Education: Bachelor of Arts, Physics, Lycoming College,

Master of Science, Physics, Oklahoma State University

Doctor of Philosophy, Physics, The Pennsylvania State University

Steve is the acting Chief Operations Officer and CERI and is responsible for developing and implementing CERI’s Government contract management system, CERI’s DCAA-compliant cost accounting system, and in general, all of CERI policies and procedures.  Along with these administrative duties, Steve is very active in the CERI R&D program.  He has developed the CERTT Laboratory and implemented the metrics and measures used in the CERI research program.  He is currently working on numerical methods for communications analysis and is also developing the next-generation Pathfinder architecture.

Polemnia G. Amazeen, Ph.D.
Faculty Research Associate

Education:  Bachelor of Arts, 1990, Psychology, Franklin & Marshall College

Master of Arts, 1994, Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, Psychology, University of Connecticut

Doctor of Philosophy, 1996, Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, Psychology, University of Connecticut

Polemnia  G. Amazeen is an associate professor of Cognitive Psychology at Arizona State University and a faculty research associate at the Cognitive Engineering Research Institute in Mesa, AZ.   Her research interests include the study of the acquisition and control of coordinated movements, with an emphasis on the discovery of generic principles that guide coordination at multiple levels of analysis.  In particular, Dr. Amazeen specializes in the application of nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory and symmetry groups to coordinative phenomena, including various types of motor and social coordination.  She is currently working on the development and validation of a dynamical model for the intentional control of economical breathing patterns during motor activity and has developed real-time feedback displays to facilitate the performance of novel patterns in order to test model predictions.

More about Nia here. 

Tonya Branaghan has recently joined the CERI group as an Event Coordinator. She will handle the details and planning for our upcoming workshops.  Tonya got her degree at New Mexico State University, majoring in Hospitality & Tourism with a focus in Event Planning. "There is great reward in watching an event come to life after the planning stage".

Tonya and her family recently moved back to the southwest after spending time in North Carolina, Washington, Minnesota and Ohio. They like to spend free time discovering Arizona and all it has to offer.

Education: Bachelor of Science, Psychology

Jasmine is a graduate student at Arizona State University and is employed by the Cognitive Engineering Research Institute as a research assistant.  She received a B.S. in Psychology from Arizona State University in 2005. Her current research efforts include the MURI, PSYOPs, and CIFTS projects.  Miss Duran’s research interests include team performance related to coordination, communication, and decision making, and the reliability and validity of measures of effectiveness of psychological operations.

My research interests are in understanding how the human visual system interacts with other distinct cognitive systems, such as memory and cognitive control. I have used an assortment of techniques, such as computational modeling and dual-task paradigms, to aid in determining interactions and their effects on observable behavior (saccades, dwells, etc.). My general research interests have led me to study visual scanning and associated metrics, cognitive load, the interaction between memory, oculomotor, and attention processes, the interaction/combination of endogenous and exogenous visual influences, and how the spatial and statistical structure of visual environments affect ocular behavior. The challenge here is great: to explain issues such as change blindness, object and scene recognition, visual information acquisition, search of complex visual displays, and more by showing how they interact with, are controlled by, and control other functional cognitive systems.

More about Chris here

Education: B.A. Psychology-University of California, San Diego

M.A. Psychology-New Mexico State University

Harry Pedersen is currently completing his Ph.D. in Engineering Psychology at New Mexico State University with an emphasis on aviation psychology.  He is a research assistant to Dr. Nancy Cooke at the Cognitive Engineering Research Institute (CERI) and the Cognitive Engineering Research on Team Tasks (CERTT) Laboratory at ASU East.  He received his Masters Degree at NMSU in experimental psychology, and his B.A. in cognitive psychology at the University of California, San Diego where he was also was employed at The Scripps Research Institute Cognitive Electrophysiology Laboratory.  Harry’s research interests are in the areas of skill retention of team coordination in uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV) control, and various aspects of aviation psychology including human-automation interaction, aviation displays, crew resource management (CRM) and Line-Oriented Flight Training (LOFT).  Harry’s other research interests include human memory and the study of the human evoked response potential (ERP).

Dan Sevier
Graduate Research Assistant

Education:  B.A. Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Dan is a new graduate student at Arizona State University and is newly employed by Cognitive Engineering Research Institute as a research assistant.  Originally, Dan is from Syracuse, NY, but has also lived in Rochester, NY,  Chapel Hill, NC,  and Pittsburgh, PA.  He decided to escape Northeastern winters and attend his dad's alma mater.  His current research interests tentatively include product design/usability, hoping to focus on both evaluation and design. 

Education: B.A., Psychology

Jennifer Winner is a graduate student in the Applied Psychology Program at Arizona State University’s Polytechnic campus.  She received her undergraduate degree from Wright State University in Dayton, OH.  Her research interests include team training and performance, team situation awareness, and the communication of intent.