2024 Rising Stars: Automakers & Suppliers

Big break: Campbell met a fellow father who worked at Gatik while waiting to pick up his eldest daughter after school

Adam Campbell started out as a sharp-hitting third baseman for the University of British Columbia baseball team. His .320 batting average and team-leading six home runs in 2004 were enough to catch the attention of the Boston Red Sox, who drafted him in the 45th round of the Major League Baseball draft.

But Campbell had plans beyond baseball. He never signed a contract.

"It wasn't an easy decision, but I decided to gear up on the schooling side," he said.

He returned to the University of British Columbia to study neuromechanics and kinesiology. His research in both laid the foundation for his current work pioneering safety advances and protocols at self-driving truck startup Gatik.

Safety in the autonomous vehicle realm can be a nebulous topic — there are no regulations that determine when self-driving systems are safe enough to deploy, nor agreed-upon benchmarks to help determine whether they're safer than human drivers.

Campbell is changing that. He has a patent pending for a method that analyzes expected human performance in a given scenario — reacting to a stop sign, for example. He measures reaction time, response time and other factors, and those can then be compared with autonomous performance in an apples-to-apples fashion.

That's especially impactful at Gatik. The company's trucks are deployed on repeatable, short-haul routes, mostly on arterial roads. So Campbell can scrutinize real-world risks and hazards along the entirety of the operation.

Campbell is versed in analyzing driving behavior, be it automated or human. Before joining Gatik, he spent a decade working at a Canadian forensic engineering firm, where he researched human factors and reconstructed traffic crashes.

"You have an end scene, and you take that evidence and rewind it to pre-impact circumstances," he said. "You take it to where a driver made a decision to detect a hazard — or not — and follow up with braking."

Such experience easily applies to automated vehicles, though his job at Gatik arose by happenstance. While waiting to pick up his eldest daughter at school one day, Campbell found himself alongside a fellow father, Richard Steiner, Gatik's head of public policy. The two hit it off, and Campbell started at Gatik in December 2021.

While Campbell appreciated the chance to contribute to autonomous vehicle safety, he found Gatik's business model equally appealing. In his mind, the two are inextricably linked.

"You are not going to scale safety and save lives in a massive way unless you have a viable business behind the scenes that keeps the safety flywheel turning," he said.

In the same way, he said safety is not a one-man job at Gatik or anywhere else. Instead, it is infused throughout the organization and its customers.

"This is everybody at Gatik committing their entire day to ensure safety in every element of the business they touch," he said.

— Pete Bigelow