Chandra Bhat, director of the Center for Transportation Research (CTR) at The University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded a Humboldt Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.
In addition to leading the CTR, Bhat is a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering's Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering. This prestigious award is given in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date and specifically to “academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.”
As part of the Humboldt Award, Bhat plans to collaborate with professor Kai Nagel at Technische Universitat (TU) Berlin on research issues at the intersection of transportation demand modeling and transportation supply modeling. He will also collaborate with professor Claudia Czado in the mathematical statistics field at TU München. Czado and Bhat share interests in the area of complex multi-dimensional dependency modeling, an important methodological issue in accommodating interactions between decision-making agents in complex systems such as transport systems.
“I am tremendously honored to receive this international recognition from the Humboldt Foundation. Collaborative research initiatives at a global level expand the knowledge of all the researchers involved and benefit the fields that the researchers work in. I am particularly excited by the interdisciplinary nature of my collaboration with leading German academics,” Bhat said. “When you get right down to it, we serve the public and help society through our research and this gives us an opportunity to do so on an international stage.”
This award is the latest in a lengthy series of distinctions he has received. Bhat is a leading expert and professor in travel demand modeling and travel behavior analysis. His pioneering contributions in econometric choice modeling are now routinely used in the transportation field, as well as several other fields.
