March 7, 2025
We are excited to announce the first Glenn Distinguished Lecture sponsored by the Glenn Department of Civil Engineering!
Dr. Ricardo Martinez, M.D. will deliver his distinguished lecture titled: “From Pavement to People: Modernizing Transportation Engineering for the 21st Century” on Friday, March 7, 2025 at Clemson University in the Watt Family Innovation Center auditorium.
Ricardo Martinez, MD is the former Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. During his tenure, the Agency reframed traffic safety as a national public health problem and later introduced Vision Zero from Sweden as a framework for change. He is an Adjunct Professor in Emergency Medicine, at Emory School of Medicine, Co-founder and Senior Advisor of the Injury Prevention Research Center at Emory, and Senior Advisor, of the Crash Injury Research Engineering Network at Emory in Atlanta, Georgia. He works clinically at the Grady Marcus Trauma Center in Atlanta. In June 2023, he was appointed to the Executive Committee of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, DC.
Dr. Martinez was the Associate Director of Trauma at Stanford University Medical Center and was a Visiting Fellow of the Accident Research Unit in Birmingham, England. He served on the Board of the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine, the Vice-chair of the Public Health Foundation, and the Board of Intelligent Transportations Systems of America.
Under Dr. Martinez’s leadership of NHTSA, the Agency issued the two most significant safety rules in a decade, developed new procedures and processes for undertaking larger and more complicated recalls, led the development of the International Harmonized Research Agenda on crash injury and a United Nations global agreement on vehicle regulation, established the National Transportation Biomechanics Research Center and the Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN) to bridge the gap between engineering and medicine, and transition to “eCars” and digital alerts like Automatic Collision Notification. His tenure also led the development of the EMS Agenda for the Future by the EMS community, which has modernized the discipline. Dr. Martinez’s tenure oversaw the lowest fatality rate, the lowest percentage of alcohol-related fatal crashes, and the highest seat belt use and child safety seat use in American history. He served as CEO of Safety Intelligence Corporation, a start-up that obtained digital Event Data Recorder data from vehicle crashes via telematics for inclusion into a Safety Vault. This IP became part of Hughes Telematics. He trained in emergency medicine at LSU-Charity Hospital at New Orleans and was selected as Chief Resident. He served as an Assistant Police Surgeon in New Orleans. He has been honored with national awards by the American Medical Association, National Safety Council, American College of Emergency Physicians, American Trauma Society, and National Association of EMS Physicians. In 2004, Dr. Martinez was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, now the National Academy of Medicine. As a National Academy of Medicine member, he has served on the Board of Population Health and Public Health Practice and on Committees and Workshops on transportation, health, and emergency care. He was honored by the American Medical Association for outstanding service as a Member of the Executive Branch by Presidential Appointment.
