Category: Alumni Spotlight

An invitation to take part in a transit research project during his undergraduate years in civil engineering at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez motivated Dr. Miguel Lugo to pursue transportation engineering. The project paired students from various disciplines to work on topics related to urban systems, sustainability, and human factors.  “I was exposed […]

Abigail Osei-Asamoah’s interest in transportation and engineering started from a young age; she would spend time figuring out how things got from one place to another. While being driven to and from school she would muse on the other vehicles moving between homes in minutes, passing pedestrians along the way.   Having a father who is a […]

Dr. Ria Kontou was encouraged to take transportation courses by great mentors while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. During her studies, she worked to complete her undergraduate thesis on bus-to-depot allocation a decision that helped her down the transportation engineering road. Ria’s fascination with the potential […]

Abi Komma graduated from the UF with a Masters of Science in Transportation Engineering in August 2008. Komma is currently employed as a senior data scientist on the Computer Vision Platform team at Uber in San Francisco. The team is responsible for developing core computer vision capabilities such as text recognition, image classification, object detection […]

As a result of a study conducted by the University of Florida Transportation Institute in 2016, a new program with ten Road Rangers was rolled-out to start service in Brevard County, Fla., in April 2019, complementing recent expansions near Gainesville and Lake City. Road Ranger Service Patrols are provided by the Florida Department of Transportation […]

UFTI alumnus Seckin Ozkul graduated with his Ph.D. in August 2014. Ozkul’s dissertation research was on developing an advanced vehicle dynamics modeling approach in traffic microsimulation with emphasis on commercial truck performance and on-board-diagnostics data. His supervisor was Dr. Scott Washburn. During his graduate years, Ozkul commuted from Tampa, FL, to Gainesville, Fl, taking classes […]