The ASCE Transportation and Development Institute (T&DI) is pleased to announce Dr. Sean Qian, Ph.D., M.ASCE, of Carnegie Mellon University, as the 2026 Francis C. Turner Award recipient. The Francis C. Turner Award was established in honor of the former Chief Engineer of the Bureau of Public Roads and Federal Highway Administrator and is awarded in honor of the nominee’s contributions to the advancement of the knowledge and practice of transportation engineering.
Dr. Sean Qian is H. John Heinz III Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He is jointly appointed at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (by courtesy). He directs the Mobility Data Analytics Center (MAC) at CMU.
In 2020, Qian founded a CMU technology spinoff firm, TraffiQure Technologies, to commercialize AI/ML technologies in the infrastructure and mobility service domain. Qian's research interest lies in large-scale dynamic network modeling and AI/ML applications for multi-modal transportation systems, in development of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) solutions and in understanding infrastructure system interdependency. His research has been supported by a number of public agencies and private firms, such as NSF, U.S. DOE, U.S. DOT, PennDOT, Maryland SHA, IBM, Honda Research Institute, Fujitsu Research, Hitachi Rail, Benedum Foundation, and Hillman Foundation. Prof.
Qian serves an Associate Editor for Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Transportation Science, Transportmatrica B, and Journal of Public Transportation, and an editorial board editor for Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, and is an active member of the Computational Methods and Analytics Committee of TRB and AI Committee of ASCE. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2018 and Greenshields Prize from the Transportation Research Board in 2017.
Qian was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University from 2011 to 2013, and received his PhD degree in Civil Engineering at the University of California, Davis in 2011 and his M.S. degree in Statistics at Stanford University in 2012.