Hani Mahmassani Named New Transportation Center Director

October 9, 2008

The McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University is pleased to announce that Hani Mahmassani will take over as director of Northwestern’s renowned Transportation Center. Mahmassani is the William A. Patterson Distinguished Chair in Transportation and professor of civil and environmental engineering, and he is affiliated with the Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Department at the Kellogg School of Management.

The Transportation Center, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2004, is an interdisciplinary education and research institution serving industry, government and the public. The center conducts interdisciplinary research, offers academic programs, and engages in a wide array of outreach activities that connect it to both the private and public sectors of the transportation industry.

Northwestern University has a long standing tradition of excellence and innovation in transportation research and education, which began with the creation and operation of the Center for Public Safety (originally the Traffic Institute) in 1936. The Transportation Center, started in 1954, has since collaborated with newer centers like the Infrastructure Technology Institute and the Center for Energy Efficient Transportation. Together these centers engage a broad community of faculty across the schools, departments and disciplines of Northwestern. The more recently-formed centers bring a sharper focus on some emerging issues of critical importance – particularly security, energy, and sustainability. All of these centers are supported by the Transportation Library at Northwestern, which holds perhaps the most extensive, best-supported, and internationally-regarded collections of transportation information resources in the world.

Julio Ottino, dean of the McCormick School, says Mahmassani’s leadership will bring the center to a higher level of interdisciplinary and globalized research.

“Transportation is more important than ever in Chicago and in our increasingly globalized world,” he says. “Chicago is a major a hub of transportation, but we must continue to expand our focus to include transportation issues that impact the rest of the world.”

Mahmassani specializes in multimodal transportation systems analysis, planning and operations, dynamic network modeling and optimization, transit network planning and design, dynamics of user behavior and telematics, telecommunication-transportation interactions, large-scale human infrastructure systems, and real-time operation of logistics and distribution systems. He came to Northwestern in 2007.

He was previously the Charles Irish Sr. Chaired Professor and director of the Maryland Transportation Initiative at the University of Maryland, after 20 years on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD from MIT and his MSCE from Purdue.

“Northwestern’s Transportation Center has been a domain-defining leader and a much-emulated model for cross-disciplinary research and education in transportation systems,” Mahmassani says. “The Center will continue to work actively with its key constituencies and stakeholders, reach out to new ones, and form new alliances to remain at the cutting edge in a field of increasingly global dimensions.”

The appointment was effective Oct. 1. Mahmassani takes over the position from interim director Joseph Schofer, who is a professor of civil and environmental engineering and associate dean of the school. Schofer will now begin as interim chair of the civil and environmental engineering department.