© All photos are owned by Morgan Sweere.
This interview took place prior to Morgan starting her fellowship.
After years of hard work, emergency medicine physician and now Indiana University (IU) Motorsports Medicine Fellow, Dr. Morgan Sweere’s “I’m Finally Here Moment” arrived when first putting on a medical fire suit at Indianapolis Motor Speedway during a month-long rotation in residency. She recalls her medical school experience as, “You’re working so hard, like 80 to 100 hours a week. You miss most holidays. You don’t really get free time. You’re just waiting. I can’t wait till I get there.”
The moment was a poetic full circle. Morgan, her Dad’s “Pit Crew Girl”, an endearing name she earned as a young child from others at the track, watched her relatives race every Friday night at the dirt track. During high school, Morgan was severely injured in a four-wheeler accident. “I was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and had to have emergency surgery…I feel like it made me understand from the patient side of things and how it feels to be there for someone on one of their worst days…I remember immediately being like, I want to be a part of this.” Although she had an admiration for racing, motorsports medicine was not exactly the point of focus. Sweere recalls, “I tried being really open during medical school to other specialties,” but in the end, she loved that emergency medicine had the unique aspect of an emergency situation. “Our specialty is the art of resuscitating the critically ill patient.”
Morgan’s Pit Crew Girl Trophy she received after the 2001 racing season.
Finding Motorsports Medicine
The connection between emergency medicine and motorsports arose when Morgan became involved in Emergency Medicine Residence Association (EMRA) during her time in residency. “Through [EMRA], I got on the board and [met] one of the other American College of Emergency Physician Board Members, Dr. Ryan Stanton, the medical director for American Medical Response (AMR), who staffs response for National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR)… I was talking to him about EMRA when I learned he was super into racing… He invited me to come shadow him at a race in Daytona several years ago and I went. He introduced me to the IU Motorsports Medicine Fellowship and the current fellow at that time.” Sweere was ultimately offered a month-long rotation at Indianapolis Motor Speedway to learn more about the field, with permission from her residency program. After enjoying her experience, she decided to apply for the fellowship. The program only accepts one individual per year, so Morgan was focused on merging her background in racing and medicine to make the best application possible.
Once she made the decision to apply, Morgan became more involved. She began serving on the safety team at a local dirt track in Florida, where she completed residency. “I cold emailed Volusia Speedway’s promoter, which is a very prominent dirt track in Florida…like hey, can I volunteer to come watch your safety team and see what it’s like? He called me immediately… On my first day there, he handed me a payroll packet.” At the time, Sweere was still a resident physician but excited to join the safety team. Through this opportunity, she has experienced more training and exposure, implemented ideas from newly published research, and also established her own research endeavors to improve safety at dirt tracks. Morgan was also selected as the IU Motorsports Medicine Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year.
Morgan sitting on the pit wall.
Spearheading Safety Research in Dirt Track Racing
From gaining different perspectives in multiple levels of different motorsports series such as IndyCar and NASCAR to dirt track racing, Sweere has seen how injury patterns, accident data, and safety resources are inconsistent between series. “IndyCar requires drivers to wear incident data records in their earpiece. I think NASCAR is currently optional but a lot of drivers wear them. So all of the higher level series are getting a lot of data with this… Dirt track racing, you’re going to find a couple of studies [and] they’re on head kinematics,” she says. The lack of safety research in dirt track racing is concerning because it’s an accessible entry point for drivers. “Driver experience is so varied, you don’t know what they’re going to do when they get into that car. It could be their first time.” For Sweere, it's especially crucial because of her upbringing at dirt tracks, “I’ve seen my dad wreck a lot of times, I’ve seen his car catch on fire… And so I understand it from that side.”
Morgan recently completed an initial study for publication regarding dirt track safety resources to determine what resources exist. The methods included a painstaking manual search for active dirt tracks and their contact information. Morgan shares, “It’s a lot of emails, Facebook messaging of, ‘Hello, this is who I am, please fill out my survey.’ I contacted each track three times to try to get the survey filled out. There’s about almost 500 active dirt tracks in the country and I got a little over 50 responses. I tried really hard to get a really good sample. I know there’s going to be bias because the people who filled it out are the people that probably have more resources.” From her data collection, Morgan explains, “Most of the tracks don’t have any kind of airway equipment in case someone stops breathing. Most of the tracks actually didn’t even have an Automated External Defibrillator (AED). Resources are really widely varied, but it’s something that I think is a lot more dangerous. Just anecdotally, it seems like there’s a lot more wrecks. Some drivers at this level have high-end equipment, but some drivers may have gotten random safety stuff that may be from Facebook Marketplace. They may not even be buying new equipment. It may not be fitted for them correctly. So it’s such a wide range, whereas IndyCar, this driver’s helmet, fire suit, and seat are specifically fitted for them. That’s not at all what my [dirt track] drivers are riding in.”
