Lily Elefteriadou, Ph.D.

Barbara Goldsby Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering

Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering

2024 Awardee

Lily Elefteriadou has made significant contributions to advances in the transportation sector. An international leader in transportation engineering, her research focuses on groundbreaking work in critical areas such as signal control optimization, highway capacity analysis and traffic management using advanced transportation technologies. Elefteriadou’s work has contributed extensively to understanding and managing transportation systems.

Her expertise in highway capacity analysis involves developing analytical and simulation models to assess the performance of highway facilities in response to design configurations and environmental factors. Elefteriadou’s research on traffic management includes optimizing, simulating and developing models that consider the performance of autonomous and connected vehicles, sensors, and real-time information systems. Additionally, her work on signal control optimization has aimed to maximize traffic flow and minimize travel times on highways.

As a leader of various projects for the National Science Foundation and state and federal transportation agencies, Elefteriadou has spearheaded the development of algorithms for a smart intersection that enables autonomous vehicle trajectories to optimize traffic flow. Her utilization of data from connected and autonomous vehicles in researching signal control optimization and freeway management has been instrumental in developing methods that may alleviate congestion and reduce travelers’ time in traffic.

In 2011 and 2017, Elefteriadou led a team of 10 universities and was successful in securing a federally funded Regional University Transportation Center for the southeast U.S., one of 10 such centers in the country.

As founding director of the University of Florida Transportation Institute, she created the I-STREET Living Lab in collaboration with the Florida Department of Transportation and the City of Gainesville. I-STREET is an open-road area and lab dedicated to testing and deploying leading-edge transportation technologies. Its road network includes Gainesville, the University of Florida campus and segments of Interstate 75 and Interstate 4.

For her accomplishments in transportation engineering research, Elefteriadou has received numerous awards. They include the 2021 American Road and Transportation Builders Association Research and Education Award S.S. Steinberg Award, the 2019 American Society of Civil Engineers Harland Bartholomew Award for work on I-STREET and the 2015 James Laurie Prize for contributions to highway capacity analysis. She earned a doctoral degree in transportation planning and engineering from New York University.