Adele Polson

Overview

Adele Polson is a Senior Research Associate with more than 20 years of transportation safety research experience and a main area of focus in occupant protection, including child passenger safety issues. As a specialist and a project director in large-scale field studies with complex statistical designs, she oversees all contractual, budgetary, scheduling, technical, and statistical requirements for these projects. She also manages these tasks: developing study protocols, designing data collection tools, organizing trainings, monitoring study progress, processing data, producing reports , and presenting results.

Since 1999, Polson has served as project director of the National Occupant Protection Use Survey (NOPUS) for NHTSA and in that same capacity for NHTSA’s Seat Belt Use by Commercial Motor Vehicle Drivers study since 2005. Since 2008 Polson has been a Certified Child Passenger Safety Technician  and helped to expand Westat’s occupant protection work into child passenger safety. Polson is also the project director for the National Digital Car Seat Check Form (NDCF) data analysis, leading Westat’s work to analyze and develop data dashboards for the only national database of car seat misuse. During her career, she has contributed to dozens of technical publications on national occupant protection issues and presented on the results of her research.

Education

• BA, (cum laude), Psychology, University of Maryland, Baltimore County