Professor Gary Davis of the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering (CEGE) has been appointed Richard P. Braun/CTS Chair in Transportation Engineering, effective July 1. The purpose of the endowed faculty chair is to foster innovation in the academic program in transportation engineering at CEGE.
CTS collaborated with the Department of Civil Engineering (now CEGE) to establish the chair in 2006. CTS initiated the position using royalties from Autoscope®, an invention in traffic detection technology developed by Professor Panos Michalopoulos and patented by the University. Braun was the founding director of CTS and a former commissioner of MnDOT. CEGE professor David Levinson was the inaugural chair.
Davis outlines his plans below.
What are your research interests?
During the past 25 years, my research has targeted four general areas: causal inference and impact assessment in traffic safety, application of accident investigation and reconstruction methods to traffic engineering questions, the use of Bayesian statistical methods in traffic and transportation engineering, and the application of optimization methods to problems in traffic engineering and transportation planning.
What will your focus be?
I expect my main focus over the next several years to be in the area of safety-related decision support. I also plan to support and advance the Minnesota Traffic Observatory data collection capabilities, with a focus on adding crash and near-crash events to our database.
What are your teaching plans?
At the undergraduate level I regularly teach CEGE’s required introduction to transportation engineering course, our required uncertainty and decision course, and a technical elective in traffic engineering. This year I’ve also returned to our technical elective in highway design. At the graduate level I regularly teach a course in data analysis methods.
