Home

Athlete Engineering Institute

Revolutionizing human performance through science, technology, and collaboration.

Capabilities

Partners

Team

Our Mission

The Mississippi State Athlete Engineering Institute centers on human factors—how athletes interact with systems and processes. This foundation sets us apart: we design initiatives around the athlete, not the other way around, using these insights to drive performance and mitigate injury risk.

The MSU Athlete Engineering Institute was shaped by interviewing strength and conditioning coaches at the collegiate and professional levels to understand their needs, concerns, and opportunities. Their feedback became the fundamental core of our mission, which is to advance human performance through translational, interdisciplinary research at the intersection of biomechanics, wearable technology, data science and human factors.

About Us

Founded in 2017 with 15 members and a small start-up grant, Mississippi State’s Athlete Engineering program began as a collaborative effort to bring together expertise from Industrial and Systems Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kinesiology, and the School of Human Sciences. Early work focused primarily on the development and application of wearable technologies for collecting and analyzing human performance data.

Since then, the program has grown steadily by through the challenges of a pandemic, refining its research focus, and building momentum as a multidisciplinary team dedicated to improving human performance across sport, industry, military, and public safety settings. In 2023, Athlete Engineering was formally established as a research institute.

Today, the Athlete Engineering Institute collaborates with teams from leading athletic conferences, professional organizations including NBA and NFL teams, and industry partners such as Toyota and Ingalls Shipbuilding. The institute is affiliated with Mississippi State’s Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems, which provided critical support during Athlete Engineering’s early growth, particularly as the program explored human factors related to advanced and autonomous vehicle systems.

The institute is home to the Athlete Engineering Research Lab (AERL), a state-of-the-art human performance research environment that integrates equipment, expertise, and resources from multiple engineering departments, CAVS, Fashion Design and Merchandising, and Kinesiology. Together, these resources position the Athlete Engineering Institute to advance research, innovation, and practical solutions that support human performance in real-world environments.