Graduate RA Morgan Price - a "SAFER" Summer in Sweden

Graduate Research Assistant Morgan Price is spending this summer at Chalmers University in Goteborg, Sweden on a crash causation project.  The Public Policy Center’s Human Factors and Vehicle Safety program is collaborating with Chalmers to develop an international standard on coding car crashes from naturalistic data. The SAFER Vehicle and Traffic Safety Centre at Chalmers is a joint research unit where 25 partners from the Swedish automotive industry, academia and authorities cooperate to make a centre of excellence within the field of vehicle and traffic safety.   SAFER provides excellent multi-disciplinary research and collaboration to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries, making Swedish society, academy and industry a world leader in vehicle and traffic safety.

We asked Morgan to tell us a little more about her experience:

What is your degree / future education plans?
BSE, Biomedical Engineering
MS Candidate Epidemiology
I plan to get my PhD in Human Factors, Vehicle Safety with a focus in Injury Epidemiology

How long have you worked with the PPC?
I have been working at the PPC since June 2012. My goodness, I can’t believe it has already been two years. Time flies when you are working with some amazing people!

What do you do for PPC and what studies or projects have you worked on?
At the PPC I am part of the Human Factors and Vehicle Safety Research team. My interests are in quantifying human behavior in naturalistic environments. To this end, I have conducted naturalistic research in bicycle riders, teen drivers and distracted pedestrians. I first started working on geographically mapping sites of teen driving errors in Iowa City. From there, my interest in vehicle safety grew. I am currently working on a project in Sweden with naturalistic driving data.

Explain what you are doing over the summer?
The work we are doing with Chalmers is an extension of our crash causation work. We are leading an effort with our Swedish colleagues to develop an international standard on coding car crashes from naturalistic data— like the drive cam work that we are doing here for the AAA foundation.

How did you come across this opportunity?
My boss and mentor, Dan McGehee, was absolutely crucial in helping me secure this position. He wanted to create a partnership between the University of Iowa and Chalmers University in Goteborg Sweden. In order to solidify the relationship he decided to send a student for the summer to work at SAFER which is a collaboration of Chalmers University and Volvo. He asked me if I would like to go and of course I said yes! The rest is history!

Photo Credit:  Tom Jorgensen, University Creative Services