Taming Phantom Traffic Jams A National Science Foundation Cyber Physical Systems Project

Project Team

Leadership Team


Benedetto Piccoli (PI): Distinguished Professor, the Joseph and Loretta Lopez Chair Professor of Mathematics Department of Mathematical Sciences and Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, and the Associate Provost for Research at Rutgers University Camden. His research interests include traffic flow on networks, partial differential equations, control systems, systems biology, and mathematical finance. He is the recipient of 2009 Fubini Prize, 2012 AMS Fellow, founder and Editor in Chief of Networks and Heterogeneous Media.


Benjamin Seibold (PI): Director of the Center for Computational Mathematics and Modeling and an associate professor of Mathematics at Temple University. His research expertise includes high-order methods for fluid flows and interface evolution, radiative transfer and kinetic problems, and traffic flow modeling, simulation, and control. He received his Dr.rer.nat. from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, and he was an Instructor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined Temple University in 2009. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation via DMS Applied Mathematics, DMS Computational Mathematics, and CNS Cyber-Physical Systems, and he is the recipient of the 2013 Greenshields Prize, awarded by the Transportation Research Board. His research publications appear in Applied Mathematics, Physics, and Engineering journals. Media coverage of his research, as well as contributed media articles, include The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.


Jonathan Sprinkle (former PI): Litton Industries John M. Leonis Distinguished Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona. In 2013 he received the NSF CAREER award, and in 2009, he received the UA's Ed and Joan Biggers Faculty Support Grant for work in autonomous systems. His work has an emphasis for industry impact, and he was recognized with the UA "Catapult Award" by Tech Launch Arizona in 2014, and in 2012 his team won the NSF I-Corps Best Team award. His research interests and experience are in systems control and engineering, and he teaches courses ranging from systems modeling and control to mobile application development and software engineering. Before coming to Arizona, Dr. Sprinkle was the co-Team Leader of the Sydney-Berkeley Driving Team, a collaborative entry into the DARPA Urban Challenge. In 2004, he led a team from UC Berkeley which autonomously flew against an Air Force pilot in autonomous pursuit/evasion games in the Mojave Desert at Edwards Air Force Base. Dr. Sprinkle graduated with the PhD from Vanderbilt University, and with his MS in 2000. He graduated with his BSEE in cursu honorum, cum laude, from Tennessee Tech University in Cookeville, TN, in 1999. In 2005, Dr. Sprinkle was selected as one of 108 Regional Finalists for 11-19 highly competitive positions of White House Fellow.


Roman Lysecky (PI): Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Riverside in 2005. His research focuses on embedded systems with emphasis on medical device security, automated threat detection and mitigation, runtime adaptable systems, performance and energy optimization, and non-intrusive observation methods. He is an author on more than 100 research publications in top journals and conferences. He received the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award from the European Design and Automation Association (EDAA) in 2006, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation in 2009, and seven Best Paper Awards. He is an inventor on one US patent. He has authored 10 textbooks on topics including C, C++, Java, Data Structures, VHDL, and Verilog, and he has contributed to several more. His recent textbooks with zyBooks utilize a web-native, active-learning approach that has shown measurable increases in student learning and course grades. He has also received multiple awards for Excellence at the Student Interface from the College of Engineering at the University of Arizona.


Daniel Work (PI): Associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University. He has previously held appointments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at the University of California Los Angeles, Nokia Research Center Palo Alto, and Microsoft Research Redmond. Prof. Work is a member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Cybernetics for Cyber-Physical Systems and the ASCE Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Impacts Committee. Prof. Work was named a 2018 Gilbreth Lecturer by the National Academy of Engineering, a 2018 IoT Pioneer by Connected World, a CAREER Award recipient from the National Science Foundation in 2014.



Research Team

Post doctoral researchers

Shumo Cui has a PhD in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently is an analyst at Arowana Asset Management Limited. Prior to his current position, Dr. Cui was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mathematics at Temple University.</li>


Maria Laura Delle Monache is currently a research scientist in the Networked Controlled Systems team at Inria and in GIPSA-Lab (Department of Control) in Grenoble. Her research interest is mainly related to the mathematical and engineering aspects of traffic flow. In particular, she is interested in mathematical modeling, analysis, numerical approximation and control of traffic flow applications. Prior to Inria, she was a Postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University Camden.</li>


Thibault Liard is currently postdoc at Inria and in GIPSA-Lab (Department of Control) in Grenoble working under the direction of Maria Laura Delle Monache. His research interest include control of partial differential equations and mathematical modeling of vehicular traffic. Prior to Inria, she was a Postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University Camden.


Graduate students

Matt Bunting is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona. Prior to his graduate studies, Mr. Bunting received his BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Arizona.


Rahul Bhadani is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Arizona. Mr. Bhadani holds a BS degree in Information Technology with an emphasis on Computer Science and Software Engineering. His research interests include modeling, simulation, and control of autonomous vehicles, developing novel statistical models for traffic simulation. Prior to joining the University of Arizona, Mr. Bhadani worked as software engineer for Oracle.


Sean McQuade is a PhD student in Applied Mathematics at Rutgers University -- Camden. Prior to joining Rutgers University, Mr. McQuade received a MS in Risk Management from Temple University and a BS in Mathematics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.


Raphael Stern is a postdoctoral fellow at the Technical University of Munich and will be joining the faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo-Engineering at the University of Minnesota in 2019. Before joining the Technical University of Munich, Dr. Stern was a visiting scholar in the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University Dr. Stern received a bachelor of science (2013) in Civil Engineering, a master of science (2015) in Civil Engineering, and a PhD (2018), all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Stern has also spent time as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Pure and Applied Math at the University of California Los Angeles.


Fangyu Wu is a graduate student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley interested in control, robotics, and learning. Prior to joining Berkeley, he received his MS and BS degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where he served as an undergraduate and graduate research assistant.


Undergraduate students

Miles Churchill is an MS student in Urban and Regional Planning and a MS student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to beginning his graduate studies, Mr. Churchill was an undergraduate research assistant in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.


Hannah Pohlmann received a BS in Materials Science and Engineering and a BS in Mathematics from the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State University. During her undergraduate career, Ms. Pohlmann spent time as a visiting researcher in the Department of Mathematics at Temple University.


Yuhao Lu is a Masters student in computation science and engineering at Harvard University. Prior to joining Harvard, Mr. Lu received his BS degree in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and served as an undergraduate research assistant in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.


George Gunter is an undergraduate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois. George is also a visiting undergraduate researcher at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University. His research interests include transportation cyber-physical systems and autonomous vehicles.


Kyra Jenkins is an Undergraduate Research Grant at Rutgers - Camden, Spring 2016. Kyra worked on methods to reconstruct fundamental diagram from data. She is currently math teacher at LEAP Academy in Camden.

Millicent Kipp is an Undergraduate Research Grant at Rutgers - Camden, Spring 2016. (Dean’s Undergraduate Research Prize.) Millicent worked on using statistical methods to analyze traffic data in collaboration with a group from UPenn. She is currently marketing specialist at Freedom Mortgage.