Lily Elefteriadou, Distinguished Professor in Civil Engineering at UF and an international leader in transportation engineering, has been named a 2024 University of Florida Research Foundation Professor by the UF Research Foundation. Elefteriadou has made significant contributions to the state-of-the-art in the transportation sector. Her active research program focuses on groundbreaking work in critical areas such as highway capacity analysis, traffic management utilizing advanced transportation technologies, and signal control optimization. Elefteriadou’s work has contributed extensively to understanding and managing transportation systems.
Elefteriadou’s expertise in highway capacity analysis involves the development of analytical and simulation models to assess the performance of highway facilities in response to various design configurations and environmental factors. Her research on traffic management includes optimizing, simulating, and developing models that consider the performance of autonomous and connected vehicles, sensors, and real-time information systems. Additionally, Elefteriadou’s research on signal control optimization has aimed to maximize traffic flow and minimize travel times across highway networks.
As a leader in various projects with the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), Elefteriadou has spearheaded the development of algorithms for a smart intersection that enables autonomous vehicle trajectories to optimize traffic throughput. Her utilization of data from connected and autonomous vehicles in researching signal control optimization and freeway management has been instrumental in developing methods that may alleviate congestion and reduce travelers’ time in traffic.
In 2011 and 2017, Elefteriadou led a team of ten universities (Georgia Tech, University of North Carolina, North Carolina State, the Citadel, Tennessee Tech, Jackson State University, Florida International University, University of Alabama Birmingham, and Auburn University) and was successful in winning the USDOT-funded Regional University Transportation Center (UTC) for the southeast region, one of ten such centers in the U.S.
Elefteriadou is the director of the University of Florida Transportation Institute and has created the I-STREET Living Lab in collaboration with FDOT and the City of Gainesville. The I-STREET Living Lab is an open-road area and physical lab space dedicated to testing and deploying cutting-edge transportation technologies. The lab’s road network includes the University of Florida campus, the City of Gainesville, Florida, and segments of Interstate 75 and Interstate 4.
For her remarkable accomplishments in transportation engineering research, Elefteriadou has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards. These include the 2021 American Road and Transportation Builders Association Research and Education Award S.S. Steinberg Award, the 2019 American Society of Civil Engineers Harland Bartholomew Award (for her work on I-STREET), the 2015 James Laurie Prize for contributions to highway capacity analysis, the 2015 Ethel S. Birchland Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Transportation Research Board’s Fred Burggraff Award for excellence in research in 2001. These accolades are a testament to her dedication and expertise in the field.
Eleferiadou graduated with a surveying and environmental engineering diploma from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and a master’s degree in civil engineering from Auburn University. She obtained her doctoral degree in transportation planning and engineering from New York University.