In Memoriam - Alexander Kirlik
October 17, 1960 — October 8, 2025
Former HFES member Alex Kirlik passed away October 8, 2025. Born October 17, 1960 in Indiana, PA, Alex grew up along the shores of Lake Erie near Cleveland, OH, where he graduated from Bay Village High School (1979), followed by BS (1983), MS, and PhD (1989) degrees in systems engineering from The Ohio State University.
There, Alex began a 35-year teaching and research program on cognitive science & engineering, human factors, and human-computer interaction, focused on modeling and designing technology to support people in challenging, cognitive tasks. His NASA sponsored PhD thesis, providing a computational model of human cognition and expertise as perceptually guided skill, won the George E. Briggs award from the American Psychological Association as best dissertation of the year in Engineering and Applied Psychology. In 1989, he became assistant and then associate professor of systems engineering, computing, and cognitive science at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, followed by joining the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2002, where he taught for more than 20 years as professor of computer science, systems engineering and member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, retiring in 2022 as emeritus professor.