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. Her research focuses on team communication and decision making by practitioners working in high-reliability environments, such as space flight operations and aviation. She patterned the concept of crew-centered communication to characterize strategies that are effective in mitigating operator error but that also support team decision making and foster a positive team climate. Crew-centered communication has been adopted by domestic and international airlines in their pilot training, and has been incorporated into a training program for nurses and physicians. In recent projects with collaborators at NASA Ames and SFSU, she examined team communication processes and their contribution to team performance during simulated space exploration missions. This work resulted in the specification of linguistic indices of team cognition and interpersonal climate, and the development of communication protocols to facilitate the collaboration between flight controllers and space crews during long-duration explorations missions.