About Me

I am Martin Lee Fracker. I am an experimental psychologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I studied under Christopher Wickens. If you know Chris, you will realize that my specialization is in Engineering Psychology, which is a subdomain of Human Factors Engineering. Engineering Psychology programs are sometimes found in Industrial Engineering or Industrial Psychology departments, but at Illinois it was a specialization within Experimental Psychology.

As an undergraduate, I attended Seattle Pacific University where I double majored in Psychology and Theater. Then I earned a Master of Science degree in Experimental Psychology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. A few years later, the United States Air Force sent me to the University of Illinois to earn my doctorate in Engineering Psychology, which I completed in 1987.

Following my 20-year Air Force Career, I joined IBM as a Usability Engineering consultant. I stayed with IBM for another 20 years until retiring finally in 2018. I’ve been enjoying retirement ever since, spending time with my wife Esperanza and doing quite a bit of traveling. Nevertheless, I have kept up my interest in Psychology as a scientific discipline, and recently decided to build this website (drmartinfracker.com) as way to share my scientific interests with others.

While I worked most of my career as an Engineering Psychologist in various applied settings within the military and then business, my true love lies in research and academia, including clinical, experimental, personality, and social psychology. I guess I would say that experimental and clinical psychology are my favorite subdisciplines .

There was a time early in my academic career when I was torn between becoming a clinical or an experimental psychologist. Obviously, I eventually chose experimental. My main reason for this choice was that I was attracted to what seemed to me at the time its greater scientific rigor. Looking back over the years, I think I made the right choice for me.

In case you are interested in such things, I am a retired charter member of the Association for Psychological Science, a regular member of the American Psychological Association, and also a lifetime member of the Association for Computing Machinery due to my career in IBM.