
Stephen G. Ritchie, Ph.D., F.ASCE, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Irvine, has been named a fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Ritchie is an internationally recognized educator and pioneering researcher in intelligent and sustainable transportation systems planning and engineering emphasizing the development, application, and field deployment of emerging technologies and artificial intelligence techniques for traffic operations and management, and support of infrastructure investment for the nation’s freight transportation system. He has led the Institute at UCI to become one of the major transportation research centers in the nation, while also being the focal point of the highly successful transportation research and education enterprise on the UCI campus.
His research, and his founding of the international journal Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, helped define and advance the scientific basis of what is now the worldwide field of intelligent transportation systems. His current leadership of the Freight Mobility Living Laboratory, a near-real-time, scalable ecosystem for exploring field deployments of innovative approaches and technologies for collecting vital road and rail freight activity data, is impacting research frontiers and the state of practice in California and the nation.
Ritchie has published over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers and graduated 28 Ph.D. students and 25 M.S. students in transportation engineering. Thirteen of his doctoral graduates hold positions as professors of civil or transportation engineering in major universities, and two have won prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER awards.
He is a life member of ASCE and is a recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the ASCE Frank M. Masters Transportation Engineering Award (with citation: "For his innovative work in the development and application of new technologies in transportation engineering"), the U.S. Transportation Research Board Pyke Johnson Outstanding Paper Award, and the Intelligent Transportation Society of America’s Best of ITS Research Award.
Ritchie’s extensive professional service includes being organizer/conference chair/co-chair/organizing committee member for major national and international transportation conferences, including the ASCE international conference series on Applications of Advanced Technologies in Transportation Engineering. He has also served as chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UCI and chaired major campus committees including a national search for dean of engineering at UCI. He has developed and taught numerous undergraduate and graduate transportation engineering classes, including establishing the required UCI CEE introductory transportation engineering class, in which he has taught thousands of CEE undergraduates, preparing them for the F.E. exam and successful careers in civil engineering practice.
In 2024 he was named Chancellor’s Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, an honor granted to fewer than 5% of ladder-rank faculty at the University of California, Irvine.