Speakers & Chairmen

Since 2011, Dr. Barbat has been The Executive Technical Leader for Safety, the highest safety technical position at Ford globally, overseeing overall vehicle safety in research, advanced product development, strategy, and regulatory, company-wide. Dr. Barbat has 34 years of engineering experience: 26 years in Automotive Safety, 2 years in the aircraft engineering, and 6 years in the academia. Dr. Barbat is an internationally recognized safety leader who sustained a record of pioneering contributions to the automotive industry and societal benefits. His past 26 years have been with Ford involved in all aspects of automotive safety, e.g. structural crashworthiness, occupant protection, alternative fuel vehicle, integrated safety and biomechanics. At Ford, he has held several technical and management leadership positions. More than 11 years as the Manager for Passive Safety Research and Advanced Engineering and as a product development Safety Manager of a large group of more than 100 engineers involved in the design, development and safety sign-off for several platforms that meet or exceed Corporate, Regulatory, and Public Domain requirements. Dr. Barbat achieved SAE and ASME Fellow Grades. He served as the Chairman of International ISO WG4 for Virtual Testing for 14 years; alternate Chairman of Crash Safety WG and member of the Safety Technical Leadership Council of the USCAR since 2000; a member of the technical advisory board at various universities; and of the ISO United State Technical Advisory Group. He serves as a co-organizer/sessions chair of various Crashworthiness and Biomechanics Symposiums such as ASME, SAE, STAPP, and Government Industry meetings. Editorial Advisory Board member for various national and international journals. Dr. Barbat hold nearly 100 issued/filed patents and wrote around 65 papers. Some of his work has been recognized with a prestigious Henry Ford Technology Award; the SAE Arch T. Colwell Merit Award, 17 SAE/ASME Recognition Awards and 4 USCAR Awards. In 2017 he was awarded the prestigious ASME Barnett-Uzgiris Product Safety Societal award (the 6th recipient of this award) for his outstanding contributions to the society and vehicle safety. Dr. Barbat holds a Ph.D. degree in Applied Mechanics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, US in 1990; M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from UMIST, Manchester, UK in 1980; and a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Baghdad, Iraq in 1976.

Ms. Leyre Benito Cia studied Industrial Engineering at the "Universidad Pública de Navarra – UpNA" (Spain) from 2005 to 2011. Her thesis was on "Investigation of mass transport through membranes using the CFD method" as part of a research project in cooperation with Volkswagen AG at the TU Braunschweig. Since 2011 she works at GNS mbH first in crash simulation and since 2016 in the Generator4 management team.

Noor Faradila Paiman is a senior Research Officer, consultant and certified trainer at the Malaysian Institute of Road Safety Research (MIROS) since 2008. Her research interest is active and passive safety of passenger vehicles focusing mostly on child safety. From 2012 she joined the development and operation of ASEAN NCAP, she conducted and coordinated ASEAN NCAP's official and development, particularly for the passive safety assessment. Additionally, she actively participates in knowledge dissemination activities such as provision of training and road safety talks, as well as presenting at conferences throughout the world and publishing the journals.

Dr. Bu Xiaobing, who works at CATARC and is the director of the Impact Test Analysis Department，he is engaged in the research of passive safety development and virtual testing, has published 8 SCI papers and more than 20 EI papers, and has rich theoretical knowledge and engineering development experience. At present, he is mainly engaged in the technical research and protocols revision of passive safety virtual testing, active and passive safety integration virtual testing.

Chen Debing, deputy general manager of China Merchants Inspection Vehicle Technology Research Institute, senior engineer, has been engaged in vehicle safety performance testing and research for a long time.

Andre Eggers is a researcher at BASt (German Federal Highway Research Institute) since 2006 working in the area of biomechanics, evaluation of dummies, human models and virtual testing. He studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Hamburg and Biomedical Engineering at Wayne State University. 2013 he completed his doctorate at the Technical University of Berlin. He contributed to several European research projects like IMVITER, THORAX, ASSESS, SENIORS and OSCCAR. He is representing BASt in Euro NCAP working groups related to injury criteria and virtual testing.

