An Escape Made Easier WRITTEN BY SEAN GALLAGHER |
SEAN@STNONLINE.COM Yousif Abulhassan
Due to the reputation of the school bus being the safest form of transport for children, the student transportation industry has traditionally been on the forefront of tackling safety concerns and enhancing the ability to protect its precious cargo, especially during evacuations. Enter Yousif “Joe” Abulhassan. He wants to make the school bus as safe for children as possible. At 27 years old, he has made a career studying human perfor- mance in emergency evacuations and the design of emergency systems on mass transportation vehicles. The assistant professor at Murray State University in Kentucky started his journey researching school buses
while working on a doctorate in industrial and systems engineering. “I took an advanced safety engineering doctoral course my second year as a graduate student at Auburn University (in Alabama),” Abulhassan said. “The main topic of that course was school bus safety.” Abulhassan visited the Blue Bird manufacturing facility in Fort Valley, Geor- gia, with his professor at the time, speaking to the chief engineers about concerns with the emergency evacuations systems on school buses. “I was highly motivated to pursue this research after Blue Bird donated the rear section of the school bus for us to conduct the research,” he said, adding that the section that Blue Bird provided included the rear emergency door, a roof hatch, and the last two rows of seats. His dissertation went on to highlight some of the concerns with the design of emergency exits on school buses, quantifying the strength and physical ca- pabilities of the youngest group of students riding the school bus. This work led to his current project developing devices to ease emergency evacuations. “Based on the results of child strength and anthropometry collected from my research, we are working on patenting various devices that could be easily installed in existing and new buses that I believe could greatly improve the ability of children to evacuate a school bus through existing emergency exits,” Abulhassan said. Yet, as he noted, for these features to be viable options and effective solu- tions, they need to be easily adapted to existing school buses, as well having “a minimal impact on the strained budgets of school districts and manufac- turers,” Abulhassan said. He added that he envisions working on this research in the long-term. “I plan on working on further research on school bus safety, and human per- formance specifically with respect to the design of emergency exits,” Abul- hassan said, adding that he intends to test different emergency exits and devices on how they affect the performance of children and adults during emergency evacuations. l
Read more this month about young industry stars starting on page 50.
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