Ben D. Sawyer was raised in Montana, the son of a librarian and a professor. He grew up without television, reading, riding horses, tending bees, and hunting and fishing in the mountains. He began driving at 14, and spent high school pursuing swimming, drama, Math Olympiad, and computer programming. He had no idea what he wanted to be when he grew up, and initially worked as a butcher, doing theater and stand-up comedy in the evenings. He soon turned his talent for technology into his first company, Carpe Datum, which helped point-of-sale and financial firms to move their data from legacy hardware, some of it the size of an entire floor of a building. After the sale of that company he explored Europe on bicycle, and was able to parlay the experience into a career in travel and a travel investment, visiting over 100 countries on six continents. He moved to Taiwan, where he studied Mandarin Chinese, bicycled in the mountains, and started Teacher Ben American English, which prepared finance, engineering, and design students bound for the US.
Sawyer returned to the USA to enroll at Colorado State University, where he was involved with VR, driving simulation, and EEG research. He helped to build Ookkii, a personal finance startup, and started Tech Takeout, a home tech-support company focused on emeritus faculty. He then pursued a PhD at UCF under Dr. Peter Hancock‘s MIT^2 laboratory. He studied Industrial Engineering for his MS and Applied Experimental and Human Factors Psychology for his PhD, which received an Outstanding Dissertation Award. He concurrently worked for the USAF 711th Human Performance Wing, in their Battlefield Audiology, Applied Neuroscience, and BATMAN units. After offers from Harvard and Purdue he joined The Center for Transportation and Logistics at MIT, where he supported and led research into distraction and textual information in automated driving. He remains an affiliate at MIT. Amid work with automotive OEMS and major tech companies he won The Human Factors Prize for work mathematizing patterns of human attention in automated and repetitive tasks. He also co-founded AwayrAI, a startup building operator monitoring systems for operational settings. His most recognized work from this period is the first published evaluation of Google Glass in driving, in collaboration with the Air Force, which covered by media worldwide and for which he received the IEA K.U. Smith Award for best student paper.
In 2018 Sawyer accepted a faculty position at The University of Central Florida’s Industrial Engineering and Management Systems department, where after funding including a USAF Young Investigator Award (USAF YIP) and he received tenure in 2021. He also established Expert Human Factors, which provides consulting and expert witness work. Dr. Sawyer led the creation of and now directs The Readability Consortium. TRC researches the design of textual information and typography and now supports a community of over 200 PI-level researchers and dozens of companies including Google, Adobe, and Monotype. Dr. Sawyer’s work in readability optimization, human digital twins,neuroergonomic error detection, and attention modeling in human-machine systems has been funded by over $5 million in contracts with fortune 50 companies, DOD and federal grants, and state appropriations. His teams’ findings impact how textual information is delivered billions of readers worldwide. His students and mentees, and his published research, are an integral part of high-profile work in industry, government, and academia. Sawyer and his teams have contributed over 100 academic outputs to high-impact journals and conferences, and have been covered by The Washington Post, The New York Times, Fast Company, Wired, Scientific American, The BBC, and many more. He’s having fun, and is still not entirely sure what to be if he grows up.