Swanson School Honors Dr. Kevin Toosi as its 2024 Distinguished Alumnus in Bioengineering
Above: Kevin Toosi (center) with Interim Department Chair Mark Redfern (left) and Interim U.S. Steel Dean Sanjeev Shroff.
The University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering feted its 2024 class of Distinguished Alumni on Wednesday, April 10 at the University Club. Recognized among this year's honorees was Kevin Toosi, MD, BSBioE ’03, MSBioE ’06, PhD BioE ‘11, as the Distinguished Alumnus in Bioengineering.
“Like Kevin, my passion is biomechanics, and it is great to see all the great things he has done with his education,” noted Mark Redfern, Interim Department Chair of Bioengineering. “I think of him as a ‘biomechanical detective’ — he uses biomechanics to determine how any injuries may have occurred and how improved design may reduce future injuries. This type of forensic analysis is critical for law enforcement and others to understand how trauma – both great and small – not only affects the human body, but also its cause and future prevention.”
About Kevin Toosi
Dr. Toosi received his Medical Doctorate in 1994 and went on to practice medicine as a Primary Care Physician for more than five years before attending the University of Pittsburgh where he earned his B.S., M.S, and PhD in Bioengineering with a focus on Biomechanics. In 2005, he joined Exponent Failure Analysis Associates, one of the nation’s largest engineering and scientific consulting firms, where he worked as an engineer and scientist in their Biomechanics Practice for three years where he focused on accident reconstruction, crush analysis, and occupant kinematics during motor vehicle accidents. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh.
His primary research interests include investigating the relationship between repetitive stress injuries and biomechanical factors affecting the upper extremities’ structure and function. He is the President and Principal Scientist at BioEx Consulting where they specialize in Biomechanics using engineering and biomedical sciences to explore the cause, nature, and severity of bodily injuries, and investigating and reconstructing vehicle and marine accidents to ensure accurate conclusions are formulated as to the cause of the accident.
For more than a decade, he has conducted forensic investigation and analysis of accident reconstruction involving pedestrians, passenger and transport vehicles and industrial equipment applying Newton's Laws of Motion. He has analyzed the injury potential of human body parts in automobile accidents including low-speed impacts, as well as the biomechanics and mechanics of human injury in slip-and-fall and other possible trauma-inducing events. He has applied the principles of impulse, momentum, and kinetic energy of collisions to accident reconstruction; and considered the effect(s) on the musculoskeletal system of forces/energy during automobile impacts as well as other events involving force(s) application to the human body.
He has performed human factors analysis of automobile and non-vehicle incident reconstruction including operator reaction and response time to proprioceptive visual and other stimuli. Safety engineering and design including hazard communication systems (e.g., product warnings) are evaluated to provide data and information for the most logical explanation for incident causation, injury or lack of injury and responsibility. He has more than thirty years of experience in clinical medicine, injury biomechanics, and accident reconstruction. He has authored and coauthored several journal articles, abstracts and proceedings papers, and numerous extended reports. He is a member of SAE International, Biomedical Engineering Society, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, American Society of Biomechanics, and Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine.