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Samer Madanat, Director of ITS (Photo by Peg Skorpinski)

A New Director for ITS Berkeley

Samer Madanat Becomes the Fifth, Succeeding Martin Wachs

Samer Madanat, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and former Director of California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH), became the fifth director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies on July 1.

Madanat, 42, succeeds Martin Wachs, who served from January 1999 through June of this year. The Institute, which first opened its doors in 1948, is home to approximately 50 faculty members, 50 staff researchers and more than 100 graduate students.

"I’m very lucky to be stepping in as Director at a time when ITS is doing remarkably well,” Madanat said. "Under Marty, the Institute grew significantly and got its house in order, in large part thanks to the efforts of Steve Campbell, ITS's Assistant Director. Marty’s own reputation contributed to ITS’s stature, and his style of leadership helped to strengthen our ties with our sister institutes at Davis, Irvine and UCLA.”

Madanat, who was born in Amman, Jordan, chose to pursue a career in transportation engineering during a six-week internship when he was 22 years old. He was in the fourth year of a five-year undergraduate program in civil engineering at the University of Jordan when he had a chance to participate in a popular internship program for engineering students, the International Association for the Exchange of Students for Technical Experience. Because he was ranked at the top of his class academically, he had first choice of a number of internships in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

"The most exotic place to me was Sweden. Belgium was an option, but I grew up in France, and I had visited that country already so it would not have been as interesting. But Sweden—I thought this might be my only chance to spend time there. So I didn’t pick the firm because its focus was transportation. I picked the country.”

Once he arrived, however, he quickly discovered that transportation engineering encompassed areas of research that were more interesting than his education up to that point had led him to believe.

"My undergraduate education was typical—materials, hydraulics, structural and geotechnical engineering, and construction management. But like most traditional civil engineering programs, transportation was not really emphasized. I took two courses but they were oriented to geometric and pavement design for highways.”

Turning Point in Sweden

In his first few weeks at the Swedish consulting firm, Madanat realized there was a bigger world in transportation planning that he knew nothing about—and it captivated him.

"It was so exciting. What I knew was how to design a highway. It was very static and very design oriented. The world of transportation I discovered that summer was much bigger. They were dealing with cities and transportation networks, and talking about demand forecasting and impact studies, and I realized that it was much more interesting than the narrow focus of my transportation engineering courses.”

Madanat describes the actual work he did for the firm that summer as fairly menial: He wrote a computer program for highway alignment, administered surveys, and played a minor role in a spreadsheet analysis of work involving traffic impact studies. “The rest of the time, I was just tagging along with other people and watching what they were doing.”

But when he returned to the University of Jordan to complete the last year for his undergraduate degree, he knew what he wanted to do. He applied to graduate schools in the U.S. and set off the following year to pursue a master’s degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He took classes in planning, demand forecasting, network analysis, and economics, but his research was in infrastructure management. The subject so interested him that he continued on for a PhD at MIT.

After receiving his doctorate in 1991, Madanat worked briefly for a consulting firm, Cambridge Systematics. In January 1992 he joined the faculty at Purdue University. Four years later he received an offer to come to Berkeley as an Acting Associate Professor. In 1999 he received the Science and Technology Award from the Office of the President of the University for his proposal to improve the way infrastructure maintenance decisions are made. The award is given annually to one faculty member in the UC system.

In 1998 he received tenure and was promoted to full professor in 2002. He served as Acting Director of ITS in 2002-2003 when Martin Wachs took a sabbatical, and then served as director of PATH for two years.

At Berkeley, Madanat helped found a systems program in the civil engineering department at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He will continue to teach the undergraduate course, Civil and Environmental Systems Analysis, while he serves as Director. Likewise, he will continue teaching his own graduate course in transportation infrastructure management.

New Programs in Store

As the new Director, Madanat has set a number of goals for the Institute, including establishment of a program in public transportation. “We have people who are experts in various aspects of public transportation, and we have an active research program in transit operations at PATH, but we need to integrate all these strengths with our graduate courses in public transportation. “

While ITS is a research unit rather than an educational department, it has traditionally contributed to the educational mission of UC Berkeley by helping integrate research in some courses in transportation. One of Madanat’s goals is to help establish a certificate program in intelligent transportation systems, to be offered jointly between several engineering departments. There is already a model for such certificates: the Logistics Certificate offered by the departments of CEE and IEOR.

Another goal that Madanat has set for himself is to continue to strengthen ITS’ relationship with related units on campus, including the University of California Transportation Center (UCTC). “In June 2007, UCTC and ITS will jointly host the 12th World Conference in Transportation Research in Berkeley. This is the largest international research gathering in the field of Transportation, but the first time it will be held in the U.S.,” said Madanat.

Similarly, Madanat will continue to play a role in the nascent UC Berkeley Center for Metropolitan Studies, one of three new interdepartmental programs selected in a campus-wide competition in 2004. “This center will integrate education and research to identify solutions to the problems of mega-cities, including infrastructure planning and management.”

Madanat also plans to devote substantial amounts of time to the Institute’s three newest research centers. “We have three well-established research programs—PATH, PRC, and NEXTOR. Their funding is stable, they have international reputations,” he explains. “Three others are newer—the Traffic Safety Center, the California Center for Innovative Transportation (CCIT) and the new UC Berkeley Center for Future Urban Transport. I will play a more active role in them.“

Given the importance Madanat’s internship in Sweden had on his choice of study and career, the newest research center, the UC Berkeley Center for Future Urban Transport, may have special resonance for Madanat: It is funded by Volvo, the Swedish carmaker.

International Association for the Exchange of Students for Technical Experience Web site: http://www.iaeste.org/

ITS Berkeley Research Centers:

• California Center for Innovative Transportation (CCIT), a center to facilitate deployment of research;
• California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH), the nation’s largest program of intelligent transportation research;
• National Center of Excellence for Aviation Operations Research (NEXTOR), a consortium sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration;
• Pavement Research Center (PRC), an international authority on pavement structures, materials, and technologies;
• Traffic Safety Center, a joint venture of ITS and the School of Public Health; and
• UC Berkeley Center for Future Urban Transport, a Volvo Center of Excellence.

Associated Research Units at UC Berkeley

• Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD), a multidisciplinary research unit focusing on urban and regional growth and decline.
• University of California Transportation Center (UCTC), the U.S. Department of Transportation's University Transportation Center for Federal Region Nine (California, Arizona, Nevada, and Guam).