The University of California Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies is pleased to announce that Scott Moura, Clare & Hsieh Wen Shen Distinguished Professor in Civil & Environmental Engineering will serve as Acting Director for the 2025-26 academic year.
“Professor Moura is an excellent candidate to lead ITS while Professor Rodriguez goes on sabbatical,” says Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Lok Siu. “We are pleased to make the appointment and look forward to working with him.”
Moura currently is the Faculty Director of California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology (PATH), a center within ITS, and the director of the Energy, Controls, and Applications Lab (eCAL), where he mentors undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and visiting PhDs.
“I cannot think of a better choice to lead ITS Berkeley over the next year,” says current ITS Berkeley Director Daniel A. Rodriguez, who will be on sabbatical the next year. “The Institute is in good hands, and I look forward to seeing what Professor Moura will do at the helm!”
Moura’s research focuses on the areas of modeling, estimation, and control of energy systems. He is the recipient of the ITS Faculty of the Year Award in 2020, ASME Division of Control Systems and Division Outstanding Young Investigator Award, National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship, among other notable accolades. Moura has served on the editorial board for the SAE International Journal of Connected and Automated Vehicles. He also teaches courses on energy engineering, optimization, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) for smart cities.
"This is a very exciting opportunity, and I am honored to have been chosen,” says Moura. “I am excited to work with colleagues across ITS to make long-lasting societal impacts through research and innovation., I am also excited to work with Professor Gonzalez as she leads PATH this coming year.”
Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and City and Regional Planning Marta Gonzalez will serve as the Acting Faculty Director at PATH.
“This is a great way to contribute to the ITS and PATH community,” says Gonzalez. “I am excited and thrilled to help guide PATH as we shape current and future technologies and policy!”
Gonzalez is also a Physics Research faculty in the Energy Technology Area (ETA) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her research focuses on urban sciences, with a focus on the intersections of people with the built and the natural environment and their social networks. Her ultimate goal is to design urban solutions and enable caring development in the use of new technologies. Gonzalez has developed new tools that impact transportation research and discovered novel approaches to model human mobility and the adoption of energy technologies.
She is a recipient of the prestigious Joseph M Sussman Prize for Frontiers in Built Environment best article award in 2021, the UN Foundation award in support of her research studying the consumption patterns of women in the developing world in 2016, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation award to study access to financial services in the developing world in 2016. In 2023, she was named fellow of the Network Science Society for her seminal contributions to our understanding of human mobility and transportation networks, and for applying network modeling to solve societal problems in urban systems, and in 2024 she received the Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize for her scientific research in the field of complexity sciences, its applications and dissemination.