James Fell

James C. Fell is a Principal Research Scientist in the Economics, Justice, and Society department. He joined NORC in February, 2016. His areas of expertise include behavioral studies in traffic safety, evaluating impaired driving countermeasures, determining the effectiveness of various alcohol policies and safety issues associated with the legalization of marijuana in the states. Before joining NORC, Fell was a Senior Research Scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) in Calverton, Maryland, where he worked on projects which included evaluating the effectiveness of enforcement programs, particularly highly visible, highly publicized and frequent sobriety checkpoints, in reducing impaired driving. Prior to joining PIRE, Fell worked with Star Mountain, Inc. as the Director of Human Performance Technology and spent thirty years at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration where he held a series of positions including Chief, Research and Evaluation Division (GS-15). During the 1990s when states were considering lowering their illegal BAC limit for driving from .10 g/dL to .08 g/dL, Fell co-authored one of the first studies showing the effect of BAC levels on impaired driving fatal crashes. Subsequently, he was invited by officials in 12 states to provide expert testimony on the merits of lowering the BAC to .08 (DE, DC, IL, IN, MD, MN, MO, NE, NC, TN, TX, and WV). In 2000, President Clinton signed a bill providing a strong incentive for all states to lower the BAC limit to .08; ll states and the District of Columbia eventually adopted the law. In 1994 while at NHTSA, Fell developed a statement of work for the development of a statewide sobriety checkpoint program to determine its feasibility and its effectiveness in reducing impaired driving. The State of Tennessee provided the best proposal and was awarded a cooperative agreement from NHTSA. In 1996, Fell co-authored an article that was presented at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine showing a 20% reduction in impaired driving fatal crashes associated with the Tennessee checkpoint program. NHTSA published a more comprehensive report in 1999. The “Checkpoint Tennessee” program became the model for states to replicate. The program is still listed as one of SAMSHA's Best Practices programs. In 2009, Fell was lead author on an article published in ACER, which showed that the MLDA-21 laws were associated with significant reductions in underage drinking driver rates in fatal crashes. From 2008 to 2010, Fell was part of a team that developed an algorithm that used driver performance to assess alcohol impairment from experiments using the National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS) at the University of Iowa. B.S., Industrial Engineering, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1966 M.S., Human Factors Engineering, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1967