Technical Speaker -
Daniel McGehee

Director - National Advanced Driving Simulator

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.