Research

Dr. Fan is the Director of the USDOT University Transportation Center for Advanced Multimodal Mobility Solutions and Education (CAMMSE) housed directly under the CEE Department at UNC Charlotte. He is also a thrust leader/associate director of the NC Transportation Center of Excellence on Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Technology (NC-CAV). Dr. Fan is also the founding director of the Smart, Safe and Sustainable (S3) Transportation Lab at UNC Charlotte. 

Dr. Fan’s primary research interests include big data analytics for transportation (machine learning, artificial intelligence, travel demand analysis, transportation safety data analysis, and discrete choice modeling); connected, autonomous, and electric vehicles (technologies, impact analysis, simulation and modeling, optimization and control); shared mobility and multimodal transportation (carsharing, bike-sharing, public transit, and non-motorized transportation (bicycle and pedestrian) systems planning and operations); traffic system operation and control (traffic simulation, and active traffic management including variable speed limits and managed lanes); transportation system analysis and network modeling (equilibrium-based traffic assignment, network design and highway improvements, travel time reliability, freeway bottleneck identification and mitigation, and congestion pricing); operations research (optimization and statistics); and computer software development.  

Dr. Fan has been and is involved in many sponsored projects with a total of over 17.35 million dollars in funding , having been a principal or co-principal investigator on many research studies for many sponsors such as 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).

Research Collaborations: 

• Built a large professional network over the years, both domestically and internationally.

• Collaborated on multiple large grant proposal writings with multiple researchers in various disciplines from 40+ universities across the country. 

• Collaborated on a wide variety of topics ranging from "Improving Mobility of People and Goods" to "Improving Safe" and "Enhancing Transportation Infrastructure", among many others.