Sweere also has been looking at crash data bases to quantify the number of wrecks between the series. After cold emailing, a skill Morgan is noticeably quite great at, she obtained a sponsorship from DIRTVision, a streaming platform for dirt track racing, to analyze crashes for her research study. Currently Morgan shares, “I’m going through all of those televised races and watching all of them… I’m looking basically at how many incidents there are and where on the track. Ultimately with this data, I’m hoping that we can show how many incidents there are in dirt track racing so that people will be forced to take a look and put more resources and attention towards the dirt track world. Then, we can hopefully do more research on how they’re wrecking and look at each series. Even how they’re seated throughout each series can make a difference. Like do they get more spinal fractures in sprint cars because they’re sitting more straight up? Do they get more orthopedic injuries because the drive shaft runs between their ankles? Once we know how many wrecks there are, it’ll be easier to figure out how to intervene. But when no one’s looking at it and there’s no data, it’s hard to say what to improve.”
Morgan is likely one of very few ER doctors that also work on a dirt track safety team, which has been a skillset that helped contribute to saving lives. She recalls, “Last year during speedweek we had a guy who was critically ill and may have died if there wasn’t intervention. He walked out of the hospital later because of what we did at the track as a safety team. He sent an email back to the track saying thank you. That was a really big deal to me.”
Morgan in the safety uniform for Volusia Speedway.
Navigating Academia
Outside of the track, Morgan worked incredibly hard to get herself into the position she is in today. Her journey has encompassed four years of undergrad, four years of medical school, three years of residency, and now, her year-long motorsports medicine fellowship: making for a total of 12 years. She shares, “In undergrad, I worked really hard to get into medical school. At some point, I worked three jobs during college trying to make sure that I could pay for things that I thought would benefit me and set me apart for medical school.” She also got the opportunity to work in the ER as a technician where she drew blood which she says her experiences, “really solidified for me that I wanted to be in the emergency department for my whole life.” Sweere also was accepted into Arkansas’s only MD medical school, which was highly competitive.
Throughout her medical journey, Morgan has a profound appreciation for the community of ER doctors that she has had while she was in school. She shares, “Going through my training and being from Arkansas, I learned that emergency medicine used to be a primarily male specialty, but it doesn’t have to be. There were really good female attending physicians and great mentors…that was something I really looked for in my residency interviews was for strong females in leadership positions…pretty much my entire residency leadership team was female. That was really important to me to see [women] in leadership roles.” She’s additionally very thankful for the support she received during residency for her uncommon path of motorsports medicine. “I could go up to them and say, ‘Hey, I want to do this crazy thing no one’s ever heard of (motorsports medicine), can you help me?’”
The Road Forward
When reflecting on over a decade of her work, Morgan does share that, “I wish someone would have essentially done this before me so I could have someone [show me the path].” But Morgan is the type of individual that does not shy away from hard work or a challenge. She learned from her parents that you can outwork anybody’s talent or natural gifts at any time. Her passion for both medicine and racing has led her to become a trailblazer of safety in the world of motorsports medicine, which will save countless lives and prevent injuries as motorsports continues to evolve.
As for advice she leaves to future doctors, current medical students, and those interested in the world of motorsports medicine, she encourages everyone to get involved with a local track. “It doesn’t matter the kind of racing that you want to do, it’ll get you some experience, even if it’s tech, inspections, or something else. If you’re interested in safety, doing something at the track teaches you how things work. You make connections in the field and a lot of connections in dirt track go up to the other series.” Morgan also encourages becoming a marshal for races. “They do fire response and things like that, but they have them for lower level races that you can get involved with and work your way up. I have some experience with all of these things. I’ve got the FIA (Federation Internationale de I’Automobile) training.” She shares that FIA has courses on motorsports medicine that are free online. “The International Council for Motorsports Sciences (ICMS) has a lot of events, they have a conference every year that you can join. They have zoom events every month where they have mentors in motorsports talk about different things. They’re also available on YouTube for free. Pretty much every medical director for every series event is pretty much an IMCS member; you don’t know who you might end up meeting.”
Apart from organizations, Morgan also suggests becoming familiar with vehicle design and aerodynamics. She took a motorsports aerodynamics course from which she says, “Incident analysis has a lot of engineering aspects that I struggle to understand because my background is not [engineering]. I feel like ultimately learning a lot about what interventions to make from the engineering and medical side comes from learning about cars.”
To keep up with Dr. Morgan Sweere, follow her @thatmotorsportsdoc on Instagram and TikTok.
