Professor & A.P. and Florence Wiley Faculty Fellow
Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
3136 TAMU
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX
77843-3136
Tel. (979) 458-3949
Fax. (979) 845-6481
e-mail : d-lord “at” tamu “dot” edu
Last updated: July 18, 2022
Video of Dr. Lord discussing his research program at TTI
Short Biography
Dr. Dominique Lord is a Professor and A.P. and Florence Wiley Faculty Fellow in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University and former Division Head for the Materials and Transportation Division (2014-2016). Between 2011 and 2015, he held the Zachry Development Professor I, while being an Associate Professor. Prior to joining the department in September 2004, he was an Associate Research Scientist with the Center for Transportation Safety at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) (formally known as the Texas Transportation Institute), and a Research Assistant at Ryerson University. Dr. Lord holds a B.Eng. (1992) in Civil Engineering from McGill University, and an M.A.Sc. (1994) and Ph.D. (2000) from the University of Toronto.
Over the last 25 years, Dr. Lord has conducted numerous research studies in the United States, Canada, and across the world. He just completed the study titled “NCHRP 17-58: Safety Prediction Models for Six-Lane and One-Way Urban and Suburban Arterials” funded by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Since joining Texas A&M, he successfully completed the project titled “NCHRP 17-29: Developing a Methodology for Predicting the Safety Performance of Rural Multilane Highways,” TxDOT’s “Analysis of Roadway Departure Crashes on Two-Lane Rural Roads in Texas,” as well as a CDC-funded project titled “Reducing Older Driver Injuries at Intersections using more Accommodating Design Practices.” Dr. Lord has also had the opportunity to provide his expertise on many other projects, such as: the safety effects of on-premise digital signs; aiding in the development of new design guidelines for installing median barriers; incorporating safety into the highway design process; the calibration of crash prediction models; the application of accident modification factors within the highway design process; and the development of an in-service evaluation program of roadside safety devices. Further, he was one of the participants in an award-winning research study on the application the empirical Bayes (EB) method to estimate the safety benefits of installing roundabouts at intersections. Another important study in which he participated was on the evaluation of the Manitoba Driver Education Program for high school students. In 2000, Dr. Lord lead a traffic safety study in Burkina Faso, Western Africa, that incorporated the application of the latest state-of-the-art safety methods to identify hazardous roadway segments located in rural areas.
His work has led to the identification of important issues in highway safety research (e.g., misuse of zero-inflated models, biases caused by low sample mean and small sample size problems) and the development of new and innovative methodologies for analyzing crash data (e.g., Bayesian neural networks, support vector machines, Conway-Maxwell-Poisson GLMs, Latent Class models, Negative Binomial-Lindley, Negative Binomial-Generalized Exponential, and Semi-Parametric models based on the Dirichlet process). The results of his research have been used by researchers across the world and several areas, including medicine, accounting, mathematics and statistics, biology and most engineering disciplines among others.
Dr. Lord’s primary interests are conducting fundamental research on accident analysis methodology, new and innovative statistical methods for modeling motor vehicle collisions (including Bayesian statistics), and before/after evaluation techniques. His other research interests include problems associated with the crash data collection process, safety audits, human factors related to older drivers and pedestrians, and traffic flow theory. He has had more than 150 papers published in peer-reviewed journals and more than 135 papers at international conferences with a peer-reviewed process.
He is the recipient of numerous national awards, such as the Transportation Research Board D. Grant Mickle Award, the 2000 Canadian Association of Road Safety Professional Best Paper Award, the 2010 CUTC-ARTBA New Faculty Member Award, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) New Investigator Research Award. He is a registered Professional Engineer in both the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec.