Daniel McGehee

Director

Dr. Daniel V. McGehee is the director of the National Advanced Driving Simulator Laboratories and associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, emergency medicine, public health and public policy. Previously, he was director of the Human Factors and Vehicle Safety Research Division at the University of Iowa Public Policy Center (PPC). In his capacity as director, he leads a group of faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students in an interdisciplinary transportation research program that includes human factors, automotive safety and injury that is funded by government and industry.

His interests are in driver attention and response, crash avoidance, automation and traumatology. He has been a principal or co-principal investigator of over $33 million in research for the US DOT, NIH and the automotive industry. From bench to policy, his research experience integrates engineering, medicine, public health, and public policy.

He has over a million miles of naturalistic and on-road data human factors and driver behavior testing experience and was the first to examine naturalistic driving among teen drivers. In this same context he has studied thousands of naturalistic driving crashes and is keenly interested in the attention issues up to impact as well as understanding injury mechanisms in car crashes. In a series of studies funded by the NIH, insurance industry, state DOTs, NHTSA, CDC, foundations, and the auto industry.

His current research focus is on automated vehicles. In 2017 he led a UI team along with the Iowa City Area Development Group in getting the roads around Iowa City and the Cedar Rapids corridor designated as National Proving Grounds for Automated Vehicles. The US DOT selected the UI and nine other sites out of over 60 applications. Since 2015 he has served as one of three US representatives to the US-EU-Japan Trilateral Human Factors and Automated Vehicle Working Group.

Active in several professional societies, he has led the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Collision Warning Standards, In-Vehicle Text Information and Driver Performance Metrics efforts for the last 15 years. In 2004 he was elected vice-chairman of the SAE Safety and Human Factors Committee. In 2006 he was selected by the International Standards Organization to lead the first ever Driver Metrics Workshop—which convened world leaders in driver performance assessment to develop standard performance measures for assessing driver-vehicle interfaces. He has led or co-authored SAE standards for forward collision warning, adaptive cruise control, vehicle information text displays, and driver performance operational definitions.

In 2010 he was chosen by the US DOT to serve as a US representatives to a new US-European Union working group on driver distraction policy. Also in 2010, he was invited by US DOT Secretary Raymond LaHood to present to the Distracted Driving Summit on the history of driver distraction research. In March, 2012, he was invited by the then Chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, Deborah Hersman, to testify at a hearing on driver distraction in Washington, DC. In 2015 he presented a NHTSA administrator Mark Rosekind’s cognitive distraction hearing.

In 2014 he formed the first international working group on ‘The First Crash.’ This working group is made up of international leaders from computer, automotive, and insurance industry as well as US and European government officials. The goal of the working group is to develop a consensus on what crash data will be immediately released to the public after the first crash of an autonomous vehicle. He is also the co-founder of the International Driving Assessment Conference—now on its eighth meeting.

He has edited eight proceedings books and has published over 140 scientific articles and book chapters on driver performance and response and automotive safety.

Dr. McGehee earned his PhD in England at the University of Leeds Institute for Transport Studies. His PhD dissertation examined driver perception and biodynamics in pre-crash response and was funded in part by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and by Nissan North America. General Motors funded his MS thesis at the University of Idaho—where he developed the first prototype forward collision warning system for GM.

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