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Rich Hanowski, Division Director

Division of Freight, Transit, & Heavy Vehicle Safety

Dr. Richard Hanowski is a senior research scientist and serves as the director of the Division of Freight, Transit, & Heavy Vehicle Safety at VTTI. Dr. Hanowski has been involved in transportation human factors research since 1991, when he was a graduate student working at the National Center for Advanced Transportation Technology at the University of Idaho. His career has included an internship at General Motors and three years as a research scientist at Battelle in Seattle. His experience includes transportation human factors with both heavy & light vehicles, laboratory & field testing, simulation, advanced system development & testing, naturalistic driving, design guideline development, and human performance evaluation. He is skilled in all phases of research including conceptual framing, research design, data collection/synthesis/analysis, assessment of results, and presentation of findings. Dr. Hanowski has served as the principal Investigator or Co-PI on over $81 million of contract research resulting in 300+ publications, including journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, and technical reports. His research has impacted national transportation policy including truck driver fatigue/hours-of-service and driver distraction/texting. He has received a number of awards for his research including SAE International's L. Ray Buckendale Lecture award in 2011. Dr. Hanowski received his Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering in 2000 from Virginia Tech.


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