The University of Virginia’s Center for Applied Biomechanics is involved in a wide spectrum of research activities and projects for improving various aspects of injury prevention and control.  Experimental work is conducted at an 11,000 sq. ft. facility that houses an automobile test sled, a variety of state-of-the-art equipment for safety-related and impact biomechanics testing, a high performance computational cluster, and biomechanical material preparation facilities.  Current projects include development and evaluation of lower extremity and thoracic injury criteria, development of finite element models for these regions as part of the Global Human Body Model project, biofidelity evaluation of future crash test dummies, investigation of blast injury to the brain, evaluation of advanced vehicle passenger restraint systems, and characterization of biological materials.