Directory profile for Dr. Rachael Thompson Panik

Rachael Thompson Panik, AICP, PhD is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at The University of Alabama.

Dr. Panik research aims to operationalize the Safe Systems accounting for the complexities of the socio-technical transportation system. Specifically, her work examines how planning and organizational decisions, new mobility, policy, and human behavior interact to produce—or prevent—traffic fatalities. Much of her research focuses on improving safety outcomes for people outside of vehicles — people biking, walking, and riding motorcycles. Across her research, Dr. Panik combines a systems safety engineering lens with Bayesian, machine-learning, time-series, and latent-class approaches to better describe the complex transportation system. Recent examples of her work include developing high-resolution exposure estimates for pedestrians and bicyclists, critiquing crash-based high-injury-network methods in favor of risk-based networks, identifying heterogeneity in motorcyclists’ safety attitudes and behavior, and exploring engineering students’ attitudes toward safety. Together, these threads support her long-term goal: helping communities translate Safe System principles into evidence-based decisions that anticipate harm and build transportation systems more capable of protecting all road users.

Dr. Panik has degrees in civil engineering (University of Alabama at Birmingham), city planning (Clemson University), and transportation systems engineering (Georgia Institute of Technology).She has also worked in engineering and planning consulting for several years, during which she helped communities across the southeast become more bikeable and walkable. Outside of the classroom, Dr. Panik enjoys running, reading, and walking in her neighborhood.