Distinguished Speaker Series

Measuring Urban Mobility Performance Across Scales, Times, and Places: Examples, Challenges and Possibilities

by

Associate Professor P. Christopher Zegras
Transportation & Urban Planning
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA

About the Speaker

P. Christopher Zegras teaches graduate-level courses in urban transportation planning, statistics, and land use-transportation planning in the Department of Urban Studies at MIT, where he has also co-taught urban design and planning studios and Practica in Beijing, Santiago de Chile, and Mexico City. He currently serves as the MIT Lead for the MIT-Portugal Program Transportation Systems Focus Area. He is on the Faculty Advisory Council of the Transportation@MIT Initiative and a former member of the Campus Energy Task Force of the MIT Energy Initiative.

His research interests include:

• The relationship between transportation and the built environment
• Transportation system finance

• Transportation energy use and greenhouse gas mitigation

On these and other related topics, he has consulted widely, including for the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Canadian, German, US, and Peruvian Governments, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the United Nations Center for Regional Development. Zegras previously worked for the International Institute for Energy Conservation in Washington, DC and Santiago de Chile and for MIT’s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment.

He holds a Master in City Planning and a Master of Science in Transportation from MIT and a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning, also from MIT. He was the recipient of a Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Dissertation Fellowship, an MIT Presidential Fellowship, and a US DOT Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship.

About Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre

Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre, the research centre established by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in partnership with Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF), serves as an intellectual hub for interactions between MIT and global researchers in Singapore at exciting frontier areas of science and technology. The SMART Centre allows faculty, researchers and graduate students from MIT to collaborate with their counterparts from universities, polytechnics, research institutes and industry in Singapore and Asia. There will be a continuous cohort of MIT professors, post-doctorates and PhD students at the SMART Centre. Major research interactions will involve groups of post doctoral fellows and PhD students from MIT as well as affiliated researchers from other institutions working side by side in the SMART Centre. The Centre now has five inter-disciplinary research groups (IRGs), which together consist of several hundred people.

Professor Thomas L. Magnanti, Professor of Engineering and MIT Institute Professor, is the founding Director of the SMART Centre. He has been actively involved in MIT's Singapore educational programmes and is currently the President of the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Professor Rohan Aberayatne is the current SMART Centre director, based in Singapore.

The Future Urban Mobility inter-disciplinary research group (IRG) aims to develop in and beyond Singapore new paradigms for the planning, design, and operation of future urban transportation systems. Its modelling engine, linked to a range of networked computing and control technology-enabled mobility innovations, and operations research-based decision models, will analyze the impacts of various novel concepts, including real-time information and management systems, and innovative mobility services such as "mobility–on–demand".