Oliver Gao is the director of Cornell Systems Engineering, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and the principal investigator at the Center for Transportation, Environment, and Community Health at Cornell University. His research focuses on transportation systems, the environment (especially air quality and climate change), energy, and sustainable development. He also studies sustainable food systems, quantifying and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from food supply chains. Oliver is emerit, Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research Part D Transport and Environment. He received a B.S. in civil engineering and environmental science and an M.S. in civil engineering from Tsinghua University in China, and graduate degrees (M.S. in agriculture and resource economics; M.S. in statistics; Ph.D. in civil engineering) from the the University of California, Davis.
Director, Center for Transportation, Environment, and Community Health →
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Timon Stasko earned his B.S. in civil engineering from Cornell University. He continued his studies at Cornell, joining Oliver Gao’s research group as a Ph.D. student, writing his dissertation on optimization algorithms for fleet management in the presence of regulation. Specific applications included school bus fleets and highway maintenance fleets subject to clean diesel requirements. As a Ph.D. student, he also worked on several smaller side projects involving the modeling and optimization of supply chains, and an assessment of the impacts of carsharing on parking demand. Timon now works for MTA NYCT and his research interests focus on the improvement of transit operations using analytics. This includes the development of real-time decision support tools, as well as modelling/analysis efforts to support longer-term decision making processes.

Faisal Alkhannan Alkaabneh’s primary research interests lie in the application of operations research to food supply chain systems and humanitarian logistics. More specifically, he focuses on developing data-driven large-scale optimization algorithms to optimize the performance of logistics systems. Currently, in collaboration with the Food Bank of The Southern Tier (Elmira-NY), he is working on designing decision support tools to help allocate and distribute food items among agencies serving populations in need. We expect this research to help decision makers at food banks better serve people by taking into account nutrition and health aspects and minimizing food waste.

X. Alex He was born in Guangzhou, China, in 1988. He received his B.E. degree from Zhejiang University in China in 2011; an M.S. from the University of California, Davis, in 2011; and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2015. His Ph.D. committee members included Oliver Gao (CEE and SYSEN), Krishnamurthy Iyer (ORIE), Miguel I. Gómez (AEM), and Mark A. Turnquist (CEE and SYSEN). His research covers the areas of systems engineering, game theory, environmental studies, sustainable food supply chains, regional trade, and transportation planning. His Ph.D. work at Cornell studies multi-unit many-to-many matching under the supervision of Oliver. His interest lies in the development of mathematical and economic models with applications in the management of complex systems, including trade, transportation, logistics and supply chains, infrastructure, environment, and financial networks.

Shuai Pan is currently a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University under Oliver Gao. He is developing a comprehensive analytic system that includes energy, technology, and policy pathways; the interactions of these pathways; and associated impacts on transportation emissions, air quality, and community health. He completed his Ph.D. in atmospheric science at the University of Houston. During that time, he built an air-quality forecasting and modeling system that considered atmospheric processes, emissions, and chemical reactions. Using the model, he deciphered the mystery of an exceptional high ozone event during NASA DISCOVER-AQ 2013 Texas campaign. He received a B.S. and M.S. in atmospheric science from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST) in China, where he designed circuit boards for a flight mill and processed radar signals to study insect flight patterns.

Graeme Troxell is a Systems Engineering Ph.D. student studying normative decision-making in infrastructure systems with Oliver Gao. His current research interests include normative decision theory, sustainability, infrastructure systems design, infrastructure business models, and socio-technical systems. He has a background in philosophy and has published papers on the philosophy of engineering and design ethics. He has also managed an interdisciplinary research team developing painless and stressless euthanasia systems for the poultry industry.

Christian Sprague is a Ph.D. student in Systems Engineering at Cornell University. He received an M.S. in economics from Boise State University as well as a B.S. in applied mathematics and a B.A. in economics. His research focuses on the social costs of environmental, both natural and built, externalities and how regulations that limit these externalities promote better health and economic outcomes. His current research seeks to understand the linkages between the built environment, health, and economy by using spatial-temporal econometric risk analysis of built environment data to detect characteristics of high-risk zones of poor health outcomes. His research interests include environmental economics, econometrics, and health economics.

Noam David received a B.Sc. (with distinction) and Ph.D. (through the direct doctoral program) degrees in geosciences from Tel Aviv University in Israel. He currently holds a postdoctoral position with the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell. His research interests include weather and atmospheric sciences, remote sensing, air quality, the effects of weather on wireless communication networks, and environmental monitoring.
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Omid M. Rouhani is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics at McGill University. His expertise is in the area of transportation economics and transportation systems analysis. His research program focuses on network design problems, road and congestion pricing, advanced traveler information systems, public private partnership projects, energy policy analysis, optimization techniques for transportation problems, and sustainable infrastructure systems.

Yan Deng began her M.S./Ph.D. study at Cornell University in August 2013, majoring in Transportation Systems Engineering, minoring in Operation Research and Systems Engineering, under the advisement of Oliver Gao. Her research focuses on portfolio management and investment strategies on the life cycle of infrastructure assets. Some of her ongoing projects include: an adaptive portfolio management framework and dynamic valuation tool for infrastructures investment decisions incorporating strategic flexibility under uncertainty; an infrastructure investment optimization model for projects selection and resource allocation, to improve social welfare and disaster resilience under climate change; and optimal life-cycle maintenance strategies for large-scale infrastructure systems with multiple objectives from economic and environmental perspectives.

