cognition as it relates to any type of complex human task.

Fiore noted that this is now a 5-year student paper award winning streak in the Cognitive Engineering technical group of HFES.   Modeling and simulation students took first and third place in 2016, first place in 2015 and 2014, and second place in 2013.

“These awards are an important recognition of the UCF’s modeling and simulation students,” Fiore said, “and show they have the talent to contribute to the future of improved technologies that augment cognition and can help solve the kinds of complex problems facing society in the modern age.”

Stephen Fiore and Shawn Burke’s project is one of 27 selected from 18 institutions around the country, which will receive money from a $12 million pool over three years. The projects were selected because NASA is preparing to send astronauts on distant missions, including Mars.

Most of the studies selected will look at space travel’s impact on the human body, including visual impairment, bone and muscle loss, human performance, cardiovascular health, and sensory and motor adaptations, among other issues.

“This is important because studies suggest that cognitive processes may be negatively affected by the spaceflight context,” Fiore said. “So we need to understand how problems with memory or attention will impact the spaceflight team’s ability to function and successfully perform their mission.”

The idea is to mitigate the effects as much as possible, he said.

Fiore, the lead investigator, is director of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory and a faculty member with the cognitive sciences program in the Department of Philosophy and the Institute for Simulation & Training.

Burke is a research professor at the IST specializing in team dynamics and behavior.

Burke said this is just one of several studies they have been working on for NASA that look at team dynamics. The others address issues such as leadership behavior, crew dynamics, impact of confined spaces on these dynamics, and cultural differences. NASA has been funding the grants the past couple of years, she said.

This project is funded by the agency’s Human Research Program and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, which seek to answer questions on astronaut health and performance in long-duration space missions. The Human Research Program also plans strategies to monitor and mitigate risks humans may face on missions.

NASA has been pushing to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. That effort would be in preparation to travel to Mars, a planet believed to be capable of hosting life, and possibly beyond.

The goal of the current studies is to better prepare astronauts to manage the mental and physical demands of space travel.

Some of the studies will be conducted aboard the International Space Station, NASA said. Others, including UCF’s studies, will be conducted in settings that mimic the space environment.

The new area of study, called the “science of team science,” or SciTS (rhymes with sights), focuses on what works and what doesn’t when teams of scientists are working together to accomplish an overarching research goal. Improving teamwork in these situations is important, says Joann Keyton, a professor of communication at NC State and co-author of the paper, because research initiatives increasingly involve researchers in different disciplines, at different institutions and, often, in different countries.

The paper represents the first time that physical scientists, life scientists and social scientists have come together to address SciTS. Their goal, Keyton says, is to let the research community know that the dynamics of team research are now a recognized field of study, and that they are increasingly important to both public and private research funding agencies.

This paper was co-authored by Stephen Fiore, an associate professor of Cognitive Sciences in UCF’s Philosophy Department and director of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory at the Institute for Simulation and Training.

Improving teamwork in interdisciplinary collaborations is going to become more  important for researchers who hope to get funding from public or private sources. “This is going to affect policy,” Keyton says. “When people apply for grants, they’re going to be asked to demonstrate that they understand how teams can effectively work together. Simply assembling a team isn’t going to be enough for funding agencies anymore – funding agencies want to know that the team will be adequately supported and able to function successfully.

“Team science raises new challenges,” Keyton says. “Language is often a problem. For example, scientists in different disciplines may use the same term to refer to very different things. There can be a major misunderstanding between researchers on the same research team, and they won’t even know it.”

The increasing complexity of both scientific problems, and the teams that are assembled to tackle them, creates an opportunity for social scientists to help identify, characterize and resolve problems related to working collaboratively.

“Substantial gain in understanding can be made when ideas and methods from different disciplines are used to address a single, yet complex, problem,” Fiore said. “The challenge comes from ensuring the scientists build a shared and multidisciplinary understanding of the problem they are trying to solve.”

The paper, “A Multi-Level Systems Perspective for the Science of Team Science,” is published in the Sept. 15 issue of Science Translational Medicine. The paper was co-authored by researchers from Indiana ����ֱ��, Northwestern ����ֱ��, the ����ֱ��, the National Cancer Institute, the ����ֱ�� of California – Irvine, and Cornell ����ֱ��.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This content was adapted from a news release issued by North Carolina State ����ֱ��.