CSCRS Researchers
Subhadeep Chakraborty
Subhadeep Chakraborty is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Subhadeep specializes in characterization and mitigation of failures in complex systems using data-driven system identification and supervisory control, electrochemical sensor development for simultaneous detection of multiple environmental contaminants through stochastic signal processing, and modeling and analysis of behavioral dynamics in networked societies. His research interests lie within computational sociology, opinion dynamics, intelligent transportation, and egress and evacuation. He received his PhD from Pennsylvania State University as well as his MSEE and MSME. He received his BS from Jadavpur University.
CSCRS projects:
R27: Safety Testing for Connected and Automated Vehicles through Physical and Digital Iterative Deployment
R43: Applying AI to data sources to improve driver-pedestrian interactions at intersections
Chris Cherry
Dr. Chris Cherry is an Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. His research interests include bicycle and pedestrian safety and system design, the role of e-bikes on the transportation system, multimodal transportation planning and economics, travel behavior and demand, sustainable transportation and transit security. Dr. Cherry received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Arizona and received his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. His research focuses on sustainable transportation, including aspects of transportation safety, economics and environment. About half of his research work is focused on the rapid motorization of Asia, with research projects in China. His domestic research agenda includes evaluating safety and system performance in non-motorized and transit systems, as well as commercial vehicles.
CSCRS projects:
R4: Completing the Picture of Traffic Injuries: Understanding Data Needs and Opportunities for Road Safety
R15: Integrating Spatial Safety Data into Transportation Planning Processes
R16: Opioids at the Health and Transportation Safety Nexus
Tab Combs
Tab Combs is a scholar of transportation planning and policy. Tab has expertise in transport and land use planning, the built environment-travel behavior connection, equity impacts of new mobility innovations, and transport planning in developing contexts, with a particular focus on social and environmental impacts of transport policies. Her overarching research goals are to expand our knowledge of the environmental determinants of travel behavior and vehicle use, and to apply that knowledge to support efforts of decision-makers to create more sustainable, healthy, socially just communities.
CSCRS projects:
R34: COVID-19 streets: Mobility justice and the rapid rollout of pedestrian and bicyclist improvements
R35: Using Safe Systems approach to assess traffic impact and land development
Missy Cummings
Dr. Mary L. “Missy” Cummings was the director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory at Duke University. She received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1988, her master’s in space systems engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her Ph.D. in systems engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004. A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, she was one of the U.S. Navy’s first female fighter pilots. (Dr. Cummings is now a senior advisor for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA); read the CSCRS letter of support for her appointment.)
CSCRS projects:
R7: Development and Evaluation of Vehicle to Pedestrian (V2P) Safety Interventions
R9: Concept of Operations for an Autonomous Vehicle Dispatch Center
R10: Machine Learning Tools for Informing Transportation Technology Design
Eric Dumbaugh
Dr. Eric Dumbaugh is an Associate Director of CSCRS and an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association. His work spans the domain of urban transportation, including planning, policy, engineering, and design. Dr. Dumbaugh has directed $3 million in externally-supported research activities, and has received the profession’s premier scholarly accolades, including best paper awards from Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Science and the Journal of the American Planning Association, among others. Dr. Dumbaugh has a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as master’s degrees in both Civil Engineering and Urban and Regional Planning.
CSCRS projects:
R3: Defining Safe Systems: A Review of the State-of-the-Practice and Leadership Summit
R5: Identifying the Traffic Safety Information Needs of Major Cities in the U.S.
R18: Examining Potential Safety Risks Associated with the Introduction of Light Rail Transit
R32: Applying Civic Innovation Methods to Advance Safety Education: A Pilot Program
R42: Advancing crash investigation with connected and automated vehicle data – Phase 2
Kelly Evenson
Dr. Kelly R. Evenson is a Research Professor who specializes in physical activity epidemiology. She has collaborated on and led many studies on physical activity and sedentary behavior and has authored or co-authored more than 300 peer-reviewed articles. She is a fellow with the American College of Sports Medicine and served for three years as an Associate Editor for their journal. She currently serves on the editorial board for several journals including Medicine and Science in Sport and Exercise, Journal of Physical Activity and Health, and the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. Her interest in studying Vision Zero connects with the need to identify population-based strategies to facilitate walking and bicycling in local communities.
CSCRS projects:
R17: Strengthening Existing and Facilitating New Vision Zero Plans
RR2: US Vision Zero Implementation
Jerry Everett
Jerry Everett is the Associate Director at the University of Tennessee Center for Transportation Research (CTR) in Knoxville, TN. In his current position Jerry serves as the program manager of several Highway Safety Office grants, performs research and provides management oversight for transportation planning, teen highway safety outreach, K-12 STEM education, highway traffic safety culture, travel data collection and travel demand modeling projects. He has worked professionally in transportation since 1991. Prior to working at the UT, he served as a community planner in the Metropolitan Planning Division of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in Washington, D.C. for 7 years. He is an active member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) and currently serving as chairman of TRB Committee ADA30 – Transportation Planning for Small and Medium-Sized Communities.
