Avijit Mukherjee was awarded first prize in the Federal Aviation Administration's Air Transportation Centers of Excellence Student Paper Competition on Future Air Transportation Systems and second prize in the Center's poster competition at the Third Joint Annual FAA Centers of Excellence Meeting, held in Daytona Beach, Florida, November 4-7.

Mukherjee, a Ph.D. student in Transportation Engineering at the University of California, Berkely, does research on developing optimization models for air traffic flow management. Mukherjee's paper, "The Role of Optimization Models in Future Air Traffic Management," discusses the benfits of using optimization methods to determine whether measures such as the pre-departure delay of flights, airborne holding while enroute and dynamic rerouting should be taken. His poster,"Dynamic Decision Making and Optimization Methods in Future Air Traffic Management," presents an optimization model for managing air traffic flow into an airport whose arrival capacity falls below demand.

Mukherjee received an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, and an MS in Civil Engineering from Kansas State University.

Find out more about the Centers of Excellence prizes here.