Keynote Speakers
Russell Neudorf, M.Sc., P. Eng.
Russell Neudorf has over 30 years of broad and extensive experience in transportation that includes policy development, consultation and engagement of partners and stakeholders, and the management of research and major capital projects.
For 14 years he has served as the Deputy Minister of Transportation for the Government of the Northwest Territories, Canada reporting directly to the Minister of Transportation. As Deputy Minister he provided strategic leadership and management of the Department. He managed several large scale capital projects, including the Deh Cho Bridge and the Inuvik Tuktoyaktuk Highway, Canada’s first highway to the Arctic Ocean, taking the projects from planning, through environmental assessment, construction and commissioning. He is currently serving as a Special Project Advisor with the Department of Infrastructure.
Russell was elected the President of the Transportation Association of Canada (TAC) in 2006 and served in that role until 2008. He continued to serve as the Past President until 2017. TAC’s 500 members represent federal, provincial and territorial transportation departments, municipalities, private-sector firms, academic institutions and associations with an interest in road and urban transportation issues. He has also served as chair for the Council of Deputy Ministers Responsible for Transportation and Highway Safety from 2007 to 2008. He successfully led the development of a strategic vision for transportation in Canada which was approved by all provinces, territories and the federal government. From 2009 to 2017 he was the Chair of the Engineering and Research Support Committee that reports to the Council of Deputy Ministers.
Russell moved to the Northwest Territories in 1993 to begin his work for the Department of Transportation as the Senior Transportation Planner. He was promoted to the position of Director of Transportation Planning and Policy in 2002.
Russell began his professional career in 1986 with the consulting engineering company in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan working on a variety of transportation engineering, planning, statistical and economic projects.
Russell attended the University of Saskatchewan, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering with Great Distinction in 1986, and a Master of Science degree in Transportation and Engineering Economics in 1989.
Thomas A. Dingus, Ph.D., CHFP
Dr. Thomas A. Dingus is director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), is an endowed professor of Virginia Tech, and is the president of VTT, LLC.
Since 1996, Dr. Dingus has managed the operations and research at VTTI, which annually conducts more than $40 million in sponsored research. He has performed transportation safety and human factors research since 1984, focusing on automated and connected vehicles, driver distraction and attention, the safety and usability of advanced in-vehicle devices, crash avoidance countermeasures, and fatigue. He has led substantial efforts in growing Virginia as a pioneer in automated-vehicle research, with VTTI and partners creating a suite of advanced test beds—including the Virginia Automated Corridors in Northern Virginia and the Virginia Smart Roads in Blacksburg, Va.—that facilitate both public roadway and edge-and-corner (e.g., surface street, rural roads) test scenarios. The institute is also lead on a master IDIQ contract from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration worth up to $25 million across five years to assess human factors and cybersecurity issues relative to vehicle automation.
Dr. Dingus and VTTI researchers work with private- and public-sector partners, including 14 auto manufacturers and more than 50 suppliers, to create data acquisition, advanced data analytics, and simulation methods that provide the technical foundation for the development and deployment of advanced vehicles and systems. The institute also conducts proprietary research for such industry leaders as GM and Google as a key step in advanced-vehicle development.
Dr. Dingus pioneered the naturalistic driving study research method, which involves instrumenting vehicles with unobtrusive video cameras and sophisticated instrumentation that assess crash and near-crash causation and help determine crash countermeasures. VTTI and partners recently completed the Second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2) Naturalistic Driving Study, the largest study of its kind with more than 3,500 drivers aged 16 - 98 across six data collection sites in the United States. The resulting data comprise more than 35 million miles of continuous naturalistic data and more than 1,900 verified crash events, making it the largest crash-only database. The naturalistic driving study method is now being employed at VTTI to develop advanced-vehicle simulations and to study driver behavior/performance in advanced vehicles, including automated vehicles, thus providing a realistic understanding of human-machine interactions.
Dr. Dingus has more than 230 technical publications and has managed more than $500 million in research funding to date. He was named a White House Champion of Change in 2013 and is a Fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, from which he has received several awards, including the A.R. Lauer Award for outstanding contributions to the field of safety. Dr. Dingus is a board member of both the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and the Intelligent Transportation Society of America.
