The WACRSR has been established to conduct research using the Safe System Approach. The four cornerstones of the Safe System Approach are —“safe roads and roadsides, safe road use, safe speeds and safe vehicles.”

This approach represents a paradigm shift in road safety and takes a holistic view of the road transport system and the interactions of its various elements to create a road transport system in which human mistakes do not result in death or serious injury.

WACRSR leads research focusing on road safety across these four cornerstones, including:

• driver behaviour
• vehicle safety
• road and other infrastructure safety
• speed
• general causes of road crashes and trauma
• new, emerging and existing safety solutions to prevent and/or reduce road trauma
• contributing factors to injury and death in road crashes
• injury prevention in road crashes

Our Vision

Our vision is to see road-related harm to the Western Australian community eliminated entirely. This is the ‘zero’ of the Towards Zero Strategy. Zero fatalities may seem like an impossible task, and it is one we do not take lightly. However, we have brought together the best minds to achieve it.

Professor Teresa Senserrick PhD AFHEA (Indigenous), Director

Teresa’s training is in developmental psychology, with her research dedicated to road safety since 1999. Her lead expertise is road user education, training and licensing systems. She has particular interest in policy and practice relevant research, including a focus on disadvantaged and vulnerable road users and communities.

Find out more about Teresa

Professor Lynn Meuleners, Senior Honorary Research Fellow

Lynn is a road safety epidemiologist and has over 20 years’ experience in road safety. Her interests include fatigue in heavy vehicle drivers, older drivers, data linkage, cycling safety, driving simulation studies, visual impairment and road safety program evaluations.

Find out more about Lynn

Associate Professor Paul Roberts, Deputy Director

Paul is an experimental psychologist with over 15 years’ experience in road safety, working in both academic and applied settings. He is interested in all aspects of the human factors involved in driving, especially fatigue and distraction. His particular expertise is distraction from digital billboards.

Find out more about Paul

Dr Matt Albrecht, Research Fellow

Matt is the current Main Roads WA Research Fellow. He holds PhD in psychopharmacology from UWA and broad postdoctoral experience in psychology, neuroscience, and statistics. He now applies these interests and experience to road safety, with a strong interest in the design, methodology, and analysis used to understand the impact of road safety interventions. Current projects include assessment of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of black spot programs and understanding the risk factors associated with crashes on WA roads. He also has a strong interest in driving simulation, driver impairment, and hazard perception.

Find out more about Matt

Dr Muhammad Hussain, Research Fellow

Muhammad has a solid background in road safety, aberrant driving behaviours, transport engineering, traffic modelling and simulation, with over 10 years of expertise in his field. His research interests primarily revolve around road safety in the context of autonomous vehicles, including topics such as cooperative and highly automated driving, road safety performance in roadwork environments, and lane manoeuvrings capabilities at signal intersections. He has also conducted research on modelling road crashes using in-vehicle parameters and investigating the impact of driver distraction on traffic flow and road safety.

Find out more about Muhammad

Angela Yan, Research Associate

Angela is a 2022 UWA Psychology Honours Graduate whose research focused on personality and attention. She has completed volunteer and internship positions at UWA and other WA community health organisations, following a previous research assistant appointment in Perth. Her experience includes supervising small teams and mentoring students on the autism spectrum, doing administrative tasks for clinicians, and managing online content. Angela is involved in Road Safety Commission projects, Main Roads projects, and general UWA research administration.

Find out more about Angela 

Dr Razi Hasan, Research Associate

Razi is a road safety enthusiast following a long background in transport and civil engineering, with academic and industry experience. He completed his PhD in 2023, investigating contributing factors to drug driving and the role of enforcement related countermeasures. His road safety research methods including systematic literature reviews and meta-analysis, survey and observational studies, and complex statistical modelling. He has published several papers in relation to impaired driving and pedestrian safety.

Dr Judy Fleiter, Project Manager

Judy has always been fascinated by the way people interact on the road, which led her to the field of traffic psychology more than twenty years ago. She has worked in applied and academic settings and has extensive experience supporting road safety improvements at grass-roots and government levels in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Her research interests include factors influencing speed choice, speed management, risky road use, cross-cultural influences and enforcement methods to improve road safety outcomes.

Damir Kekez, Research Officer

Damir’s training was in neuroscience and pharmacology, with a particular interest in monoamine neurotransmitters function in Parkinson’s Disease, and Schizophrenia. He went on to driving simulator investigations of novel signalised intersection designs for the treatment of specific WA intersection blackspots, before transferring to hearing and dementia research. He has since resumed work in the road safety space at WACRSR, returning to blackspot intersection treatment studies.