Pere Fonts has been working in Automotive Safety since he graduated back in 2000 in Spain. He started his career at IDIADA Spain where he spent 11 years working on different Safety areas. The last 2 years at IDIADA, he was transferred to Shanghai (China), to work as Safety Project Manager. After that, he joined a Chinese OEM startup, QOROS Auto, the first Chinese OEM to achieve 5 Stars in Euro NCAP and awarded as best in Class in 2013. In 2015, he moved to NIO where he was responsible of Complete Vehicle Safety. Within his first 5 years at NIO in China, 3 vehicles were delivered to the market. The first 5 Stars C-NCAP for NIO was done with ES8 within that time. In 2020, he moved to Sweden for a short period working for NEVS. Since end of 2020 he re-joined NIO from the UK office as Senior Expert, Global Vehicle Safety. During this period, several vehicles have been delivered to Chinese and European markets achieving NCAP’s 5 Stars performance in all of them.

George Hu joined Humanetics in 2014. At Humanetics, he worked as CAE engineer in dummy model development. Today he is CAE engineering manager. In his position, he is responsible for technical support and dummy model development, focusing on Chinese insurance and consumer tests.

Over 3 years of application and development experience in ANSA/META, and has completed the development of many automation projects, involving automatic pre- and post-processing research on vehicle structural collisions, restraint systems and pedestrian protection. He has worked with a lot of large OEMs on projects to develop tools for pre- and post-collision safety. 3+ years of research in the field of collision safety, and in-depth research on META post-processing. In terms of VTC, he is responsible for supervising changes in VTC-related regulations, ensuring the compliance of VTC tools, and participating in the R&D and improvement of VTC tools.

2022-Present Leader of the product performance group in Customer experience Asia 2004-2021 Technical director, ESI Korea 1997-2003 Technical leader, Virtual performance team, ESI Korea 1991-1996 Engineer, Vehicle research and development Dept. Ssangyong motors 1998-2004 Ph. D, Mechanical design and production engineering, Seoul national university Research Develop the H-model, full human body FE model for the injury prediction, together with Prof. Hyunyun Choi in Hongik University Develop the human body model for the seat comfort analysis together with Prof. Choi, part of the Virtual seat solution package in ESI Support the GHBMC human body model conversions to VPS Lead and perform hundreds of vehicle crash and safety studies with various vehicle companies in Asia and Europe

Xiangrong Li joined CATARC In 1998, he served as director of the real vehicle collision department of CATARC Automotive Test Center, minister of the collision department of CATARC Automotive Test Center, test management department minister of the CATARC Automotive Test & Assessment Management Center. In December 2020, he served as deputy director of CATARC Automotive Test & Assessment Management Center, and in May 2022, he presided over the overall work of CATARC Automotive Test & Assessment Management Center.

Xiaoying Li is the founder and CEO of Digauto Automobile Technology Co., Ltd, which located in Shanghai of HQs and in Zhejiang of the ADAS proving ground, in Jiangsu of indoor test center. Digauto is the pioneer and driver in China on ADAS/AD testing, offers complete solution from test tools to service and ICV test license. Before Digauto Xiaoying Li worked in Kistler, Corrsys-Datron as the expert and chief representitive of vehicle dynamics. She graduated from Shanghai University of MBA and international trade and is a PhD candidate in Industry Economics at CASS (China Academy of Social Sciences).

Dr. Yu Liu received his PhD. from the Hunan University. He is currently employed at the Automotive Safety Technology Center of China Automotive Engineering Research Institute Co., Ltd.. He is responsible for the research and iteration of safety assessment protocols such as C-IASI and I-VISTA.

Simona Roka is a Senior Engineer at IDIADA, where she leads innovative projects on new trends in vehicle safety. She also contributes to the development of new protocols regarding passive safety and virtual testing. Simona earned her Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from universities in Slovakia and Austria, specializing in Applied Mechanics with a focus on biomechanics. She has led several projects at both the internal and European levels. Currently, she is the project coordinator for a European project called IMPROVA, which focuses on reducing the long-term consequences of road traffic accidents. Simona is an active presenter at various conferences, covering topics such as pre-crash braking and its influence on restraint system performance, human body modeling, and more.

Christian Salm is Chief Product Officer at MESSRING GmbH. In his role, he is responsible for global product sales and product manufacturing in the areas of passive and active safety. Since graduating with a degree in business administration, Mr. Salm has worked in the field of innovation and organizational development in high-tech industries. Initially as a partner in a strategy consultancy and in recent years as founder and CEO of a medical technology start-up.

