About

Professor Emeritus Raphael Grzebieta (B.E. (Krakow, Hons), M.Eng.Sci. (Krakow), PhD (Monash), FIEAust, CPEng., NER (Civil), APEC (Civil), IntPE (Aus), MSAEA, MSAE, RRSP) is a forensic engineer specialising in vehicle and road infrastructure crashworthiness, injury biomechanics and road safety. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Forensic Medicine at Monash University located at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. He is also jointly an Professor (Em.) of Road Safety in the Transport and Road Safety (TARS) Research Centre within the School of Aviation at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney.

Prior to retiring from UNSW, Raphael spent 10 years at UNSW leading major Australian Research Council, Government and industry funded research projects on vehicle rollover crashworthiness, heavy vehicle safety, motorcycle into barrier and motorcycle safety, bicycle safety, naturalistic driving study and lately quad bike safety. Prior to UNSW, he was in the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University for 25 years, where as an Associate Professor he headed up Civil Engineering’s road-safety, crashworthiness and rapid loading research team and supervised numerous PhD, Masters and project students.

Raphael has over 250 publications and supervised numerous PhD and Masters students in the areas of structural crashworthiness research, accident investigation, road safety, road and infrastructure crashworthiness design, injury causation and biomechanics, quad bike rollover safety, bicycle helmet safety, ambulance crashworthiness, failure analysis, numerical modelling and experimental testing of a variety of structures subjected to impact and large deformation loads. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Australasian College of Road Safety and the international open access ‘Safety’ Journal and on numerous Editorial Boards. He is also a co-Author of Chapter 140 in 'Expert Evidence' entitled, 'Traffic Crash Investigation, Analysis and Reconstruction' published by Thompson Reuters. Raphael has also chaired and co-editor of a number of international conferences and given numerous invited public lectures and keynote papers. His international network in his research fields is extensive. He was recently awarded by the US Academy of Sciences Transportation Research Board’s AFB20 Committee on Roadside Safety Design the Ken Stonex lifetime achievement award for a long and distinguished career devoted to promoting best practices in transportation design and management to develop a “human error tolerant” roadway system.

He has carried out over 200 in-depth crash investigations and accident reconstruction analyses, providing expert reports and evidence in court. His latest cases have been for the NSW, Queensland, Victorian and New Zealand Coroners, NSW and Victorian Departments of Public Prosecutions, NSW Police, Victoria Police and Victorian WorkCover Authority as well as a number of cases for the S.A. CTP Insurer. He has also been involved in major safety related projects for the NSW WorkCover Authority, Australian Defence Department, and major international companies such as BHP, Cargil Corporation and Hancock Resources. He also assisted the governments of Romania and Latvia as a World Bank road safety consultant, reviewing these countries road safety strategies.