(updated December 2007)
EDUCATION Ph.D. in Civil Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1982. MS.C.E., Purdue University, 1978. B.S.C.E., University of Houston, 1976.
Dr. Hani S. Mahmassani holds the William A. Patterson Distinguished Chair of Transportation at Northwestern University, where he is Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Professor (courtesy) in Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences, Kellogg School of Management.
From 2002 to 2007, he was at the University of Maryland, where he was the first holder of the Charles Irish Sr. Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Director of the Center for Intermodal Freight Security and Mobility and (founding) Director of the Maryland Transportation Initiative. He was also an affiliate professor in the Department of Decision and Information Technologies in the Smith School of Business, a member of the Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation, and an affiliated faculty with the Master of Engineering and Public Policy Program at the University of Maryland. He joined Maryland after 20 years on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was most recently the A. Abou-Ayyash Centennial Professor in Transportation Engineering (and Transportation Area Coordinator), Professor of Management Science and Information Systems, and Director of the Advanced Institute for Transportation Infrastructure Engineering and Management (part of the Southwest University Transportation Center).
He has over 29 years of professional, academic and research experience in the areas of multimodal transportation network modeling and optimization, dynamic system management, travel behavior analysis, traffic science, econometric methods, transportation demand forecasting and planning, system evaluation and decision-making, telecommunication-transportation interactions, system vulnerability and security applications, large-scale human infrastructure systems, and real-time operation of logistics and distribution systems. He received his PhD in Transportation Systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 and MS in Transportation Engineering from Purdue in 1978.
Dr. Mahmassani has directed over 100 funded research projects and programs sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Texas Advanced Technology Program, General Motors Research Laboratories, TxDOT, Texas Governor's Office, Austin Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority, U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, Maryland DOT, Maryland State Highway Administration, European Commission, and Baltimore Metropolitan Council, among others.
He is active in several technical and professional committees in the US and internationally, and is the Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Science, and Associate Editor of Transportation Research C (Emerging Technologies), and the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. He serves on the editorial boards of the major transportation journals. He has served as the Paper Review Chair of the Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics of the Transportation Research Board since 1989, and is the immediate past chair of that committee. He is also the founding chair of the Transportation Supply (renamed Transportation Network Modeling) Committee of the TRB. He is a past president of the Transportation Science Section of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, and a past President of the International Association for Travel Behavior Research. He is a member of the ITS America Research, Integration, Training and Education (RITE) Forum Steering Committee, and former member of the ITS America Coordinating Council. He is the Conference Chair and organizer of the International Symposium on Traffic and Transportation Theory (Maryland, 2005), and General Chair of the INFORMS 2008 Annual Meeting (Washington, DC). Dr. Mahmassani is the author/co-author of over 200 refereed publications in Transportation Science, Transportation Research A, B and C, Journal of Transportation Engineering, Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, Transportation, Transportation Research Record, Computers and Operations Research, European Journal of Operations Research, Transportation Quarterly, Environment and Planning and various conference and symposia proceedings. He is also author/co-author of over 100 bound technical research reports, and Editor of two books “In Perpetual Motion: Travel Behavior Research Opportunities and Application Challenges”, Pergamon, 2002; and “Transportation and Traffic Theory: Flow, Dynamics and Human Interaction”, Elsevier, 2005.
He has served in an advisory capacity to various institutes and programs, and has performed several program assessments of leading international research institutes and corporate R&D departments. He serves on the external advisory boards of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and of the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California-Davis. He serves or has served on various panels of the NCHRP, the National Academies’ National Statistics Council and the National Science Foundation. He also serves as a consultant to several companies and government agencies in the areas of transportation network modeling and simulation, transportation-energy systems interactions, intelligent transportation systems, logistics, and strategic systems planning. His is frequently quoted on traffic and transportation matters of national interest in the popular media (incl. the Wall Street journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, San Francisco chronicle…), most recently on road pricing, emergency evacuation and intermodal freight (port) security. He was the recipient of the Frank Masters Award of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2004, and of a Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of the American University of Beirut in 2006. He was elected in 2006 Emeritus member of the Telecommunications and Travel Behavior Committee, and again in 2007 as Emeritus member of the Transportation Network Modeling Committee of the Transportation Research Board (of the National Academies).