Board Member Profile: Dr. Reuben F. Burch V

Associate Director, Associate Professor, & Endowed Chair, Mississippi State University

Reuben F. Burch V, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering, the Jack Hatcher Endowed Chair for Engineering Entrepreneurship, the Associate Director of Human Factors & Athlete Engineering at the Center for Advanced Vehicular Center (CAVS), a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Strategic Planning & Analysis Research Center (NSPARC), the Technical Research Fellow of Human Factors for The Communiversity at East Mississippi Community College (EMCC), and founder of the Athlete Engineering research program at Mississippi State University (MSU). Prior to returning to academia, Dr. Burch spent 14 years working for and with global Fortune 500 companies in research and development areas such as virtual reality design, weapons systems and training, satellite systems and geospatial data, high-value financial software systems, logistics technology and management, autonomous vehicle design, wearables, and human performance. Dr. Burch’s primary research interests presently center around human factors and ergonomics, cognitive engineering, macro ergonomics, and human-technology interactions with different athlete personas including: sports, industrial (repetitive motion tasks), tactical (warfighters and emergency first responders), and at-risk (tele-health and rehabilitation) athlete populations. A brief video describing Athlete Engineering can be found here: https://www.weringtrue.msstate.edu/athleteengineering/index.html.

We sat down with Reuben to hear a little more about his perspective on the Tactical Athlete. Here is what he had to say:

(TA-LB): The themes of the Tactical Athlete Leadership Board are Readiness, Resilience, and Recovery. From your perspective, why are these themes essential, and what about them resonates with your experience in the human performance industry? 

(Reuben): These themes are exactly in line with the motivation of sports athletes, and they pair perfectly with the initiatives from the Pentagon to train military professionals as athletes. In the current state of the world, these themes are now even more important. They are measurements often associated with baselining the performance of an athlete to show improvements, to show the deltas between the elite and those training to become elite, and to show the goal an athlete must re-achieve should an injury or setback occur. These measures are the primary reasons human performance technology exists.

(TA-LB): Looking to the future, what technological innovation do you think will have the most significant impact on tactical athletes? 

(Reuben): Technologies that most accurately capture the current state of tactical athlete performance in combination with a flexible training curriculum that adjusts based the athlete’s deficiencies. From a physical and cognitive perspective, how does a brand-new pilot in training compare to an experienced weapon of war? That delta needs to be accurately captured and then converted into curriculum that specifically targets the necessary type 1 and type 2 skills that will help expedite the training process of that warfighter. To create more throughput in the military pipeline, processes must be streamlined to match the greatest need. Technologies that assist in quantifying those greatest needs and help training practitioners translate needs to curriculum is how that pipeline to readiness will be enhanced.

(TA-LB): The spirit of the TALB is to bring a diverse set of perspectives to the table aligned toward a singular purpose: to sustain the tactical athlete of today and preparing for the tactical athlete of tomorrow. Why is it essential for the broader human performance industry to work together towards this end? 

(Reuben): While the greatest challenge to innovation may be the need to create recognized standards, the biggest hurdle for maximizing the use of human performance technology to make better health and safety decisions is user adoption. For most tactical athletes required to use human performance technology, the “user is often not the chooser.” This means the person using the technology did not choose the technology. This also means that most technology acceptance models are not relevant for this space as they are built around the idea that the user is the chooser… which is especially not true for the tactical athlete. We need more people who are multilingual meaning that they speak the language of management who chooses the technology, the cultural evangelist who understands how to get users to adopt the technology, and the academic who generates the technology acceptance research.

(TA-LB): What is the greatest challenge to innovation in the human performance sector?

(Reuben): Standardization of human performance technology, particularly in wearable devices. This includes standardized practices in every aspect, from hardware testing for ruggedization, to sensor validation against laboratory gold standards, to cybersecurity, data security, and user protection, to the use of common terms like loading and readiness, and finally to the communication of the results of the data to practitioners. In 2022, the wearable market reached $20 billion but still only 25% of all wearables on the market are validated by someone other than the manufacturer.

Note from the Dr,

Athlete Engineering at Mississippi State University has one of the strongest stakeholder ecosystems in the human performance space because we span across military, industry, sports, and medical in our team of experts. Our students learn to be interdisciplinary across human factors, engineering, kinesiology, textiles, sociology, and communications. We are really good at identifying problems and connecting the right people to the need to generate a solution.