Keynote Speakers

Professor Emeritus Icek Ajzen

Professor Emeritus Icek Ajzen is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA). He received his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and is best known for his work on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB). Ajzen has been ranked the most influential individual scientist within social psychology in terms of cumulative research impact. He received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 2013 and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2016. His research has been influential across diverse fields such as traffic and transport psychology, health psychology, consumer behaviour, and environmental psychology, and has been cited over 250,000 times.

Dr Judy Fleiter

Dr Judy Fleiter is the Global Manager with the Global Road Safety Partnership, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, where she manages a Road Policing Capacity Building Program, a Road Safety Advocacy Grants Program, and together with Johns Hopkins University colleagues, co-hosts and delivers the Global Road Safety Leadership Course twice yearly. Fleiter contributes technical support to road safety initiatives in a large number of low and middle-income countries. She has a PhD in Psychology (Road User Behaviour) and worked in an Australian University-based road safety research centre for 15 years before joining GRSP in 2016, conducting behavioural-based research in speeding, speed management, and drink driving enforcement, focussing primarily on psychological and behaviour change principles to improve road safety.

Panel discussion on Automation

There will be a panel discussion on different traffic psychology perspectives on automation. A moderated discussion will follow the initial presentations.

Professor Natasha Merat

Professor Natasha Merat is an experimental psychologist and research group leader of the Human Factors and Safety Group, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds. She also leads Virtuocity, a suite of human-in-the-loop, connected, simulators, designed to study user behavior in future cities. Her main research interests involve understanding the interaction of road users with new technologies. She applies this interest to studying factors such as driver distraction and driver impairment, and she is an expert in studying the human factors implications of highly automated vehicles. Prof. Merat is Chair of the TRB sub-committee on Human Factors in Road Vehicle Automation and has appointments as expert advisor to the European Commission, Veoneer, and the UK’s National Highways.

Professor Graham Parkhurst

Professor Graham Parkhurst is Professor of Sustainable Mobility and Director of the Centre for Transport & Society, UWE Bristol, UK. Graham has degrees in psychology (BA University of Warwick), biological anthropology (MSc University of Oxford) and transport geography (PhD University of Oxford), and has worked in transport and mobility studies since 1991. His current research interests are examining the wider implications of the trends to greater automation, electrification, flexibility and use of digital technologies in the transport sector. He has providing social and behavioural research leadership in respect of UK-Government-funded (Innovate UK) research consortia examining connected and automated vehicles (Venturer, Flourish, CAPRI, and MultiCAV) and flexible collective transport solutions (Mobility on Demand Laboratory Environment). Electric mobility, instead, is the focus of a European Commission-funded project (Replicate) which seeks to pilot and ‘upscale’ electric car and cycle sharing. Graham also teaches Transport Policy at Masters’ level, and led the UWE contribution to the EC-funded project EVIDENCE, which evaluated the quantity and quality of evidence that Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans are effective.