2020 UMEC Student of the Year

The Urban Mobility and Equity Center chose Maha Elouni, a doctoral student at Virginia Tech, as its University Transportation Center Outstanding Student of the Year for 2020.

Each year at the annual winter meeting of the Transportation Research Board - a unit of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine - the most outstanding student from each university transportation center is honored for their achievements and promise of future contributions.

Elouni holds two master's degrees, one from Virginia Tech in math and another in engineering from The National School of Computer Science in her native Tunisia. She is working on a Ph.D. in computer and electrical engineering.

"I like this field because it could be applied to solve problems in many other areas like transportation, robotics, biomedical engineering, etc.," she said. "I am interested in traffic flow control, speed harmonization - which is basically regulating a vehicle's speed - connected and autonomous vehicles, intelligent transportation systems, and clustering urban networks."

Since 2016 she has been working in the Center for Sustainable Mobility at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, implementing and developing different control methods to control the traffic flow and speed in an urban network.

"The goal of this research is to reduce traffic congestion and fuel consumption," she said.

In addition to journal and conference publications, Elouni has published a book chapter. She also has taught math courses as a teaching assistant at Virginia Tech, and her computer skills include Matlab, Python, C, C++, Fortran, ArcGIS, Arduino, Java.

Along with English, Elouni speaks both French and Arabic and knows a smattering of German. She hopes to continue to pursue her passion for both teaching and research in her career.

"I would love to work in a research-related job and see the benefits of the applied developed strategies. I also love teaching and mentoring students. I believe that it is important to transfer knowledge to other persons so that they make their own touch in the future. A job that provides dynamic interaction with people would fit nicely to my career ambitions."