Faculty and Staff

Faculty

Dr. Tony Z. Qiu

Dr. Tony Qiu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta and holds both the Canada Research Chair in Cooperative Transportation Systems and the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Intelligent Transportation Systems. Since joining the U of A in 2009, Dr. Qiu founded the Centre for Smart Transportation (CST) and was recently appointed the Scientific Director for the Autonomous Systems Initiative (ASI), a multi-million dollar, Campus Alberta, research program focused on developing artificial intelligence and automated systems. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007 and his BSc. and MSc. from Tsinghua University of China in 2001 and 2003, respectively. From 2008-2009, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the California PATH Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His research aims to enhance our understanding of roadway traffic operation and control. He has collaborated with organizations across the public and private sectors on projects related to intelligent transportation systems, wireless sensor networks for traffic data collection and analysis, Advanced Traffic Management Systems, Advanced Traveler Information Systems, and other new technologies and practices. In recognition of this work, Dr. Qiu was the recipient of the Young ITS Canada Leadership Award in 2019.

For more information, please visit Dr. Qiu's faculty profile or website. He can be contacted at tony.qiu@ualberta.ca.


Dr. Amy Kim

Dr. Amy Kim joined the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta in August 2011. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked in the transportation engineering and planning industry both in the U.S. and Canada. Her research interests are in transportation systems analysis; transportation systems design and management concepts; urban and interurban multi-modal systems planning; air transportation; and transportation economics.

For more information, please visit Dr. Kim's faculty profile or website. She can be contacted at amy.kim@ualberta.ca.


Dr. Karim El-Basyouny

Dr. Karim El-Basyouny is the holder of the inaugural City of Edmonton Research Chair in Urban Traffic Safety. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia in 2011. His research applies advanced statistical techniques to traffic safety in order to evaluate safety-based initiatives. Currently, he is organizing this research around four subjects: crash modeling, safety evaluation, speed management, and the analysis of surrogate safety measures.

For more information, please visit Dr. El-Basyouny's faculty profile. He can be contacted at basyouny@ualberta.ca.


Dr. Tae J. Kwon

Dr. Tae J. Kwon joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta as an Assistant Professor in August 2016, shortly after earning his PhD degree at the University of Waterloo with the prestigious UW Engineering Doctoral Thesis Award. His current research areas include location optimization of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) facilities, winter road maintenance, spatial and temporal analyses of road traffic and safety using geostatistics, geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) transportation, and application of Big Data for estimation and forecasting of road and traffic conditions. He has published more than 30 papers including peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, project reports and book chapters. Dr. Kwon received the Early Career Researcher Award three times in 2017 and 2018 from the University of Alberta. In March 2019, he also received the 2019 Great Supervisor Award for excellent supervisory contributions and dedicated work of great supervisors at the University of Alberta.

For more information, please visit Dr. Kwon's faculty profile. He can be contacted at tjkwon@ualberta.ca.


Staff

Liqun Peng

Liqun Peng is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow under the supervision of Dr. Qiu in the Centre for Smart Transportation (CST) at the University of Alberta. He received his Ph.D. degree in Automotive Engineering from Wuhan University of Technology in China in 2015. Prior to returning to CST, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. Qiu on ACTIVE-AURORA connected vehicle test-bed from 2015-2017. More recently, Liqun was appointed as an Associate Professor at East China Jiaotong University, P.R. China, 2017-2019. His current research interests are in the areas of connected vehicle and traffic big data analysis, specifically for improving traffic mobility and safety on both arterial roads and freeways. He enjoys jogging, hiking, and travelling in his spare time.

Dr. Sharon Harper

Sharon Harper

Dr. Sharon Harper has recently joined the CST as the Technical and Communications Writer after 15 years experience in Higher Education in the UK. There, she worked with students and academics at all levels, as well with artists, photographers and designers looking to express their ideas effectively through the written word. She specializes in communications writing, academic copy editing and writing skills, and focuses on content structuration and argumentation as well as the fundamentals of grammar and spelling. She is also a published researcher and author.


Alice Da Silva

Alice Da Silva

Alice Da Silva has been with the U of A since 2004, accumulating over 15 years of experience in the field of office management, event planning, administration and finance. She currently provides administration support to the Centre for Smart Transportation (CST), working closely with the CST and its partners. She also assists the CST with event coordination and execution of various projects.

