About
Dr. Robert S. Fijan
Robert Fijan Consulting was founded to provide consulting services in accident reconstruction and biomechanical analysis.
Dr. Fijan has his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, where his concentration was in dynamic systems and control and his research was in biomechanics. During his graduate work at MIT, he took off a year to work full-time in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, setting up the Bio-Motion laboratory to measure three-dimensional motions of patients before and after surgery.
After receiving his PhD from MIT, Dr. Fijan was a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Michigan, where he taught courses in dynamic systems, control and biomechanics. He then left academia to work at Exponent (originally called Failure Analysis Associates) for eight years, performing accident reconstruction and biomechanical analysis in Menlo Park, CA, Philadelphia, PA and Phoenix, AZ (where they performed vehicle-to-vehicle crash tests including crash-test dummies). Since that time, Dr. Fijan has continued working as an independent consultant in accident reconstruction and biomechanical analysis.
Dr. Fijan has over 30 years experience in analyzing and providing expert witness testimony for insurance companies and other clients, and he has testified in numerous states (including Arizona, California, Florida, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania), more than 100 times at trial.
In addition to his skills in accident reconstruction and biomechanical analysis, Dr. Fijan has a particular expertise in photogrammetry and in using information from dash cam or other video in car, bus and trucking accidents to assess vehicle position, motion, speed, accelerations, etc. and to assess relevant motions of a person with a claimed injury (when the video camera directly records the person).
Dr. Fijan also has expertise in animation, displaying the results of accident reconstruction or biomechanical analyses for trial.