Tom Dingus

Tom Dingus is a distinguished fellow for the Virginia Tech Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science and is recognized as a world-renowned transportation safety pioneer. He has nearly 40 years of research experience in transportation safety and human factors.

Previous Roles

Dingus served as director of Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) for 25 years. He pioneered the naturalistic driving study research method, which involves instrumenting vehicles with unobtrusive video cameras and instrumentation that assesses crash and near-crash causation, helping to determine crash countermeasures.

He managed more than $800 million in research funding on projects designed to enhance transportation safety, improve the efficiency of the transportation system across multiple users, assess driver performance and behavior, and ensure the safe and efficient development and deployment of advanced vehicles, including automated vehicles.

Dingus also led the development and enhancement of a suite of test beds on the VTTI campus, which includes weather-making and lighting functionalities. The testbeds are used for researching driver behavior on highways, surface streets, and rural roadways.

Awards

Dingus was named a White House Champion of Change in 2013 in recognition of his exemplary leadership and innovation in the transportation arena

He received the Best Ergonomics in Design article award for 'Estimating Crash Risks' from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in 2012.

He earned the A.R. Lauer Safety Award from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society for outstanding contributions to the understanding of human factors in safety in 2000.

Dingus also received the Jerome H. Ely Human Factors Award for the most outstanding paper in 1998.

Affiliations

Dingus is a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and has provided key testimonials about issues of driver distraction and attention for U.S. Congressional subcommittees, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the National Council of State Legislatures.

Education

Dingus received a Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research from and a master’s degree in industrial engineering and operations research from Virginia Tech, as well as a bachelor’s of science degree in systems engineering from Wright State University.