The Department of Defense manages about seven million people. Major Paul Lester, Director of Research for the Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of the Army, discusses how the Army uses HR data to improve the lives of its soldiers.

Lester’s team has built an enormous database for securely and anonymously analyzing and experimenting with that data. They have run analyses on over 16,000 soldiers entering basic training to determine the factors that lead to attrition throughout the training.

They have also studied the factors that make a solider more susceptible to post traumatic stress disorder that can be identified before deployment. The goal with all these efforts is to find insights to help make the lives of their soldiers happier, healthier, and more resilient, both on the battlefield and back at home.

Learn more about how Major Lester conducts psychological research in combat in this interview from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.