New Group Leadership Signals a Bright Future for UMTRI - University of Michigan Transportation Institute

This fall, the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) welcomes a new slate of research group leaders at a pivotal moment for transportation. Artificial intelligence, automated vehicles, and increasingly connected transportation systems are rapidly reshaping how people and goods move, creating new possibilities, new questions, and new challenges for safety.

Meeting those challenges requires more than expertise in any one field. It requires understanding how people, vehicles, infrastructure, and emerging technologies interact in the real world.

UMTRI’s new research leaders bring a breadth of expertise that represents the full arc of UMTRI’s multidisciplinary approach: the human body, the human mind, the human experience, the vehicle and infrastructure systems that connect them all, and the real-world environments where new technologies and ideas are put to the test.

“UMTRI’s strength has always come from bringing together different kinds of expertise to solve transportation’s hardest problems,” said UMTRI Director Henry Liu. “AI and automated vehicles are changing not only the technology of transportation, but how people, vehicles and infrastructure interact. Understanding those connections is what UMTRI does best, and our team is positioned to carry that work into the future.”

Renée St. Louis: Behavioral and Data Sciences Group

Renée St. Louis leads the newly integrated Behavioral and Data Sciences Group, building on years of work examining the human side of transportation safety, from the psychosocial factors that shape driving behavior to program and policy evaluation that improves mobility across the lifespan. An Associate Research Scientist and Adjunct Research Fellow with the Monash University Accident Research Centre, St. Louis has led major national studies on aging drivers and safe mobility and is a certified Child Passenger Safety Technician Instructor currently serving on the National Child Passenger Safety Board. Her leadership signals a broadened focus for the group: pairing UMTRI’s deep behavioral research tradition with the data science tools needed to translate insight into impact at scale.

Jingwen Hu: Biosciences Group

Jingwen Hu, a research professor at UMTRI and a professor in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, leads the Biosciences Group. Hu’s research centers on impact and injury biomechanics in motor-vehicle crashes, with a particular focus on developing parametric human body models that reflect the true diversity of the driving population, including children, older adults, pregnant occupants, and people of varying body types. Hu has been recognized with the U-M College of Engineering Departmental Faculty Award (2025), the Miller Faculty Scholar award (2017), and multiple best-paper honors. He is reshaping how the industry designs for occupant safety. Most recently, Hu was awarded $750,000 through the university’s Strategic Initiative Fund (SIF) to establish the Center of Safety for All (Safety4All).

Debby Bezzina: Engineering Systems Group

Debby Bezzina leads the Engineering Systems Group with more than three decades of experience in connected vehicles and infrastructure systems spanning General Motors, Ford, and Visteon before joining UMTRI. As managing director of the Center for Connected and Automated Transportation and the Ann Arbor Connected Environment, Bezzina has overseen nearly $100 million in connected-vehicle and digital infrastructure investment, deploying C-V2X roadside units, smart sensors, and perception systems across dozens of Ann Arbor intersections, and helped make the city home to one of the world’s first large-scale, real-world connected deployments. That deployment’s data directly informed federal rulemaking on connected vehicle technology, testament to the kind of applied, systems-level thinking she now brings to lead UMTRI’s engineering research.

Monica Jones: Human Factors

Monica Jones, an associate research scientist and Board Certified Professional Ergonomist, leads the Human Factors Group, bringing together applied human factors, ergonomics, and vehicle safety research to better understand how people interact with transportation systems. Her work spans human-machine interaction, driver and occupant behavior, driver and occupant state monitoring, use of automation, passenger motion sickness, engineering anthropometry, and inclusive vehicle interface design, with a focus on translating human variability into safer, more usable, and more inclusive vehicle systems. Drawing on more than 14 years of postdoctoral and faculty research experience and earlier work as an industrial engineer in the automotive industry, Jones brings a measurement-driven, human-centered perspective to the role. Her leadership reflects a growing opportunity for the group: connecting behavior, performance, user state, comfort, capability, and body diversity to advance safer and more inclusive mobility.

Greg McGuire: Mcity

Greg McGuire is the managing director of Mcity, which became part of UMTRI last year and anchors the institute’s multidisciplinary research in the place where it meets the road: a controlled, safe test environment for proving out what’s next before it reaches the public. He has more than two decades of experience building tools and platforms that make shared, connected mobility work. Before joining Mcity, McGuire helped build and scale Zipcar from the ground up, then went on to co-found several mobility and data analytics startups. Mcity is a public-private partnership that operates the Mcity Test Facility, U-M’s purpose-built proving ground for connected and automated vehicles and technologies. Under McGuire’s leadership, the capabilities of the test facility have expanded by leveraging AI to help create a mixed-reality testing environment, facilitate remote use of the physical track, and develop fully digital twins of the facility. He is also managing director of M-air, an expansion of Mcity that is focused on advanced air mobility.

Looking Ahead

Transportation is changing faster than at any point in UMTRI’s history. Vehicles are more connected, data is more abundant, and the questions researchers are asking have never mattered more. This new leadership team doesn’t inherit a finished institution; they inherit a launchpad. With deep expertise across human factors, biosciences, behavioral and data science, engineering systems, and real-world testing now guiding the way, UMTRI is positioned to keep doing what it has always done best: turning research into safer, smarter, more human-centered transportation for everyone.

The future of transportation is being built here and UMTRI’s future has never looked brighter.