From New Bedford to Amazon: This local is leading research on products we've yet to see.

NEW BEDFORD – Later this year, New Bedford local Brandon Fluegel will be releasing a product with Amazon that he’s been on the research team for since day one – earning an award from the company recently.

As a user experience researcher, he said his love for the field started in a physics classroom at New Bedford High School.

“It was kind of one teacher I had in New Bedford High School: Mr. George Crook,” Fluegel said. “The New Bedford School system really allowed me to learn how to interact with different types of people from different backgrounds.

“That really got me passionate about psychology learning how to navigate these differences.”

Fluegel, who started at Amazon in June 2020, is responsible for leading research for various product work streams. This includes both hardware such as the Alexa devices, and software experiences such as understanding what an optimal amount of time for Alexa to respond is and what personality she should have when responding to different questions.

“I use research from various fields, such as linguistics and cognitive psychology, to understand how people communicate and apply the same principles to AI,” Fluegel said. “My work is focused on creating a human-centric perspective on product design.”

Without going into too much detail, because he signed a strict non-disclosure agreement with Amazon, he said people haven’t even seen the capabilities that the company has planned in the tech field.

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“We like to say it's always day one every day. And that's sort of this idea that we're always living in the future. We're always thinking long term,” he said.

Releasing his first 'day one' project at Amazon

In November 2023, Fluegel said there will be some excitement over a product announcement. He has been leading the research on the product since its early conception.

“We've been doing this over the past two years, and now we're in sort of the final rounds of research because research is always going on,” he said. “But we will be having some really exciting announcements later this year.”

On March 16, Fluegel received an Amazon Inventor award for filing a patent on behalf of the company which will be a new method of interacting with their products.

“It will greatly increase not only the efficiency of interaction, but also the delights of interaction,” he said carefully not to give anything away accidentally.

Born in Springfield, Missouri, Fluegel moved up to New Bedford when he was 2-years-old because his grandparents owned a house in New Bedford. After graduating New Bedford High School, he attended the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida.

“I was interested in psychology, the human interaction, the way that we navigate the world,” he said. “I never was passionate about doing therapy work or clinical work.”

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He said it was during his first year of his senior year that he discovered Human Factors Psychology.

“Human Factors Psychology is a scientific field that studies how humans process information, such as attention, memory, cognition, sensation, and perception,” he said.

What is Human Factors Psychology?

According to Fluegel, by understanding these human factors, researchers can design products that are not only useful and efficient, but also intuitive and pleasant to use for their audience.

“This field helps us build products that are accessible to anyone, from grandparents to 10 year olds,” he added.

Human Factors Psychology provides a human-centric approach to product design that engineers may not have, allowing people to create products that are tailored to the user, not just tech-savvy engineers.

This field, which Fluegel said was created during World War II, was created in order to address the issue of planes crashing due to the design of the cockpits not being intuitive enough for humans to operate them.

While working as a research assistant in a lab called the Neurophysiology of Aging, which was focused on identifying methods to predict cognitive decline in the elderly, Fluegel said one of the investigators saw potential in him and had me present a research study at the American Academy of Audiology Conference.

“I was able to win a national award for that research study, which opened up many opportunities for me,” he said, including getting into a PhD. program and Harvard.

From Mercedes-Benz to NASA

While taking a gap year to prepare for his PhD and to make his resume more attractive, Flugel said he made hundreds of cold calls and emails and ended up getting two offers from Harvard and MIT to work in cognitive neuroscience labs.

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He worked in the clinical neuroscience lab at Harvard Medical School for a year to refine his research approach and learn how to think and speak as a researcher.

After this gap year, he was accepted into a 5-year PhD program for human factor psychology at Old Dominion University in Virginia.

During this program, he had the opportunity to work in the tech industry including Mercedes-Benz and NASA.

“At NASA, I helped lead research on the medical workstation design for the successor to the International Space Station, called the Deep Space Gateway,” he said. “Yes, it absolutely felt like a science fiction movie.”

Soon after, he found his way to Amazon. He currently lives in Denver, Colorado, but does miss the New England seasons and the Boston sports culture.

“But I gotta say, man, I absolutely loved the mountains and ever since I moved out here I've been fascinated by the stories of the early explorers,” he said. “How much guts it took to to explore untouched territory of the West and doing it without any confidence that they make it back.”

That sums up where Fluegel is, as he heads into uncharted territories with his developing research at Amazon.

“As we say at Amazon, it's always day one, and we're gonna blow some minds here,” he said. “I’m very excited to be part of that.”

Standard-Times staff writer Seth Chitwood can be reached at schitwood@s-t.com. Follow him on twitter: @ChitwoodReports. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Standard-Times today.

This article originally appeared on Standard-Times: Amazon researcher Brandon Fluegel from New Bedford accepts prize