Welcome to the Center for Injury Research and Prevention: Discovering a Safer World

As long as there are childhood injuries, there will be a need to apply the tools of science to prevent them. The Center for Injury Research and Prevention is a comprehensive pediatric trauma research facility at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia dedicated to addressing injury, the leading cause of death for children and adolescents.

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Research Programs & Networks

  • Partners for Child Passenger Safety (PCPS)

    In a unique collaboration between academic institutions and private industry, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, The University of Pennsylvania, and State Farm Insurance Companies® joined forced in 1997 to form Partners for Child Passenger Safety (PCPS). PCPS soon became the world’s largest child-focused motor vehicle crash surveillance system, and its findings are recognized worldwide.

  • Young Driver Research Initiative (YDRI)

    This multidisciplinary research alliance of The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and State Farm uses a scientifically rigorous, teen-centered research approach with the goal of launching a comprehensive outreach and education initiative proven to reduce young driver crashes.

  • Center for Child Injury Prevention Studies (CChIPS)

    This center-within-a-center is an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center established in 2005 by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Faculty and students work side-by-side to conduct translational research that is practical to industry.

  • Child and Adolescent Reaction to Injury and Trauma (CARIT)

    This program conducts pioneering research into the range of responses that children and their parents experience after pediatric injury so that effective interventions may be developed to reduce post-traumatic stress.

  • Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN)

    As part of a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-sponsored network, the Center's crash investigation team contributes multidisciplinary analyses of Children's Hospital and PCPS-based crashes to a rich database, forming the basis for potentially life-changing tools and technologies.

  • Injury Free Coalition for Kids of Philadelphia (IFCK)

    The Injury Free Coalition for Kids of Philadelphia works in the West Philadelphia community to prevent unintentional childhood injury. The coalition's grassroots-based approach focuses on topics such as: home safety, bicycle safety, pedestrian safety alternatives, and violence reduction.

  • National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Indefinite Quantities Contract

    NHTSA currently provides funding for the Center to conduct research on a wide range of research topics including, abdominal protection, test dummy development, and improving restraint use in at-risk populations.

  • The Philadelphia Collaborative Violence Prevention Center (PCVPC)

    The Philadelphia Collaborative Violence Prevention Center (PCVPC) was established in 2006 through a cooperative agreement with The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with the goal of preventing violence and aggression in the lives of young people in West and Southwest Philadelphia. Through a truly collaborative relationship, PCVPC brings together academic institutions (The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University and Drexel University) and community-based organizations to share equally in the planning, leadership, analysis, and dissemination of research results.

News Spotlight


Staff Spotlight:

Matt Maltese
Matt Maltese, MS
Our hope is that one day we will be able to develop a crash-test dummy that is based on real child biomechanical data, not adult biomechanical data scaled down. This will then hopefully lead to restraint systems in vehicles that are designed for children to reduce morbidity on our nation’s roads.

Matt Maltese, MS, program manager for experimental biomechanics at the Center for Injury Research and Prevention, has been working to help design human pediatric crash-test dummies and associated criteria for adults for the past 15 years. A three-year veteran of the Center, Maltese spent 10 years in experimental biomechanics with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Maltese’s team also is involved in several research studies measuring pediatric human volunteer responses in everyday activities. The goal of this research, he says, is that by examining how children move in low-level recreational and athletic activities, we will gain an understanding of how the parts of the body interact with each other. Then we can use computer models to extrapolate to the crash environment.