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Bertini Receives NSF CAREER Award
Assistant Professor Robert L. Bertini of the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering is the recipient of a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. The NSF CAREER program recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution.
The performance of our transportation infrastructure critically affects our nation's economy, security, environment and quality of life. The CAREER award will support Bertini's research:"Mining Archived Intelligent Transportation Systems Data: A Validation Framework for Improved Performance Assessment and Modeling." The mission of this project is to develop and evaluate methods to archive, mine and analyze real-time Intelligent Transportation Systems data, using infrastructure-based sensors, video and dynamic floating probes. Using these resources, we will develop partnerships with local transportation agencies to develop a data archive; implement and test an improved performance measurement platform; expand our understanding of basic traffic flow principles underlying models of traffic flow through systematic assessment of freeway bottleneck behavior; and develop improved traffic flow models and model components. In turn, we will enhance these tools with a greater understanding of model uncertainty propagation.
The NSF award includes a five-year, $400,000 grant for research and education activities that will involve undergraduates in multidisciplinary research teams and support summer transportation academy for underrepresented high school students, partnership with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry including construction of a bilingual transportation data exhibit in the new Technology Hall. Outreach efforts will be aimed at increasing enrollment, quality and diversity in the transportation program, and attracting and retaining students from diverse backgrounds and with diverse learning styles to science and engineering. In addition to his research, Bertini teaches an undergraduate course in urban transportation systems, and graduate courses in public transportation, intelligent transportation systems and transportation operations. As director of the Center for Transportation Studies in the College of Urban and Public Affairs, Bertini also offers a weekly on-line transportation seminar on the PSU campus. This was the only CAREER Award in the transportation field in the U.S. this year, and one of only five across all disciplines awarded in the state of Oregon this year.
The NSF award includes a five-year, $400,000 grant for research and education activities that will involve undergraduates in multidisciplinary research teams and support summer transportation academy for underrepresented high school students, partnership with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry including construction of a bilingual transportation data exhibit in the new Technology Hall. Outreach efforts will be aimed at increasing enrollment, quality and diversity in the transportation program, and attracting and retaining students from diverse backgrounds and with diverse learning styles to science and engineering. In addition to his research, Bertini teaches an undergraduate course in urban transportation systems, and graduate courses in public transportation, intelligent transportation systems and transportation operations. As director of the Center for Transportation Studies in the College of Urban and Public Affairs, Bertini also offers a weekly on-line transportation seminar on the PSU campus. This was the only CAREER Award in the transportation field in the U.S. this year, and one of only five across all disciplines awarded in the state of Oregon this year.
