Transit Lab

Dr. Anson Stewart is a Research Scientist in DUSP and Lead for Analysis and Research at a small software firm. He researches how public transportation can shape more sustainable and accessible cities, drawing on collaborations with planning professionals and community groups, international perspectives, and experience developing cloud-based software to analyze large transportation datasets.

Dr. Awad Abdelhalim is the Associate Director of the MIT Transit Lab and Urban Mobility Lab. He’s an expert in applying urban computing and artificial intelligence techniques to improve transit operations, analyze travel behavior, and integrate emerging technologies. He earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Transportation Systems Engineering, alongside an NSF graduate certificate in Urban Computing from Virginia Tech. His research expertise and interests include urban computing, intelligent transportation systems, transportation analytics, and applied artificial intelligence.

Bhuvan Atluri is the Associate Director of Research at the MIT Mobility Initiative. Bhuvan is a mobility & automotive technology enthusiast who is extremely passionate about solving the problems mobility faces today. He has interests across Electric Vehicle Adoption & Charging Equity, Autonomous Mobility & Safety, and Multi-Modal Urban Mobility. He has over 11 years of product, marketing and business development experience starting from early days as a brand manager at Unilever to most recently founding & heading the B2B e-commerce subsidiary of NCML. He has a MIT Sloan Fellows MBA, a master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, and is a computer science engineer by training.

Jim Aloisi is a Boston-based lecturer, writer, transit advocate and strategic consultant. In addition to serving as Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation in the Administration of Governor Deval Patrick, Jim's public service includes service on the Boston Human Rights Commission, the Massachusetts Transportation Finance Commission and the Massachusetts Port Authority Board. Jim teaches a graduate course in Transportation Policy and Planning.

John specializes in public transport management, fare policy, information technology, and short-term planning and operations, and manages several graduate student research projects sponsored by large public transport and private agencies in London, Chicago and Boston.

Dr. Brooke Elander is a Postdoctoral Associate with the MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI). Originally from the Seattle area, I moved to Boston to pursue my Ph.D. in Materials Science in the Department of Chemistry at Boston College. My doctoral research focused on developing biohydrometallurgical approaches for recycling lithium-ion batteries. This process capitalizes on the natural biological byproducts of microorganisms to recover critical metals in a sustainable and efficient manner. Her research interests focus on sustainability, lithium-ion battery recycling, circular economies, and emerging battery chemistries beyond conventional Li-ion systems.

Alexandre Jacquillat is the Maurice F. Strong Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Operations Research and Statistics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research develops scalable optimization algorithms for large-scale optimization, discrete optimization and optimization under uncertainty. His research has been primarily applied to urban mobility, responsible supply chains, and other social good operations. Alexandre is the recipient of several research awards including, most recently, the INFORMS-wide Donald P. Gaver, Jr. Early Career Award for Excellence in Operations Research. He also received several teaching awards, including the MIT Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching— the most prestigious teaching award at the Sloan School of Management. He received a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique and PhD in Engineering from MIT.

Haris N. Koutsopoulos is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, and research affiliate with the Transit Research Program at MIT.

Alok Prakash is the Scientific Director and Chief Technology Officer of the Mens, Manus & Machina (M3S) program at the Singapore–MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s largest international research enterprise outside Cambridge. At M3S, he leads a multidisciplinary team exploring how artificial intelligence, robotics, and human–machine collaboration are transforming aviation, workforce development, learning, and urban systems.

M. Elena Renda is an IT researcher within the WiNeMA Research Team at IIT - CNR in Pisa, Italy, and from 2016 she is also a visiting scholar with JTL lab.

Frederick Salvucci, senior lecturer and senior research associate, is a civil engineer with interest in infrastructure, urban transportation and public transportation. He has over 30 years of contextual transportation experience, most of it in the public sector as former Secretary of Transportation for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1983-1990) and transportation advisor to Boston Mayor Kevin White (1975-1978).

Professor Nigel Wilson has more than 30 years experience dealing with operations, management and planning issues associated with transit systems worldwide. His research and teaching focus on urban public transportation, including topics related to the operation, analysis, planning and management of transit systems.

Dr. Xinyi Wang (pronounced as “Shin-yee Wong”) is a Postdoctoral Associate of the JTL Urban Mobility lab at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining the JTL lab, Xinyi received her doctoral degree from Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), specializing in Transportation Systems and Engineering. Her dissertation was particularly focused on investigating the treatment effect of teleworking on travel behavior, contributing valuable insights to the evolving landscape of mobility. Xinyi’s research interests span a wide array of critical areas within the field, including travel behavior analysis, survey method, advanced statistical analysis, machine learning, and issues of equity and gender differences in transportation systems.

​

Jinhua Zhao is the Edward H. and Joyce Linde Associate Professor of City and Transportation Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. Prof. Zhao brings behavioral science and transportation technology together to shape travel behavior, design mobility systems, and reform transportation policies.