KEY ONGOING RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. Body & Mind Across the Gravity Spectrum: Human Performance from the Skies to the Deep Sea
Sub-project: The Warrior in the Machine — Psychophysiological Resilience in High-Stakes Military Environments
What does the human body and mind look like when gravity is no longer a constant? From the buoyant weightlessness of orbit to the crushing pressures of the deep sea, extreme environments push the physiological and psychological limits of human performance in ways that are still only partially understood.
This research program maps the full spectrum — from aviation and space to undersea and submarine operations — asking what changes, what endures, and what can be deliberately strengthened when human beings operate far beyond the conditions their biology evolved for. Drawing on applied psychophysiology, neuroergonomics, and aerospace medicine, the work spans sensorimotor adaptation, cognitive load, fatigue, and the relationship between bodily experience and decision-making under stress.
The Warrior in the Machine sub-project extends this inquiry into high-stakes military environments, where the stakes are not only performance but survival. Here, psychophysiological resilience — the capacity to regulate the nervous system, maintain situational awareness, and act with precision under extreme pressure — becomes a matter of operational life and death. We are particularly interested in the interplay of autonomic regulation, cognitive control, and the lived phenomenology of being a human inside a high-performance machine or mission system.
This research welcomes collaboration across aerospace medicine, defense human factors, and performance science communities — whether in academia, operational settings, or research organizations with access to relevant extreme environments.
→ See also: Applied Psychophysiology