Meet the DLSPH professor reframing road safety as a public health issue
August 21/2025
Assistant Professor Brice Kuimi received the Early Researcher Award to support his work looking at road safety as a public health issue, using public health approaches to reduce injuries and fatalities.
By Ishani Nath
When Brice Kuimi shares the focus of his work, he is often met with one question: “Road safety and public health, what is the connection?”
Kuimi is an Assistant Professor and epidemiologist at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health (DLSPH). His research reframes road safety as a public health issue by looking at the impact of collisions on health and our health care systems. In 2022, motor vehicles caused 1,931 deaths and 8,851 serious injuries in Canada. In Ontario alone, health issues caused by motor vehicles cost the province more than $728 million.
Kuimi explains that traffic collisions, like infectious diseases, can impact the mental, physical and social health of individuals and cause a burden on the health care system. With this in mind, public health approaches can be used to improve road safety.
“There is this mismatch between how I see the problem and how people were talking about it,” he says, adding that from his perspective, the term traffic ‘accident’ is inaccurate because “in reality, most of them are preventable.”
Kuimi’s innovative approach has now earned him an Early Researcher Award, and $140,000 in Ontario Research Funding. His project is one of 162 Ontario-based research and innovation projects that were selected by the provincial government for their potential impact on Ontario’s economy, workforce and the lives of people in the province.
“By driving cutting-edge research at our world class postsecondary institutions, hospitals, and research institutions, people in Ontario, Canada and around the world will benefit from discoveries made in our own backyard,” Nolan Quinn, Minister of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security, said in a statement announcing the awardees.
Brice Kuimi
The funding will help Kuimi and a team of researchers collect data to better understand and improve traffic safety.
Over the last 15 years, municipalities from Kamloops, British Columbia to Toronto, Ontario to Halifax, Nova Scotia have adopted plans to eliminate traffic-related injuries and fatalities, known as Vision Zero. Kuimi explains this approach as shifting the focus from changing individual behavior to looking at ways to design roads and policies that account for human error, “because people will always make mistakes.” He cites bike lanes and speed bumps as examples of interventions that can, in theory, reduce collisions. Kuimi and his team will evaluate the impact of these interventions using machine learning to gather data from before and after the changes were implemented.
Kuimi explains this approach using a cooking analogy — if you want to know if a spice makes food better, you need to compare the taste of the food with and without the spice, he says. That’s what this project is doing with collisions; finding data on when and where collisions occur to determine what factors make a difference.
In addition to the Early Researcher Award, Kuimi’s unique perspective and important work earned him an Early Career Award from the Canadian Society of Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CSEB), which was presented to him on August 13, 2025.
Through his research, Kuimi aims to create a machine learning model that can be used to fill missing data gaps to make our roads safer. He also hopes to inspire more public health professionals to work in this field. “If through this project and funding I could create some interest in people to consider public health approaches to road safety as a career option, that would be great.”