Chandra Bhat, professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Chandra Bhat, director of the Center for Transportation Research (CTR) at The University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded a Humboldt Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.
In addition to leading the CTR, Bhat is a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering. This prestigious award is given in recognition of a researcher’s entire achievements to date and specifically to “academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.”
As part of the Humboldt Award, Bhat plans to collaborate with professor Kai Nagel at Technische Universitat (TU) Berlin on research issues at the intersection of transportation demand modeling and transportation supply modeling. He will also collaborate with professor Claudia Czado in the mathematical statistics field at TU München. Czado and Bhat share interests in the area of complex multi-dimensional dependency modeling, an important methodological issue in accommodating interactions between decision-making agents in complex systems such as transport systems.
“I am tremendously honored to receive this international recognition from the Humboldt Foundation. Collaborative research initiatives at a global level expand the knowledge of all the researchers involved and benefit the fields that the researchers work in. I am particularly excited by the interdisciplinary nature of my collaboration with leading German academics,” Bhat said. “When you get right down to it, we serve the public and help society through our research and this gives us an opportunity to do so on an international stage.”
This award is the latest in a lengthy series of distinctions he has received. Bhat is a leading expert and professor in travel demand modeling and travel behavior analysis. His pioneering contributions in econometric choice modeling are now routinely used in the transportation field, as well as several other fields.
A Brief Description of Chandra Bhat’s Contributions
Bhat has made fundamental contributions in the form of discoveries, recognized theories, and insights in examining the interlinkages among human behavioral dynamics and activity-travel choices on the one hand and built environments on the other. His fundamental study of these linkages has broad social and environmental implications for human quality of life, especially at the interface of transportation, urban policy design, public health, energy dependence, sustainable development, and greenhouse gas emissions.
He has not only contributed to the fundamental study of human activity and travel behavior but has also been a pioneer in the formulation and use of analytic methods. His published analytic-oriented scholarly pieces have been seminal and innovative contributions that represent a body of research that has significantly impacted the econometric and statistical fields. These published research efforts have been described by leading transportation and economics researchers as “absolutely pivotal,” “a phenomenal development in the discrete choice field”, “a quantum leap forward,” and “electrifying in terms of its scope”.
In all, Bhat now has over 150 high-quality (published or forthcoming) refereed journal publications, and the number of times his work has been cited, as per the Thomas Reuters Web of Science database, is close to the 2400 mark with an h-index of 30. He is currently listed by Google Scholar among the top ten most cited civil engineering researchers around the world. Two of his papers have been included in a book compilation of the 44 most influential scholarly papers in the choice modeling field in the past 80 years. He has received many awards during his career, including the prestigious 2008 Jefferson Science Fellow (JSF) program coordinated by the US Department of State. As importantly, Bhat has made significant scientific impacts by producing a new generation of high-quality researchers.
About the Award
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, based in Bonn, Germany, grants up to 100 Humboldt Research Awards annually to scientists and scholars from abroad with internationally recognized academic qualifications. Award winners are invited to carry out research projects of their own choice in Germany in cooperation with colleagues. Among past winners of this prestigious prize are nearly 40 Nobel Laureates. The Humboldt network is a nonprofit foundation established by Germany for the promotion of international research cooperation.