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Civil Engineering Professor Yoram Shiftan is visiting the School of Public Policy from the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. While on his year visit with the school, Professor Shiftan will be researching transportation policy issues.
"I was attracted to George Mason's public policy school because of their unique transportation program," he said. "Very few universities look at transportation from a public policy point of view. It's unique."
He will be working on practical approaches to activity based modeling, a idea that attempts to derive demand for transportation from the demand for participation in activities. Thus far most of Professor Shiftan's research has dealt with passenger demand in activity based modeling. He is starting to collaborate with Mark Maggio, who is developing an activity based approach for freight transportation.
"We're trying to combine his knowledge of freight activity with my understanding of passenger activity to better understand transportation demand," said Professor Shiftan.
Professor Shiftan holds a
Ph.D. in transportation systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His masters and bachelors degrees are from the Israel Institute of Technology.
While in the area, Shiftan will also be working with Cambridge Systematics,
a consulting company working on travel demand modeling issues.