Steven Reed is a Research Associate within the Transport Safety Research Group at Loughborough Design School. He specialises in road safety and driver behaviour, with particular expertise in accident investigation and naturalistic driving through real-world trials.
Steven joined Loughborough University in 2004 as an accident investigator working on the assessment of passenger car performance in real-world crashes, his engineering background and expertise in this field has allowed him to develop his investigation skills to other transport modes, including motorcycle and pedal cycle crashes, and provide expert witness services for civil and criminal prosecution cases.
Since 2008 Steven has worked as a research associate and has been involved in a wide range of road safety initiatives, funded by both industry and grant schemes; during this period, studies have covered topics including: the development of a European fatal accident database, truck head light standards, assessment of direct and indirect vision from heavy goods vehicle cabs, investigation of cycle fatalities in London and examination of vehicle seat comfort in simulator studies. In the course of this work he has worked on large European projects through to small scale commercial studies across a variety of sectors.
Steven gained experience across a broad spectrum of research methodologies including the development of an instrumented vehicle and increasing his knowledge of driving simulators. Developing from this work is his primary area of research into driver behaviour, and specifically long term studies into distraction and visual behaviour in vehicles. This work has involved designing and running, real world driver studies using detailed vehicle measures, video and eye tracking equipment.
Expertise
Steven is an experienced accident investigator with a 15 year history of investigating real world collisions involving a range of different road users. Steven’s expertise in crash performance and vehicle engineering has led him to develop and run a number of training programmes for collision investigators in Australia, India and Belarus along with providing expert knowledge to both civil and criminal prosecution cases.
In addition Steven has developed accident investigation and vehicle engineering modules for master's courses in road safety and designed and run outreach sessions for STEM programmes.