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Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement (2017)

Chapter: Appendix D: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/24818.
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Appendix D

Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff

JOEL B. GREENHOUSE (Cochair) is a professor in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to his current appointment, he was associate and assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon and has served as an associate dean for academic affairs. He is also an adjunct professor of psychiatry, and adjunct professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. His areas of research include methods for research synthesis and the use of Bayesian methods in practice. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has served as editor-in-chief for Statistics in Medicine, associate editor for Statistics, Politics, and Policy, associate editor for the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and editor of the IMS Lecture Notes – Monograph Series. He received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Maryland at College Park, and M.P.H. in biostatistics, A.M. in statistics, and Ph.D. in biostatistics all from the University of Michigan.

SHARON-LISE NORMAND (Cochair) is a professor of health care policy (biostatistics) in the Department of Health Care Policy and in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. She has made important contributions to the use of hierarchical models, and to a better understanding of causal inferential techniques. Further, she has served as director of MASS-DAC, the data-coordinating center responsible for collecting, analyzing, and reporting on the quality of care for adults dis-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/24818.
×

charged following a cardiac procedure from all non-federal hospitals in Massachusetts. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. She has served as associate editor of Circulation, Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, Statistics in Medicine, Biometrics, and Health Services and Outcome Research Methodology, methods editor for Psychiatric Services, and guest editor for a special issue of Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology. She earned B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in statistics from the University of Western Ontario and a Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Toronto.

MICHAEL BELZER is associate professor of economics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wayne State University. He also is a research scientist at the University of Michigan’s Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, and is associate director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Trucking Industry Program, which focuses on trucking industry operations and industrial relations and where he directs its Trucking Industry Benchmarking Program. Current benchmarking efforts include an Owner Operator Cost of Operations Survey, in partnership with the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association, and a Safety Best Practices Program. His research interests include trucking industry organization and operations, labor management relations, employment policy, and safety. He currently is studying the relationship between truck driver pay (both method and level) and safety, as well as issues related to truck driver hours of work. Earlier, he spent 10 years driving trucks. He received a Ph.D. from Cornell University.

DANIEL BLOWER is associate research scientist emeritus with the Center for the Management of Information for Safe and Sustainable Transportation Group at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. He has extensive experience with all primary national crash data files, and many state crash data files. His primary area of research is traffic crash causation. Past projects include investigating the crash experience of younger truck drivers, developing an event tree for heavy truck accidents, and developing statistical models relating vehicle configuration and operating environment to the probability of accident involvement. He is chair of the Michigan Truck Safety Commission. He received a B.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan.

LINDA NG BOYLE is professor and chair of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Washington, and also has a joint appointment with Civil & Environmental Engineering. Previously, she was an associate professor at the University of Iowa and a senior researcher at the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center. Her research centers

Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/24818.
×

on driving behavior, crash countermeasures, crash and safety analysis, and statistical modeling. She is an associate editor for the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention. She received a B.S. in industrial engineering from SUNY Buffalo and an M.S. in inter-engineering/human factors and a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Washington.

MICHAEL DANIELS is professor and chair of the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences, and professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests lie in Bayesian methodology, biostatistics, hierarchical modeling, incomplete data models, and causal inference. He is coauthor, with Joe Hogan, of Missing Data in Longitudinal Studies: Strategies for Bayesian Modeling and Sensitivity Analyses. He currently serves as coeditor of Biometrics. In the past he served as associate editor for Biometrics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Statistics and Probability Letters, and Biostatistics. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected fellow of the International Statistics Institute. He received an A.B. in applied mathematics from Brown University and an Sc.D. in biostatistics from Harvard University.

DON HEDEKER is a professor of biostatistics in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Chicago. He is an expert in the analysis of longitudinal data, missing data analyses, and hierarchical modeling. He has developed several freeware computer programs for statistical analysis of such data (MIXREG for normal-theory models, MIXOR for dichotomous and ordinal outcomes, MIXNO for nominal outcomes, and MIXPREG for counts). He has served as associate editor for Statistics in Medicine and Journal of Statistical Software. Along with Robert Gibbons, he is coauthor of Longitudinal Data Analysis. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He received a Ph.D. in quantitative psychology from the University of Chicago.

BRENDA LANTZ is the associate director of North Dakota State University’s Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute (NDSU/UGPTI) as well as the program director for the Transportation Safety Systems Center branch of UGPTI. As program director she leads a team responsible for the development of inspection and investigative commercial vehicle safety systems for use by FMCSA. Her primary research interests include commercial vehicle safety systems and analysis. She has worked on projects involving the CSA/SMS system, including Commercial Vehicle Inspection and Investigative Systems Software Development. She also participated in the Commercial Motor Vehicle Driver Risk Factors Study and An Evaluation of Commercial Vehicle Drivers’ and Safety

Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/24818.
×

Inspector’s Opinions Regarding the MCSAP, the Roadside Inspection Process, and Motor Carrier Safety. She received a B.S. in sociology and an M.S. in applied statistics from North Dakota State University and a Ph.D. in business administration, supply chain management and information systems from Pennsylvania State University.

