Ph.D. students are challenged to discover new ideas, invent new products or break through barriers on existing problems. As a Ph.D. student I am leading a new area of research in the STEM discipline. As an industrial engineer, I am attempting to extend the reach of engineering methods and tools traditionally applied in manufacturing and service-related settings to the area of human performance. Human Performance Engineering, IE 402 008, is a new creative inquiry class that Dr. Kevin Taaffe and I have created. The research includes many focus areas such as quality, decision making, perception, game theory, biology, simulation, and disciplines from engineering to psychology to management and the sciences can all potentially play a role. For the last two semesters I have guided undergraduate students in investigating the cause and effect relationships in human performance in individual or team sports. As a research group, we are challenged to learn materials that are beyond our current knowledge base and to examine psychological and biological factors that affect decisions people make in a competitive environment. Moreover, we aim to quantify the extent to which changes to our mental and physical abilities translate into an increased performance during the sporting event.