Roger V. F. Lindgren, 2005 Ph.D. Graduate, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Roger Lindgren likes to study highways from all angles. After earning a B.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Alberta, Roger began his engineering career with ChevonTexaco designing facilities for crude oil extraction and refining. He eventually realized that he was more interested in the asphalt cement refined from the crude oil and the highways in which it was used. This passion for highways led him back to the University of Alberta to pursue graduate work in pavement engineering as well as traffic flow theory.

An opportunity to teach budding highway engineers brought Roger to the Oregon Institute of Technology (Oregon Tech) where he is currently an associate professor of Civil Engineering. The relocation to Oregon also provided the chance to study transportation engineering at Portland State University (PSU) and join the Intelligent Transportation Systems Lab.

Roger is the first graduate of the PSU Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Ph.D. program. Working under the guidance of advisor Dr. Robert Bertini, Roger recently completed his Ph.D. dissertation on traffic dynamics on a congested German freeway. As a research associate with PSU's Center for Transportation Studies, his current research interests lie in the application of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to rural locales and in improving design methods for long lasting pavements.

Roger is involved in the transportation community of southern Oregon, where he chairs the Klamath County Roads Advisory Committee and, most recently, was involved in the development of a transportation system plan for this large rural Oregon County. He serves as the Oregon Tech faculty advisor to active chapters of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) as well as the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Roger's devotion to engineering ethics led him to found a new chapter of the Order of the Engineer in Southern Oregon. Roger was the 2003 recipient of the Oregon Tech Faculty Achievement Award. He presented results of his research at the ITE 2003 Annual Meeting in Seattle (Microscopic Simulation of Traffic at a Suburban Interchange), twice at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (Examination of Features of a Freeway Bottleneck Surrounding a Lane Drop in 2003 and Empirical Analysis of Flow Features on a German Autobahn in 2004).