Mobility and transportation are at the dawn of the most profound changes with an unprecedented combination of new technologies (autonomy, computation, and AI) meeting new and evolving priorities and objectives (decarbonization, public health, and social justice). And the timeframe for these changes – decarbonization in particular – is short in a system with massive amounts of fixed, long-life assets and entrenched behaviors and cultures. It’s this combination of new technologies, new purposes, and urgent timeframes that makes an MIT-led Mobility Initiative critical at this moment.
The MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI) is designed to effect fundamental changes in the longterm trajectory of sustainable mobility development. It serves to coalesce all mobility and transportation activities at MIT, knitting together our efforts on research, education, entrepreneurship, and civic engagement at the Institute into a greater whole. This series of webinars will highlight just a few of the key research areas to be explored. We will also discuss how industry can participate in the MMI as a research partner through the MIT Mobility Initiative Consortium.
Jinhua Zhao is the Professor of Cities and Transportation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prof. Zhao integrates behavioral and computational thinking to decarbonize the world’s mobility system.
Prof. Zhao founded the MIT Mobility Initiative, coalescing the Institute’s efforts on transportation research, education, entrepreneurship, and engagement. He hosts the MIT Mobility Forum, highlighting transportation innovation from MIT and across the globe.
Prof. Zhao directs the JTL Urban Mobility Lab and Transit Lab, leading long-term collaborations with transportation authorities and operators worldwide and enabling cross-culture learning between cities in North America, Asia, and Europe.
Prof. Zhao leads the program “Mens, Manus, and Machina (M3S): How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Future of Learning” at the Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART).
He is the co-founder and chief scientist for TRAM.Global, a mobility decarbonization venture.
Research Interest
He brings behavioral science and transportation technology together to shape travel behavior, design mobility systems, and reform urban policies. He develops computational methods to sense, predict, nudge, and regulate travel behavior and designs multimodal mobility systems that integrate automated and shared mobility with public transport. He sees transportation as a language to describe a person, characterize a city, and understand an institution and establishes the behavioral foundation for transportation systems and policies.
Annie is an urban mobility researcher with MIT’s Urban Mobility Lab and MIT’s AgeLab. Her research focuses on preparing cities for next-generation transportation technologies. She has worked as a consultant and researcher on a number of transportation projects for organizations ranging from the IADB to the Parisian government. Prior to her time at MIT, she worked as an energy policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, honing an expertise on energy transitions in Europe as well as ‘frontier’ energy innovations. She has also worked in communications for a wide variety of urban mobility clients, ranging from car-sharing company Zipcar to bike-sharing company Zagster. She received dual masters degrees from MIT in Urban Planning and Transportation Science and her bachelors in World Politics and German Literature from Hamilton College.