Chandra Bhat, SWUTC Executive Committee Member and key researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, is the recipient of the Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. The award recognizes “academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.”
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, based in Bonn, Germany, grants up to 100 Humboldt Research Awards annually to scientists and scholars from abroad with internationally recognized academic qualifications. Award winners are invited to carry out research projects of their own choice in Germany in cooperation with colleagues. Among past winners of this prestigious prize are nearly 40 Nobel Laureates. The Humboldt network is a nonprofit foundation established by Germany for the promotion of international research cooperation.
As part of the Humboldt Award, Bhat plans to collaborate with Prof. Kai Nagel at Technische Universitat (TU) Berlin on research issues at the interface of transportation demand modeling and transportation supply modeling. He will also collaborate with Prof. Claudia Czado in the mathematical statistics field at TU München. Prof. Czado and Chandra share interests in the area of complex multi-dimensional dependency modeling, an important methodological issue in accommodating interactions between decision making agents in complex systems such as transport systems.