THE COUNCIL

Barry Sheerman

Barry Sheerman, Chairperson, has been the Labour and Co-operative MP for Huddersfield since 1979. Barry as a new Member of Parliament organised a group that successfully introduced compulsory seat-belt wearing for adults & also restraint of all children in cars. This group became the charitable trust PACTs ( Parliamentary Advisory Vouncil for Transport Safety) After a few years he organised the European Transport Safety Council ETSC with leaders from the Netherlands Sweden & Germany. Later Barry was s founding supporter of the World Bank's Business Partners for Development which created the Global Road Safety Partnership (GRSP) on which he served as member then deputy chairman then for two years as Chair.He is passionate about education, skills, and the next generation, having chaired the House of Commons Select Committee on Education and Skills from 2001-2007, and then the Children, Schools and Families Committee from 2007-2010. He currently chairs the Skills Commission which has recently led a series of major inquiries on the skills needs of the future economy.

Barry Chairs the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Transport Safety (PACTS), which was founded in the debate about the compulsory wearing of seatbelts in the fronts of cars in 1981. Barry was instrumental in moving an amendment to the 1981 Transport Act which made seat belt wearing a legal requirement. Recognising the importance of the European dimension in transport safety, PACTS was a co-founder of the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC), based in Brussels, which brings together representative organisations across the EU.

Barry has a major interest in the environment and sustainability: he chairs the All Party Sustainable Resource Group which has recently published reports on Remanufacturing and Exporting Waste, as well as the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Industrial Sustainability. He is also an active social entrepreneur having initiated over 40 social enterprises in his career, including Policy Connect which runs a number of parliamentary groups and inquiries, and the John Clare Trust.

Brian O’Neill

Brian O’Neill worked for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) in the US from 1969 until his retirement at the end of 2005, and from 1985 he was president of the organization. IIHS is a non-profit research and communications organization funded by automobile insurers with a mission to reduce deaths, injuries, and property damage resulting from motor vehicle crashes. Mr. O’Neill’s own research has covered a wide range of vehicle and highway safety issues including: driver behavior; traffic law enforcement; vehicle crash avoidance and crashworthiness; and injury severity scoring.

Since his retirement he has done some limited consulting, including for the US Consumers Union on its infant and child restraint evaluation programs. From 2010 to 2012 he was one of seven experts who served on the Toyota North American Quality Advisory Panel under the leadership of the former US Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater. This independent Panel was tasked with advising the senior management of Toyota on changes the company needed to make to address the many safety and quality problems it had been experiencing around that time.

In October 2015 Mr. O’Neill was hired by Honda and Takata to organize an independent audit of the Takata development and production validation testing of airbag inflators for Honda vehicles to determine if inflators that had not been recalled create a safety risk (by mid-2016 more than 100 million vehicles worldwide with Takata airbags were expected to be recalled). Since 2010 he has served on the Board of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) a non-profit public health research group, and since 2014 he has been the Chair of the Board.

Christer Hydén

Christer Hydén, Professor emeritus in trafficsafety, has been working with traffic safety ever since 1971. He took his degree at Lund Institute of Technology, 1987, and became a full time professor in 1993. First achievement was the development of the Swedish Traffic Conflicts Technique, which was the basis for his thesis in 1987. Research on conflict theory and practise has been one of the main themes ever since. He has, in that context, been involved in several projects around the world where conflict studies has been the main issue. Another major topic Is vulnerable road users, which lead to a focus on safety in cities and – particularly – vehicle speeds. He led the first project on Speed Limiter in cars, and was also responsible for a large scale experiment on small round-abouts in the 1990-ies. This project created a lot of interest in Sweden, and resulted in a large scale implementation of such round-abouts. Hydén has been the President of ICTCT, the International Co-operation on Theories and Concepts in Traffic from 1979 to 2011. He has presented papers at a large number of national and international research conferences, and been lecturing at several international traffic safety courses organised by the Swedish Road Research Institute and Lund Institute of Technology, in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. One speciality has been to spread knowledge about traffic conflicts. Hydén received in 1991 the Volvo Traffic Safety Award for the development of the Swedish Traffic Conflicts Technique, and in 2014 the Frank Blackmore Award for Lifetime Contribution to Roundabouts, 2014 by TRB Committee on Roundabouts.

Geetam Tiwari

Geetam Tiwari is Associate Faculty at Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP) at IIT Delhi and MoUD Chair Professor for Transport Planning at the Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Delhi. She received the degree of Doctor of Technology honoriscausa from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden in 2012 and was Adlerbretska Guest Professor for sustainable urban transport at the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden 2007–2010. She has been working in the area of traffic and transport planning focusing on pedestrians, bicycles and bus systems. She and her research group have contributed to enhanced knowledge on urban traffic patterns of various vehicles, public health effects in the urban environment and the relationship between the municipal infrastructure and traffic safety. Their research has led to concrete measures, such as the introduction of a Bus Rapid Transit Systems in Delhi, and guidelines for the design of highways and streets in urban environments.

Tiwari has written, edited and contributed to various books in the field of urban transportation systems, road safety and injury prevention. These include The Way Forward : Transportation Planning And Road Safety,Injury Prevention and Control, Urban transport for growing cities: high capacity bus system, Road Traffic Injury Prevention: Training Manual, and Transport Planning & Traffic safety: Making Cities, Roads& Vehicles Safer.She is editor in chief of International Journal of Injury Control and Safety Promotion.

