CUTR names new Executive Director and Associate Director

On October 7, 2021, Robert H. Bishop, dean of the University of South Florida’s College of Engineering, announced that Fred Mannering, Ph.D., accepted the position of Executive Director and Lisa Staes accepted the position of Associate Director for the Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR).

“We are both excited to begin this new adventure and we look forward to the future of CUTR and its research,” said Dr. Mannering at a meeting with CUTR employees.

Dr. Mannering is a highly decorated scholar and academic researcher who has been actively involved with engineering and transportation research. He has published extensively over the years and his work has been cited over 28,000 times in Google Scholar. Dr. Mannering has supervised 26 Doctoral students, many of whom hold prominent academic and industry appointments. He has received numerous awards over his career, most recently being included on Clarivate’s annual list of the world’s most highly cited researchers (2019 and 2020) and receiving the Council of University Transportation Centers Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. Previously, Dr. Mannering served as the Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington and Head of the School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University.

Lisa Staes was previously the program director of CUTR’s Transit Safety and Workforce Development program. She has authored several publications for the Transportation Research Board (TRB) and the Federal Transit Administration. Ms. Staes is the chair of TRB’s Task Force on Transit Safety and Security and an active member on several TRB committees and subcommittees. She also serves as an editorial board member of Elsevier’s Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives (TRIP) Journal. She manages the high-profile national Federal Transit Administration Standards Development Program that is now in its 5^th year with a total budget of $7M. In the last three years as a program director, Ms. Staes oversaw over $10M in sponsored projects.

“I am delighted and grateful for the opportunity to work at CUTR as the associate director,” said Ms. Staes. “CUTR’s dedicated and impassioned employees conduct extremely meaningful work, and I am excited about the future holds for us.”

Both Dr. Mannering and Ms. Staes have been working in these positions since 2020 and led the organization through the COVID pandemic, remote work, and new contracts and research.

Dr. Mannering and Ms. Staes begin their appointments immediately.