EMERITUS PROFESSOR (ROAD SAFETY)

Dr. Raphael Grzebieta is Professor Emeritus with a focus in Road Safety in the Transport and Road Safety (TARS) Research Centre within the School of Aviation at UNSW's Sydney Campus. Before retiring from UNSW, Raphael spent 10 years at UNSW leading major Australian Research Council, Government and industry funded research projects on vehicle rollover crashworthiness, road safety barriers, motorcycle safety and barrier impacts, heavy vehicle safety, bicycle safety, naturalistic driving study and lately quad bike safety. Raphael has over 350 research publications in structural crashworthiness research, accident investigation, road safety, road and infrastructure design, injury causation and biomechanics, ambulance crashworthiness, failure analysis, numerical modelling and experimental testing of a variety of structures subjected to impact and large deformation loads. He has received several national major government research grants and awards. Research teams he has led or been involved with have carried out numerous laboratory and field tests on road vehicles, road safety barriers and more recently off-road quad bikes and Side by Side (SSV) vehicles. He is Editor-In-Chief of the international open access journal 'Safety'.

Raphael was President of the Australasian College of Road Safety for four years. He is also a member of a number of road safety, editorial, journal and standards committees. He has influenced road safety policy and standards worldwide. Raphael is regularly interviewed by radio and TV media and has appeared in science programs in relation to road safety and crash testing. He has also chaired a number of international conferences and given numerous invited public lectures and keynote papers.

Prior to UNSW, Raphael spent 25 years at Monash University as an Associate Professor leading the Department of Civil Engineering’s road-safety, crashworthiness and rapid loading research team, supervising numerous PhD, Masters and project students. The university research team he headed up at Monash carried out numerous crash tests, computer crash modelling and theoretical studies investigating and mitigating injuries in motorcycle fatalities, motorcycle into road safety barrier crashes, truck under-run, far-side impact, rollover, roadside barrier crashes and industrial work places. He was recently appointed as an Adjunct Professor at Monash University’s Department of Forensic Medicine located at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, specialising in forensic engineering and vehicle and road infrastructure crashworthiness, crash reconstruction, injury biomechanics and road safety. He regularly provides expert witness reports and court evidence for Coroners, Police, Public Prosecutors, Work Regulators, CTP Insurers and legal firms. He has also been involved and worked on major road safety projects (includes one or all of Safer Vehicles, Safer Roads, Safer People and Safe Speeds analyses, advice and reports) for: Cargill Worldwide in Indonesia; Pan Aust Mining in central Laos; BHP-Escondida Mine in Chile; World Bank under contract to the Romanian Ministry of Transport and the Lithuanian Ministry of Transport; United Nations and the Kuwait Ministry for Transport; Australian Defence Department; SafeWork NSW; WorkCover Victoria; VicRoads; Telstra; and a number of private Engineering firms.

Raphael was awarded the 2003 Warren Medal by the Institution of Engineers Australia, as co-author of the papers "Crashworthiness Systems - A Paradigm Shift in Road Safety Design", Parts I & II. He was also awarded in 2007 Fellow of the Australasian College of Road Safety in recognition of his exceptional international service to road safety. In 2019, he was awarded the Kenneth Stonnex Award for his 30-year career improving safety for road users, by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Transportation Research Board’s (TRB’s) Roadside Safety Design Committee AFB20. This award is given to engineers and road safety experts who have dedicated their career to advancing transportation infrastructure and making roads safer. He was also awarded the Australian Road Research Board’s (ARRB) national transport research organisation’s 2019 Lifetime Research Award and in 2020 Engineers Australia's Sir John Holland Civil Engineer of the Year Award in recognition of his outstanding achievements in Civil Engineering. More recently, he was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his significant service to the transport industry through road safety research and promotion.