March 18, 2026
Michael Lewis, a professor in the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems, will be officially retiring from Pitt at the end of the 2025-26 spring semester. Lewis, who has been at Pitt for 40 years, has seen the University and hundreds of students grow, change, and develop throughout his time.
During his years as a professor at Pitt, Lewis has taught multiple core cognitive courses in Human Factors and Interactive Systems at both graduate and undergraduate levels, along with a graduate ‘Human Information Processing’ class and a ‘Special Topics in Human-Robot Interaction.’ Yet most of Lewis’ career has been devoted to his research.
“The bulk of my effort has gone into research. I have managed funded research projects supporting my PhD students continuously since 1991,” Lewis said. “My recent research has centered around human supervision of multiple robots as well as the related area of facilitating interaction within human and human-robot teams.”
Lewis has worked on multiple Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) projects, with two of the most recent projects having to do with AI.
“In one recent DARPA project we developed and evaluated an AI advisor using Theory of Mind to assist human teams,” Lewis said. “Most recently in another DARPA project we generated diverse simulacra to train a ‘cooperative’ agent capable of working with a novel partner without additional training.”
Lewis explained that his work in research will be one of the most important things that he will take away from his time at SCI.
“Getting wrapped up in interesting problems is the primary joy of research,” Lewis said. “I have been incredibly lucky to be able to do this for a career.”
In the beginning of his career, Lewis was PhD student and instructor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology before becoming the Lead Human Factors Engineer for the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant’s Detailed Control Room Review. Lewis arrived at Pitt in the fall of 1987 joining the School of Library and Information Sciences, which today is the School of Computing and Information. During this time, Allen Kent, the founder of the Information Science program at Pitt, led the way on research which held up the school with the support he earned from NASA and others.
“I came as an Assistant Professor to the information science department… as part of a clique of new ‘cognitive’ hires, all now retired, intended to jump start research at the school,” Lewis said. “With [Allen] Kent’s mandatory retirement approaching, new hires were given reduced loads of four courses per year and tasked with starting research programs to provide a replacement.”
In his first decade teaching, the information science department (now known as the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems) catered towards professionals from local Pittsburgh industries, such as Westinghouse or US Steel, who were returning to school to get their master’s degrees. Because of this, many classes were taught at night and there were few PhD students.
“As the 1990’s progressed, up until the internet bubble burst in 2000, our enrollments swelled, bringing in younger more capable students from diverse backgrounds,” Lewis said. “At its height [Master of Science in Information Science] classes such as ‘Interactive Systems,’ which had been seminar size five years before, were being taught in auditoriums to classes of 90 and more.”
After this point, Lewis explained, enrollments to the school declined. But, because of his and others’ research work, they were able to start pulling in more PhD students than ever before.
“My research program and those of others hired later had begun to bear fruit and we became able to support more PhD students just as students from the best schools in China and India began applying in large numbers to our program,” Lewis said. “The ensuing 15 years saw a substantial increase in research and funding.”
Lewis said some of his proudest moments from his many years at Pitt come from the success of his students, including:
- Carl Edlund, Partner Engineering Manager at Microsoft, Core Operating System and Intelligent Edge, who is currently on sabbatical
- Yang Xu who became chair of Computer Science at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and now holds chairs at two additional universities
- Lewis’ postdoctoral researcher Alin Coeman, who is now an Associate Professor at Princeton
- Lewis’ last graduate, Huao LI, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Lewis said these relationships with students will be one of the things he misses most about working at SCI.
“Being around young people and new ideas helps keep us excited and involved,” Lewis said. “I hope to maintain some association with students at SCI even after I retire.”
During his retirement Lewis plans to do house maintenance and travel for conferences and other purposes, enjoying a break from work after years of giving SCI his very best.