Richard Brown, who died June 23 after falling in his driveway in Huntington Beach, Calif., was a pioneer in biomechanical testing of theme-park rides.

Doc Brown, as his colleagues called him, had a doctorate in biomedical engineering from Case Western University, a love of roller coasters he traced to his teen years riding the Coney Island Cyclone, and a hand in the design of more than 100 amusement-park rides, including the Disney parks, Six Flags Magic Mountain, Universal, and Knott’s Berry Farm.

“He was the most prominent of just a handful of people who worked in this field,” the North American editor of Park World magazine, Paul Ruben, said Thursday. “He made sure that the new rides being introduced were not only thrilling but also safe and comfortable.”

He also became a pioneer in medicine in 1977 when he developed new ways to monitor the central nervous system of patients before and after surgery.

Brown’s doctoral thesis concerned methods of monitoring the spinal cord during surgery on children for scoliosis. Today, the practices he developed are widely used in operations that involve an instrument touching the spine.

While working in biomedical research, Brown continued to moonlight by taking a spin on new coasters and other thrill rides, evaluating how their owners could make them safer. While some safety experts use mannequins wired with sensors to test rides, Brown insisted on providing his own human analysis.

“I’m the only dummy that rides,” he told the Wall Street Journal in a 1993 story that recounted his role in smoothing out Universal’s Back to the Future flight-simulator ride. When company executives test-rode it, they vomited.

Armed with his accelerometers, which measure acceleration and gravitational pull, Doc Brown diagnosed the problem after one trip on the prototype. The test film on the screen was out of sync with the cars, which made the executives feel off balance. They were motion sick. In addition to fixing the synchronization, Brown suggested that the film shown during the ride keep an object – a building, a clock, a tyrannosaur – on the screen so that riders could focus on to keep from getting dizzy.

Richard Hart Brown was born on June 15, 1941, in New York City to Raymond and Helen Brown. His father was a businessman and his mother a telephone operator. From 1958 to 1962, he served on submarines in the Navy and learned to like diving.

After earning his bachelor’s in electrical engineering in 1967 from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, he began studying the emerging field of biomechanical engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. In 1988, Brown became director of orthopedic research at St. Luke’s Hospital in Cleveland while honing his reputation as a troubleshooting human guinea pig of amusement-park rides.