Saving Lives

Richard Kent doesn’t necessarily think of himself as being “accomplished.”

He says this from his office inside the trailer on Linden Avenue, home to U.Va.’s Center for Applied Biomechanics. Students are milling about the trailer, working on various projects involving automobile safety. Next door, the main building houses the department’s “sled track,” where researchers conduct safety tests using dummies to simulate automobile crashes.

Some may disagree with Kent’s self-assessment. He earned bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees all before the age of 35, received a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Department of Emergency Medicine; and now has been named one of the top innovators in the country. But Kent claims that, really, he feels the most accomplished when he has helped people.

Kent’s department conducts a broad array of research related to automobile safety, with a focus on developing “smart” seat belts and airbags. “Basically, the goal of our whole center is to reduce the burden of traffic injury globally,” he said. “The biggest thing is to just get everybody to wear their seat belts. If we could do that, that would make a lot of these other things we do really fade into the noise.”

It’s hard to get Kent to talk about himself. He seems much more comfortable talking about the work of his department, his students and how critical the situation of automobile safety is -- in this country and beyond. His specific focus is on restraints, he said, and how to build the best restraint possible for a particular person.

“There are some people who say automobile safety or crashes are the biggest public health problem in the United States,” Kent said. “About 40,000 people a year die. To put that in perspective, that’s something like a jumbo jet going down every couple days … like 9/11 every couple of weeks.”

Kent’s department is working toward developing sensors that are given data about a crash while it’s occurring. The sensors can look at the particular person -- their position in the car, their age, their size and weight, their bone density -- and determine whether they need more airbag and less belt, or vice versa. It’s important, he said, because the U.S. population is getting older and older and the roads are going to get more crowded. Each person has different safety needs when they are involved in a crash.

After he received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah, Kent accepted a job with Collision Safety Engineering, a company that retrospectively evaluates how a car performs in a crash. However, after earning his master’s degree in biomechanical engineering from Utah, he decided to come to study and work at U.Va.

“I realized I was much more interested in the person than the car,” Kent said. “I was more intrigued with what happens to a heart when you hit it, what happens to an arm -- those kinds of questions seemed more interesting.”

Now Kent spends his days at the biomechanics lab, conducting research and overseeing his own students. His passion for automobile safety is obvious, and seeps into all parts of his job -- including his interactions with his students.

When one student wants to run an errand at lunch, Kent’s response, half-jokingly, is always the same: “You know, 40,000 people a year [die in crashes]… [If] you’re gone 20 minutes … that’s one person [we won’t be able to save] while you’re changing your oil. You can do it if you want, but...”

Kent says that he treats his students like faculty colleagues. “My students do everything,” he said. “They are project managers, they are bolt tighteners, they interact with sponsors. … I expect them to be like that.”

Visit him in his trailer office, and it’s not being named one of the top innovators that Kent wants to talk to you about -- even if you continue to ask.

“Did you know that during the next 10 years, 35 percent of the population is going to be over the age of 65?” he asks, and spins in his chair to pull up a picture on his computer screen. He wants to show what the results can look like when an elderly woman is in a crash without proper safety restraints, and how his department is working to improve her odds of survival. He wants to talk some more about his students, show off the sled track and the work they’ve done, and how it relates to the future of safety restraints.

With every new piece of information Kent’s group learns about restraints, they are closer to saving even more lives. And to Kent, that’s the real meaning of accomplishment.

This article originally appeared in the Jan. 14-27, 2005, issue of Inside UVA.