Our Team

Optomize is a lean family-run business, featuring our core skills of psychology and engineering with input at times from our trainee anaesthetist daughter, but the team is much wider, including highly skilled researchers, clinicians and industry partners who we regularly contribute to the advancement of our vision for performance training.

Dr Mel McKendrick CEO Optomize

Assistant Professor Heriot-Watt University

Dr Mel McKendrick is the Founder/CEO of Optomize Ltd since 2014. She is a Chartered Experimental Psychologist, with 14 years’ experience of eye tracking and an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Heriot-Watt University since 2014, where she is the Founding Director of SPECTRA Labs (Simulation, Performance, Evaluation, Cognition, Translational Research, Anxiety, which includes The Heriot-Watt Medical Education Lab (MEL), The Social Training and Anxiety Research (STAR) Lab and The Mental Illness & Neurodiverse Digital (MIND) Hub. The aim of her work is to implement a data driven approach to

1. capture and analyse individual and group cognitions, behaviour, and performance to understand the mechanisms and processes that account for differences between superior and less skilled performance with the aim of reducing performance learning curves
2. to facilitate optimal digital interventions for mental health and professional resilience.
   Before becoming an Academic, she used to be a fashion model, with performance anxiety, so understands the problems of performing under pressure and the need to practice until perfect.

SPECTRA Labs:

Gary McKendrick

Engineering Research and Media Consultant

Gary is our Engineering and Media Research Consultant. He has a Bachelor of Engineering – BEng focused in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and is also very fast as he is a Scottish Masters Athletics Champion, which gives also him first-hand knowledge of performance under pressure, resilience, dedicated practice and the importance of objective metrics.

Sloane

CWO Chief Welfare Officer