Biography

Eric is an applied psychologist with 15+ years of leadership experience successfully bringing technology products to market for Fortune 50 companies such as General Motors, Dell, and Boeing. His broad psychology background has given him the foundational knowledge of experimental design and his focus area of engineering psychology taught him how to design products that will be part of a human-computer system. His time in industry taught him how to deliver enterprise and consumer products in a timely manner using Agile and Lean techniques and his time as both a "people manager" and as a "manager of managers" gave him the leadership and people skills necessary for identifying, standing up, and managing strong team members across multi-million-dollar projects.

Eric's time at SA Technologies, with Dr. Mica Endsley, gave him a deep understanding of Situational Awareness and the applications for its use in many disciplines including soldiers in high-stress situations. He was the lead researcher responsible for visiting all the major military bases to conduct user testing on the early prototypes of the Warfighter Machine Interface. Their work developing the user interfaces for the various military roles using an applied process leveraging the theory of Situational Awareness and led to multiple papers.

At Dell, Inc. Eric helped navigate the Usability team through the evolution to User Experience as the team grew from 3 to over 150 team members globally. Eric spent a year in Singapore and was part of the development of talent at Dell's Singapore Design Center. Eric was also the lead for Dell's partnership with Google when they were first introducing their Chromebooks to the market. This was Google's first time entering the hardware product space, so part of his job was educating them on the best practices to bring a product to market, timelines, factory relationships, etc. A key contribution while at Dell, Eric was the lead researcher on a new brand that was developed to compete at the high-end of the portfolio against Apple. Eric's contributions defining the value proposition using multiple research projects, including many conjoints, used to help prioritize features for the Adamo brand. These findings have gone on to carry the most successful consumer brand at Dell, the XPS line of products. While working with Boeing, Eric was a researcher for the design of the Warfighter Machine Interface, a subset of the multi-billion dollar program known as FCS (Future Combat Systems). At both General Motors and Rackspace, Eric built out and managed user experience teams including research and design resources that were responsible for everything from the research and design of the e-commerce websites to the software that ran the factory floor assembly lines.

Eric has transitioned into academia over the last 2.5 years where he now serves as a Clinical Associate Professor. Eric was one of 10 faculties from The University of Texas at Austin (UT) awarded a two-year Provost Teaching Fellow. In academia, Eric has brought his fast-paced industry work ethic to projects in this new role. Eric is the Founding Director of the UT iSchool's Health Care Experience Lab (hcx.ischool.utexas.edu) which employs students dedicated to healthcare related projects that come to the team through partnerships with Dell Medical School as well as industry partners. Eric's team has worked on a variety of projects including mobile and desktop applications, augmented reality, virtual reality, and marketing campaigns to ensure they are successful. The team's recent work on an application focused on Opioid Overdose was submitted, and accepted, by his students for presentation at the annual UXPA conference for 2018 in Puerto Rico.

Positions and Employment

1. Clinical Associate Professor, School of Information, University of Texas, Summer 2017 - Present

2. Partner, Sentier, Inc., Austin, TX, Sept 2017 - Present

3. Adjunct Faculty, School of Information, University of Texas, Spring 2016-Summer 2017

4. Director of User Experience, Rackspace, 2014 - 2016

5. UX Architect, General Motors, 2013 - 2014

6. Lecturer, Department of Psychology, Texas State University, Spring 2013-Fall 2016

7. User Experience Lead, Dell Inc. 2010 - 2013

8. Marketing Manager, Dell Inc. 2008 - 2010

9. Usability Engineer, Dell Inc. 2002 - 2008

10. Usability Engineer, Situation Awareness (SA) Technologies, 2004 - 2006

Degrees

Areas Of Specialization

Health Care Experience
Usability
Human-Computer Interaction

Recent Courses