An alumna of the School of Psychological Science, Stosic researches nonverbal communication by astronauts
Morgan Stosic
By Taylor Pedersen, CLA Student Writer - February 18, 2026
Long before she studied astronauts, Morgan Stosic, ‘19, taught people how to ski. She grew up in Reno, Nevada, in a family where athletics were less of an extracurricular activity and more of a lifestyle. Track meets, volleyball tournaments, and competitive ski races filled her childhood. By high school, Stosic was spending her winters at Mt. Rose, just outside Reno, working as a ski instructor; learning how to read people, adapt on the fly, and keep small groups moving safely down a mountain.
Those early lessons, she said, quietly shaped the way she now thinks about human behavior.
“When you’re looking at small teams, whether it’s a ski lesson or an astronaut crew, the dynamics really matter,” Stosic said. “Who works well together, how people communicate, how personalities fit; it all affects performance.”
At the time, though, Stosic didn’t imagine herself working in research, much less at NASA. She entered OSU with an interest in medicine, drawn to helping people but uneasy about working directly with the body. Psychology stood out as a compromise: a way to understand people without blood or scalpels.
That interest sharpened into something more concrete during her first year at OSU, when retired psychology professor Frank Bernieri invited her to join his Interpersonal Sensitivity Lab. Bernieri, a pioneering researcher in nonverbal behavior, became not only her mentor, but a defining influence on her career.
“I really lucked out,” Stosic said. “Frank was one of the early people pushing psychology to take nonverbal behavior seriously; facial expressions, posture, small movements. Joining his lab shaped everything I’ve done since.”
Working with Bernieri, Stosic discovered something unexpected about herself: she loved statistics. While many psychology students shy away from the math-heavy side of research, Stosic gravitated toward modeling, coding, and data analysis.
“That surprised me,” she said. “But it also pushed me toward research in a big way.”
By her junior and senior years, Stosic was traveling to conferences and publishing papers with Bernieri, developing a growing fascination with how people unconsciously read and respond to one another. The lab’s work focused on subtle behaviors: head nods, hand gestures, shifts in posture, that quietly shape social interaction. Studying those signals changed how she moved through the world.
“You start noticing how much information is exchanged without words,” she said. “It’s everywhere.”
That curiosity followed her east when Bernieri encouraged her to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Maine under Dr. Mollie Ruben, a research colleague of Bernieri’s. There, Stosic narrowed her focus even further, studying nonverbal synchrony and mimicry; the ways people unconsciously coordinate their movements during interaction. Part of that interest came from an unlikely source: ballroom dancing.
“I took all the ballroom classes at OSU,” she said. “Sometimes you dance with someone, and it just clicks. You move together without thinking. Other times, it’s awkward no matter how hard you try.”
That sense of effortless coordination, or its absence, became central to her research. Her dissertation examined why people synchronize their nonverbal behavior and what those patterns reveal about motivation, intention, and group performance. While in graduate school, Stosic balanced academic work with contract research at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Those applied settings pushed her to think beyond journal articles.
“In academia, the endpoint is often publishing a paper,” she said. “But I wanted my work to actually change how things function; policies, procedures, communication.”
Working in hospitals also taught her how different disciplines speak about the same ideas.
“You have to translate your findings,” she said. “The language doctors use isn’t the same as academic psychology, even if you’re studying the same behavior.”
That ability to translate would soon become critical. During her Ph.D, Stosic’s research caught the attention of NASA. Funded by the agency, she began studying fatigue through nonverbal behavior, exploring how doctors on Earth might assess astronauts’ cognitive and physical states while they’re in space.
“It was this intersection of everything I cared about,” she said. “Behavior, performance, high-stakes environments.”
After finishing graduate school, Stosic briefly worked as a UX researcher at Collective Health, a third-party healthcare administrator, before being hired full-time by KBR at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. She has now been a research psychologist there for over a year and a half, working in human spaceflight and studying how small, tightly knit teams function under extreme conditions. Astronaut crews, she noted, are usually made up of four to six people, far smaller than most teams studied in traditional organizational psychology.
“When you’re sending a group into space, team composition really matters,” she said. “Personality, motivation, background, communication style, all of it shapes performance.”
Her work often looks nothing like a traditional psychology lab. At NASA, research can involve giant pools used to simulate microgravity, underwater spacewalk tests, and collaborations with engineers, physiologists, and medical doctors.
“It’s not a little conference room,” Stosic said. “It’s this massive, integrated scientific environment.”
That interdisciplinary approach, and her growing impact in the field, recently earned Stosic a spot on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list. While the recognition is significant, she sees it as just one moment in a much longer journey.
“If you’d told 16-year-old me, teaching skiing at Mt. Rose, that I’d work at NASA, I wouldn’t have believed you,” she said.
Stosic never had a single, fixed plan. Instead, she followed what interested her: statistics, nonverbal behavior, teamwork, letting those threads pull her forward.
“My path zigzagged,” she said. “I just kept asking, ‘What makes me excited to get out of bed?’ and followed that.”
From snowy slopes in Nevada to astronaut crews, that curiosity has carried her farther than she ever expected, and, fittingly, has kept her studying the quiet signals that hold teams together, even in space.