Vaca’s partners at the Child Study Center, including its chair Dr. The lab's mission is to understand behavior, and brain development and function for young people as they learn to drive.” Brain development, which continues into the mid-20s, tends to lag behind the complex demands facing novice drivers, he explains. Teens and young adults are the most at risk, says Vaca, in part because their brains are still developing when they start learning to drive. Last year was one of the deadliest for fatal car crashes in the United States according to the National Safety Council, with a 6% rise in deaths over 2015. The end-goal: to curb the number of injury crashes among the young and to make them safer drivers sooner. “The mission of the lab is to understand behavior, brain development, and how the brain functions for adolescents and young adults as they learn to drive,” he says. Housed in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale, the DrivSim Lab applies expertise in crash injury and prevention, adolescent psychology, and brain science to the study of crash risk among teens and young adult drivers. To tackle the growing problem of fatal crashes, Vaca has collaborated with colleagues at the Yale Child Study Center to establish an innovative research lab: the Developmental Neurocognitive Driving Simulation Research Center, or the DrivSim Lab. In his work at Yale School of Medicine, he combines his knowledge of risk factors for motor vehicle crashes with research on adolescent development and behavior. The son of a nurse and auto mechanic, Vaca has come full circle as a professor of emergency medicine specializing in safety and injury research. His experience motivated him to pursue research in injury prevention and public health, with a focus on driving and young people.
But beyond the tragedy, Vaca also saw an opportunity for prevention. “Early on in my career, I saw a lot of motor vehicle crashes, kids being ejected from cars, a lot of young people seriously injured and too many killed,” he recalls. Federico Vaca treated countless car crash victims as an emergency medicine physician at UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange, California.
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