Ronan Keane is a first year Ph.D. student in Systems Engineering. He has a B.S. and M.S. in applied math from Kent State University and the University of Washington, respectively. Broadly speaking, he studies transportation systems with Oliver Gao, his adviser. Traffic jams are an example of emergent behavior in a complex system. He wants to understand how interactions between individual vehicles affect the flow of traffic. His general interests are in emergent behavior, dynamical systems, optimization, scientific computing, and data science. His current project lies at the intersection of optimization and data science. His hobbies include cooking, playing piano, working out, hiking, and playing Fortnite.

Ioannis (Yiannis) Kamarianakis is an assistant professor of applied statistics in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at Arizona State University. He researches statistical space-time models with an emphasis on transportation and environmental applications. He has published many papers on the subjects of traffic forecasting and incident detection in urban networks and on the statistical analysis of remotely sensed data. His research has appeared in prestigious journals such as Environmental Science and Technology, Remote Sensing of Environment, Journal of Geophysical Research, International Journal of Epidemiology, Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry, and Transportation Research Part C. In addition to his published research, he has worked on the development of IBM’s Traffic Prediction Tool and has filed 3 U.S. Patents.
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Mohammad Tayarani’s research aims to understand the dynamic interaction between land use and transportation systems to achieve climate change and public health goals over 20 to 30 years of a transportation planning period. He focuses on balancing land use and transportation systems and getting them pulling together to create a more sustainable transportation system. He is also interested in mathematical modeling for solving transportation problems. In particular, he has developed a meta heuristic algorithm to solve transportation network design problems after natural disasters such as earthquakes. One day he wishes to wrap up his research on humanitarian logistics. His research interests include integrated land use and travel demand modeling, meta heuristics algorithm, transportation network design, vehicle emission and exposure modeling, air quality and public health concerns related to vehicle emissions, and the impact of autonomous vehicles on traffic and travel demand.

Hamid R. Sayarshad received B.S. and M.S. degrees in industrial engineering in Iran in 2006, and a Ph.D. degree in civil engineering from Ryerson University in Ontario, Canada, in 2015. He joined the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University in 2016 as a postdoctoral associate. His research interests include demand analysis, freight transportation and logistics, multimodal networks, dynamic optimization models, machine learning, transport economics, and urban logistics.
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Darrell Sonntag received a B.S. in civil engineering from Brigham Young University, and a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from Cornell University in 2010, with Oliver Gao serving as his Ph.D. adviser. He is currently a vehicle emissions researcher with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and leads the data analysis team for the Motor Vehicle Emissions Simulator (MOVES). His research interests include statistics, data visualization, modeling industrial and environmental processes (quantifying uncertainty of vehicle emission inventories, linking emission models to air quality models), and environmental decision making.
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Yi-Chieh Liu’s research interest lies in innovative infrastructure finance, mainly focused on the application of securitization and structured finance. She has a demonstrated history of working as a researcher in the higher education industry. After obtaining her B.S. degree in civil engineering at National Taiwan University (NTU), she continued her graduate study at NTU, where she started exploring the potential of implementing asset-backed securitization to public-private partnership projects in Taiwan. At Cornell University, her study of infrastructure finance continues to thrive. A more systematic and quantitative approach was developed to tackle the topic. Currently, she is working on research that integrates project revenue forecast and the optimal bond structuring. The research focuses on the modeling of the future revenue of the underlying infrastructure and the optimization methods of tranching/bond structuring. By combining the techniques, the risk factors that may affect the project performance and thereby the financial decisions can be examined and assessed, and the bond can be tailored to different investors’ hedging needs.

Yuechen (Sophia) Liu received her B.S. and M.S in electrical engineering from Beijing Jiaotong University in China. There, her dissertation was about energy efficient optimization of electric vehicle systems. She received another engineering degree (M.S) from Ecole Centrale de Lyon in France, where she was trained to deal with system problems by applying knowledge from distinct disciplines. She became interested in transportation systems engineering during her time as a visiting student at the University of Washington. Then, she decided to make the optimization of transportation systems her future career. She is currently a Ph.D. student at Cornell University, majoring in Transportation Systems Engineering, under the advisement of Oliver Gao. Her research aims to develop sustainable and energy efficient transportation systems, and her research interests focus on the areas of systems simulation, electrified transportation systems, electric vehicle systems, energy storage systems, operations research, and optimization. During her free time, she is a semi-professional radio/TV host. She also likes hiking, swimming, cooking, and traveling.

Xun Wang currently works as a principal data scientist at Snag. He has a decade of experience in statistics, machine learning, and optimization and more than five years of experience in designing and building machine learning-based software systems in the industry setting. Xun’s current research and project interests include search and recommendation systems with real-time feedbacks, natural language processing, and yield management frameworks for online marketplaces. Xun obtained his Ph.D. in Transportation Systems Engineering from Cornell University in 2013. He currently resides in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife.