Welcome to CATIER Lab.

The Center for Advanced Transportation and Infrastructure Engineering Research (CATIER) was founded by Dr. Manoj K. Jha in August 2003 in a pursuit for establishing a world-class research center in transportation and infrastructure engineering. The Center is established within the Department of Civil Engineering at the Morgan State University and is located in the Schaefer Engineering Building. The Center experienced a tremendous growth in extramural research, number of researchers, publications, and conference participation between 2003-2008.

CATIER lab. Conducts research in the areas of transportation and infrastructure engineering, and actively engages undergraduate and graduate students in the research projects. At the undergraduate level exceptionally good students can be recruited at the sophomore level and up, to gain valuable research experience in the general area of transportation and infrastructure engineering. The research may require field data collection as well as computational and mathematical modeling. The students are encouraged to formulate cutting-edge research problems and be independent thinkers. Another avenue of undergraduate student involvement is through a senior design project (known as capstone project at other institutions), which requires working with an external agency, such as the Maryland State Highway Administration, to ensure completion of a quality real-world project with significant design content.

At the graduate level  students perform advanced research that often require original mathematical formulation, analytical modeling, and computer programming. The research is generally used by masters and doctoral students toward the fulfillment of their master technical paper or doctoral dissertation. Most of the graduate level work are published in respected journals and conferences.

During the 2008-2009 academic year the lab. had 5 undergraduate students and 16 graduate students. The funding agencies included the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the Federal Highway Administration. Financial support is also provided in the form of graduate school fellowships and title III grant fellowships.

The lab. actively collaborates with leading researchers across the globe on various research projects. Some leading researchers with whom collaborative publications and projects were undertaken during the 2008-2009 academic year, include the following:

• Professor Paul Schonfeld, University of Maryland, College Park
• Professor Shinya Kikuchi, Virginia Tech.
• Professor Matthew Karlaftis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
• Professor Wolfgang Kuehn, Westsachsische Hochschule Zwickau, University of Applied Sciences, Germany