Contact Alice Da Silva at ad11@ualberta.ca.


Rachelle Foss

Rachelle Foss

Rachelle Foss is a technical writer and editor for the Centre for Smart Transportation at the University of Alberta. Rachelle has been writing and editing professionally since 2011. Her experience spans various levels of communication including The Western Sentinel military newspaper, magazine articles, and ILM training modules for NAIT. She is the editor of a horror fiction anthology published in 2017. And, in addition to serving as a member of the editorial board for an undergraduate research journal since 2011, Rachelle has published seven undergraduate environmental research papers. Despite a diverse range of experience, technical and academic writing is her guilty pleasure. Rachelle graduated from Grant MacEwan in 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts in Applied Communication and Professional Writing.


Affiliated Faculty

Dr. Morris Flynn

Dr. Morris Flynn

Morris R. Flynn is an associate professor of mechanical engineering and received his Ph.D. from the University of California--San Diego in 2006. He then completed a post-doc at MIT before joining the University of Alberta in 2008. Morris's interests in transportation science primarily focus on traffic flow modeling, more specifically the formation, saturation and dissipation of "phantom jams," traffic blockages that appear in the absence of roadway bottlenecks and for no apparent reason. In studying this multifaceted problem, Morris collaborates with colleagues from Canada, the United States and Saudi Arabia.

For further information, please visit http://websrv.mece.ualberta.ca/mrflynn/traffic.html


Dr. Michael Hendry

Dr. Michael Hendry

Dr. Michael Hendry is the Associate Director of the Canadian Rail Research Laboratory (CaRRL) (since 2011), the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Railway Ground Hazard Research Program (RGHRP) (est. 2003, position since 2014), and an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta. As the Associate Director of CaRRL, Dr. Hendry assists with coordinating the research activities of CaRRL, while leading the research themes focused on the assessing infrastructure quality, assessing the effect of cold climates on the performance of the railway infrastructure and evaluating the associated risks. As the PI of the RGHRP, Dr. Hendry leads the research conducted on ground hazards such as landslides, rock falls, very soft track subgrades, the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events, and evaluating the effectiveness of remediation and risk mitigation efforts being implemented by CN and CP. As an Assistant Professor, Dr. Hendry supervises graduate students (11 current, and 7 past), all focused on projects designed to increase the safety and reliability of the Canadian Railway network.

Contact Dr. Hendry at hendry@ualberta.ca.


Dr. Hai Jiang

Dr. Hai Jiang

Dr. Hai Jiang received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electronics engineering from Peking University, Beijing, China, in 1995 and 1998, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree (with an Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies Award) in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, in 2006.

Since July 2007, he has been a faculty member with the University of Alberta, where he is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests include radio resource management, cognitive radio networking, and vehicular communications.

Dr. Jiang is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and the IEEE Wireless Communications Letters. He received an Alberta Ingenuity New Faculty Award in 2008 and a Best Paper Award from the IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM) in 2008.

For more information about Dr. Jiang, please visit his homepage.


Dr. Derek Martin

Dr. Derek Martin

Dr. Derek Martin is an internationally renowned expert in geotechnical engineering and directs and coordinates research activities for the Canadian Rail Research Laboratory (CaRRL). Dr. Martin is a Senior NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Railway Geomechanics and holds an Alberta Innovates Technology Futures Tier 1 Industry Chair in Railway Geomechanics. His team of experts from the University of Alberta work directly with engineers from Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Railway, National Research Council Canada, Transport Canada and Association of American Railroads - Transportation Technology Centre Inc., encouraging the transfer and implementation of technology into industrial practice. His current research includes investigating ground hazards, risk and GIS technologies; repository geomechanics; and geoscience (stress and fracture flow).

For more information about Dr. Martin, please visit his webpage.


Dr. Manish Shirgaokar

Dr. Manish Shirgaokar

Dr. Shirgaokar is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012. Dr. Shirgaokar's expertise and interests are in the areas of transportation policy, land use planning, international development, and urban design. His current research interests are located in understanding factors that drive consumption at the household level.

For more information, please visit Dr. Shirgaokar's department profile or website. He can be contacted at shirgaokar@ualberta.ca