After working for 2 years at Gresham Smith, a transportation consulting firm in Nashville, Tennessee, Dr. Shraddha Sagar has decided to change her trajectory and pursue a career in the academic sector as an assistant engineering faculty member with UFTI’s Technology Transfer Center.
Dr. Sagar specializes in traffic operations, roadway safety, data analytics, and emerging technologies. In her role at T2, she will be working directly with Center Director Dr. Nithin Agarwal, assisting with strategic planning, identifying research needs, and liaising with potential partners and stakeholders.
“To start with, I will be working on some of the ongoing safety projects at the T2 center,” she said.
Some of these projects are related to T2’s Transportation Safety Center (TSC), which is the main go-to entity for Florida counties in receiving assistance with developing local road safety plans. The TSC helps to identify road safety problems and works with local agencies to create road improvement projects that are eligible for federal funding.
“USDOT’s key priority areas and strategic initiatives includes safety and transformation – which lines up perfectly with Shraddha’s education and training,” said Dr. Agarwal. “The hiring committee was impressed with her academic background, practical training in the private sector, and experience in collaborating with local agencies. We look forward to her management of the Transportation Safety Center and the ways that the program will benefit from her many abilities.”
Dr. Sagar has published articles in peer-reviewed journals, including Accident Analysis & Prevention and Transportation Research Record. She has been an active member of professional organizations such as American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), and the Intelligent Transportation Society (ITS) Tennessee.
Dr. Sagar’s academic preparation includes graduating with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Kerala, India. She went on to pursue her master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Kentucky, focusing on transportation engineering. Her master’s thesis was on the “Prediction of Protected-Permissive Left-Turn Phasing Crashes based on Conflict Analysis,” and her doctoral dissertation was on the “Effect of Socioeconomic and Demographic Factors of Driver Residence on Crash Occurrence.”
Dr. Sagar will bring a wealth of knowledge and skill to UFTI’s T2 Center, but a question we like to ask of our engineers is what made them interested in the world of transportation engineering? For Dr. Sagar, it was spending time with her father and grandfather, both civil engineers, at their offices.
“I was very curious about everything they did, and probably that’s where I started to learn about civil engineering in general,” she said. “Later on, I decided to pursue my bachelor’s degree in civil engineering.”
A fun fact about Dr. Sagar is that when she moved from India to the United States to begin her graduate studies, she decided to bring a beloved pet into her family.
“I was just by myself, and I decided to bring a little four-legged friend to join my adventures,” she said. “His name is Apple (yes, the fruit!), and he is a beautiful golden retriever.”
Dr. Sagar also enjoys cooking and trying out recipes from different countries, is training as a singer in Indian classical music, and she is teaching herself to play the ukulele. Her husband, Dr. Rahul Nair, is a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University.