Olympic Coach, Avionics Engineer, and Tufts Master’s Student Leslie Stratton

According to Leslie Stratton, Skeleton—a sport where athletes slide down an icy track on a sled—is all about human factors engineering. The athlete is what makes a difference in the performance. “Theoretically, if you take a sled and drop it at the top of the track, it should make it down the track with pretty nice lines. The human is the issue because we move, and we have adrenaline, and we steer incorrectly,” she explained. The goal is to engineer the sled, and the athlete’s performance to minimize the effects of human error while maximizing time gain.

Stratton fell into the sport unexpectedly after her college years and competed from 2014-2022. At the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano/Cortina, Stratton coached Anna Fernstädt, an athlete from the Czech Republic, who ended up placing 10th in the games. “I find so much satisfaction, on the coaching side of things. Honestly, maybe more than my own personal accomplishments,” Stratton said.

Although she is still involved in the sport through coaching, she retired as an athlete in 2022 after a successful career including competing in the 2018 U.S. Olympic Trials for Team USA Bobsleigh and Skeleton and two World and European Championships for Sweden through her dual-citizenship. She also qualified for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, China but ultimately wasn’t sent due to a secondary qualification standard Sweden has (top 8 in the world ranking). Retiring from her athletic career felt like a leap of faith. “It’s a bit of an identity thing,” she said. “You're like, who am I? What do I do? I've done this my whole life.” Luckily, Stratton had other passions to fall back on.

Aviation has always been in Stratton’s blood. Her father is a recently retired pilot, and her mother is a retired flight attendant. “For me, it was always aviation, it was always human factors,” Stratton said. She started a new job improving airplane cockpits with Collins Aerospace, but she knew she wanted to dive further into human factors research in a master’s program.

Having grown up near Boston, Stratton had heard about Tufts University from an early age. Two of her friends who are both Tufts alumni encouraged her to consider the School of Engineering’s human factors master’s program. As she thought about what she wanted her new life to look like post-athletic career, Tufts seemed like the right choice. “I applied to Tufts in that December-January time frame, knowing I was going to retire as an athlete in the spring. I owe a lot to Tufts in helping me with that transition, giving me direction, and giving me passion, and having people that invested in that, too,” Stratton said.

Like a true human factors engineer, Stratton jokes that she did a gap analysis to evaluate which master’s program was the best fit for her needs. “I really wanted hands-on experience and buy-in from professors to do the research and felt that immediately at Tufts,” she said. “I knew as soon as I started connecting with professors that’s where I wanted to go.”

Another perk? At Tufts, the human factors program is housed within the Department of Mechanical Engineering. As an interdisciplinary field, human factors programs fall under different departments depending on the school. Stratton wanted to gain a stronger theoretical understanding of mechanical engineering to complement her real-world experience in aviation and Skeleton, making Tufts’ mechanical engineering underpinning to the human factors program a perfect fit.

Stratton credits Tufts courses like Assistive Design and The Human Side of Systems Thinking with giving her a new perspective on human factors engineering. “All of the classes have allowed me to put a human element into the concepts that I've learned. I'm learning the theory behind things and how to design better and how to be a better engineer, but also, the practical application of it, which I think is one of the biggest things that I was looking for.”

Her research with Professor of the Practice Dan Hannon aims to quantify situational awareness for pilots. “Situational awareness is a term that’s thrown around pretty loosely in aviation,” Stratton observed. Using physiological measurements such as heart rate, she measures pilot’s response times in a flight simulator. With a more concrete understanding of situational awareness, engineers could improve cockpit designs to better facilitate it. She hopes the work will lead to improved pilot training and more objective certification evaluations.

As a self-described “huge fan of Boston,” Stratton has enjoyed being closer to the city she loves. She’s been able to balance her full-time work in avionics at Collins Aerospace with her master’s program and coaching responsibilities. Reflecting on her Tufts experience, Stratton is grateful for the positive impact her graduate education has had on her career, “It’s definitely made me think of how I engineer whether that's on the aviation side or with equipment on the skeleton side. It's allowed me to have a more holistic view of those things overall,” she said.

Learn more about the master’s in human factors engineering at Tufts.