Welcome Dr Elnaz (Elli) Irannezhad
rCITI would like to welcome Dr Elnaz (Elli) Irannezhad to rCITI.
Elli has been appointed as a Senior Lecturer of transport in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Elli has a background in Civil Engineering with a specialisation in transport engineering. Her research contributes to the advancement of science in cross-disciplinary fields, including logistics, supply chain and freight transportation, agent-based modelling, Mobility and Logistics as a Service, automated vehicles, and blockchain technology.
Elli is a pragmatic and applied transport researcher and she endeavours her research closely with the industry to ensure a good alignment with the real-world needs and industry uptake. In the past two years, she acted as a Principal Engineer and the Portfolio Leader of Next Generation Transport Systems at the Australian Road Research Board (ARRB), where she secured and led several complex projects in various fields such as automated vehicles (see e.g. Austroads project, iMove project), heavy vehicle smart monitoring (see summary), port container data analysis, heavy vehicle origin-destination studies, and hydrogen fuel heavy vehicles.
Elli moved to Australia in April 2014 to commence her PhD at the School of Civil Engineering of University of Queensland (UQ), prior to which she worked in industry as a traffic engineer, geospatial analyst and transport modeller in Iran for nine years. Her PhD dissertation, “Contributions to Behavioural Freight Transportation Modelling”, was mainly about examining determinants of important logistics choices. Throughout her doctoral research, she developed an agent-based simulation model to investigate the likely impact of cooperation among freight transport agents through an intelligent decision support system in hinterland container transport, or so-called port community system. Closely working with the Port of Brisbane, the result of her PhD research assisted the Port in measuring the efficiency of import/export container supply chain and improving the logistics processes.
From 2017 to 2020, she was employed in a three-year postdoctoral research contract by UQ’s School of Economics on a partnership project with the Port of Brisbane. Throughout her postdoctoral project, she focused on the application of blockchain for port logistics, where she examined different blockchain-based enterprise solution and their suitability considering port logistics.
During her PhD and Postdoctoral research, she also was the chief investigator in several industry-oriented research projects, such as: (i) “Who Moves What Where” commissioned by the National Transport Commission (NTC); (ii) “Freight Data Requirements” commissioned by iMove and DITRDC; (iii) “Freight Supply Chain Framework” commissioned by Northern River NSW Government. These projects triggered major freight data collection and dissemination practices at the national and local level.
She will be teaching and researching in the field of logistics optimisation, freight transport modelling, and emerging technologies such as blockchain, automated zero-emission heavy vehicles, and artificial intelligence applications in freight transportation.
