Terrific Talk on Transportation Science + Economics

Today we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Eric Gonzales of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at UMass Amherst in our INFORMS Speakers Series. Dr. Gonzales, who received his PhD from UC Berkeley, and then spent 2 and a half years at Rutgers, recently joined the UMass faculty.

His talk, "Coordinating Traffic and Transit Systems: Linking Transportation Science and Economics," was fabulous. He discussed system optimization and user equilibrium with tipping points of switching to transit. I especially liked his use of numerous images and graphs to display trade-offs as well as his discussions of different cities around the world. He emphasized how to capture congestion in cities in an aggregated way. Several of the students in the audience had taken my Logistics and Transportation class as well as my graduate class on Networks, Game Theory, and Variational Inequalities, so they could very much appreciate his perspective.

Below are several photos that I took today at Dr. Gonzales' presentation at the Isenberg School, which attracted an audience also from the College of Engineering.

We are very lucky that Dr. Gonzales has joined the faculty at UMass Amherst! His dissertation advisor at UC Berkeley was Professor Carlos Daganzo, who was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering.