The Mississippi Consortium for Military Personnel Research is proud to submit this proposal on the science of personnel research. The proposal is composed of an integrated suite of projects that are intended to collectively cover a significant portion of the sciences important for personnel research. Each of the projects proposes basic research to advance some aspect of the science that underlies military manpower and personnel research needs. With it we intend to significantly expand the Navy initiative between the Navy Personnel Research Science and Technology Office (NPRST) and the Universities of Mississippi and Memphis to address the accession, selection and management of military personnel for all three services.

The Mississippi Consortium for Military Personnel Research, (MCMPR), is composed of thirty four research faculty at three institutions of higher learning, the University of Mississippi, the University of Memphis and Kansas State University. The faculties of our three institutions provide a diverse mixture of skills from areas of engineering, business, mathematics, computer science, operations research, psychology, and economics. We believe that many of the problems of dealing with military personnel require fresh approaches that require the perspective of more than one traditional field of study and substantial cross fertilization of ideas among the fields. Several of the specific projects that are included in our proposal cross the traditional barriers that separate these fields and several involve faculty from more than one of the schools. The breadth and scope of the research disciplines represented in the MCMPR are necessary and sufficient to address the fundamental fields of science that apply to problems of military personnel. 

Many of our faculty researchers have established close contact with the Navy Personnel Research Science and Technology Office (NPRST). They are currently involved in basic research which directly supports applied research at NPRST. Our plan is to expand this relationship and to add additional research faculty and to cultivate relations with additional applied research facilities. Each of the twenty projects in the proposal include budgets for travel to NPRST, to ONR and, in some cases, to other military laboratories to confer with research staff and to aid the transition of the basic research results to applications in the Department of Defense. In addition, the Hearin Center for Enterprise Science, a source of three projects involving faculty from the University of Mississippi and the University of Memphis, has as its main goal the transition of basic results in optimization and enterprise science to business and industry. Applications from these projects will find their way into problems of distributing freight, trucking assets and natural gas through the relations that this center has already established with industry. Additional applications to industry personnel problems will also be facilitated by these research projects.

The projects in our proposal are grouped into four areas of potential application:

Final Reports

final reports

MAS V JUNE 3-5 CONFERENCE

Conference report

Military Personnel Science Workshop

Conference report