Vitae research staff conference 200905 November 2009

Dr Elizabeth Dodson

Presenter Organisation

Loughborough University

Presenter Job

Senior Researcher

Sessions & Workshops

Community - Using online communities to engage research staff

Biography

Liz is a chartered psychologist and forensic road collision investigator. She completed her PhD in 2004, which focused on the experiences of adults with acquired brain injuries and their families. It was within this work that Liz developed a particular interest in risk taking and the human factors aspects of crash causation, as the majority of adult acquired brain injuries are caused by road traffic collisions.

For the past five years, Liz has worked as a senior researcher with an on-scene crash investigation team at Loughborough University. She specialises in accident causation and reconstruction, with a particular interest in road user behaviour. She has spent significant time working in the field, following police shift patterns, to conduct witness interviews at collision scenes. She is also trained to collect all the physical data required for reconstruction, enabling her to make a scientific assessment of the extent to which witness accounts are likely to be representative of actual events.

Liz is keen to network with other researchers and is an active participant within the research staff community at her university. She is a core contributor to the Vitae research staff blog and hopes that the development of a national online research community will help researchers to get their voices heard on common issues found across different institutions and different disciplines.