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For
Automotive Safety Research Institute’s Kim Alexander,
Safety is Her Passion
When Kim Alexander,
executive director of CU-ICAR’s Automotive
Safety Research Institute (ASRI), was a senior in high school,
an automobile crash changed the course of her life. She was a passenger
in a car that ran off the road and crashed into a tree. The result
was a spinal cord injury that left her paralyzed and confined to
a wheelchair.
 Where others
may see limitations, Alexander found opportunity. When she was
a Clemson undergraduate student, Alexander began to use her personal
experience as a springboard and created a program called “Keeping in Motion,” an inspirational testimony
that challenges students and adults to utilize their abilities
and seize their opportunities. She speaks on the state, national
and international stage, offering a look at the consequences of
one’s judgments and shares the importance of smart, healthy
and informed decision making. Alexander believes that “in
order to survive you have to keep your eyes open and your options
alive, and realize that you may not always get a second chance!”
She also has
earned a national reputation for the University’s
Cruisers Program, an evidence-based K-12 life skills curriculum
that focuses on the issue of youth traffic safety. South Carolina
historically has had one of the highest traffic-based teen-fatality
rates in the country, and crashes are the No. 1 killer of teens
nationally. “We call these events accidents,” says
Alexander, “but crashes are preventable and most often occur
due to human error.”
To date, she
has received over $2.3 million in sponsored research in the field
of transportation safety. ASRI takes Alexander’s
work to a new level and makes safety a focal point for the international
automotive research community.
She holds
a bachelor’s degree in marketing, a master’s
in counseling and guidance services and a doctorate in education – all
from Clemson.
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