Research

Dr. Wei (David) Fan serves as the Director of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s University Transportation Center for Advanced Multimodal Mobility Solutions and Education (CAMMSE), which is housed within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at UNC Charlotte. He also holds the roles of 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 at UNC Charlotte.

Dr. Fan’s research interests encompass a wide array of topics, including sustainable transportation and resilient infrastructure systems (optimization and simulation); big data analytics in transportation (machine learning, artificial intelligence, travel demand forecasting, safety data analysis, and discrete choice modeling); connected, autonomous, and electric vehicles (technology development, impact analysis, simulation, optimization, and control); shared mobility and multimodal transportation systems (carsharing, bikesharing, public transit, and non-motorized modes such as bicycling and walking); traffic operations and control (simulation and active traffic management strategies, including variable speed limits and managed lanes); and transportation system analysis and network modeling (equilibrium-based traffic assignment, network design, highway improvements, travel time reliability, bottleneck identification and mitigation, and congestion pricing). His expertise also includes operations research (optimization and statistics) and transportation software development.

Dr. Fan has been involved in numerous sponsored research projects, with total funding exceeding $17.35 million. He has served as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on many studies funded by agencies 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:

Dr. Fan has established an extensive professional network both nationally and internationally through years of academic and research engagement. He has collaborated with researchers from over 40 universities across the United States on a wide range of interdisciplinary topics. These collaborations have included joint efforts on numerous large-scale grant proposals, spanning themes such as improving the mobility of people and goods, enhancing transportation safety, and advancing transportation infrastructure. His work reflects a broad commitment to addressing complex, cross-cutting challenges in the transportation field through collaborative research.

"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there."