CORVALLIS, Ore. – Robert Bertini will take over as head of the Oregon State University School of Civil and Construction Engineering on Aug. 31.

Bertini comes to the OSU College of Engineering from the University of South Florida, where he was the director of the Center for Urban Transportation Research, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of sustainable transportation in the Patel College of Global Sustainability.

“I greatly appreciate the welcoming atmosphere within OSU’s School of Civil and Construction Engineering and I’m looking forward to building on all of the past successes to create a diverse, inclusive school that feels like home for all members of our community,” Bertini said.

Bertini was appointed in 2009 by President Barack Obama as the deputy administrator for research and innovative technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation, where he also led the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office and chaired the department’s Innovation Council.

“At the Department of Transportation my position included special responsibility for civil rights within our agency, and we made great strides in strengthening the diversity and collaborative spirit of the organization, building trust with our labor and employee organizations and dramatically improving employee satisfaction as reported through federal employee surveys,” he said. “We focused on the importance of civility in all our discourse, and we must also recognize that our choice of words and traditional professional vocabulary may include biases that must be eliminated.”

Bertini has been a faculty member at Portland State and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and worked in the private sector for seven years as well. From 2002 to 2006, he was the founding director of the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium, a statewide, four-campus, national university transportation center in Oregon.

“Rob is excited to work with the exceptional students, staff, faculty, advisory board members and all of the school’s stakeholders,” said Scott Ashford, Kearney Dean of Engineering at OSU. “He is especially looking forward to continuing and expanding upon OSU’s distinguished tradition of civil and construction engineering and helping advance the new architectural engineering program. We are fortunate to have him and I am looking forward to the continued growth in excellence and reputation of the school under his leadership.”

Bertini’s primary research interests are sustainable transportation solutions, traffic flow theory, intelligent transportation systems, multimodal transportation and proactive traffic management and operations. His research has generated more than $25 million in external funding over his 20-year academic career, and he is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Bertini succeeds Jason Weiss, who will remain on the faculty as a professor and the Miles Lowell and Margaret Watt Edwards Distinguished Chair in Engineering.

College of Engineering

About the OSU College of Engineering: The college is a global leader in artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced manufacturing, clean water and energy, materials science, computing, resilient infrastructure and health-related engineering. Among the nation’s largest and most productive engineering programs, the college awards more bachelor’s degrees in computer science than any other institution in the United States. The college ranks second nationally among land grant universities, and fifth among the nation’s 94 public R1 universities, for percentage of tenured or tenure-track engineering faculty who are women.

 

Story By: 

Steve Lundeberg, 541-737-4039
[email protected]

Source: 

Robert Bertini, [email protected]
Scott Ashford, 541-737-1805
[email protected]

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