Photo By Emily Swedlund | KISSIMMEE, Fla. (Aug. 6, 2025) Members of the Naval Psychological Readiness and Human...... read more read more
Kissimmee, Fla. – Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory (NSMRL)’s Naval Psychological Readiness and Human Performance (NPRHP) team received two awards this week; the Military Health System Research Symposium (MHSRS) Outstanding Research Accomplishment by a Military Team award and the Charles S. Gersoni Military Psychology Award from the Society for Military Psychology.
The MHSRS Team Awards recognize outstanding medical research contributions, particularly in areas relevant to warfighter health and readiness. MHSRS recognizes one military team and one academic team for this award each year.
The Gersoni Award is presented to one team or individual per year for outstanding contributions to military psychology in research, service, product development, or administration. Presentation of this award reflects acknowledgement of the teams’ service on behalf of the welfare of military personnel.
The NPRHP team focuses on improving the holistic health of the undersea warfighter, and has received recognition for their work modernizing the Submarine Environment Fit Test (SUBFIT), which was recently implemented throughout the entire Submarine Force (SUBFOR) and was covered by NSMRL public affairs earlier this year.
The SUBFIT program has been a long time in the making. When NSMRL was founded in the 1940s, psychological readiness screening was one of three original focus areas. The team focused on screening for psychological factors that were incongruent with submarine life. Submarine service is voluntary, and submariners often operate in extreme environments, so it is important to find sailors who are mentally and physically fit for the challenge.
“Because time is flat circle, we’re still facing some of the same issues they faced in the 1940s” said Dr. Justin Handy, a cognitive psychologist and principal investigator on the NPRHP team. “We’re still working to find solutions to screening and assessment challenges that have been around since the beginning of the Submarine Force, and carrying on that legacy.”
NSMRL developed the Submarine Environmental Screener (SUBSCREEN) as one potential solution in 1986, and the program ran successfully until 2020. In 2017, submarine leadership recognized that SUBSCREEN was leaving issues unresolved, so they called a Summit in Groton, CT. Representatives from the Navy medical, submarine, and naval reactor communities came together to propose updates to the submarine screening process, and solve the issue of unplanned losses (when a sailor leaves submarine duty earlier than planned). The summit sought a long-term solution that would identify resilient submariners with the correct disposition for this extreme service.
The eventual result of this summit was the creation of SUBFIT, a program initiated by Cmdr. Jay Haran, a uniformed research psychologist assigned to NSMRL at the time of the summit, and a term coined by Dr. Andrea Bizarro, an industrial-organization (IO) psychologist on the team. Haran envisioned a team of experts with diverse backgrounds, who would create a program from the ground up that was tailored specifically to the Submarine Force and their needs. Team members include psychologists (IO, clinical, applied, and cognitive), military personnel, and data scientists. This talent pool allowed the team to build a completely customized tool.
“We developed SUBFIT from the ground up,” said Dr. Dominica Hernandez, clinical psychologist and principal investigator on the NPRHP team. “SUBSCREEN focused on psychopathologies, but we wanted to place more emphasis on the performance component, so that we could develop and retain the incoming sailors. We didn’t want to impact just the individual, but the culture as a whole.”
For the updated SUBFIT, the team emphasized the developmental side of the screening process. The goal was to equip sailors with the necessary tools when they enter the fleet—i.e., retain submariners, prevent unplanned losses, and maximize the effectiveness of the submariners during their time in the fleet. SUBFIT enables SUBFOR leadership to intervene early and support the warfighter throughout all stages of their career continuum.
With so much historical work, NPRHP was able to compare their SUBFIT tool to SUBSCREEN and other commercial-off-the-shelf products, such as the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory), and create a triage assessment. They started with a personality-based job analysis focused on key qualities and characteristics for success in submarine duty and then slowly added existing validated measures to address elements like general personality, coping, organizational commitment, resilience, and mindfulness, which are important traits when working in the extreme submarine environment.
“After taking the SUBFIT, each sailor gets a summary of their results and three specific goals, based on their assessment,” explained Handy. “As a relatively small team, it’s really a miracle we’ve been able to do so much, especially since we work in such a limited technological environment, so these assessments are really all paper and pencil.”
“Because we built everything ourselves, we’re basically saving millions of dollars,” continued Hernandez. “Everything we do is coded and programmed here, and we’re able to interpret our own reports, so there’s no need for extra clinicians at the end stage.”
With support from SUBFOR leadership, SUBFIT was greenlit for implementation in the training pipeline in April 2022, and was released for use in the operational fleet starting in March 2025.
“We really have to think, is there utility in what we’re doing to help them, is there value in providing that self-reflective feedback,” said Hernandez.
“SUBFIT serves as a conduit to have those conversations and to encourage sailors to think introspectively about themselves, and the provide them with the language to talk about issues that they might not have had otherwise.”
“With SUBSCREEN, there were efforts to try and answer the ‘what’s next’ question, but there wasn’t a fully realized vision on how that info could be used to fuel a post-assessment type interaction,” continued Handy. “Now we’ve built that process in place, and it’s just continuing to expand.”
This kind of tailored assessment program exists only in the Submarine Force, and only because of the work of the NPRHP team. However, under Handy, it is beginning expansion into the nuclear community.
“This is still a work in progress, and there are different challenges for these different communities,” explained Handy. “But it’s another example of trying to leverage these tools and keep the same mission of readiness and lethality.”
The SUBFIT program is just one branch of the NPRHP team. They were recently solicited by the Navy’s Talent Management Center of Excellence to develop a leadership competency model specific to the Submarine Force, as part of a larger Navy-wide effort to create a Navy Leadership Assessment Program. They are also working directly with SUBFOR leadership to investigate help-seeking behaviors and stigma to reduce harmful behaviors. Additionally, Handy is working with Navy Advanced Medical Development, partnering with industry to develop an underwater capable tablet, which will be the first of its kind optimized for research purposes.
“Obviously, SUBFIT is still in it’s infancy,” said Hernandez, “But we’ve seen a reduction in non-graduation numbers, and a reduction in reclassification, and these very early analyses show promising results.”
NSMRL, part of Navy Medicine Research & Development and based out of Groton, Connecticut, sustains the readiness and superiority of U.S. undersea warfighters through innovative health and performance research and works to lead the world in delivering science solutions to ensure undersea warrior dominance.
For 250 years, Navy Medicine, represented by more than 44,000 highly-trained military and civilian healthcare professionals, has delivered quality healthcare and enduring expeditionary medical support to the warfighter on, below, and above the sea and ashore.
| Date Taken: | 08.07.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 08.07.2025 16:30 |
| Story ID: | 545077 |
| Location: | KISSIMMEE, FLORIDA, US |
| Web Views: | 34 |
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