 | Richard A. Schmidt, Ph.D
 E-mail: rschmidt@vectorscientific.com
Senior Human Factors Consultant
Dr. Schmidt offers 35 years of university faculty experience in the field of psychology and human factors (ergonomics), as well as 26 years of consulting experience in human factors. He provides research, general consulting, and expert testimony concerning human factors and ergonomics, and the capabilities and limitations in human performance, related to the design and use of controls, automobile (and other vehicle) accidents and design, and the use of a wide variety of consumer products.
He is actively engaged as Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCLA. He has authored over 150 articles in scientific journals since 1967 and published four books. He has supported over 700 investigative cases and provided extensive consulting to the world's automakers and other manufacturers
Areas of Expertise
 Automobile accidents and operator behavior
Vehicle accidents (bicycles and motorcycles, ATVs, trucks, trains, ships and boats)
Workplace ergonomics and machine use
Warnings, labeling, and instructions on consumer products
Perception and reaction time, night-time vision, eye movements
Human error, attention, distraction, and 'panic'
Learning and training
Cell-phone use and human performance
Personal
After attending high school in Santa Barbara, California, Richard attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his B.A. in physical education, with a minor in mathematics, in 1963. In those days, the program at Berkeley under psychologist Dr. Franklin Henry was one of the few (many programs have followed in the years since) in which physical education was an academic discipline. At Berkeley, the fundamental processes in human performance were studied scientifically in the laboratory just as they would be in any other scientific field.
While an undergraduate at Berkeley, Schmidt was a collegiate gymnast, and was named to the All American Gymnastics Team on the still rings in 1962. Naturally, he was passionate about gymnastics, and he became fascinated by the possibility that his interest in gymnastics, movement control, and teaching could be integrated with his background in science and mathematics, and a career was launched.
With this background and motivation, he then received a teaching credential and an M.A. degree in physical education in 1965 from Berkeley. After he taught and coached gymnastics for a year at the high-school level in the mid-1960s, he entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois, where he worked with Dr. Alfred Hubbard and the famous motor-behavior psychologist Dr. Jack Adams. He finished his Ph.D. physical education in 1967, with a graduate minor in experimental psychology, examining problems in timing control of interceptive actions for his doctoral dissertation. Throughout, his focus had been on the scientific study of human performance and learning.
After graduate school at the University of Illinois, he served on the faculty at the University of Maryland in College Park (1967-1970; Physical Education and Psychology Departments), the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (1970-1974; Physical Education Department), the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (1974-1980; Physical Education and Psychology Departments), and the University of California, Los Angeles (1980-1988; Kinesiology Department). Since 1988, he has been a member of the UCLA Psychology Department, and has been Emeritus Professor since 1998. His activities in Psychology have been in the Department's Cognitive Area, where he did research and teaching in the areas of human performance, human factors and ergonomics, and human learning.
View Dr. Schmidt's Curriculum Vitae
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