International Love Data Week 2026 is February 9-13, 2026. The theme this year is Where’s the Data? The U-M scholars who have shared their data publicly are enthusiastically answering this question.
Deep Blue Data is a repository offered by the University of Michigan Library that provides access and preservation services for digital research data that were developed or used in the support of research activities at U-M.
In honor of Love Data Week, we reached out to some recent Deep Blue Data depositors to ask about the history of their work, unique discoveries they made along the way, and how they see their data being useful to their research communities and beyond.
We hope you enjoy learning more about the scholars behind the data sets. As a reminder, all data sets in Deep Blue Data are openly accessible for anyone to download and use, because we love data.
Dr. Kathy Klinich is a research scientist at the UM Transportation Research Institute. Her expertise is in automotive safety, and some of our recent research has focused on how to ensure that people who travel while seated in their wheelchairs can safely and independently use automated vehicles (in this dataset, Finite Element Models of Wheelchairs and Associated Components to Support Wheelchair Transportation Research), as well as use their own wheelchairs on aircraft (in this dataset, Evaluating Wheelchairs for Potential Use as Aircraft Seating: Test Data).
What prompted you to conduct your research in this area?
There's been a grassroots movement (All Wheels Up) to let people use their own wheelchairs on aircraft, so the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), which is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, was interested in supporting our project to understand the crashworthiness of WC19 wheelchairs on aircraft. For ground vehicle travel, future automated vehicles hold great promise for improving independent travel opportunities for people with disabilities, so National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) which is part of the US Department of Transportation, has funded work that led to the wheelchair modeling tools.
For those not familiar with your field, what is the one thing you think is most important/interesting to know/unique about your work or your findings?
We are grateful to all of the wheelchair users who have provided guidance for our projects.
How do you hope your data might be encountered or reused out in the world?
We hope the Finite Element Models can be used by vehicle safety engineers to design integrated wheelchair stations in vehicles, with occupant protection systems (seatbelts and airbags) tailored to wheelchair users. The data on wheelchairs tested to aircraft seating standards can help bring us closer to wheelchair stations on aircraft, where people can use their own wheelchairs instead of transferring to aircraft seats.
What is one thing you learned during the process of preparing your data for deposit or sharing?
How important it is to document what you are sharing!
Why do you think sharing data is important?
Using our data can help make travel safer and easier for wheelchair users.