Since 2012 at DSD as COO for the Testing Division (Passive safety engineering, active safety engineering and sled testing service) 2018 Acquisition of this business from Humanetics and thus Managing Director of DSD Testing GmbH since 2018

After completion of his studies in electrical engineering at the technical college in Mannheim, Germany, Alexander Schmitt started his career in 1999 as Sales Engineer at Endevco in the general vibration measurement business. From 2001 to 2012 he worked at Denton COE GmbH and later Humanetics Europe GmbH as European Sales Engineer for crash test dummies, crash dummy instrumentation and related products and services In June 2012 he joined Kistler Automotive GmbH, his current position is Business Development Manager Europe in the business field Crash & Vehicle Safety.

Director and Professor Andre Seeck has been Vice President of the Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) since April 2022, where he heads the Vehicle Technology division. In this position he is responsible for the preparation of European Safety Regulations. Furthermore he represents the German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport in the Board of Directors of Euro NCAP and he is the chairman of the strategy group on automated driving and of the rating system. These positions enable him to gain deep insight into current and future developments in vehicle safety. In 2017 NHTSA awarded him the U. S. Government Special Award of Appreciation.

Philipp Toelke is general manager of the Seattle Safety Germany GmbH which is a 100% daughter company of Seattle Safety LLC in Seattle. Philipp is responsible for the European market and works very close with the engineering in Seattle at the development and market introduction of new Seattle Safety products. Philipp has a diploma degree in Engineering from Braunschweig University (Germany) and he worked in the field of vehicle safety for the last 17 years.

Michiel van Ratingen, PhD, PDEng, Msc (1966) studied at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Eindhoven and the Medical University of Maastricht. Michiel joined TNO Netherlands and completed his PhD at Eindhoven and the Medical University of Maastricht. Michiel joined TNO Automotive in 1995 where he first got involved in vehicle crash safety research and development. In 2005 he joined First Technology Safety Systems (now Humanetics Innovative Solutions) as Technical Director. At FTSS he was responsible for global engineering activities, including design and validation of crash test dummies, dummy sensors and computer models. Since 2007 Michiel is acting Secretary General of the European New Car Assessment Program Euro NCAP in Leuven, Belgium. He implemented the organisation’s recent rating scheme updates, including the introduction of crash avoidance technology testing. He is a technical advisor to the Global NCAP and Latin NCAP programmes.

Dr. Z. Jerry Wang is the Chief Technology Officer of Humanetics Safety Group. He started his career at Humanetics in 1996 (formerly FTSS). Throughout his career, he has spearheaded many dummy development projects, including the HIII dummy family, SID-IIs, WorldSID, Q3s, WIAMan, THOR-5F, and THOR-AV. Dr. Wang serves on numerous SAE and ISO committees. He has a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University, a Master of Science in Biomechanics from West Virginia University, and a PhD in Engineering Mechanics from Michigan State University. He has authored and co-authored over 40 papers and holds 17 patents.

Wang Hong is Research Associate Professor at Tsinghua University. She received the Ph.D. degree in Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, in 2015. From the year 2015 to 2019, she was working as a Research Associate of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering with the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on the safety of the on-board AI algorithm, the safe decision-making for intelligent vehicles, and the test and evaluation of SOTIF. She has published over 60 papers on top international journals. Her domestic and foreign academic part-time includes the associate editor for IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, Young Communication Expert of Engineering.

Joey Wu, male, 36 years old, who is the senior application engineer at Instron (Shanghai) Ltd. 14 years of experience in automation control related work, with rich experience in the application of crash simulation system (CSA). Able to provide professional technical support for CSA applications to customers in accordance with relevant regulations, enterprise regulations, and R&D requirements. He independently completed the commission work of 15 CSA systems and provided technical support for CSA commission at Technische Überwachungsvereine (TÜV) in the Czech Republic and the National Aeronautical Research Institute (NIAR) in the United States in 2016 and 2019 respectively.

He deeply involved in the research and iteration of automotive safety assessment protocols such as C-IASI and I-VISTA, and currently responsible for the development Chinese human body models(AC-HUMs) in CAERI.

Mr.Guang Zhu is General Manager of Chongqing MESSRING Technology Co., Ltd, the sudsidary company of MESSRING GmbG in China. Between 2004 and 2013, he was team leader of Crash test Departement in Chongqing Changan Automobile Co., Ltd. He received engineering master degree in Vehicle engineering from Chongqing Univerisity and a bachalor Diploma in Engineering mechanics from Hua Zhong University of Science and Technology . he is also the MBA from Chongqing University.