Laura Fraade-Blanar is an associate policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. Her work sits at the intersection of health, technology, and transportation. She focuses on safety and risk, applying her background in public health and injury epidemiology to questions around measuring the safety of emerging and traditional transportation modes. Around traditional transit, she has explored older driver safety, notably in relation to health services-based measures of cognition and Alzheimer’s disease. Around emerging transit, as a postdoctoral fellow at RAND, she worked with colleagues to generate a framework for measuring automated vehicle safety, assessing conventional methods and metrics and creating new ones where needed. Fraade-Blanar also worked on a perspective piece considering automated vehicle safety policy and contributed to the Road to Zero report.
Fraade-Blanar holds a Ph.D. in health services from the University of Washington, School of Public Health, with a focus on evaluation sciences and occupational health. Prior to her doctoral work she was a research scientist at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and a consultant at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO). She also holds an M.P.H. in international health and a B.A. in public health from Johns Hopkins University.
Selected Publications
Fraade-Blanar L, Blumenthal M, Anderson, J, Kalra N. , Measuring Autonomous Vehicle Safety: Forging a Framework. , RAND Corporation (RR-2662), 2018
Fraade-Blanar L and Smith JP, "Cognitive change and driving behavior among older drivers," Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2018 (forthcoming)
Fraade-Blanar L, Ebel BE, Larson, EB, Sears JM, Thompson HJ, Chan KC, Crane PK. , "Cognitive decline and older driver crash risk," Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 66(6), 2018
Fraade-Blanar L, Hansen RN, Chan KC, Sears JM, Thompson HJ, Crane PK, Ebel, BE, "Diagnosed dementia and the risk of motor vehicle crash among older drivers," Accident Analysis and Prevention, 113, 2018
Ecola L, Popper SW, Silberglitt R, and Fraade-Blanar L, The Road to Zero A Vision for Achieving Zero Roadway Deaths by 2050, (RR-2333), 2018
Fraade-Blanar L and Kalra N, Autonomous vehicles and federal safety standards: an exemption to the rule, (PE-258-RC), 2017
Blanar L, Sears JM, Chan KC, Thompson HJ, Crane PK, Ebel BE. , "Older adult occupational injury risk in association with job demands and health state," Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 59(2), 2017
Nevin P, Blanar L, Maeser J, Kirk AP, Kaufman R, Cramer G, Freedheim A, Hitchcock L, Ebel BE. , "'I wasn't texting; I was just reading an email …': a qualitative study of distracted driving enforcement in Washington State," Injury Prevention, 23(3), 2017
