Engineering and Carnegie Mellon University Receive $3.5 Million for Transportation Research

Daniel Lee

The U.S. Department of Transportation has awarded the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science and Carnegie Mellon University’s Carnegie Institute of Technology a $3.5 million grant to research and implement technologies to improve the safety and efficiency of transportation.

Through a new University Transportation Center Consortium, Penn and Carnegie Mellon will explore cutting-edge applications of technology that could influence everything from the safety of vehicles and roads to the analysis of traffic flow. The consortium will also establish a workforce-development program to train graduate students in modern transportation-related technologies and policymaking.

The Penn/CMU Consortium for Technologies for Safe and Efficient Transportation, or CT-SET, a Tier 1 National Center, will be located on CMU’s campus in Pittsburgh.

"The idea behind the center was to bring together computer science, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering to do research that will impact how people commute, drive and move around this country," said Daniel Lee , an associate professor in Penn’s engineering school and the lead faculty member on the proposal.

Lee’s research on autonomous cars, intelligent vehicles that "drive themselves," may play a role in some of the center’s activities. Penn’s School of Design was also involved in preparing the grant application.

The Penn/CMU consortium was chosen as one of 22 grant recipients out of 63 applicants in the competitive process, aimed at eliciting transformative transportation research from the nation’s universities. The consortium has partnered with more than 20 private, government and non-profit organizations, including the City of Philadelphia and the City of Pittsburgh, the Port Authority of Allegheny County, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, the Conference of Minority Transportation Officials, Allegheny County, PennDOT, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, ACCESS Transportation Systems, Accessible Transportation and Workforce Interagency Cooperative, AASHTO, the Community College of Allegheny County, PITT-OHIO Trucking Company, ALCO Parking, Sustainable Pittsburgh, the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, the Pittsburgh Technology Council, Booz Allen Hamilton, Innovation Works, General Motors, IBM, Bosch and Volkswagen Group of America.

"With this center we can make Pennsylvania a test bed for improving transportation," Lee said. "With CMU in the west and Penn in the east, we’re ideally positioned."