He holds a PhD., M.S., and B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
CSCRS project:
R28: Reducing Motorcyclist Injuries: Engaging Stakeholders to Apply Evidence-Based Countermeasures
Arthur Goodwin
Arthur Goodwin joined the UNC Highway Safety Research Center in 2001. His research interests and experience include young driver safety, graduated driver licensing (GDL), distracted driving and cell phones, motorcycle safety, alcohol-impaired driving, and occupant protection. Arthur has examined the magnitude and nature of the effect of GDL on young driver crashes, the degree of teen compliance with GDL restrictions, methods to facilitate parental management and supervision of beginning drivers, and the role of parents and police in enforcing restrictions. In his recent work, Arthur was the principal investigator for a project funded by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety to investigate how parents supervise their teens’ driving during the learner stage of GDL.
CSCRS project:
R8: Development of Resources to Guide Parents in Helping Teens Learn to Drive
Offer Grembek
Dr. Offer Grembek is an Associate Director of CSCRS, researcher, and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. He serves as the Co‐Director at the university’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Center, a research center affiliated with the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies. Dr. Grembek is a member of the Transportation Research Board Committee on Transportation Safety Management, and the Co‐Chair of the TRB Global Road Safety Subcommittee. His research expertise includes: injury risk in multimodal environments, pedestrian safety, systemic approach to road safety management, and in‐vehicle injury protection systems. Dr. Grembek received his B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in 2002, his master’s in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, and his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010.
CSCRS projects:
R2: An Enhanced Systemic Approach to Safety
R24: Developing a Framework to Combine the Different Protective Features of a Safe System
Katherine Harmon
Katherine “Katie” Harmon is a Research Associate at the UNC Highway Safety Research Center. Katie holds a Ph.D. in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a M.P.H. with a joint concentration in Epidemiology and Environmental and Occupational Health from Saint Louis University, and a B.S. in Environmental Health Science from the University of Georgia.
CSCRS projects:
R22: Using Integrated Data to Examine Characteristics Related to Pedestrian and Bicyclist Injuries
R36: Laying the Groundwork for a National Pedestrian Injury Surveillance System
R37: Applying AcciMap to e-Scooter Crashes: A Safe Systems approach to analyzing micromobility
Asad Khattak
Dr. Asad Khattak is an Associate Director of CSCRS. He received his master’s and doctoral degrees in Civil Engineering from Northwestern University. He is currently the Beaman Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and serves as coordinator for the Transportation Group in the department; coordinator and lead researcher for “Big Data for Safety Monitoring, Assessment, and Improvement,” a multi-year Southeastern Transportation Center UTC project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation; and Co-Director of the Initiative for Sustainable Mobility. He is affiliated with the UT Center for Transportation Research as well as the Baker Center for Public Policy, where he works on a broad range of research and educational projects sponsored by state and federal agencies. He teaches courses and conducts research related to intelligent transportation systems, transportation safety, and transportation planning.
CSCRS projects:
R19: Developing a Taxonomy of Human Errors and Violations that Lead to Crashes
R20: Investigating the Vulnerability of Motorcyclists to Crashes and Injury
R23: Driver Impairment Detection and Safety Enhancement through Comprehensive Volatility Analysis
R25: Advancing crash investigation with connected and automated vehicle data
R42: Advancing crash investigation with connected and automated vehicle data – Phase 2
R44: Safety enhancement by detecting driver impairment through analysis of real-time volatilities
Seth LaJeunesse
Seth LaJeunesse joined the UNC Highway Safety Research Center as a Research Associate in 2010. Seth evaluates behavioral interventions designed to enhance bicycle and pedestrian safety and access, and designs studies that draw from psychology, sociology, and systems science. He primarily focuses on studying youth traffic safety and discerning ways to accelerate the diffusion of effective road safety practice. Seth serves as the principal investigator of several state and federally funded research endeavors, including projects funded by the NC Department of Transportation, NC Governor’s Highway Safety Program, CSCRS, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Across all research projects, he aims to advance safe, equitable access to physical activity and community life.
CSCRS projects:
R1: Structures of Stakeholder Relationships in Making Road Safety Decisions
R29: Factors and Frames that Shape Public Discourse Around Road User Safety
R38: Assessing how private beliefs conflict with public action on Safe Systems
Yanmei Li
Dr. Yanmei Li is an Associate Professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida Atlantic University. Her interests include policies related to affordable housing, sustainable community development, housing programs for people with special needs, and disaster adaptation and mitigation policies related to housing. She has worked on various research grants on economic development planning, landscape planning, disaster resilience indices, and transit-supportive land use planning. She currently conducts research on community social capital and its planning implications, applied planning methods, and traffic crashes in low income neighborhoods.
CSCRS project:
R11: Understating Crash Risk Exposure of Low Income Neighborhoods and Households
Noreen McDonald
Dr. Noreen McDonald is an Associate Director of CSCRS. Her work focuses on how infrastructure investments and technology changes influence travel and the downstream impacts on road safety, public health, energy demand, and city form. She is an internationally-recognized expert on the travel behavior of youth and young adults. Her work on children’s travel has shown that improved pedestrian and bicycle facilities can increase travel by foot. She has assessed the causes of declines in driving in the U.S. and U.K. and looked at how transportation planning practice can respond to recent behavioral shifts and those anticipated due to changing technology. Her most recent work explores disruptions associated with shared mobility, e.g., Uber/Lyft and autonomous vehicles.
CSCRS projects:
R6: Using Advanced Analytics to Frame Vulnerable Road User Scenarios with Autonomous Vehicles
R13: Shared Mobility Services and Their Connection to Roadway Fatalities
R30: Urban Freight and Road Safety: Trends and Innovative Strategies
Diana Mitsova
Diana Mitsova is an Associate Professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning and Director of the Visual Planning Technology Lab. Her research focuses on the use of geographic information systems in disaster planning, critical infrastructure protection, coastal resilience, and climate adaptation of urban systems. She is currently serving as a principal investigator on a project funded by the National Science Foundation to investigate critical infrastructure interdependencies and their impacts on vulnerable populations. Additionally, her work has been funded by NOAA (the Florida Sea Grant), USGS, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Florida Department of Emergency Management. Diana holds a master’s degree from the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Purdue University – Indianapolis, and a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Cincinnati.
CSCRS project:
R31: Crash Risk for Low-Income and Minority Populations: An Examination of At-Risk Population Segments and Underlying Risk Factors
Becky Naumann
Dr. Becky Naumann, PhD, MSPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and Core Faculty at UNC’s Injury Prevention Research Center. She received her Bachelor of Science in Environmental Health degree from the University of Georgia, Master of Science in Public Health degree from Emory University, and her doctorate in Epidemiology from UNC. Prior to beginning her doctoral training, Dr. Naumann worked as an epidemiologist on the Transportation Safety Team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for seven years. Her work is focused on understanding risk factors and trends of road traffic injury and evaluating injury prevention interventions. Methodologically, Dr. Naumann has experience and interest in applying complex systems science methods to injury prevention.
CSCRS projects:
R21: A systems Approach to Pedestrian Safety, Phase II: Examining Congestion Pricing Policies
R39: Integrating systems thinking tools into Vision Zero and Safe Systems approaches
Krista Nordback
Dr. Krista Nordback is a senior research associate at the UNC Highway Safety Research Center who focuses on bicycle and pedestrian traffic and safety. She earned her doctorate in civil engineering from the University of Colorado-Denver, master’s from University of Minnesota, and bachelor’s from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her doctoral dissertation developed a new method for estimating bicycle traffic and provided one of the first safety performance functions for bicyclists at signalized intersections in the U.S. She has researched non-motorized traffic counting technologies and programs for Colorado, Washington, and Oregon Departments of Transportation. She has also worked with the team at Portland State University on creating a national bicycle and pedestrian count archive, Bike-Ped Portal. At HSRC Krista continues working toward understanding bicyclist and pedestrian safety.
CSCRS project:
R14: Creating a CSCRS Clearinghouse for Bicyclist and Pedestrian Safety-Related Data, Phase I: Inventory & Framework
David Ragland
We are deeply saddened by the news that our CSCRS research colleague and friend David Ragland, founder and Co-Director of the UCB Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC), died on May 7, 2023. Ragland, who was also professor emeritus of epidemiology at UCB’s School of Public Health, was a transportation injury research visionary, bringing together the public health and engineering perspectives long before a “systems” approach was popular. We are so fortunate to have been able to work with him as part of the CSCRS consortium, and know he will be missed by all of his colleagues and friends in the field.
Our friends at SafeTREC created this moving tribute page in his honor.
CSCRS project:
R12: Linking Crash and Post-Crash Data
Laura Sandt
Dr. Laura Sandt is the Director of CSCRS. She has been with the UNC Highway Safety Research Center since 2004 and is active in a variety of research areas, including intervention evaluations and studies focusing on pedestrian and bicycle safety and other modes of travel. Her primary focus area lies in conducting research and developing guidance related to pedestrian and bicycle safety and mobility. Dr. Sandt also serves as director for the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center, a federal clearinghouse of pedestrian- and bicycle-related training materials and resources. She has been involved in the development of several popular Federal Highway Administration and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration resources aimed at various audiences. She has also led projects working directly with states and local communities to develop, implements and evaluate programs aimed at improving pedestrian and bicycle safety.
CSCRS project:
RR1: Explaining the Rise in Pedestrian Fatalities: A Safe Systems Approach
