Hani Mahmassani named William A. Patterson Chair in Transportation
HANI S. MAHMASSANI
William A. Patterson Distinguished Chair in Transportation
Northwestern University
Hani S. Mahmassani has been named the William A. Patterson Distinguished Chair in Transportation at Northwestern University, with a primary appointment in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He will be affiliated with Northwestern’s Transportation Center, an interdisicplinary research center in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
"Hani Mahmassani is recognized around the globe as a leader in transportation research," said Joseph Schofer, interim director of the Transportation Center. "Bringing him to Northwestern, with our 50-year tradition of excellence in this field and our already strong faculty, will advance our programs to another level."
Since 2002 Dr. Mahmassani was the first holder of the Charles Irish Sr. Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland, where he was the founding director of the Maryland Transportation Initiative, a cross-disciplinary institute for transportation systems research and education. Before joining the University of Maryland, he was on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin for 20 years, where he was most recently the A. Abou-Ayyash Centennial Professor in Transportation Engineering, professor of management science and information systems, and director of the Advanced Institute for Transportation Infrastructure Engineering and Management.
The editor-in-chief of Transportation Science, Mahmassani is also the associate editor of Transportation Research C: Emerging Technologies and of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
His research areas include multimodal transportation systems analysis, planning and operations, dynamic network modeling and optimization, transit network planning and design, dynamics of user behavior and telematics, telecommunication-transportation interactions, large-scale human infrastructure systems, and real-time operation of logistics and distribution systems.
Mahmassani received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in transportation systems in 1982 and his MS in transportation engineering in 1978 from Purdue University. He holds a BS in civil engineering from the University of Houston.
At Northwestern Dr. Mahmassani will also have a courtesy appointment in the Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences of the Kellogg School of Management, and he will be an affiliate of the Infrastructure Technology Institute.
The William A. Patterson Endowment and Chair was established in 1978 as the intellectual focal point for transportation research and education at Northwestern University. The late Frank A. Spencer, Northwestern professor and noted aviation expert, provided the leadership gift of $100,000 to help establish the chair, which was named in honor of the late William A. Patterson, a central figure in the nation’s air transport industry for more than four decades. Patterson served as president and chairman of United Airlines from 1934 until his retirement in 1966. Patterson was also a life trustee of Northwestern and was instrumental in the establishment and strategic leadership of its Transportation Center. Marvin Manheim was named the first Patterson Professor in 1979 and served in that position until his death in 2000.
For more information on Dr. Mahmassani, read his bio here.
