Center for Transportation Research: Highlights

USDOT Secretary Ray LaHood today tapped CTR faculty member, Dr. C Michael Walton, to be a member of the National Freight Advisory Committee. This 47 member committee is comprised of a diverse group of transportation professionals tasked to improve the national freight transportation system.

“The strength of our economy and the strength of our national freight system go hand in hand,” said Secretary LaHood. “The members of this committee understand firsthand the critical importance of freight movement, and their valuable insight will help ensure that our system is more secure and better connected.”

Dr. Walton’s extensive and widely published career span 40 years in the areas of freight transport, transportation engineering, planning, policy and economic, as well as ITS.

Click here if you’d like to learn more about Dr. Walton and his distinguished career at CTR.

The May 2013 issue of the Research Digest is now available for download from the CTR Library’s website. This month’s digest provides abstracts for 24 recent publications that the library has received from the Transportation Research Board’s research programs. This issue focuses on guidebooks, syntheses, and research results summaries.

Full-text links are provided for each publication and print copies are available in the library.

To stay up-to-date on all the latest research published through different transportation programs, you can visit the library’s “New Materials” web page or follow us on Twitter. CTR Library provides links to online full-text of reports in our catalog when publishers make that content available for free.

News Release
For Immediate Release
April 30, 2013

Chandra Bhat awarded Humboldt Research Award

AUSTIN, Texas – Chandra Bhat, Director of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Texas, has been awarded a Humboldt Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.

This prestigious award is given in recognition of a researcher’s entire achievements to date and specifically to “academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.”

As part of the Humboldt Award, Bhat plans to collaborate with Prof. Kai Nagel at Technische Universitat (TU) Berlin on research issues at the interface of transportation demand modeling and transportation supply modeling. He will also collaborate with Prof. Claudia Czado in the mathematical statistics field at TU München. Prof. Czado and Chandra share interests in the area of complex multi-dimensional dependency modeling, an important methodological issue in accommodating interactions between decision making agents in complex systems such as transport systems.

“I am tremendously honored to receive this international recognition from the Humboldt Foundation. Collaborative research initiatives at a global level expand the knowledge of all the researchers involved and benefit the fields that the researchers work in. I am particularly excited by the inter-disciplinary nature of my collaboration with leading German academics” said Bhat. “When you get right down to it, we serve the public and help society through our research and this gives us an opportunity to do so on an international stage.”

This award is the latest in a lengthy series of distinctions he has received. Dr. Bhat is a leading expert and professor in travel demand modeling and travel behavior analysis. His pioneering contributions in econometric choice modeling are now routinely used in the transportation field as well as several other fields.

For more information: Joey Williams – joeywilliams@utexas.edu – 512.484.1135

The April 2013 issue of the Research Digest is now available for download from the CTR Library’s website. This month’s digest provides abstracts for 20 recent publications from TxDOT’s university research program.

The research projects represented here are sponsored through TxDOT’s Research and Technology Implementation Office and conducted by researchers here at the Center for Transportation Research (CTR) as well as at Texas Tech University’s Center for Multidisciplinary Research in Transportation (TechMRT), the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI), Lamar University, the University of Houston, and the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Abstracts and full-text links are provided for each report. Print or CD-ROM copies are also available at the library and in some cases we may have spare copies to give away.

To stay up-to-date on all the latest research published through different transportation programs, visit the library’s “New Materials” web page or follow @ctrlib on Twitter. When publishers make their reports available online for free, CTR Library provides links to the online full-text in our catalog.

April is National Distracted Driving Awareness Month and TxDOT launched the Talk. Text. Crash. campaign to coincide with the national promotion. Throughout this month, TxDOT will reach out to Texans through community events, TV public service announcements, and online and outdoor advertising.  As part of the campaign, TxDOT is asking Texans to do their part by making a simple commitment to focus on driving when they get behind the wheel.

Texans can watch campaign videos onYouTube.

Learn more about the Talk. Text. Crash. campaign by liking the TxDOT Facebook page:www.facebook.com/txdot.

For media inquiries, contact TxDOT Media Relations at MediaRelations@txdot.gov or (512) 463-8700.

CTR is proud to announce the Texas Distinguished Lecture Series in Transportation. This series will present the latest thinking and challenges in the field of transportation. In keeping with CTR’s mission of research, education, and public service, the Texas Distinguished Lecture Series is open to the public, as well as to transportation researchers and practitioners.

We are honored to host Victor Mendez, FHWA Administrator, as the speaker at the inaugural lecture. Please join us on May 3, 2013, at 3:00 p.m., when Mr. Mendez will speak on the theme of Pursuing Innovation in Transportation.

Meredith Cebelak, P.E., was recently selected to represent The University of Texas at Austin at the 21st Annual Leadership Development Conference, hosted by the Eno Center for Transportation. This conference, held in Washington DC June 2–6, is attended by 20 of the nation’s top graduate students in transportation and gives them a first-hand look at how national transportation policies are developed. During the Conference these “Eno Fellows” meet with federal officials and leaders of business and non-profit organizations.

The Eno Leadership Development Conference is designed for students in transportation-related programs, including engineering, planning, public policy, public administration, economics, business, and law. Universities are invited to nominate one student from each transportation-related discipline.

Ms. Cebelak had over 10 years of experience in the private sector before returning to school to pursue her masters and PhD at the University of Texas at Austin. As a graduate assistant to Dr. C. Michael Walton, P.E., she is on the Technical Assistance project for the Texas Department of Transportation’s Austin District, which investigates the use of intelligent transportation system (ITS) solutions for the area’s transportation needs. She is a member of the student chapter of Women’s Transportation Seminar and the student chapter of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, and is the current president of the student chapter of the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Additionally, she serves on the CTR Employee Council Committee as the student representative.

The March 2013 issue of the Research Digest is now available for download from the CTR Library’s website. This month’s digest provides abstracts for 16 recent publications from Southwest Region University Transportation Center (SWUTC). The SWUTC is a consortium of five universities (Texas A&M University System, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas Southern University, Louisiana State University, and the University of New Orleans). All research from SWUTC is meant to support the theme of Sustainable Transportation Solutions to Enhance Economic Prosperity and the Quality of Life.

Abstracts and full-text links are provided for each report. Print copies may also be available at the library; in some cases we may have spare copies to give away.

To stay up-to-date on all the latest research published through different transportation programs, visit the library’s “New Materials” web page or follow @ctrlib on Twitter. When publishers make their reports available online for free, CTR Library provides links to the online full-text in our catalog.