About Us
What do we do?
The Simulation and Analysis of Factors Explaining Transportation of Yesterday to Improve Modeling and Prediction Accuracy of Crashes Tomorrow Lab or SAFETY IMPACT for short is committed to understanding the future of transportation. Transportation is advancing rapidly with the introduction of electric vehicles, advanced active safety systems (such as automatic emergency braking and lane centering), vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication, vehicle to infrastruction (V2I) communication, driver state monitoring systems and development of autonomous vehicles. With all of these advances, the SAFETY IMPACT Lab aims to answer the question "How do we know the future will be safer?" This primary question motivates us to use real-world crash and driving data to answer more specific questions such as:
- What improvements can be made to road and roadside design?
- How do we evaluate roadside safety hardware like guardrails?
- What is the reduction in occupant injury due to passive safety systems like seat belts and airbags?
- What types of crashes might not be avoided with current active safety systems like AEB?
Who are we?
The SAFETY IMPACT Lab is one of the research groups within the Center for Injury Biomechanics (CIB) at Virginia Tech. The current graduate students are in the Virginia Tech - Wake Forest School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences (SBES) joint graduate program within the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics (BEAM). Dr. H. Clay Gabler founded the SAFETY IMPACT Lab in 1998 at Rowan University before relocating to Virginia Tech in 2005. In 2021, Dr. Luke E. Riexinger began leading the lab to continue Dr. Gabler's work improving transportation safety.
Where Do Our Alumni Work Now?
