Our Team

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:

Professor Graeme McLeod

Consultant Anaesthetist, NHS Tayside, Honorary Professor, School of Medicine, University of Dundee

Graeme McLeod is an NHS Consultant Anaesthetist and Honorary Professor of Anaesthesia at the University of Dundee. He also is Co-Lead for the MSc in Regional Anaesthesia at the University of East Anglia. He is director of the Mastery Learning Course in regional anaesthesia at the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee that uses the unique Thiel cadaver simulator. His research interests include validation of Thiel cadaver as a simulator of needle interventions: the translation of skills from cadaver simulators to patients and development of new needle technologies.

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