Our Graduate Students

We work with students in all phases of their college careers.A few of our graduate students are highlighted here.

Thomas Burt

Research interest: modeling cannabis-impaired driving performance

Thomas Burt spent his summer in Washington, D.C., as an intern for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on the ADS Vehicle Exemption Program Team. During his internship, Burt reviewed and investigated imported automated vehicles, assessed their use on public roads, and analyzed incident and crash data.

Additionally, Burt presented in Gothenburg, Sweden, at the International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology on “THC Potency, Perceived Effects, and Driving Performance,” and in Portland, Oregon, at the Association for Advancement of Automotive Medicine Conference on “Perceived Effects of Cannabis: Generalizability of Changes in Driving Performance.” During his time at Iowa, Thomas has already published three journal articles on the effects of cannabis intoxication on driving impairment.

Emily Shull

Research interest: transition of control in automated vehicles

Emily Shull uses her background in psychology to understand how we can effectively facilitate the transition of control from partial automation back to the driver in a safe and timely manner. She hopes that this understanding can be applied to much broader concepts and influence the way we design and implement automation in our lives.

Over the summer, Shull presented her research on “The Gap Effect in Shifting Attention in Conditional Automation” at the International Conference on Traffic and Transportation Psychology in Gothenburg, Sweden.

This fall, she also received the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 2022 Student Member with Honors Award for her contributions to human factors research.

Joy (Jimin) Kim

Research interest: transfer of learning on over-theair updates and consumer education

Joy Kim’s main research interest includes the safety concern surrounding the transfer of learning and knowledge gaps around new vehicle technologies. She currently is focusing on data collection at NADS on a project investigating the transfer of control from automated driving features to manual driving.

Max Miller

Research interest: data analytics and modeling

Max Miller is a graduate student who joined our team at NADS over the summer to pursue his interest in engineering research. Miller has a BS in industrial engineering, and he hopes to apply his interests in data analytics, modeling, and computational algorithms to new and unconventional areas of research.

GRADUATE SPOTLIGHT

Christopher R. M. Rundus, PhD

Christopher R. M. Rundus graduated with his PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering in the spring of 2022 and has since begun his career with Gulfstream Aerospace in Savannah, Georgia, as a human factors engineer.

During his time at the University of Iowa, his research interests focused on the safety benefits of regenerative braking systems in electric vehicles. He authored multiple papers surrounding regenerative braking and has one patent from his dissertation.

This past summer, Rundus presented his research on regenerative braking and driver-foot behavior at the Road Safety and Simulation Conference in Athens, Greece.