Blacksburg, Va. -- Biomechanics innovations ranging from a computer model of a pregnant driver to a head injury monitoring system for the Hokie football team have earned Virginia Tech researcher Stefan Duma a place among the world's top young technology developers.
Duma, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and founding director of the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest Center for Injury Biomechanics, was named by Technology Review to the 2006 "TR35" roster of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35.
The editors of Technology Review, a publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the oldest technology magazine in existence, selected the TR35 honorees from among hundreds of nominations submitted by universities and industries around the world. Profiles of Duma and the other researchers will appear in the magazine's September/October edition and also on the website on Sept. 8 (visit http://www.technologyreview.com/).
Duma and the other researchers in the 2006 TR35 class will be honored during Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference, Sept. 27-28 at MIT. Speakers at the event will include Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeffrey Bezos and AOL chairman and CEO Jonathan Miller.
An alumnus of the University of Tennessee, Duma completed his first automobile safety project, "An Experimental Study of Airbag Induced Injuries," in 1996 as his master's thesis at the University of Cincinnati and realized that the subject of human impact injuries was largely uncharted research territory. Since completing his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia and joining the Virginia Tech mechanical engineering faculty in 2000, he has laid the groundwork for a remarkable range of research.
One of his unique contributions to the field of injury biomechanics is the world's first computer model of a pregnant driver. The inspiration for the model came in 2001 when was his wife, Christine, was pregnant with the
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Contact: Liz Crumbley
lcrumb@vt.edu
540-231-9772
Virginia Tech
8-Sep-2006