Building pathways to sustainability: 110th Transportation and Highway Engineering Conference

The 110th Transportation and Highway Engineering Conference marked a record-breaking year with 1,510 attendees gathering at the I Hotel and Conference Center on February 27-28, 2024.

Under the guidance of conference chair and Illinois Center for Transportation rigid pavements lead Jeffery Roesler, the annual conference broadened its reach by introducing sessions on aviation.

This year’s conference emphasized sustainability, with talks by ICT director Imad Al-Qadi on a net-zero transportation system, Aerospace Engineering professor Phillip Ansell on sustainable aviation and a panel on electric vehicle infrastructure.

Robert Molloy (National Transportation Safety Board), Marsia Geldert-Murphey (American Society of Civil Engineers), and Craig Thompson (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) shared on highway safety, smart city engineering and transportation legislation and funding, respectively.

The conference boasted presentations on several ICT and Illinois Department of Transportation research projects:

• Al-Qadi, alongside doctoral students Lara Diab and Javier García Mainieri, highlighted their research findings in “R27-216: Optimizing the Use of Local Aggregate in Stone-Matrix Asphalt.”
• Christopher Schmidt, IDOT’s air quality engineer and IDOT lead of project R27-236: Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Plan in Illinois, participated in the electric vehicle charging panel.
• BJ Murray, IDOT’s section chief of aviation and marine transportation programming and planning, discussed advanced air mobility (R27-241: Advancing Air Mobility in Illinois).

Hadi Meidani, CEE associate professor, addressed “Application of Large Language Models for Transportation Challenges.”

The collective efforts of speakers, moderators, exhibitors, sponsors, volunteers and the planning committee made this event’s success possible.