Behavioral Research and Analysis

Max Vercruyssen, PhD, is the director of Hawaii Academy, a private school for lifetime fitness, gymnastics, and human sciences, where he also serves as chair of the research department and as head coach of the school's elitelevel trampoline gymnastics teams. For the past 15 years, Dr. Vercruyssen has reduced his research activities so that he and his wife, Dr. Donna Mah, could coach their four daughters in national and international championships.

He holds a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology; master's degrees in experimental and physiological psychology, exercise and sport sciences, and public health; a PhD in neuromuscular control, and pursued postdoctoral training to earn advanced certificates in ergonomics and gerontology. Most of his advanced statistics training was under Paul A. Games (Pennsylvania State University) and as required for experimental psychology, biostatistics, and longitudinal studies of aging.

At the University of Southern California (USC), Dr. Vercruyssen served as assistant professor of human factors and ergonomics, director of the Human Factors Laboratory, and codirector of the Laboratory of Attention and Motor Performance in the Andrus Gerontology Center. He also helped develop the university's ergonomics graduate degree programs and mentored the first ergonomics majors in safety science. At the University of Hawaii, he was an associate professor in psychology, gerontology, and geriatric medicine.

During the 1990s, Dr. Vercruyssen was also a research associate at the University of Minnesota's Center for Transportation Research, Institute of Intelligent Transportation Systems, and a distinguished fellow of gerontechnology at the Technical University of Eindhoven, Netherlands. Dr. Vercruyssen authored or coauthored over 200 refereed publications and presented papers at international scientific and technical conferences. Nine years of his university appointments involved teaching experimenta