About Us

Dr. Yinhai Wang is a professor in transportation engineering and the founding director of the Smart Transportation Applications and Research Laboratory (STAR Lab) at the University of Washington (UW). He also serves as director for Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans), USDOT University Transportation Center for Federal Region 10 and visiting chair for the Traffic Information and Control Department at Harbin Institute of Technology. He has a Ph.D. in transportation engineering from the University of Tokyo (1998), a master's degree in computer science from the UW, and another master’s degree in construction management (1991) and a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering (1989) from Tsinghua University in China. Dr. Wang’s active research fields include traffic sensing, e-science of transportation, big-data analytics, traffic operations and simulation, smart urban mobility, transportation safety, etc. He has published over 120 peer reviewed journal articles and delivered more than 130 invited talks and nearly 220 other academic presentations. Dr. Wang serves as a member of the Transportation Information Systems and Technology Committee and Highway Capacity and Quality of Service Committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB). He is currently a member of the steering committee for the IEEE Smart Cities and an elected governor for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Transportation and Development Institute (T&DI), scheduled to serve as president of ASCE T&DI in 2018. He is a co-chair of the Third IEEE International Smart Cities Conference to be held in Wuxi China in 2017 and the ASCE International Conference on Transportation and Development to be held in Indianapolis in 2018. He was a principal investigator for 75 important research projects with a total amount of funding over 51 million dollars. Additionally, Dr. Wang is associate editor for three journals: Journal of ITS, Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, and Journal of Transportation Engineering. He was the winner of the ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering Best Paper Award for 2003.

Melanie Paredes joined the PacTrans team as our new Program Coordinator. Melanie will serve as the resource person for PacTrans researchers, fellows, and students on center events, seminar talks, conferences and other research needs. She will also help coordinate meetings, seminars, conferences and travel and take on grant and fiscal support. Melanie has been with the University of Washington for more than twenty years. She’s worked at the UW Department of Radiology as Facilities Coordinator, UW Division of Gastroenterology as Assistant to the Lab Manager, UW Academic HR as Human Resources Assistant, and at the UW Payroll Office as Payroll Technician. Outside of UW, she’s worked at Archdiocese of Seattle as Assistant to the HR Director. Melanie has a B.S. in Zoology and credits in Education. She also volunteers as event coordinator of an annual ethnic Art & Culture festival at the Seattle Center and is an alumni member of the Greater Washington Alpha Phi Omega which organizes the “Adopt-A-Park” and Feeding Program.

Dr. Wei Sun is a research associate in transportation engineering in the Smart Transportation Applications and Research Laboratory (STAR Lab) at the University of Washington (UW). He has a Ph.D. in transportation engineering from University of Florida (2019) and a bachelor's degree in transportation engineering from South China University of Technology (2014). Dr. Sun’s active research fields include Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), transportation data analytics, traffic operations and safety, and traffic simulation and software development. Dr. Sun has worked on a variety of research projects funded by Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), Center for Safety Equity in Transportation (CSET), Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans), Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), Freight Mobility Research Institute (FMRI), and the Southeastern Transportation Research, Innovation, Development and Education (STRIDE). Through these projects, he has applied data analytics and statistical modeling to solve transportation engineering related problems, contributed in the technical transfer activities through developing several simulation and data analytical software programs, published technical reports and research papers, and presented lectures of research findings at conferences such as the Transportation Research Board Annual Meetings. Dr. Sun serves as reviewers for the Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems: Technology, Planning, and Operations, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Journal of Transportation Engineering, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Smart Cities Conference, and Transportation Research Record (TRR).