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.”
Fevzi Okumus
Central Florida Hotel and Lodging Association Preeminent Chair Professor
Founding chair of the hospitality services department at the Rosen College of Hospitality Management
Editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
Few People Know: He’s traveled to more than 60 countries and has a goal of visiting at least 100. His favorite spots? The Maldives for location. The Azores for experiences. The Taj Mahal for human-made wonder. “But Turkey will always be a special place to visit and let my daughters see my humble beginnings,” he says.
Fevzi Okumus is passionate about teaching, research and working with industry partners. He teaches and works on research in the areas of strategic management, leadership and hospitality management. Okumus was recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher in 2021; 2022; 2023 and 2024 by Clarivate. But he calls himself an “academic entrepreneur” more than a teacher and researcher as he loves working on new initiatives. He can’t separate the academic whose influence has helped catapult UCF’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management to No. 1 in the world for five straight years from the entrepreneur who dreams of opening his own hotel someday.
He personifies hospitality from classrooms to hospitality settings, with a perpetual smile and an innate desire to serve others.
“Hospitality is about making people happy and offering positive memorable experiences,” Okumus says. “It’s a good fit for me as a teacher, too. I want my students to know the joy of reaching the highest standards of excellence.”
As the founding chair of hospitality services at the Rosen College, Okumus has mentored and worked with more than half of the faculty members. He is very proud that Rosen College has an unheard-of job placement rate of over 90%. Graduates are raising the hospitality bar around the world, with many of them securing management positions within a few years of being hired. Alumni of the Rosen College are also taking research skills to universities around the country and adding to the home-grown faculty talent at UCF. As if all of this isn’t enough to fill Okumus’s calendar, he’s also the editor-in-chief of three well-known hospitality and tourism journals. He is the founding editor of two of them. In summers, Okumus co-lead hospitality camps to train high school students with disabilities for employment.
His smile never fades. Neither does his purpose.
“Nothing is more important to me than serving and making a positive impact. It’s why I enjoy my work so much.”
Okumus first learned hospitality from growing up in a small village near Bolu, Turkey, where yesterday’s strangers became today’s friends over home-cooked meals. As a teenager one summer, he visited Lake Abant and saw something he’d never seen: tourists. They looked different and were speaking different languages.
“I wanted to know more about where these people came from, the hotels where they stayed, and what made them happy,” Okumus says.
He enrolled in a vocational high school to learn hospitality concepts and he worked different hotel jobs possible to apply his skills: cooking, bartending, cleaning, running front desks and managing.
“I found out in every role that you excelled by solving problems and making the guest experience better,” he says.
Okumus thought he would use his growing knowledge that spanned all the way to a doctoral degree. He lived and worked around Europe and Asia working on research projects and teaching future managers at colleges. When he was invited to the Rosen College for a job interview in early 2005, he saw the state-of-the-art campus.
“It had just opened,” he says, “I called my wife in Hong Kong and said, ‘This is where we need to be.’ ”
One year after coming to the Rosen College, Okumus was promoted to associate professor and chosen to be the founding chair of the hospitality services department. Today, the college is known worldwide as the template of hospitality training with more than 2,000 undergraduates and 300 graduate students. Okumus becomes the first Rosen College faculty member to earn the Pegasus Professor distinction, in part because he exemplifies his own objective in hospitality.
“Love and excel what you do and offer memorable experiences through serving,” he says.
Graduates often reconnect with Okumus to thank him for impacting their lives. One, now the manager of a restaurant, told Okumus how his mentorship at UCF helped him overcome homelessness.
“You never know what types of challenges each student might be facing,” Okumus says. “It’s another reason to have a servant leadership mentality.”
Yan Solihin
Professor and director of the cyber security and privacy program
Charles N. Millican Chair Professor of Computer Science
Few People Know: His past hobbies have ranged from collecting insects around his home to learning how to play guitar. “My favorite is listening to Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits play his guitar in Sultans of Swing,” he says.
To this day, Yan Solihin doesn’t know how his parents were able to buy a computer when he was growing up in Indonesia. He has no doubt, however, that the first time he turned on a PC it began to radically change his future.
“I remember being astonished at what could be done on that single device,” Solihin says.
With the unexpected introduction to technology, Solihin wrote his first program at the age of 10 — a game where the computer generated random numbers for players to guess. The game piqued his curiosity about how a computer could possibly generate random numbers and if they really were random at all. Those questions pulled him into cryptography, an area where computer science and math converge, and computer security. After nearly two decades of teaching and researching (including time with the U.S. National Science Foundation), Solihin came to UCF in 2018, where he’s launched two labs while guiding the university’s growth into a prominent hub of cyber security and privacy research and education.
The latest recipient of the Pegasus Professor honor has never stopped marveling at the power of computing. It’s just that the stakes are higher today than when he was typing words and creating games as a curious boy.
“We have a long way to go to meet the need for more cybersecurity professionals,” he says. “Witness the frequency of cyberattacks. Many organizations are short staffed to handle them. That’s why I came to UCF with its young spirit and open attitude to new ideas. Our goal since I arrived is to be one of the best places in the world for cybersecurity and privacy research and education.”
Solihin has overseen a quadrupling in the number of faculty members specializing in cyber security, with more than 150 students now enrolled in the master’s in cyber security and privacy and 100 enrolled in the master’s in digital forensics.
“The most exciting aspect of my job is mentoring and teaching. I feel like I’m taking students through a journey of exploration and discovery. It’s deeply fulfilling to instill a sense of awe,” Solihin says.
Their awe connects him back to Indonesia, to his childhood home reachable only by foot or bicycle, where water had to be drawn from a well with a bucket and the walls were made of thin bamboo weaves. Solihin will never forget where his future began or the wisdom of his father, who sacrificed so much for that first computer: “Education is the only means out of poverty.”
“It took time for those words to sink in,” Solihin says, “but they have guided everything I’ve done in my professional life.”
With this backdrop, you can understand why Solihin believes students with the same kind of drive can provide the energy to grow “a national powerhouse” in cyber security and privacy education at UCF. You also realize why he says three factors motivate him whenever he wakes up.
“For one, I believe in stewardship — leaving whomever or whatever I am entrusted in a better place. I also consider it a blessing that I’m paid to do what I really like because not everyone can say that. And finally, the adventure of identifying problems and thinking of solutions makes every day exciting. To come from my childhood to where I am now, it still gives me a sense of amazement.”
