Built to Protect: UVA’s CAB is Making Cars and Combat Safer 

Whether the threat is a car crash on an American highway or a bomb beneath a military vehicle in a combat zone, the UVA Center for Applied Biomechanics (CAB) is working to understand how the human body gets injured and how to better protect it.  

Jason Forman, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, leads the center’s automotive safety research. His work focuses on understanding the mechanics of how the human body is injured in car crashes and helping stakeholders develop tools to assess the effectiveness of protective systems. The stakes are high.

“Even though there’s been a lot of progress in the safety of automobiles over the years, it’s still one of the leading causes of death and injury for a substantial portion of our population. There’s still a lot of progress that can be made.” 

JFJason FormanAssociate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

CAB’s automotive research has drawn significant attention from the Department of Transportation (DOT), automakers, and safety system suppliers. CAB has received several research contracts from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration covering pedestrian safety, novel seating designs for automated vehicles, and how different people respond to restraint systems. “Our role is to help the government and industry stakeholders develop new safety technologies and assessment methods and make sure that they have what they need to continue to advance their mission,” Forman said.  

Forman sees UVA’s broader research infrastructure as a key advantage. “One of the big advantages we have to being in a university is that we have access to a wide array of expertise and tools to be able to perform all sorts of research,” he said. “We work with the high-performance computing capabilities at the university to take the knowledge that we generate and turn it into advanced whole human body simulation models” that can be tested across a far wider range of collision scenarios.  

CAB’s expertise extends well beyond the highway. Robert Salzar, an associate research professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, leads CAB’s work with the Department of Defense, developing and testing protective equipment for the military.  

One of Salzar’s most significant projects involved Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, designed to withstand blasts from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). The Army had the vehicles, but the crash test dummies used to evaluate soldier safety inside them were built for frontal car collisions, not the high-rate vertical forces of an underbody explosion.  

Traditional crash test dummies are good for the thing they were designed to do, that is, to sit in a car and to run and react to a frontal collision. When you roll over a buried munition, the blast causes a large vertical acceleration. That dummy wasn’t built to react correctly to that.” 

RSRobert SalzarAssociate Research Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

The Army tasked CAB with figuring out why soldiers were still getting injured in MRAP vehicles.  

The answer was the sudden, concentrated force of a blast. CAB’s work led directly to the development of the Warrior Injury Assessment Manikin; a crash test dummy designed specifically for vertical blast loading which has since been adopted by the U.S. military and NATO. CAB is now using the new dummy to evaluate new energy-absorbing seats for the Marine Corps. CAB has also extended its defense work recently to include optimizing the mass of body armor while continuing to prevent injuries caused by ballistic and blast shockwaves.  

For Salzar, the military’s continued investment in CAB speaks for itself.

We like to think that the military continues to come back to CAB because of our attention to detail and our facilities where we can perform complex, high-energy tests.

RSRobert SalzarAssociate Research Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

This story originally appeared in the 2026 Annual Research Report, produced by the Office of the Vice President of Research. Find more stories from this report here: https://news.research.virginia.edu/category/annual-report/

Video Transcript:

 So at the Center for Applied Biomechanics, or the CAB as we call it, we’re focused on injury prevention research. So we perform fundamental research across a number of different fields.

We do everything about studying the, the etiology of injury. You know, how are injuries, uh, occurring in the world, and then we try to devise ways of preventing those injuries from happening For 25 years we’ve been doing everything military research, uh, for injuries.

And we’ve worked with every branch of the military. We actually built a rig that simulated the high energy environment of a person being loaded by an IED while sitting in a vehicle. Figure out why the people inside the vehicles are still getting injured.

Develop better predictive models, predictive tools to help assess the safety of various systems proactively.

Yeah, so that’s one of the great things about UVA. Our strength is in our collaboration. We work together to tackle big problems in health and safety.

This vehicle’s going to protect our fighters in the event of a IED explosion, so we’re not gonna be surprised next time.