Lead Research Area Specialist, Biosciences

Location

University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, 2901 Baxter Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48109

fax (734) 647-3330

Research Interests/Areas of Expertise

Sheila Ebert develops and implements research studies on vehicle occupant behavior, ergonomics and crash protection.  Her responsibilities include supervising student and staff investigators, collaborating with faculty and technicians, designing and constructing research materials, developing methods and protocols, collecting, organizing, and analyzing data, and contributing to resulting publications. Many of these studies include testing volunteers in passenger, commercial, and military vehicles while on the public roads and test tracks or in laboratory mockups of vehicle interiors.  She has developed testing protocols for toddlers, school-age children, senior citizens, people with high BMI, people for whom English is a second language, and military and law enforcement personnel. Ms. Ebert is currently on research teams that are studying passenger motion sickness, assessing driver state monitoring systems, and modeling vehicle occupant postures and behaviors.

Key Projects

• Naturalistic Passenger Behavior Study: Non-Driving Occupant Activities and Postures in Moving Vehicles for Future AV Interiors
• Automated Vehicle Occupant Kinematics
• Quantifying Passenger Susceptibility to Motion Sickness to Guide the Design of Automated Vehicles
• Driver State Monitoring
• Development of Advanced Occupant Accommodation Models. US Army TARDEC via ARC.
• Child Strength Testing for the Consumer Product Safety Commission