For more information, contact Cindy Young, (937) 775-3232.

October 28, 1998

WRIGHT STATE PROFESSOR TO
STUDY MISSION CONTROL DURING GLENN FLIGHT

Wright State University assistant professor of psychology, Valerie Shalin, Ph.D., will be on hand at the NASA Flight Control Center in Houston when Senator John Glenn returns to space this week on shuttle mission STS-95. For the duration of the mission, set to run from Thursday, Oct. 29, to Saturday, Nov. 7, Shalin and three Wright State graduate students will be observing workplace activities at mission control as part of a research project to help NASA improve the design of its software tools.

Shalin's research is sponsored by a $60,000 one-year grant from NASA/Ames Research Center's program in Human Centered Computing to help improve the software NASA uses to design orbits and engine burns.

Shalin and her team will be observing the work activities of flight controllers to learn how they interact with the technology at mission control as they launch and retrieve a satellite. She will also bring back video tapes of flight controllers and real-time recordings of their computer displays for analysis in her lab.

"We're taking a total systems approach to work systems design," Shalin says. "Our work is inherently multi disciplinary. We rely on all of the cognitive sciences, including computer science, psychology, linguistics, anthropology and neuroscience to improve people's interactions with technology. This approach can apply across the board in human operations at NASA."

"Valerie's work is representative of the new Ph.D. program in Human Factors and Industrial Organizational Psychology at Wright State," said John Flach, Ph.D., chair of the department of psychology. "In addition to collaborations with NASA, faculty and students from this program are actively collaborating with Air Force and other Department of Defense laboratories and local industries to develop ways to apply psychology to the design of technologies and organizations."

Shalin earned her B.S. in psychobiology at UCLA and her Ph.D. in learning, developmental and cognitive psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. She has held positions at SUNY at Buffalo in the Department of Industrial Engineering, and Honeywell Systems and Research Center.

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