Ute Fischer

Dr. Ute Fischer is a Research Scientist in the School of Literature, Media and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Princeton University and received her training in Human Factors at NASA Ames, first as an NRC/NAS post-doctoral fellow and subsequently as a Senior Research Scientist. She has extensive experience in aerospace team research, focusing on team collaboration and communication in both co-located and distributed teams. She patterned the concept of team-centered communication to characterize strategies that are effective in mitigating operator error but also support team decision making and a positive team climate.  Team-centered communication has been adopted by airlines in their pilot training and has been incorporated into a training program for nurses and physicians.  Her analyses of communication processes in spatially distributed teams resulted in the specification of linguistic indices of team cognition and interpersonal climate and the development of media-specific communication protocols to facilitate space/ground collaboration during periods of delayed and disrupted communication. A recent project in collaboration with Dr. Mosier at TeamScape and Dr. Josef Schmid at NASA JSC extended this work by exploring a technological solution to mitigating the communication errors identified previously. This project demonstrated the feasibility and usability of Braiding, a novel software-delivered communication tool, to space/ground interactions under delayed conditions.  Another project, also in collaboration with Dr. Mosier, examines the impact of crew autonomy on the multiteam system comprised of space crews and ground support personnel.