Dr. Perez is interested in a variety of efforts that help to improve the safety and convenience our transportation systems. Some of his previous projects have touched on areas including driver distraction, human modeling, collision avoidance systems, infotainment systems, and driver performance in test track and naturalistic environments. In the safety area, he currently leads several efforts related to naturalistic driving study design and analysis, data standardization, data preparation, data mining, and data analysis.

In addition, Dr. Perez is involved in efforts to increase the accessibility and suitability of the built infrastructure for individuals with disabilities and the study of temporary disability (e.g., imposed by surgical interventions) in the context of driving safety.

Dr. Perez’s background is in human factors and biomechanics, and he particularly enjoys applying statistics and novel models and approaches to find solutions and information within data. In addition to his BEAM appointment, Dr. Perez serves as a Research Scientist within the Division of Data and Analytics at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.