news>>Berkeley Transportation Alumnus Named to Prominent US DOT Research Post

Robert Bertini, who received his PhD in transportation engineering from UC Berkeley in 1999, has been named deputy administrator of the Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA). The agency “coordinates the U.S. Department of Transportation's (DOT) research programs and is charged with advancing the deployment of cross-cutting technologies to improve our Nation’s transportation system,” according to its Web site.

Included in RITA’s portfolio is the University Transportation Center program, which supports the University of California Transportation Center (UCTC), headquartered at UC Berkeley, along with 59 other centers around the country.

Bertini, who has  been on the faculty at Portland State since 2000, headed the statewide UTC, the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC). He also developed the university’s graduate program in intelligent transportation systems. He will remain on the faculty and take a leave.

Bertini’s adviser at UC Berkeley was Professor Mike Cassidy. His dissertation was Time-dependent traffic flow features at a freeway bottleneck downstream of a merge.

Link to story in the Oregonian.