Toyota Safety Engineer Shares Her Story

Mar 24, 2015

Toyota recently shone the spotlight on Dana Buckley, one of the safety engineers at the Toyota Technical Center (TTC). Buckley’s story is a unique one as she seemed to accidently fall into her career through a chance encounter with a Toyota Recruiter at a Society of Women Engineers conference back in 2012. This was a surprise to her as she originally got her degree in biomedical engineering from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) with a plan to spend her time building prosthetic limbs for amputees.

“I never expected that exactly what I wanted to do would be offered by a car company,” she says. “I never pictured myself as a typical engineer. I’m not the kind of person who sits around and solves math problems all day.”

Buckley had attended the conference with plans to speak with only representatives from medical development companies but said when she saw the Toyota booth she was compelled to go over and ask them one question; “Who gets to crash the cars?” This bold question irrevocably changed her entire career course as she discovered that she could actually build a career around crashing cars and testing them out to improve safety, thus helping people, which was her goal all along.

Since starting her career with Toyota, she has worked on the all-new Sienna which earned a 5-Star Safety Rating from NHTSA and is now putting her energy into the 2016 Tacoma. Buckley was even able to put her skills to work in a real life crash situation when she had the front end of her 2012 Camry smashed in by a vehicle that ran a stop sign. She said that once she realized that she was unharmed, her instincts immediately kicked in and she began evaluating the crash damage done to her vehicle looking for answers such as why her bumper sheared off after the blow.

“The most important aspect of engineering is asking questions,” Buckley says. “You’ll never have all the answers, but if you don’t ask the questions you can’t even start to figure it out.”

Buckley has had some incredible experiences through her venture into the world of science, and has gone to placed that she never dreamed she’d be. As part of her studies at WPI, she was required to participate in a project outside of her major, which led to go to Thailand and work with a group that was using science to study and classify the quality of life of elephants native to that area. This experience only helped to feed her strong desire to use math and science to improve the lives of others, a passion that she now proudly pursues through Toyota.