Name: Tiffany Lui 

Hometown: Brooklyn, NY

Year in program:  4th 

Research Interests: My research interests are in vigilance and nueroergonomics. I am interested in exploring how humans are impacted when performing tasks that require extreme, sustained attention such as in baggage screening, air traffic control, and driving. Additionally, I utilize a variety of physiological tools such as transcranial doppler sonography (TCD), functional near-infrared spectroscopy, and eye tracking to gain further insight into how people are affected by such tasks. From this, we hope to create solutions that will aid people when performing these tasks. The ultimate goal is to be able to physiologically monitor people in real-time to determine when their performance will start to decline. 

Career Aspirations: I hope to work at an organization where the research I conduct will have a meaningful impact on the world and will also improve people's experiences on the products they use. I also hope to work with a variety of innovative people who also share the same goals as me. 

Fun Fact: I am in the end credits of an episode of "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon."

Advice to younger students: Manage your time properly. There is always going to be some type of work you should be doing, but you can have time to take a mental break too! It's all about balance so check in with yourself regularly to make sure you're not burnt out. 

We are excited to share that several of our chapter members have won student awards for their outstanding research contributions.

At 64th Annual HFES Meeting, Miriam Armstrong received the Alphonse Chapanis Student Paper Award for her presentation titled: "The Accuracy of Interrater Reliability Estimates Found Using a Subset of the Total Data Sample: A Bootstrap Analysis."

Armstrong, M. E., Tornblad, M., & Jones, K. S. (2020). The Accuracy of Interrater Reliability Estimates Found Using a Subset of the Total Data Sample: A Bootstrap Analysis. 

At 64th Annual HFES Meeting, Daxton T. Mitchell received the Council of Technical Groups Student Presenter Award for his presentation titled: "Safety Perception and Behaviors during Human-Robot Interaction in Virtual Environments." 

Mitchell, D.T. & Choi, H. (2020). Safety Perception and Behaviors during Human-Robot Interaction in Virtual Environments.

At the 2020 HFES Perception and Performance Technical Group Business Meeting, Nicholas Garcia received the PPTG Student Research Grant award for his proposal titled: "A New Point-Light Display Software to Identify the Information to which People Attend when Perceiving Other People’s Action Capabilities."

We'd like to give a big congratulations to our award recipients, and thank you as always to the National HFES Chapter for their constant support of our students. 

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society student chapter at Texas Tech University received the gold level award for 2020 at the 64th Annual Virtual HFES Meeting. This designation is presented by the national Human Factors and Ergonomics Society to recognize student chapters for their outstanding contributions to the discipline of human factors and ergonomics. Gold is the highest level of recognition for this award.

This will be the 13th consecutive year that the Texas Tech chapter has received gold status. Congratulations to the 2019-2020 chapter members who helped Texas Tech achieve gold status this year, and thank you to the alumni for your continuous support!
​
Here's a video message from current TTU Chapter President McKenna Tornblad!

Name: Nicholas Garcia
 
Hometown: Miami, Florida
 
Year in program:  4th Year
 
Research Interest: My research interests include perception-action and human-robot interaction. I’m interested in exploring how people perceive other people’s abilities to perform actions and the information people attend when doing so. One day, I hope this research might also help us design robots that can judge other people’s abilities to perform actions. For example, this research could help design caretaker robots that can correctly judge whether our grandmothers can safely reach for a can of soup on the top shelf of their kitchens. If it’s too risky for our grandmothers to do so, a caretaker robot can then offer assistance
 
Career Aspirations: Once I graduate, I would love to be a part of a collaborative and creative research team at the industry level. Within this team, I hope to work with my peers to produce impactful human factors and user experience research that will help improve our users’ lives. With this mission in mind, I hope my Texas Tech education will offer me the chance to utilize my HF training globally to help others.
 
Fun Fact: I’ve been able to travel to over 50 countries around the world. My favorite countries I’ve visited so far include Japan and South Africa.  ­
 
Advice to younger students: Never to be too hard on yourself! Grad school will always be about growth. If you learn from both your success and failures, and give your best effort, I promise you will leave grad school as a better person and researcher.