Associate Professor David Ferguson is the first ever to receive an exercise physiology-related grant from NASCAR. The grant, awarded in January 2023, is expected to address the growing concerns of heat exhaustion a race car driver may experience during competition.

Ferguson and his team of Kinesiology undergraduate and Ph.D. students will spend the next year attending high-profile NASCAR races around the country collecting data.

“It’s going to be a very large data set. We’re going to learn a lot about how drivers respond to heat,” said Ferguson. “NASCAR is involved, which means our data can influence safety of all the cars. Large-scale problems can be fixed now.”