On Wednesday, three faculty members will join an exclusive group in earning UCF’s highest honor — the Pegasus Professor award — during Founders’ Day. UCF’s president and provost select the annual honorees based on their global excellence in teaching, research and service.
Roger Azevedo is converting psychology theories into life-like models. Fevzi Okumus personifies the meaning of hospitality. Yan Solihin continues to build a force in cybersecurity education and training.
The uncommon drive of these three professors comes from childhoods spent in war-torn Angola, in a small village in Turkey and in one of the poorest areas of Indonesia. Each will receive $5,000 and have his picture displayed in front of the John C. Hitt Library. The UCF community is invited to celebrate these professors and additional honorees during the Founder’s Day Faculty Honors Celebration on Wednesday, April 2, in the Student Union Pegasus Ballroom.
For now, meet the UCF Pegasus Professors for 2025:
Roger Azevedo
Professor, School of Modeling Simulation and Training
Lead scientist and co-cluster lead, Learning Sciences faculty cluster initiative
Director, SMART Lab
Few people know: His dream as a kid was to move to Japan and become a ninja. It didn’t happen, but he did earn a black belt in Shaolin white crane kung fu. “The determination I use in physical training is the same determination I use as a scientist,” he says.
It’s going to be a good April for Roger Azevedo. Three weeks after accepting his honor as a Pegasus Professor, he’ll fly to Denver to be recognized as a fellow with American Educational Research Association.
“It’s humbling,” Azevedo says.
Those two words are not a copy and paste acceptance phrase, even for the man who’s already received prestigious awards from the American Psychological Association and U.S. National Science Foundation for his progress in developing artificial agents that embody psychological principles of learning, reasoning and problem solving to augment human knowledge and skills in K-12, healthcare and workforce development. Azevedo’s students sense a deep personal meaning every time he uses variations of the word “humbling.”
Lead with humility. Stay humble. They fuel his work every day.
“I will never forget where I came from,” Azevedo says, “because I’ve learned everything can be taken from you in the blink of an eye.”
Azevedo spent the first eight years of his life in the middle of a civil war in the African nation of Angola. Any remembrances of hobbies were blotted out by memories of the all-day, all-night sounds of mortal shells and bullets. To avoid sniper fire, his family would eat dinner on the floor of their small home with the lights turned off. Uncles, aunts and cousins vanished. Azevedo went to elementary school with the help of armed escorts.
“We were more concerned about survival than education,” he says.
He vividly remembers his family being ushered to an airport in the middle of the night and landing the next day in Montreal, with just the clothes on their backs.
“We left everything behind,” he says, “but wow, even at that age I was thankful to have a second chance. Being an immigrant was not easy for us. The memory motivates me to be the role model that I didn’t have for most of my academic life.”
Azevedo’s mother only completed fourth grade before she had to start working. His father made it through high school. Once in Canada, they eventually scrabbled enough money together to buy World Book Encyclopedias. That’s when Azevedo discovered his insatiable appetite for learning.
“I could have thought, ‘Well, I’m just glad to be alive,’ and taken a job in labor. But I wanted to go against the grain. I’m still like that. While other kids were watching TV, I was reading. My parents said if I wanted to go to college, I’d have to figure it out, which was fine. I gladly worked three jobs to pay my own way.”
Along that way, Azevedo took an Introduction to Psychology class and fell in love with the study of human behavior. He had an urge, however, to the theories into realms where they’d never been taken. Through modeling and simulation, he could help students become better learners, clinicians become more accurate diagnosticians, teachers and faculty understand their students’ learning needs in real-time, and professionals working in high-stress environments perform to the best of the capabilities. Azevedo’s curiosity opened doors to universities and conferences around the world until he entered into a conversation while visiting and presenting at UCF before the Learning Sciences faculty cluster initiative officially announced openings.
“The people here weren’t just talking about using psychology in interdisciplinary research, they embodied the spirit of interdisciplinary research,” he says. “So, I accepted a position and started working with learning sciences and psychology students alongside computer scientists and engineers and various stakeholders to create intelligent systems to augment and support human capabilities and test their effectiveness.”
They are now designing generative artificial intelligence-driven pedagogical agents to support learners’ thinking about thinking processes (such as metacognitive), building empathetic digital twins to be empathetic, so practitioners will be better equipped to help children and adults coping with end-of-life situations and other health challenges. Azevedo considers every aspect of his work a privilege, which rubs off on his students and postdoctoral scholars.
“When they share my excitement, I feel like a blacksmith with pieces of metal. I inject oxygen, fan the flames, delicately and progressively shape the metal, and turn them into swords,” Azevedo says.
He pauses to briefly remind anyone listening, including himself, why he will move mountains for his students.
“Given my background, this is all a pipedream — earning a Ph.D. at an Ivy League school such as McGill [University], pursuing postdoctoral studies in cognitive psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, teaching across North America and other places in the world, and turning psychological theories into impactful, intelligent technological systems to benefit humans and society. I’m still just an immigrant kid who was lucky to survive. That’s why I’ll do anything in my power to make sure all of my students have whatever they need to be successful, including the love of learning, spirit of innovation, intellectual curiosity, and the desire to use technology to benefit humans and society.”