Our Team

Appalachian State University

Associate Director

Dr. Elizabeth Shay

North Carolina A&T

Associate Director

Dr. Rongfang "Rachel" Liu

NC Central University

Associate Director

Dr. William Wiener

UNC Charlotte

Associate Director

Dr. Srinivas Pulugurtha

Comprised of members from Appalachian State UniversityNC A&T UniversityNC Central UniversityUNC Charlotte, the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of City and Regional Planning, and the UNC Highway Safety Research Center, TSAP is a consortium of partners encompassing diversity in disciplines and representation. We are a multidisciplinary group of traffic safety research professionals, human factors experts, planners, public administrators, educators, computer scientists/systems engineers, and civil and electrical engineers who share a collaborative mindset.

Our team draws upon and leverages extensive national transportation experience, including extensive professional networks established through three University Transportation Centers—the Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety (CSCRS),Center for Advanced Transportation Mobility (CATM), and Mineta Consortium for Transportation Mobility (MCTM)—to benefit all North Carolinians. Additionally, NCCU brings extensive experience working with individuals with disabilities and App State is focused on rural and mountain transportation issues, two additional perspectives that further round out the consortium’s diverse research portfolio.

TSAP LEADERSHIP

Raghavan (Srini) Srinivasan, PhD

Raghavan “Srini” Srinivasan Headshotsrini@hsrc.unc.edu
TSAP Director

Raghavan “Srini” Srinivasan is a senior transportation research engineer at the UNC Highway Safety Research Center. His areas of interest include traffic engineering and safety, human factors, and the application of statistics and econometric methods. His project experience ranges from work that examined driver distraction to in-vehicle navigation devices to projects that have evaluated the safety of engineering improvements on highways and intersections. He has extensive experience in the state-of-the-art methods in highway safety, including the empirical Bayes method.

Dr. Rongfang “Rachel” Liu, PhD

rrliu@ncat.edu
TSAP Associate Director

Rongfang “Rachel” Liu is the director of the Transportation Institute at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.

Srinivas Pulugurtha, PhD, PE, F. ASCE

Srinivas Pulugurtha Headshotsspulugu@uncc.edu
TSAP Associate Director, Project 3 PI, Project 5 PI

Srinivas S. Pulugurtha is currently working as Professor & Research Director of the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte). He is also currently directing the Infrastructure, Design, Environment and Sustainability (IDEAS) Center on UNC Charlotte’s campus. Dr. Pulugurtha has experience working in diverse fields of transportation. These fields include traffic safety & operations, transportation system planning, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications, data analytics and visualization, Internet applications, artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, and operations research applications.

Elizabeth Shay, PhD, AICP

Elizabeth Shayshayed@appstate.edu
TSAP Associate Director, Project 1 Co-PI

Elizabeth Shay is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at Appalachian State University. Her teaching and research in city and regional planning focuses on transportation and land use, travel behavior and active travel, transportation equity, community development, and rural resilience.

William Wiener, PhD

William Wienerwwiener@nccu.edu
TSAP Associate Director

William Wiener serves as the Brenda Brodie Endowed Chair and Professor at the North Carolina Central University training program in Visual Impairment. He is an authority on travel by persons with disabilities and has served as coordinator of university programs at three universities that prepare instructors who teach independent travel to people who are blind or have other disabilities. He is the main editor of the most widely used textbook in the field and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness.

Tabitha Combs, PhD

Tab Combs Headshottacombs@live.unc.edu
Project 1 Co-PI

Tabitha Combs is a scholar of transportation planning and policy. She has expertise in transport and land use planning, the built environment-travel behavior connection, equity impacts of new mobility innovations, and transport planning in developing contexts, with a particular focus on social and environmental impacts of transport policies. Her overarching research goals are to expand our knowledge of the environmental determinants of travel behavior and vehicle use, and to apply that knowledge to support efforts of decision-makers to create more sustainable, healthy, socially just communities.

Sean Tikkun, PhD

stikkun@nccu.edu
Project 2 PI

Sean Tikkun serves as an Assistant Professor at NC Central University in the Visual Impairment Training Program. He has served as a Subject Matter Expert in the domain of Assistive Technology and assisted in launching the area for ACVREP. Dr. Tikkun has over 15 years of experience teaching in the areas of mathematics, visual impairments, and orientation & mobility at all grade levels. He annually reviews consumer technologies for emerging impact to the population of individuals with visual impairments.

Hyoshin (John) Park, PhD

Hyoshin (John) Park Headshothpark1@ncat.edu
Project 4 Co-PI

Hyoshin (John) Park serves as an Assistant Professor at North Carolina A&T State University. His focus areas include distributionally robust optimization-based active sensing for Transportation Systems, previous projects by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), and the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE). He is a member of TRB’s Subcommittee for the Emerging Technologies in Network Modelling (TRB ADB30) and a member of ASCE T&DI Artificial Intelligence (AI) Committee. Dr. Park’s academic efforts include the development of an online transportation certificate at NCA&T. He teaches in multiple departments that feature cross-listed transportation classes for modeling, visualization, optimization, and simulation of transportation systems, demand modeling, and transportation network models.

Venktesh Pandey, PhD

Venktesh Pandey Headshotvpandey@ncat.edu
Project 4 Co-PI

Venktesh Pandey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University. His research integrates intelligent transportation systems and emerging mobility services in traffic operations, congestion pricing, and transportation planning models with a focus on sustainability. He received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2020 where his past research focused on modeling efforts for understanding and improving our transportation systems under traffic dynamics and stochasticity. Dr. Pandey also has broad interests in improving the Engineering Education systems of the future; he currently serves as a co-PI on a National Science Foundation-funded project that establishes a digital transportation badge program for effective engagement of undergraduate students at A&T in transportation education and careers.