A U-M team led by Jingwen Hu, research professor at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE), has won $750,000 through the university’s Strategic Initiative Fund (SIF) to build a fix: the Center of Safety for All (Safety4All).
A new University of Michigan center will use AI and digital human modeling to close a decades-old blind spot in crash and injury safety, one that has left significant gaps in protection for women, people with obesity, older adults, and others who don’t fit the “standard” bodies traditionally used in safety testing.
For more than 50 years, the anchor of U.S. vehicle crash certification has been a single device: a mid-size adult male dummy, roughly 5’9” and 171 pounds. Federal standards also specify a small-female dummy, but it is a scaled-down version of the male, not a device built from female anatomy. The deeper problem is arithmetic. A single physical crash test costs tens of thousands of dollars. No automaker or regulator can run enough of them to cover the real range of people in vehicles: a 105-pound teenager, a 250-pound man, an 80-year-old with reduced bone density, each in a different posture and seating position. Physical testing will never scale to the population. Simulations can.
Now, a University of Michigan team led by Jingwen Hu, research professor at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) and professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE), has won $750,000 through the university’s Strategic Initiative Fund (SIF) to build a fix: the Center of Safety for All (Safety4All).
The award was competitive by any standard, the SIF program received more than 450 proposals from across the university and funded just 35.
“The engineering community already knows human variability matters. What has been missing is a shared set of validated, population-representative models and simulation tools that industry and regulators can actually put to work. That is what Safety4All is here to build.”
Hu’s team brings decades of leadership in human body modeling and deep automotive industry ties, paired with Michigan Medicine’s trauma and concussion expertise and IOE’s strength in AI and optimization.
The Center’s long-term goal is a membership-based, pre-competitive consortium bringing together automakers, suppliers, protective-equipment manufacturers, sports organizations, and government agencies around shared modeling challenges. Members shape the research agenda through an industry advisory board and get early access to models, tools, and results while pursuing proprietary applications independently. Recruitment of founding advisory board members begins immediately.
Workforce development runs alongside it. The Center will bring its modeling tools into undergraduate senior design projects and master’s independent studies, and will launch a professional short course on parametric human body modeling and virtual testing for practicing engineers and government researchers, addressing what Hu’s team identifies as a binding constraint on adoption: too few people trained to use these models well.
The Safety4All leadership team:
Jingwen Hu (UMTRI/IOE) – Center Director
Judy Jin (IOE) – Design Lead
James Eckner (Michigan Medicine) – Medical Lead
Sujata Khandare (UMTRI) – Modeling Lead
Wenbo Sun (UMTRI) – AI Lead
The Strategic Initiative Fund supports bold, cross-disciplinary initiatives that advance the university’s Look to Michigan vision. The Safety4All Center is situated within the Advanced Technology and Human Health & Well-Being impact areas.