Dr. Derek A. Koehl

he/they Clinical Assistant Professor

Contact

1310 Ben Graves Drive
Morton Hall
Room 236
Huntsville, AL 35899
Campus Map

derek.koehl@uah.edu

Biography

Derek Koehl is a research psychologist whose scholarship and teaching sit at the intersection of experimental psychology, human factors, and artificial intelligence. Koehl holds a Ph.D. in Applied Experimental Psychology from UAH along with an M.A. in Psychology, an M.A. in History, and an M.Ed. in Educational Technology, a combination that reflects a deeply interdisciplinary orientation grounded in psychological science.

Koehl's research focuses on human factors psychology, cognition and artificial intelligence, trust in automation, and the experimental study of human-AI teaming. They are co-developer of the Linguistic Fingerprint™, a technology that isolates latent psychological constructs such as trust from large language model sentence embeddings, enabling real-time detection and monitoring in both experimental and applied settings. Their work has been published in the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting and presented at venues including the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, the American Geophysical Union, the European Geosciences Union, and the American Meteorological Society.

At UAH, Koehl teaches psychology statistics, artificial intelligence in human and social contexts, interdisciplinary research methods, and interdisciplinary capstone research. Prior to joining the faculty, they spent seven years as a research associate in the UAH Earth System Science Center in partnership with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, where they contributed to machine learning and AI research and development for federal and scientific agencies.

Koehl is a recipient of the 2026 Outstanding Master's Thesis Award in the Social Sciences from the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools, the Charger Innovation Fund, and the William Wessels Scholarship Award. With additional professional experience in nonprofit leadership, secondary ESOL education, and technology consulting, they bring a broad applied perspective to the study of human cognition and behavior in technological contexts.

Koehl is a member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, the Psychonomic Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing, the Southeastern Psychological Association, Psi Chi (The International Honor Society in Psychology), and Phi Alpha Theta (The National History Honor Society).

Curriculum Vitae

Education

  • Ph.D. Applied Experimental Psychology, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, 2026
  • Master of Arts, Psychology, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, 2024
  • Master of Arts, History, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, 2020
  • Master of Education, Educational Technology, The University of Texas at Brownsville, 199
  • Bachelor of Arts, English Language and Composition, The University of North Texas, 1992

Recent Publications

  • Koehl, D. and Vangsness, L. (2024). Toward a Linguistic Fingerprint™ of trust. ASPIRE 2024: The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society International Annual Meeting.

  • Koehl, D. and Vangsness, L. (2023). Measuring latent trust patterns in large language models in the context of human-AI teaming. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, vol. 67 no. 1, pp. 504–511.

  • Acharya, A., Davis, C., Koehl, D., et al. (2021). Verb sense disambiguation for densifying knowledge graphs in Earth science. American Geophysical Union 2021.

  • Davis, C., Koehl, D., Adhikari, S., Ramasubramanian, M., Gurung, I., and Ramachandran, R. (2021). Information extraction on an Earth science knowledge graph built with semantic parsing. Proceedings of the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2021.

  • Davis, C., Ramasubramanian, M., Koehl, D., et al. (2020). ES2Vec: Earth science metadata suggestions and analogical reasoning. AGU Fal Meeting 2020.

  • Koehl, D., Davis, C., Nair, U., and Ramachandran, R. (2020). Analogy-based assessment of domain-specific word embeddings. Proceedings of the IEEE SoutheastCon2020.

  • Koehl, D., Nair, U., Ramachandran, R., Davis, C., and Maskey, M. (2020). Exploring Earth science applications using word embeddings. European Geosciences Union (EGU) 2020.

  • Simpson, M. S., Cockerill, G., Word, A., and Koehl, D. (2020). Faculty and student perceptions of university course evaluations. In Russ-Eft, D. and Sleezer, C. (Eds.), Case Studies in Needs Assessment.