I am currently a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University.  I received my B.S. degree in Structural Engineering from Tsinghua University in 1999, my M.S. degree from National University of Singapore in 2001, and my Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 2006.  I have been a faculty member at Northwestern since 2006 and a full professor since 2017.    My research area can be broadly described as Transportation Systems Analysis, aiming to better understand and predict the behavior of networked transportation systems, and to formulate new strategies to improve their performance. Unlike networks arising from other domains such as computer engineering and social studies, the behavior of a transportation network depends on the interactions between human activities, physical characteristics of the infrastructure and network topology. As a result, my research takes an interdisciplinary approach that draws on tools from optimization, network science, traffic flow theory, economics, and statistics.

I had served as a member of the standing committees on Transportation Network Modeling and Traffic flow Theory and Characteristics for Transportation Research Board.    Currently I am  an Area Editor for Transportation Science and  for Networks and Spatial Economics, an Associate Editor for Service Science and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Transportation Research Part A and B.  In the past decade, my research has been supported by National Science Foundation, Transportation Research Board, US Department of Transportation, US Department of Energy, and Illinois Department of Transportation.

If you would like to know a bit more about me, here is a profile made for CEE faculty spotlight.

My Google Scholar Profile is here.

My Scopus Profile is here.

My latest CV is NieYunewCV.