Steve Rowson, PhD

Associate Professor at Virginia Tech

I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech. My expertise is in injury biomechanics, concussion, and safe product design and assessment. In this work, I rely heavily on my technical background and education in mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, and data science. My CV can be found below and describes my experiences in greater detail.

I am director of the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab. My research area is primarily in injury biomechanics. The overarching rationale of this work is that if you understand the mechanical forces that cause injury to the human body, interventions can be developed to prevent injury from occurring. I’ve worked on projects in automotive and military spaces, but my current focus is on reducing concussion in sports. My funded research projects have totaled over $14M and I have authored over 80 peer-reviewed papers that have been cited over 3000 times. My publications can be read at the links below. If you don’t have access to these, feel free to reach out to me.

I'm particularly interested in translational research that results in new interventions to reduce injury across the population. I run and maintain the Virginia Tech Helmet Ratings, which I co-developed with Stefan Duma. The ratings provide consumers with an objective assessment of relative helmet performance and have resulted in a paradigm shift in the way helmets are sold and designed. Some of my other work has resulted in new rules to reduce concussion in youth football and led to improved safety analyses for drone operations over people. Below are a few recent impactful publications and VT press releases featuring my work.

Reach out to me on any one of my profiles if you'd like to discuss any of my work.