This section contains a brief bio of each of the peer review panel members.
Ken Cervenka has worked at the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) since 2007. His major responsibilities include technical assistance to MPOs, transit providers, and other agencies interested in preparing transit rider "on-board" surveys and transit ridership forecasts. For forecasts submitted by project sponsors in support of New Starts and Small Starts projects, his responsibilities include a formal assessment of the plausibility of those forecasts for use in FTA's project evaluation process. Prior to joining FTA, Ken worked as the travel forecasting manager at the North Central Texas Council of Governments, the MPO for the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Brian Gardner is a team leader at the Federal Highway Administration. He has managed a variety of modeling research efforts and planning studies. Brian's specialties include project management, program management, open source communities, transport simulation, and travel demand forecasting.
Ram M. Pendyala is a Professor of Transportation Systems in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University. His expertise lies in the study of human activity-travel behavior, transport demand forecasting, sustainable mobility strategies, public transportation systems, and the land use, travel, energy, and air quality impacts of a wide range of transportation policies and technologies. Ram has conducted sponsored research for a number of federal, state, and local agencies, and has extensively published peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in the field of transportation modeling. Prior to joining Arizona State University in 2006, he served on the faculty at the University of South Florida in Tampa for 12 years. He serves or has served on the editorial boards of a number of journals including Accident Analysis and Prevention, Transportation, Transport Reviews, Journal of Choice Modeling, and Transportation Letters. He is the chair of the Travel Analysis Methods Section of the Transportation Research Board and the immediate past chair of its Committee on Traveler Behavior and Values. He is also a past chair of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research (IATBR). Ram has his PhD and Master's degrees from the University of California at Davis.
Erik Sabina is the Information Management Branch Manager at Colorado Department of Transportation. Before CDOT, Erik was the Regional Modeling Manager at the Denver Regional Council of Governments, where he led several leading-edge modeling projects, including the development of an activity-based travel model for the DRCOG region; the first regional travel survey to cover the entire Colorado Front Range area; and the on-going effort to develop an implementation of UrbanSim for the Denver region. Erik has published numerous papers on activity-based model development and related topics, and has frequently served as an invited speaker and panelist throughout the US, most recently serving as co-chair of the TRB 2012 Innovations in Travel Modeling conference, held in Tampa, FL in May, 2012. Erik holds a BS degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado, and a MS in Transportation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Peter Vovsha has 28 years of experience in the development and application of transportation models. He has developed numerous models and computerized procedures for advanced discrete-choice models of travel behavior and integrated multi-modal network simulations. As a principal modeler, he has developed transport models for several large-scale regional model development projects in major cities such as Moscow, Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem, New York, Columbus, Montreal, and Ottawa. Peter is one of the leading experts in the development and application of the advanced tour-based and activity-based model systems in practice. He is pioneering in design of the new generation of advanced activity-based models that has been widely adopted in U.S. and worldwide (eight out of twelve activity-based models developed or being developed in practice in the U.S. were designed by Peter).
Kermit Wies is with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) where he serves as Deputy Executive Director for Research and Analysis. Kermit has over 28 years' experience in urban systems modeling and planning and is the principal author of the 2030 Regional Transportation Plan for the Chicago metro area. Over the past several years, Kermit has been overseeing CMAP's development and implementation of new modeling techniques including an agent-based economic application for freight. Kermit has overall responsibility for CMAP's analysis and evaluation work program in support of implementing Chicago's GO TO 2040 comprehensive regional plan.
Dr. Lei Zhang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses include transportation systems analysis, transportation and land use planning, transportation economics and policy, agent-based modeling, and integration of transportation operations and planning.
