Biography:

 

Dr. Loay Al-Salehi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia’s School of Biomedical Engineering, working within the Orthopaedic and Injury Biomechanics Laboratory at ICORD. His research focuses on injury biomechanics, with a particular interest in how human posture, and neuromuscular responses in the seconds or milliseconds before impact influence injury outcome. His work bridges experimental biomechanics, human motor control, epidemiological analyses, and injury prevention, with applications to vehicle crashes, headfirst impacts, rollover events, sport, and falls.

Dr. Al-Salehi completed his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at UBC, where he develop and validated a novel robotic rollover test device for human volunteer studies. This platform allows researchers to reproduce complex dynamic motions in a controlled laboratory setting and to study pre-impact responses using advanced tools such as fluoroscopy, motion tracking, and electromyography. His research has examined cervical spine posture, neck muscle activation, and subject responses during simulated rollover and inverted freefall conditions.

His broader research program aims to generate human volunteer and epidemiological data that can improve injury prediction, inform computational human body models, and support the design of safer vehicles, protective equipment, and injury prevention strategies. More recently, Dr. Al-Salehi has become interested in sex differences in injury biomechanics, including how differences in anatomy, posture, neuromuscular response, and crash exposure may affect injury risk and protection. His work is highly interdisciplinary, involving collaborations across biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, kinesiology, clinical research, and industry. His long-term goal is to better understand and prevent injuries by linking pre-impact human response to real-world injury mechanisms.