Ian Roberts

Roberts is Professor of Epidemiology at LSHTM. He trained as a paediatrician and then in epidemiology in New Zealand and at McGill University, Canada. He is co-ordinating editor of the Cochrane Injuries Group, a network that prepares systematic reviews of the effectiveness of interventions in the prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of injury. He is principal investigator of the CRASH trials, large international clinical trials of better ways to treat injured trauma patients. The CRASH-1 trial, which included 10,000 pateints with head injury from around the world, showed that corticosteroids, which were widely used in the management of head injury, did not improve patient outcome after head injury but increased the risk of death. The CRASH-2 trial has shown that tranexamic acid, an inexpensive and widely practicable treatment, safely reduces mortality in bleeding trauma patients. He is the author of The Energy Glut: the politics of fatness in an overheating world.

Kavi Bhalla

Kavi Bhalla, Convener, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Chicago, where he teaches courses in the measurement of global health, and the health impacts of transportation policies. His research aims to develop transport systems that are safe, sustainable and equitable, with a central focus on road safety in low- and middle-income countries. His recent work has focused on the development of analytical tools for improving estimates of the incidence of injuries in information-poor settings using available data sources. Kavi co-led the injury expert group of the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Project. He is formally trained as a mechanical engineer and his PhD (Cornell, 2001) thesis research focused on the mechanics of material failure, which he later applied to the study of injury biomechanics and vehicle crashworthiness. He is broadly interested in the design of products, environments, and systems that are safe and have positive health impacts.

Kenji Doi

Kenji Doi is Professor at the Division of Global Architecture, Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Japan. He is looking at sustainable urban mobility through a cross-assessment model within the framework of land-use and transport integration. His resewarch interests include safer streets through an integrated and inclusive design, and looking at sustainable urban mobility through a cross-assessment model within the framework of land-use and transport integration. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the World Conference on Transport Research Society and the Editor in Chief of the IATSS Research Journal.

María Isabel Gutiérrez Martinez

María Isabel Gutiérrez Martinezis Director of CISALVA Institute, Universidad del Valle since 2000 and Professor of Epidemiology at School of Public Health in the same university. She has been a consultant for national and local governments in Colombia and internationally, and international institutions such as the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), the World Bank and The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in strategies to identify and prevent external cause injuries, violence, suicide and injuries caused by traffic events. She is Chair of the Safe Communities Latin-American and the Caribbean Network.

She was granted the Carlos Slim Health 2009 Award as head of outstanding Institution for the development of methodologies for innovative public health surveillance. Also received the International Recognition Distinguished Career Award Safe Community from WHO Collaborating Centre for Community Safety Promotion, Karolinska Institute, on behalf of the International Safe Communities.She has been awarded the National Scientific Merit Award 2012 in the category of research excellence for her academic and research career, awarded by the Colombian Association for the Advancement of Science.She was awarded as one of four Colombian included in the Top 100 list of the most influential people in armed violence reduction in the world by The Armed Violence Reduction Foundation, (AOAV).

Marie Hasselberg

Marie Hasselberg is professor in public health epidemiology and head of the Department of Global Public Health, Karolinska Institutet. She has long-term experience of injury epidemiology and prevention studies both in high-income countries and in low- and middle-income countries. She coordinates epidemiological studies of road traffic injuries and studies on health-related consequences of injuries. She has a background in sociology and a PhD in social medicine and is member of the research group ISAC, Injuries’ Social Aetiology and Consequences at Karolinska Institutet.

Professor Mark Stevenson is an epidemiologist and Professor of Urban Transport and Public Health at the University of Melbourne. He is a National Health and Medical Research Council (Australia) Fellow, an Honorary Professor in the Peking University Health Science Centre, Chinaand an advisor for injury to the Director General of the World Health Organisation.

Prof Stevenson has worked on numerous national and international projects that have directly influenced transport policy and worked with both Federal and State Governments in Australia and internationally. He has led many research groups and is internationally recognized in the field of transport safety and public health. Prof Stevenson is the director of the newly established Urban Design, “Transport, Health and Urban Design Research Lab (see: https://thud.msd.unimelb.edu.au/) comprising a cross-disciplinary research team exploring how the effects of urban form and transportation influence the health of residents in cities.

Mark Stevenson

Mathew Varghese

Mathew Varghese, Director and Treasurer, is a post-graduate in orthopaedic surgery from Maulana Azad Medical College,Delhi University. Currently he is the Head of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at St. Stephen’s Hospital, Delhi. He has specialized in trauma care with particular emphasis on reconstructivesurgery for complex trauma to the musculo-skeletal system and in pre-hospital care for trauma patients. He was the Chair of project review committee on Trauma Care of Indian Councilfor Medical Research and member, technical committee on Trauma and Emergency Care Services(TECS) at the WHO, Geneva. He is a member of the Regional TechnicalAdvisory Group on Road Traffic Injuries and member Regional Technical Advisory Group on Disability and Rehabilitation, WHO, SEARO. He was given the distinguished alumnus award by Maulana AzadMedical College, Delhi University.