Speakers & Chairmen

Bernard Been currently holds the position of Engineering Manager at Humanetics Europe, leading the team and overviewing all European engineering activities in close cooperation with teams in USA and EU. Bernard received his degree Mechanical Engineering in 1985 and holds a diploma Industrial Design since 1995. Bernard’s professional career started in the field of Contract Industrial Design. Continued 1997 in the Crash Safety area at TNO Automotive, First Technology and now Humanetics Europe. Bernard had a leading role in the development of all current ATD’s such as pedestrian head forms, FLEX-PLI, WorldSID Midsize Male and Small female, THOR and Q dummies. Bernard is active in various relevant working groups like Euro NCAP, CEN, ISO, etc.

Joël Béla Bourgeois, born and raised in Zurich, began his professional career with an apprenticeship in architecture before taking up industrial design studies. Fascinated by working with engineers, he became involved with projects in robotics and mechanical engineering. After more than five years in a design agency, Joël focused on public transportation and worked on the development of rail vehicles in the UK and Scandinavia, including seat design for Deutsche Bahn. Since nearly three years he is responsible for seat development and coach design at Twiliner.

Marcy Edwards is a Senior Research Engineer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and conducts research on occupant protection, primarily in the areas of rear impacts, rear seat occupant safety, and child passenger safety. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia USA.

Burkhard Eickhoff studied mechanical engineering in Hannover (Germany) focusing on vehicle engineering and applied mechanics. Starting from 1999 he worked with Autoliv B.V. & Co. KG as a test engineer for sled and crash tests. Since 2003 he has been project manager in systems development (safety belt) of the same company. He was involved in the definition and assessment of new restraint systems and he conducted feasibility studies using system simulation as well as dynamical tests. Moreover he had a consultant role regarding restraint system design. He finished his doctoral thesis at the Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg in 2012 on the reduction of belt induced thorax deflection in frontal crashes. Since 2016 he has been head of the department Virtual & System Engineering, Homologation at Autoliv B.V. & Co. KG.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jörg Fehr studied Mechatronics in Stuttgart and Mechanical Engineering in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. From 2006 till 2011 he was a research assistant and doctoral student at the University of Stuttgart. Afterwards, as a simulation engineer at TRW Automotive GmbH, he was in charge of the development of new mechatronic vehicle safety systems. From 2014 to 2020 Jörg Fehr was a Junior Professor at the Institute for Engineering and Computational Mechanics and Cluster of Excellence Simulation Technology (SRC SimTech) of the University of Stuttgart. Since March 2020 he has a permanent position as a deputy head of the Institute for Engineering and Computational Mechanics. One goal of his current research is the development of validation and simulation strategies for active human body models for the simulation of new mobility solutions and the speedup of the simulations using linear and nonlinear model reduction methods.

Michael Gumprecht has been an expert within Validation Services since 2010 and is responsible for the internal validation of vehicle safety for automotive seats throughout the Group, with a focus on airbag integration and low-speed rear crash. Previously, he was the engineer responsible for whiplash and airbag integration in various projects.

Dr. Wolfram Hell studied medicine in Antwerp/Belgium, Munich/Germany and Charlottesville/USA. Subsequently he worked in BMW’s accident research and analysis department. From 1992 to 2003 he headed the biomechanics and medicine department at the GDV (German Insurance Association) Institute for Vehicle Safety in Munich. 2004 - 2018 he has been the head of the medical and biomechanical accident analysis group at the Institute for Forensic Medicine of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich where since 2019 he is focussed at LMU on special research projects. He is currently President of the Swiss/German/Austrian Society of Medical and Technical Traumabiomechanics gmttb. Moreover he has been working as an biomechanics/medicine expert witness for traffic accidents since 1997. Amongst other memberships he is member of the Injury Scaling Committee of the American Association for Automotive Medicine AAAM and was a founding member of IIWPG.

Astrid Linder is Professor of Traffic Safety at VTI, responsible for the development of the research area crash safety and biomechanics. Traffic safety, models of the human in crash testing, injury prevention and crash related countermeasures are main fields of her research activity.

Advanced Engineering Manager since 2018 at Windsor Machine group, a major North American supplier for interior components, specifically Head Restraints. As a Senior Engineer since 2008, I have worked with multiple OEMs to develop seat and head restraint designs that meet all whiplash performance targets and requirements, including FMVSS202a, E.C.E. 17, Euro NCAP, and IIHS whiplash.

Andreas Mangold is Managing Director of Photron Deutschland GmbH - a subsidiary of the Japanese Photron Limited, a leading manufacturer of high-speed cameras. Mr. Mangold is a trained electronics engineer and has been working in the field of high-speed image analysis for over 15 years. For more than 6 years he has been responsible for the "Automotive" area throughout Europe at Photron, where he is the interface between end customers and the development team.

Ulrich Meier-Noe studied mechanical engineering in Paderborn, Nottingham and Paris and obtained his doctorate in 2003 at the Chair of Automation Technology in Paderborn. For years, he has been involved in various, mostly dynamic tests and experiments in the context of aviation, automotive engineering and defense technology. Highly dynamic processes play a particularly important role here. In addition to project management, test planning and analysis of test results, he focuses on the optimization of processes and the documentation of test results.

Volker Sander has been head of the Vehicle Safety Department of ADAC, which includes active safety, passive safety and accident research, since 2010. Before that, from 1999-2007 he was in charge of the construction of ADAC’s crash test lab as a team manager. From 2007-2010 he lead the Passive Safety Department of ADAC. At Euro NCAP he is a member of the Board of Directors and chairman of the frontal impact working group. In addition to that he is member of the side impact working group, the technical working group and the ratings group of Euro NCAP. He is also lecturer for vehicle safety at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich.

Dr. Abbas Talimian is a postdoctoral research fellow at the department of Biomechanical human body models, New Technology Research Center, University of West Bohemia. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Since 2019 his research has been focused on occupants' safety and developing passive safety tools for autonomous vehicles with non-standard seating configurations.

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.

Dr.-Ing. Dirk Ulrich studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Darmstadt and stayed at the TUD to work on a government research project in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) on which subject he also received his doctorate. After that he joined Audi R&D to work in the department for computational methods and was responsible for the introduction of nonlinear FEM applications. Thereafter he worked for several international providers of simulation software for automotive applications (ESI, SOFY, TNO). Since 01.04.2007 Dr. Ulrich has been managing the CAE-training activities of carhs.training gmbh.

Thomas Unger studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Dresden from 2000-2006 and graduated with a degree in automotive engineering. As a student, he worked as part of the GIDAS project, where he assisted in the collection and recording of accident data, photogrammetric accident site surveys, and reconstruction of pedestrian accidents. From 2005 to 2018, he managed the ADAC accident research at the Technical Center Landsberg am Lech. Since July 2018, he is head of data analysis and simulation in Verkehrsunfallforschung an der TU Dresden GmbH.