Dr. Cripton is Professor and Associate Director of the UBC School of Biomedical Engineering. He co-Director of the UBC Orthopaedic and Injury Biomecahnics Group. He is an Associate Faculty member in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Orthopaedics and a Principal Investigator at the Centre for Aging SMART and the ICORD spinal cord injury ressearch Centre. He obtained his PhD from Queen’s University, with postdoctoral work at Yale University. Prior to coming to UBC in 2003 he worked as a consulting engineer at Exponent, Failure Analysis Associates in Philadelphia, PA. Dr. Cripton is a member of the American Society for Testing Materials, the Society of Automotive Engineers, the International Society of Biomechanics, and the Orthopaedic Research Society.

Dr. Cripton’s research interests include injury prevention, spine and hip biomechanics, impact biomechanics, spinal cord injury, and spinal implant biomechanics. In addition to developing a helmet to prevent spinal cord injuries during head first impacts in sports, Dr. Cripton’s other specific projects focus on preventing spinal injuries in the vulnerable geriatric and pediatric populations, developing improved mechanical surrogates for injury experiments (i.e. crash test dummy necks and physical models of the spinal cord), understanding and preventing hip fractures in sideways falls and using advanced MRI imaging techniques to better understand seat belt efficacy and how it differs between males and females.