Profile

Dr. Sina Nordhoff is currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Traffic and Transportation Safety Lab (TTSLab) of Transport & Planning of Civil Engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands as of December 2021. Her work focuses on understanding and predicting user acceptance of automated vehicles.

Her enthusiasm for user needs and preferences of automated vehicles developed as Master student at Daimler’s Society & Technology Research Group (STRG), where she wrote her thesis on user’s willingness to adopt Google’s self-driving car. She finished her PhD on user acceptance of automated vehicles in public transport in April 2020 at Transport & Planning of TUD. The PhD was conducted in cooperation with the Innovation Centre of Mobility and Societal Change (InnoZ) in Berlin, where she performed interview, survey, and accompanied test rides with real users of the automated shuttles ‘Olli’ from Local Motors and ‘Emily’ from Easymile. By means of these studies, she gained an in-depth understanding of user needs and preferences and the factors predicting the acceptance of automated vehicles in public transport. The knowledge obtained fed the development of conceptual models predicting the acceptance of automated vehicles, such as the multi-level model on automated vehicle acceptance (MAVA) representing the first process-oriented model on the acceptance of automated vehicles. She finished a highly productive PhD with eight independent  (journal) articles published in reputed journals such as Transportation Research Part A and F (edited by Elsevier).

Before she finished her PhD, Sina led the international user acceptance survey of conditionally automated cars in the European industry project L3Pilot at the eict GmbH in Berlin, where she worked as project manager and researcher. As multi-disciplinary researcher, she collaborated with colleagues from Cognitive Robotics (COR), ME (Mechanical Engineering), and IDE (Industrial Design Engineering) of TUD and Toyota on automated vehicle acceptance, perceived safety and its relationship with trust.

She taught in four courses of the BSc / MSc Track Civil Engineering & Geosciences at TU Delft, and is currently supervising four MSc students on the quantification of the human passenger experience of automated vehicles. She is currently leading a Special Issue on Automated Vehicle Acceptance in the International Journal of Human Computer Interaction together with Prof. Dr. Susan Shaheen (UC Berkeley), Dr. Peng Liu (Zhejiang Universit), and Celina Kacperski (University of Mannheim).