Milton Carrasco, President and CEO of Transoft Solutions Inc., is a fervent supporter of the University of Florida Transportation Institute (UFTI), and when he was asked by Dr. Lily Elefteriadou in 2014 to serve as the chair of the Institute’s External Advisory Board, he eagerly volunteered.
“As an Engineer, I am a huge believer of giving back to the profession that I have been a part of for over 40 years, and that has supported our software company,” he said. “Another reason is that I truly felt I could make a difference in increasing UFTI’s success by injecting private sector know-how into the mix. Also, my gut instinct told me that Prof. Elefteriadou was a great learner, humble soul, and a high achiever who could make UFTI a national success.”
Carrasco also said that he’s known Bill Sampson, Director of the UFTI/McTrans Center for more than 25 years and has “tremendous respect for him and his efforts in building the Highway Capacity Software and single-handedly making McTrans the success it is.”
In this position Carrasco has accomplished several key tasks including: drafting a Board Charter to guide the UFTI’s operations; recruiting additional Board members and facilitating a strategic planning workshop from which the Institute’s Vision, Mission, and Value statements were created. Additionally, ten objectives were identified from the strategic planning workshop – two of which included establishing Centers of Excellence – one in Big Data in Transportation and the other in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV).
In 2017 Carrasco stepped down as the Chair of the advisory board, and was succeeded by Tom Byron, FDOT Assistant Secretary for Intermodal Systems Development. Byron, an alumni of UF, has been a staunch supporter of UFTI. Byron has been instrumental in the Connected and Autonomous Vehicles testbed research at UF campus.
Carrasco recently sponsored two scholarships for junior or senior civil engineering undergraduate students specializing in transportation. View the winners here.
“I look forward to continuing to support UFTI as a regular board member and in turn help our profession thorough student licenses of our software as well as provide financial support via scholarships to students interested in pursuing a career in transportations engineering.”