Short Bio

I am currently a PhD student and Graduate Research Assistant in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of Utah. Before coming to UofU, I worked as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Civil Engineering at IUBAT, Bangladesh. I completed my BS in Civil Engineering in 2012 from Islamic University of Technology and my MS degree in Civil Engineering (Transportation) in 2019 from the same institution. During my master's, I worked on developing spatio-temporal multi-task learning architectures for ride-hailing systems with anonymized spatial adjacency information. 

For my PhD, I am working on a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which focuses on improving paratransit services for seniors and people with disabilities. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 requires transit agencies across the United States to provide door-to-door paratransit transportation services for individuals who cannot use conventional transit. These ride-sharing services, commonly known as dial-a-ride (DAR) or ADA paratransit, are typically provided through subcontractors. Although DAR customers are required to pay a fare similar to conventional transit, the actual cost of a DAR trip can be 10 times higher due to low vehicle occupancy, specialized vehicles, and increased labor per passenger. Consequently, paratransit services are heavily subsidized, and service providers are under pressure to reduce their operating costs. To address this challenge, I am working on developing novel algorithms to optimize the paratransit operations that will substantially reduce the operational cost for ADA paratransit.

Despite having a civil engineering background, I have a strong inclination toward data science, machine learning, and operations research; I enjoy utilizing them to solve problems within the transportation domain, especially problems pertaining to planning, operations, and simulation of transportation systems. 

Outside of work, I enjoy playing basketball, traveling, and hiking.