Sean Qian, Ph.D., F.ASCE, the H. John Heinz III Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, has been named a fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Qian enjoys joint appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also serves as director of the Mobility Data Analytics Center (MAC) at CMU. His research focuses on large-scale dynamic network modeling for transportation planning and operations, as well as the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to multimodal transportation systems, intelligent transportation systems (ITS), and Smart Cities solutions.
At CMU, he has led more than $20 million in R&D projects funded by a broad range of federal, state, and local agencies, private firms, and nonprofit organizations – including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Transportation, PennDOT, the Maryland State Highway Administration, the Appalachian Regional Commission, IBM, Honda Research Institute, Fujitsu Research, Hitachi Rail, the Benedum Foundation, and the Hillman Foundation.
Qian serves as associate editor for Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Transportation Science, Transportmetrica B, and the Journal of Public Transportation. He is an active member of the Computational Methods and Analytics Committee of TRB and the AI Committee of ASCE.
In 2020, he founded TraffiQure Technologies, a CMU spin-off dedicated to commercializing research-driven innovations, with AI-based systems now deployed across five states and two metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs).
Professor Qian is the recipient of the ASCE Francis Turner Award (2026), the NSF CAREER Award (2018), and the Greenshields Prize from TRB (2017). He conducted postdoctoral research in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University from 2011 to 2013, earned his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 2011, and his M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University in 2012.
