For years, Jason Hallman knew he wanted to work in medicine — but he just couldn’t ignore his love for cars.

He assumed that one passion would have to be a career and the other a hobby. However, the 25-year-old graduate student has found a way to combine both: by helping engineers build the kinds of cars that will keep people safer.

“Physicians understand how to mend the body,” said Hallman, a 2001 graduate of Rockford Lutheran High School.

“I am studying what makes it break and how to prevent it.”

Hallman recently won a $10,000 student research grant from the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Engineering so he can work with neurosurgeons to study the protective effects of side airbags.

“I have been investigating so-called ‘torso air bags’ — those designed to protect the region between the shoulder and the hip — and how they affect the biomechanics of the chest and abdomen during a side-impact crash,” said Hallman, an engineering research assistant in the department of neurosurgery at the Medical College of Wisconsin and a graduate student in biomedical engineering at Marquette University, both in Milwaukee.

“Because these air bag technologies are still quite new, our understanding of how they work is limited. Relatively speaking, we have few real-life examples of their performance.”

Because he clearly couldn’t make real people endure a car crash in the name of science, Hallman designed a computer simulation that would imitate what happens in a crash.

He has studied the effects in different positions in the car, and in crashes of different severities. What he found was a suggestion that, in some cases, that the air bag actually hurt the occupant more than it helped him or her.

Thanks to his new grant, Hallman plans to take his research to the next level.

He’ll be studying a database of actual crashes to find examples of airbags that did not help.

“Computer simulations in any science are not reality,” Hallman said. “From the real-life examples, we can recreate these scenarios in the laboratory using crash dummies. The dummy results will allow us to fine-tune our understanding of torso airbags and confirm or deny what the computer model is telling us.”

As part of the grant he received, Hallman will have the opportunity to share his findings with others in the industry at a national gathering next year.

And on a personal level, he’s hopeful the research experience will help him become a better scientist.

After trying his hand in the medical and manufacturing worlds, Hallman sees this as a career that was designed for someone with his interests and abilities in mind.

“I cannot imagine a profession that better fits all of my interests,” he said. “Perhaps I am picky, or perhaps I really was created for exactly what I am doing now.”

Rockford Register Star

Profile: Jason Hallman

Hometown: Rockford

Age: 25

Family: Wife, Kristin; parents, John and Sandra; brother, Adam, 23; and sister, Briana, 21

Hobbies: Mountain and road biking, hiking, camping, car repair, baseball and playing guitar