The incumbent serves as an engineering research psychologist in the Human-Systems Integration Branch at the FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center. The incumbent conducts human factors research, engineering, development, testing, and evaluation activities in the aviation domain. The incumbent’s work supports the FAA efforts to improve the performance and effectiveness of air traffic controllers, pilots, and other aviation professionals.
Duties
The incumbent serves as an engineering research psychologist in the Air Traffic Systems Test & Evaluation Services, Human-Systems Integration Branch at the FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center. The incumbent works in the Research Development and Human Factors Laboratory and conducts human factors research, engineering, development, testing, and evaluations. The incumbent’s work supports the FAA mission to provide the safest and most efficient aerospace system in the world by improving the performance and effectiveness of the human operators of aviation systems. These operators include air traffic controllers, air traffic managers, technical
operations specialists, pilots, unmanned aircraft operators, dispatchers, aviation safety inspectors, and maintenance technicians.
The incumbent applies detailed technical knowledge of psychological principles, practices, and techniques to solve complex human factors problems in the aviation domain. Typical assignments include: planning, preparing, and executing human-in-the-loop simulations; collecting, reducing, analyzing, and visualizing human factors data; conducting interviews, field observations, and focus groups with subject-matter experts; and conducting iterative rapid prototyping of user interfaces and conducting usability tests.
• Conducts reviews of relevant scholarly and technical literature across multiple domains, including psychology, engineering, computer science, and graphic design.
• Serves as a contributing author or co-author to research plans that outline the objectives, hypotheses, methods, metrics, and resources for projects.
• Collects human factors data following established techniques and tools, including surveys and questionnaires, video and audio recordings, and physiological monitoring devices.
• Conducts data analyses using established techniques and tools, including inferential statistics, data mining, and fast-time modeling.
• Serves as contributing author or co-author for FAA technical reports and journal articles; presents briefings and papers at professional conferences.
• Contributes relevant human factors information to requirements documents, system specifications, test procedures, standards, and guidelines.
• Conducts all activities in compliance with ethical standards for the protection of human subjects.
The incumbent performs assignments of low to moderate scope and complexity under the direction of a manager, team leader, or more experienced scientist or engineer. The incumbent acts as an individual contributor or a member of a multidisciplinary team. Existing policies and procedures provide guidance for most assignments.
• Works closely with other psychologists, engineers, computer scientists, and subject-matter experts to accomplish assignments.
• Coordinates with manager, team leader, or more experienced staff to plan time and use resources to accomplish assignments.
• Frequently refers problems and work issues to manager, team leader, or more experienced staff when existing guidelines are not available or applicable.
• Demonstrates some independence in planning time and using assigned resources to accomplish assignments and small projects. Provides regular status updates on activities to manager or team leader; Work is reviewed periodically during assignments and at completion to ensure timeliness and technical compliance with the requirements of the project or other work activity.
• Contacts are mainly internal to the branch and project teams, and involve sharing information, providing data and analyses, and discussing the status of assignments. Contacts also include participants in human factors studies, surveys, simulations, or usability tests. Depending on the project, participants may be FAA employees, employees of external companies and organizations, or private citizens.