Eleni Christofa

Dissertation: Network Traffic Signal Optimization with Transit Priority

Advisor: Alexander Skabardonis

PhD Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, 2012

MS Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, 2008

Dipl Civil Engineering (5-year program), National Technical University of Athens, Greece, 2007

University of Massachusetts Amherst Present 

• Professor, Transportation Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering 

Christofa has established herself as an “emerging leader” through her many accomplishments in research, teaching, and service. Her research area is in traffic operations and safety with a focus on the development of sustainable management strategies and infrastructure treatment that improve personal mobility, air quality, and safety in urban multimodal transportation systems. She has introduced two new sources to the CEE curriculum, one on transportation sustainability, and one on pedestrian and bicycle transportation.

Christofa has led the campus-wide Sustainability Strategies Working Group as a co-chair during 2021-2022 and served on the UMass President’s Office “Brain Trust” on Sustainability and Climate Resiliency in 2021. She is an active member of multiple committees in CEE, including the Department Personnel Committee and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee.

Christofa is an inaugural member and the secretary of the newly formed AME70 Transportation Research Board Committee on Transportation and Public Health. She also serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies and as a handling editor for the Transportation Research Record.

Among the honors earned by Christofa in recent years are her selection as: a Family Research Scholar by the UMass Center for Research on Families; the winner of the 2019 Barbara H. and Joseph I. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award from the College of Engineering; the receiver of a 2017 Student-Centered Teaching & Learning Fellowship from UMass Amherst; and the winner of the 2017 Outstanding Young Member Award from the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Christofa was also a visiting professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland in 2020 where she taught a course on Public Transportation Systems.

Christofa earned her Ph.D. and M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece.