Lawrence E. Decina, MS
Lawrence E. Decina is a Senior Associate at TransAnalytics. Previously, he worked as a Senior Research Psychologist for The Scientex Corporation (1994-2000); Manager/Research Psychologist of the Human Factors Division at Ketron, Division of the Bionetics Corporation (1980-1994), and Research Assistant at the Franklin Institute Research Center (1975-1980). Mr. Decina serves as our company’s Principal Investigator on an array of projects, having a focus on occupant protection issues but also including teen driving, older driver, and driver licensing studies. He has successfully led over twenty research grants, contracts and subcontracts for Federal and State government clients as the Principal Investigator or Project Manager since the late 1980’s.
Mr. Decina is a nationally recognized expert in child restraint system misuse observation studies and has led the way in promoting education and certification programs in this field. His study results have been used in national program and advertising campaigns. His work in this area also spans law enforcement initiatives, public education and information campaigns, and related program development and evaluation activities. Significant products of Mr. Decina’s work include national estimates of rates of misuse of child restraints and patterns of misuse of child safety seats, plus a survey of use and misuse rates for LATCH systems, for NHTSA; and for the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, he developed a guidebook for observing occupant restraint system use and misuse.
More broadly, Mr. Decina’s contributions in the field of traffic safety research include NHTSA projects investigating the feasibility of new simulation technology to train novice drivers; and more recently he led a study that produced a Compendium of evaluations of automated enforcement systems worldwide. For the Federal Highway Administration, he has developed an International Guide to Highway Transportation Information. Overall, Mr. Decina has published over thirty articles and technical reports addressing diverse topics of highway safety and driver licensing.
Mr. Decina received his M.S. and B.S. in Psychology and Information Science from Drexel University. He is a member of long standing of the Transportation Research Board, and is active in its Occupant Protection Committee (ANB45) and Operator Education and Regulation Committee (ANB30). Mr. Decina is a certified child passenger safety (CPS) technician.
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