About Me

Dr. Wei (David) Fan is a Full Professor and Transportation Area Coordinator in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte), where he plays a leading role in shaping the future of transportation research and education. A Distinguished Scholar in the William States Lee College of Engineering (LCoEN), Dr. Fan directs the U.S. Department of Transportation’s University Transportation Center for Advanced Multimodal Mobility Solutions and Education (CAMMSE), a national hub for innovative mobility research based in UNC Charlotte’s CEE Department. He also serves as a Thrust Leader and Associate Director of the NC Transportation Center of Excellence on Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Technology (NC-CAV) and is the Founding Director of the Smart, Safe, and Sustainable (S3) Transportation Lab - an interdisciplinary space dedicated to advancing next-generation transportation systems. Dr. Fan earned his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering (Transportation) from the University of Texas at Austin (Hook ’em Horns!) in 2004. He began his career as a Senior Analytical Optimization Software Developer in the R&D Department at SAS Institute Inc. in Cary, North Carolina, where he applied advanced analytics to real-world problems. From 2006 to 2013, he served as an Assistant and later Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Tyler before bringing his expertise to UNC Charlotte. 

Dr. Wei (David) Fan’s research spans a wide spectrum of transportation challenges, united by the goal of creating smarter, safer, and more sustainable mobility systems. His work encompasses sustainable transportation and resilient infrastructure systems (optimization and simulation); big data analytics (machine learning, artificial intelligence, travel demand analysis, transportation safety data, and discrete choice modeling); and emerging vehicle technologies, including connected, autonomous, and electric vehicles (technology development, impact assessment, simulation, optimization, and control). He also advances research in shared mobility and multimodal transportation systems - such as carsharing, bikesharing, public transit, and active transportation modes - as well as traffic operations and control, including traffic simulation, active traffic management, variable speed limits, and managed lanes. His expertise further includes transportation system analysis and network modeling, covering topics such as traffic assignment, network design, freeway improvements, travel time reliability, bottleneck mitigation, and congestion pricing. Complementing this broad research portfolio, Dr. Fan has strong foundations in operations research (optimization and statistics) and transportation-related software development. 

Dr. Fan plays a significant leadership role in scholarly publishing. He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology and as an Associate Editor for the ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, and Transportation Planning and Technology. He is also a handling editor for Transportation Research Record (TRR) and sits on the editorial boards of several other prominent transportation journals. His service to the research community extends to review panels for the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), and Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP). Additionally, he is a member of three American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) committees and serves as Vice-Chair of the Cross-Cutting Division of the World Transport Convention. A frequent ad hoc reviewer for more than 20 leading journals, he also contributed to the review of the 2010 edition of the national Highway Capacity Manual (HCM).

Dr. Fan’s scholarly impact has been recognized globally. He was ranked among the top 2% of the most-cited scientists worldwide in September 2024 and September 2025 - both in the “Single Year” and “Career” categories - within the fields of “Economics and Business” (Logistics and Transportation) and “Civil Engineering.” His honors include the Best Area Editor Award (Autonomous Vehicles and Intelligent Infrastructure) at the 19th COTA International Conference of Transportation Professionals (CICTP2019) in Nanjing, China; the Excellent Paper Award from the 2018 World Transport Convention in Beijing; and a nomination for the UNC Charlotte College of Engineering Graduate Teaching Award in 2016. Earlier in his career, he received the University Research Award at the University of Texas at Tyler in 2012 and was named Best Civil Engineering Professor by students in 2007. He was also recognized as an ASCE ExCEEd (Excellence in Civil Engineering Education) Teaching Fellow in 2007. 

Dr. Fan has been deeply engaged in a wide range of sponsored research initiatives, with total project funding exceeding $17.35 million. He has served as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on numerous studies supported by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), SHRP2 Education Connection, Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), and North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT). To date, Dr. Fan has authored 145 peer-reviewed journal articles, along with a substantial collection of conference papers and technical reports. His publications span multiple areas of transportation research, including sustainable and resilient infrastructure systems, big data analytics and machine learning applications, connected, autonomous, and electric vehicles, shared mobility and multimodal transportation, traffic operations and control, and transportation network modeling and analysis. Dr. Fan is also a licensed Professional Engineer in the state of Texas.