DAN McCAFFREY is principal research scientist at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. Previously he was head of the statistics group at RAND. He has focused his recent research on applications of statistics to education policy issues, especially the effectiveness of value-added models for use in assessing the performance of elementary and secondary teachers, which involves use of hierarchical models. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He has served as editor of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics and Statistics and Public Policy and as associate editor of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, Elementary School Journal, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. He received a Ph.D. in statistics from North Carolina State University.

BRISA SANCHEZ is associate professor of biostatistics in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan. Her areas of research include structural equation and latent variable models, with applications to environmental epidemiology. She has served as associate editor for Statistics in Medicine and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series C. She received a B.S. in mathematics and M.S. in statistics from the University of Texas at El Paso, an M.Sc. in biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a Ph.D. in biostatistics from Harvard University.

ROBERT SCOPATZ is a senior transportation analyst with the safety practice of VHB, Inc. His work has focused on improving safety behavior and advising states and the federal government on data quality improvement. His work in commercial motor vehicle safety includes projects for FMCSA evaluating hours of service regulations, developing predictive analyses of safety inspections and crashes, and supporting the first round of Safety Data Improvement Program grants. For the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, he conducted an evaluation of large combination vehicle safety and crash data quality. He is also secretary, past president, and long-time executive board member of the Association of Transportation Safety Information Professionals. He received a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Columbia University.

JUNED SIDDIQUE is associate professor in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. His research interests, in addition to

Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/24818.
×

medical applications, lie in the treatment of missing data, the use of hierarchical models, and causal inference. He has served as associate editor of Statistics in Medicine. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He received a B.S. in economics from the University of Wisconsin, an M.S. in statistics from George Washington University, and a Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of California at Los Angeles.

MICHAEL L. COHEN (Costudy Director) is a senior program officer for the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT). He also serves as a consultant on statistical analysis for other divisions in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Previously, he was a mathematical statistician at the Energy Information Administration and held positions at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland and at Princeton University. His general area of interest is the use of statistics in public policy, with particular focus in census undercount, model validation, and robust estimation. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Michigan and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University.

ESHA SINHA (Costudy Director) has worked on a variety of CNSTAT panel studies, workshops, and planning meetings. She co-edited Improving Measurement of Productivity in Higher Education and was co-rapporteur for several other workshops. She organized and presented at a workshop on Measuring Productivity in Higher Education in India. She has an M.A. in economics from GIPE, India, and worked as a research assistant in the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, before attending SUNY Binghamton. She has a Ph.D. in economics from SUNY Binghamton.

JACOB SPERTUS (Consultant) is a research assistant for Sharon-Lise Normand in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. His research interests include Bayesian methods and high-dimensional causal inference, on which he has written a number of statistical articles. He has presented his research at Harvard Medical School, the Society of Biological Psychiatry, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. He received a B.A. in mathematics from Bowdoin College.

RICHARD PAIN (Consultant) recently retired from the Transportation Research Board, where he was the transportation safety coordinator in the board’s Technical Activities Division. He served as staff to a wide range of committees, including studies of truck and bus safety, statistics in transportation, visualization in transportation, and future truck and bus safety research opportunities, as well as an international conference on

Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/24818.
×

research on the health and wellness of commercial truck and bus drivers. Prior to his work for the board, his work focused on human factors and safety research and evaluation in transportation, nuclear, civil, and military areas; training, development, conduct, and evaluation studies; and human engineering reviews. He has a B.A. in psychology from Hofstra University, and an M.A. in clinical psychology and a Ph.D. in applied experimental psychology from Michigan State University.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/24818.
×
Page 151
Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/24818.
×
Page 152
Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/24818.
×
Page 153
Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/24818.
×
Page 154
Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/24818.
×
Page 155
Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/24818.
×
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Every year roughly 100,000 fatal and injury crashes occur in the United States involving large trucks and buses. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) in the U.S. Department of Transportation works to reduce crashes, injuries, and fatalities involving large trucks and buses. FMCSA uses information that is collected on the frequency of approximately 900 different violations of safety regulations discovered during (mainly) roadside inspections to assess motor carriers’ compliance with Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, as well as to evaluate their compliance in comparison with their peers. Through use of this information, FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System (SMS) identifies carriers to receive its available interventions in order to reduce the risk of crashes across all carriers.

Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement examines the effectiveness of the use of the percentile ranks produced by SMS for identifying high-risk carriers, and if not, what alternatives might be preferred. In addition, this report evaluates the accuracy and sufficiency of the data used by SMS, to assess whether other approaches to identifying unsafe carriers would identify high-risk carriers more effectively, and to reflect on how members of the public use the SMS and what effect making the SMS information public has had on reducing crashes.

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