PhD Studentship - Sociotechnical approaches to Road Safety in Low-Middle Income Countries

Location: Highfield Campus

Reference: 904717AT

Road traffic accidents claim the lives of more than 1.25 million people each year, 90% of these deaths occur in Low-and Middle-Income countries (LIMC) (World Health Organisation (WHO), 2015). To put this in context, the recent Ebola outbreak claimed approximately 11,000 lives (Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015). As the ninth global leading cause of death, road traffic injuries represent a major pandemic (WHO, 2015). To address this rising global health issue, the University of Southampton’s Transportation Research Group (TRG), in collaboration with the Faculty of Medicine, has been funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) to form a Research Group on Global Road Safety to implement the Socio-Technical systems Approach to Road Safety (STARS) project (see http://www.nihr.ac.uk/globalhealth).

Our multidisciplinary approach will draw on our world leading expertise in Human Factors Engineering, Transport Economics, Traffic Engineering and Public Health. This group will work in partnership with four Low-Middle Income Countries (LMICs), namely; Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Strathmore University, Kenya, Tsinghua University, China and National University of Civil Engineering, Vietnam, in order to address the issue of road safety in these countries.

A PhD is being offered in Human Factors Engineering to implement parts of the sociotechnical approach to road safety. This will involve a mixed-methods approach for the design and evaluation of ‘local solutions for local problems’ to address the issue of road safety in the LMICs. This will be achieved in four stages:

1. Capture the current situation in each LMIC through local data collection of the road transport system

2. Develop solutions and countermeasures from a socio-technical systems-based perspective based on the local data

3. Evaluate these solutions in simulated environments (a significant output of the project is establishing simulator facilities at each LMIC institution)

4. Disseminate findings at local and national levels in order to shape the interventions, policy and regulations to reduce road crashes and associated public health trauma.

If you wish to discuss any details of the project informally, please contact Dr Katie Plant, Human Factors Engineering Team, Transportation Research Group, Email k.plant@soton.ac.uk  Tel: +44 (0) 2380 59 3148.