J. Peter Kincaid

J. Peter Kincaid (born 1942) is a scientist and science educator who is the founding director of the Modeling and Simulation Ph.D. program at the University of Central Florida, the largest such program in the world. Trained as a human factors psychologist at the Ohio State University, he has split his career between higher education and working as a scientist working for the U.S. military. While working for the U.S. Navy in Orlando in the late 1970’s, he led a team which developed the prototype for current style and grammar checks which are a component of word processing programs such as Microsoft Word. Previously, he developed the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test for the U.S. Navy. This formula became a U.S. government standard in the 1980’s and has gradually emerged as a leading measurement of the reading difficulty of textual material. The formula has been modified for use in assessing text written in dozens of different languages.

Education

He received degrees in psychology and human factors.
*Oberlin College (BA 1964)
*Ohio State University (PhD 1971)