I am an Associate Professor and Chartered Psychologist (Experimental); the Founding Director of SPECTRA Labs and Co-Lead for the Mental Ilness and Neurological Disorders (MIND) Digital Health theme in the Global Research Intitute for Health and Care Technologies. HCT I am also the Founding CEO of Optomize Ltd which implements a data driven approach to capture and analyse performance in medical training with the aim of reducing learning curves. 

I am interested in how we can use simulated environments, technology and feedback to reduce anxiety and improve performance. 

Anxiety, social performance and mental health: I specialise in social cognition, face processing and attention and am currently developing the MIND Hub as a digital mental health research and data services centre which focuses on providing consultancy, validation and research project services; development of digital content and data curation using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Further to this I am interested in face processing and cognitive biases in social judgments. 

Performance training and assessment: I founded the Medical Education Lab (MEL) to work across disciplines bringing together clinicians, academics and SMEs to develop problem based solutions for medical training Technologies include digital tools for Med x (Virtual, augmented and mixed realities); haptics; eye-tracking; 3D object recognition; data capture systems; human-robot interaction; gaming and visualisation technologies; robotics for capturing surgical skills and training.

Recently funded projects

EU Horizon led by FDK (Germany) – Heriot watt -Lim, T., McKendrick, M.(2023). SMart tools and Integrated methodology for cLinical dEcisions. SMILE

EPSRC EMERGENCE Healthcare Technologies Network+: McConnell, A & McKendrick, M (2023) Robobrico, a modular robotic platform co-designed with users. Emergence Robobrico

British Journal of Anaesthesia/ Royal Colleage of Anaesthesia, National Institute for Academic Anaesthesia: Gridewald, I., McLeod, G., Portelli, R., McKendrick, M., Husz, Z. (2023). Design and validation of an augmented reality system for simulated thoracic epidural block training on the soft embalmed Thiel cadaver. 

Tayside Healthboard Fund: Sadler, A., McLeod, G., McKendrick, M. (2023) NHS Tayside. Does cadaver simulation training offer best clinical performance behaviour during ultrasound guided regional anaesthesia?

European Crucible: McKendrick, M. Tereshchenko, I., Chollet, M. & Jess-Cooke, C. “MAVKA (2022) Co-creative gamified storytelling for trauma”.

Eye tracking, mixed realities, simulation, digital mental health, medical training, social perception, anxiety.