Dr. Richard Hanowski, Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Richard Hanowski is a Senior Research Scientist at Virginia Tech and serves as the Director of the Division of Freight, Transit, & Heavy Vehicle Safety at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI). He also serves as a Chair for the International Road Federation (IRF Global) Powered Two-Wheeler Task Force. Dr. Hanowski has been involved in transportation human factors research since 1991 and has served as the Principal Investigator or Co-PI over $100 million of contract research, resulting in over 300 publications. He is focused on actionable health and safety research that leads to improved road safety and a reduction in global road crashes. His research has impacted national transportation policy, including truck driver fatigue/hours-of-service and driver distraction/texting. Dr. Hanowski received his Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering in 2000 from Virginia Tech. He received a Fulbright Scholar Award for the 2024-25 academic year.
Carl Cospel, Chief Technology Officer
Mr. Carl Cospel is an avid motorcycle rider. When not on two wheels he serves as the Hardware Engineering Laboratory Director at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI). He also serves as the Director of Engineering for Falcon-Pursuit, a company that is focused on developing technologies to improve athlete safety and performance. Mr. Cospel has been involved in the design, implementation, and installation of automotive data acquisition systems and sensors for over 20 years. During this time, he has overseen the deployment of thousands of DAS for large scale naturalistic data collection research projects. He has also led the development of several research focused automated driving vehicles. His expertise includes systems engineering, embedded hardware and firmware development, software development, robotics, and mechanical design. Mr. Cospel received his B.S. in Computer engineering in 2003 from Virginia Tech, and his M.B.A. with a Systems Engineering Management concentration from Virginia Tech in 2011.
Dr. Feng Guo, Chief Data and Analytics Officer
Dr. Feng Guo is a Professor & Patricia Caldwell Fellow in the Department of Statistics at Virginia Tech, where he also serves as the Lead Data Scientist at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. His research spans methodological and applied areas of quantitative transportation modeling including statistical methodologies, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI), particularly emphasizing driving risk assessment, as well as the evaluation of advanced and automated driving systems. Dr. Guo has extensive experience in telematics-based driver risk prediction models with application for ride-hailing driver risk prediction, safe routing, and fleet safety management. Dr. Guo received dual Ph.Ds. in transportation engineering (2010) and statistics (2007) from the University of Connecticut.