Teams

The Human Factor

Garage Headquarters: Granada Hills, CA

Driver: John Terceman

Mechanics: Patrick Martin, Courtney Schur, Michael Lamarr, Matt Hay

Nuts and Bolts:

Michael Lamarr, Patrick Martin, Courtney Schur, and John Terceman are studying for master’s degrees in the Human Factors/Applied Psychology Program at the University of California, Northridge, and Levon Gevorkyan is their “high-achieving undergraduate engineering slave.” John, the team’s captain, says, “We thought of the Red Bull Soapbox Race as a way to diversify our resumes while gaining notoriety for our psychology department, which is home to one of the most prestigious Human Factors schools in the nation. We work hard and we play hard, but,” he admits, “most of us have not built anything since our fourth-grade volcano projects.”

While Team Human Factor may not possess a great deal of hands-on expertise, they do spend most of their waking hours learning how to make things – all kinds of things – more effective, efficient, and user friendly through psychology. Human Factors is the exploration of how and why people use products, for the purpose of improving product design. Graduate students who study the field are prepared for jobs in industry, placement in doctoral programs…and perhaps dominance in soapbox races. The teammates are constructing their “giant, slimy brain” of a car in the university’s Systems and Engineering Research Laboratory with the help of cognitive psychology professor Robert Youmans, who once built a 1965 Shelby Cobra. The team also promises some “heart-pounding” hip-hop dancing, performed as only a bunch of brainy graduate students (and their high-achieving undergraduate engineering slave) can. And they really, really want to win. John explains, “We’re failing classes and postponing our master’s theses in order to represent and kick some major butt.”