Ken Cervenka is a Community Planner at the FTA. Ken Cervenka has worked at the 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, plus encouraging the use of a multimodal performance-based planning approach. 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.
Ram M. Pendyala is the Frederick R. Dickerson Chair and Professor of Transportation Systems in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. 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. 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).
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, recently serving as co-chair of the TRB 2012 Innovations in Travel Modeling conference, held in Tampa, FL in May, 2012.
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 the 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 recently retired from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) where he served 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 had been overseeing CMAP's development and implementation of new modeling techniques including an agent-based economic application for freight. Kermit had 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.
