Sjaanie Koppel

Dr Sjaan Koppel holds a PhD in Psychophysiology and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC). Within this role, Sjaan is responsible for conducting a wide range of research projects broadly aimed at improving safe mobility and reducing transport-related injuries and deaths amongst vulnerable road users including older road users (e.g., drivers [passenger vehicle; heavy vehicle], occupants, cyclists, motorcyclists, mobility motor scooter users etc.), drivers with medical conditions and/or functional impairments, and child road users (e.g., vehicle occupants, pedestrians, cyclists etc.).

Within her research, Sjaan uses a number of behavioural safety techniques (including questionnaires, paper- pencil neuropsychological assessments, complex computer-based assessments, interactive driving simulations, on-road driving assessments and naturalistic driving study [NDS] methodologies) to examine vulnerable road users within a Safe System framework.

As part of her Australian Research Council Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship (ARC-APDI), Sjaan led the development of a novel on-road driving task (eDOS) to observe and evaluate older drivers' driving behaviour, as well as to monitor changes in individual driving behaviour over time. More recently, Sjaan has used older drivers' physiological responses (e.g., heart rate) to investigate the relationship between cognitive workload and driving behaviour during an on-road driving task.

Sjaan is on the Board of Directors for the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine (AAAM), she is an Associate Editor for the Traffic Injury Prevention (TIP) journal, and is on the Scientific Committees for the TÜV SÜD Conference ‘Protection of Children in Cars' and the International Driving Symposium on Human Factors in Driver Assessment, Training, and Vehicle Design.