Essam Radwan, Ph.D., P.E., Dist.M.ASCE, a professor emeritus in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Central Florida, has been honored with inclusion by ASCE in its 2019 class of Distinguished Members for his pioneering research to improve traffic operations using human-centered simulation and for his outstanding leadership to enhance civil engineering education.
Radwan’s research is recognized worldwide for its incorporation of human factors into the assessment of highway safety. He has striven to optimize traffic flow at intersections and arterials with leading-edge methods that have brought together scientists from the fields of electrical and computer engineering, civil and environmental engineering, industrial engineering, and psychology. The project that used a driving simulator to determine the risk of drivers involved in rear-end collisions while under the influence of cellphones is an important example of his work. Radwan has served as PI or Co-PI on over 80 projects sponsored by federal and state agencies such as the U.S. and Florida State Departments of Transportation.
His contributions to educating the next generation of civil engineers are also exemplary. For most of his tenure at UCF he was chair of the Department of Civil, Environmental & Construction Engineering, where he responsibly reformed the undergraduate curriculum and expanded the graduate program with vanguard research. Mentoring dozens of master’s and doctoral students, Radwan ensured that they, along with faculty, acquired the poise that came with making presentations of their own research progress and findings at premiere forums and at academic and professional conferences locally and often internationally. As his team’s prominence grew, he was able to attract significant and increasing research funding from various levels of government and industry, and he became founding director of the Center for Advanced Transportation System Simulation (CATSS), a multidisciplinary simulation lab of aggregated investigators working with UCF’s Institute for Simulation and Training. It was one of his major accomplishments.
Radwan led UCF’s effort to partner with the City of Orlando on the central Florida team in the Metrolab Network. That network, inspired by The White House, is a grouping of universities with their local cities to bring academic research and resources to bear in helping those cities improve their approaches to such matters as sustainability, economic development, community-building, and public safety. With the benefit of Radwan’s vision and leadership, many emerging topics like automated and connected mobility and energy diversification are being addressed successfully in practice, classrooms, and pilot programs.
He has authored an estimated 260 technical papers and reports, and his work is extensively cited by his peers. He has delivered numerous invited talks at international conferences and professional meetings, and has been a keynote speaker at events everywhere from Australia to France to Singapore and beyond.
Radwan has served ASCE on a plethora of committees since the late 1980s, and was honored with the Frank Masters Award. He is an Institute of Transportation Engineers Fellow, has been active with TRB and the Florida Engineering Society, and his consulting has taken him far and wide.
His degrees are from Cairo University and Purdue.
