MIE’s Shannon Roberts Works on Transforming Her Profession, Her Teaching, and Her Pioneering Research on Transportation Safety

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Shannon Roberts

Since Associate Professor Shannon Roberts joined the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department as an assistant professor in 2016, she has served as the embodiment of the term “upward mobility,” both literally (in terms of her transportation research) and figuratively (in terms of her accomplishments). That’s because, while plying her trade as a nationally known expert on human factors in transportation safety, she has augmented that kind of “mobility” research with a wide spectrum of upwardly mobile fellowships, awards, appointments, and promotions.

Roberts’ renown as a transportation expert is demonstrated by her frequent contributions to the mainstream website WalletHub, a widely read digital publication specializing in financial advice, including various forums on automobile-related issues.

That renown stems from her findings in the Roberts Research Group, which is focused on studying human factors in transportation safety. The Roberts team does so by designing and implementing driving-feedback systems; analyzing human-factors issues of vehicle cybersecurity; studying impaired driving (including drugged driving and distracted driving); examining behavior changes with vehicle automation; and promoting positive behavior among teenage drivers through training.

Roberts is also the co-director of the Arbella Human Performance Laboratory, which is a national leader in the area of driving-automation systems as well as young-driver training related to distracted driving. Her work in that lab aims to study the relationship between drivers and their cars in hopes of shaping this interaction in such a way that traffic fatalities are reduced.

As Roberts explains, “I achieve this aim by, first, building a foundation of knowledge about what affects drivers’ behavior and, second, using this knowledge to improve drivers’ response through feedback, warning, and training systems. My research is innovative because it takes a forward-looking step towards understanding how personal, technological, and environmental characteristics can and will change driver behavior and, consequently, traffic safety.”

Among other awards, Roberts has received: the 2023 College of Engineering Barbara H. and Joseph J. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award; the 2019 Stephanie Binder Young Professional Award from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society’s Surface Transportation Technical Group; a 2019 Best Poster Award at the Hybrid Session on “Intriguing Research About the Performance of Transportation Users” at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting; and the 2018 Industrial Engineering Professor of the Year Award, as voted on by students from the MIE department.

The national Stephanie Binder Award is especially significant because it confers an annual tribute upon a young professional who demonstrates outstanding contributions to transportation human factors.

Roberts has also received a bevy of fellowships, initially to support her education, and later to support her teaching and research.

The former include being designated as a 2013-2014 Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellow by the U.S. Department of Transportation; a 2013-2014 Graduate Engineering Research Scholar from the University of Wisconsin Madison; a 2012 National Science Foundation Engineering Innovation Fellow at Hewlett Packard Labs; a 2011 American Society of Safety Engineers Fellow while at the Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety; and a prestigious 2010-2013 Graduate Research Fellow by the National Science Foundation. 

The scholarships and fellowships supporting Roberts’ teaching and research include being appointed: a 2021-2022 Lilly Teaching Fellow by UMass Amherst; a 2021-2022 ADVANCE Faculty Fellow from UMass Amherst; and a 2018-2019 Center for Research on Families Scholar by UMass Amherst.

Roberts and her Sociology colleague Laurel Smith-Doerr have also recently received a grant from the Public Interest Technology Initiative at UMass Amherst to support their research with many implications for gender and race diversity in the future of the trucking industry. In addition, Roberts and other colleagues recently received a $25,000 seed grant from the Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation and the Institute for Diversity Sciences to support a project that is gathering timely and important data to increase awareness of the challenges experienced by Black pregnant women.

Roberts earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin Madison and her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (August 2023)