Dr. Jun Liu is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alabama (UA), and the Director of the NextGen Transportation Lab at UA. He received his PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Prior to joining UA in 2018, Dr. Liu worked as a transportation planner at the Virginia Department of Transportation and as a post-doc researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Liu's areas of research interests are innovations related to shared mobility, travel behavior, road safety, responder safety, transportation planning, intelligent transportation systems, connected and/or automated vehicles, and sustainable transportation. He possesses expertise in Big Data analytics, machine learning, agent-based modeling, micro- and macro-simulations, spatial and/or temporal modeling, and statistical analysis. Dr. Liu has published over 200 scholarly works, encompassing book chapters, journal articles, conference papers, and technical reports.
Since joining UA in 2018, Dr. Liu has made significant contributions to securing $11.9 million in funding. He has been awarded a total of 19 projects, with 14 of them as the Principal Investigator (PI) and 5 as a Co-PI. The funding sources include prestigious organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), US Department of Transportation (US DOT), AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, State Departments of Transportation (Alabama and Georgia), and various local agencies.
Dr. Liu currently serves as an Assistant/Associate Editor for the Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems: Technology, Planning, and Operations, a Handling Editor for Transportation Research Record: Journal of Transportation Research Board, and an Editorial Board Member for Accident Analysis & Prevention and the Journal of Safety Research. Additionally, he is actively contributing to the academic community as a Paper Review Coordinator for the TRB Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing (AED50) for TRB Annual Meetings, and an Area Editor for The Joint COTA International Conference of Transportation Professionals. Dr. Liu also served on the Organizing Committee for the Bridging Transportation Researchers (BTR) Conference (BTR#1, BTR#2, and BTR#3).
Dr. Liu is a member of the TRB Committee on Geo-spatial Data Acquisition Technologies (AKD80) and a member/friend of the TRB Standing Committee on Transportation Safety Management (ACS10). He was (2016-2019) a member of the TRB Standing Committee on Visualization in Transportation (AED80). Dr. Liu has served on an NSF Panel for the Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment (HDBE) Program, and he also served as a panelist for the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) project titled "State and Local Impacts of Automated Freight Transportation Systems" under the project number NCHRP 20-102(22).