Congratulations Ali Najmi for winning the prestigious Eric Pas Award
International Association for Travel Behaviour Research (IATBR) Executive Board and the 2020 Eric Pas Dissertation Award Jury announced on the 15 November 2021 the dissertation titled, “Interaction of demand and supply in transport planning model systems: a comprehensive revisit” authored by Dr Ali Najmi under the supervision of Associate professor Taha Hossein Rashidi, and Professor Travis Waller, was awarded the High Commendation in the 2020 Eric Pas Dissertation Competition. The international award is a great honour and privilege as it is given each year for the best dissertations in travel behaviour research. A summary of the dissertation will be presented in the triennial IATBR conference in Chile in December 2022. Please check out the link here to see the extremely high caliber of the previous recipients of this award. Note that Ali was the recipient of Transportation Research Board Analytics Contest 2017Outreach, Pyke Johnson Award in 98th Annual meeting of Transportation Research Board 2018, and Faculty Postdoctoral Writing Fellowship 2019.
Ali's highly original dissertation addresses key issues around calibration processes in activity-based travel demand models. It unpicks the prevailing ad hoc/unstructured approach to calibration (and validation) and proposes two alternative methods, based on established approaches in other fields/disciplines. He also conceptualises a new activity-based travel demand model that expands and generalises a strand of existing models in a manner that fully integrates calibration into model development. In the penultimate chapter, Ali's dissertation formulates a ride-sharing component for integration into an activity-based travel demand model. His dissertation made both theoretical and applied contributions. For more details, see here.
