Dr. Wang is a Civil Engineering Professor and an Adjunct Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor at the University of Washington. He’s also the Director of the Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans), Director of the Northwestern Tribal Technical Assistance Program Center, funded by the United States Department of Transportation, and is Founding Director of the UW Smart Transportation Applications and Research Laboratory (STAR Lab). His research focuses on traffic sensing, transportation big data analytics, artificial intelligence methods and applications, connected and autonomous transportation, transportation safety, and smart mobility.
Dr. Wang is an ASCE Fellow and has a very long, active, and energetic history in T&DI. He is a founding Co-Chair of the T&DI Connected and Autonomous Vehicles Committee (2017), served as T&DI President (2019), is a three-time Co-Chair of theInternational Conference on Transportation and Development (2018, 2020, 2022), and is the Connected and Automated Transportation Special Section Editor for the Journal of Transportation Engineering (JTEA). In 2003, Dr. Wang received JTEA’s Best Paper Award for 2003, the ITE Innovation in Education Award in 2018, and the UW College of Engineering’s Outstanding Faculty Award in 2021. He’s also a Founding Co-Chair of the International Smart Cities Conference (2015) for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and is currently the AED 50 AI and Advanced Computing Applications Committee Chair at the Transportation Research Board (TRB).
As a leader, Dr. Wang has mentored 20 students who have earned a Ph.D. - 12 of those students are now faculty themselves. Among research projects, Dr. Wang has been a Principal Investigator (P.I.) or Co-P.I. 117 times and these projects have received $92M in funding. He’s the owner of three issued U.S. patents and is a registered P.E. in Washington State.