Dr. Nathan Gartner standing next to me before receiving his award
Dr. Gartner being recognized with the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science
At the Society for Transportation Science and Logistics meeting at the INFORMS Conference in Charlotte this past Monday evening the 2011 Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science was given.
This award is given every two years and previous recipients are listed on this link.
I have served on this award selection committee and have even chaired it and it is a distinct honor to be recognized in this way. Professor Martin Beckmann, who received this award after Robert Herman (the award is named after him now) was on my doctoral dissertation at Brown University committee. Other recipients include Professor David E. Boyce (whom I had just seen a few days prior at the regional science conference in Miami) and Professors Michael Smith and Michael Florian (I have cited almost all of the recipients in my work).
Although I did not serve on this award selection committee this year (and the awardee's name is kept, more or less, in secret, until the official announcement is made) as soon as I saw Dr. Nathan Gartner from UMass Lowell enter the big room where our business meeting was taking place I knew.
I went up to him to tell him that I had mentioned his name to my students last week in the transportation & logistics class that I am teaching this term since we were covering the elastic demand transportation network equilibrium model and its reformulation using the excess overflow reformulation into a fixed demand model pioneered by him in an article in Transportation Science. He then kindly introduced me to his wife (so I immediately knew that he would be getting the award).
This recognition is also very exciting since Professor Gartner is a Professor at UMass Lowell in the Department of Civil Engineering and he has done so much work over the past 4 decades in transportation -- from traffic flow models to signal setting models and even work, as noted above, on transportation network equilibria.
Above are photos taken of Dr. Gartner this past Monday that I could not resist posting.
I will share this great news with my students tomorrow morning (unless some get a preview by reading this post).
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