Piyushimita Vonu Thakuriah

Dr. Vonu Thakuriah is a Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Rutgers Urban and Civic Informatics (RUCI) Lab. Her interdisciplinary research bridges transportation systems, smart cities, urban and geospatial AI, big data analytics, and social and economic cyberinfrastructure. Her research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the European Commission, UK Research and Innovation, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, US Department of Transportation, and other leading federal, state and local agencies. To date, she has served as Principal Investigator (PI) or Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) on more than $70 million in externally sponsored research funded by national, state, and local agencies, including over $25 million as PI. She has given keynote addresses and plenary talks at prestigious international and national scientific venues including the National Academy of Sciences, the European Commission in Brussels and Luxembourg, the Royal Academy of Engineering in London, the Leibnitz Center for Informatics in Germany, and the National Institute of Informatics in Japan.

Dr. Thakuriah currently serves as a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Board of Mathematical Sciences and Analytics’ Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, where she has supported an interdisciplinary data science agenda on multi-modal data fusion and digital twins, and generally on Scientific AI. She serves on the editorial boards of Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, the Harvard Data Science Review, and the Journal of Big Data Analytics in Transportation. She is on the advisory board of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s GREAT Smart Cities Institute, and previously served as a member of the UK Office of National Statistics Data Science Advisory Board, and as chair of the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s International Expert Committee on Smart Cities. She served as the Dean of the Bloustein School in Rutgers University, and as the Ch2M Endowed Chair Professor of Transport in the University of Glasgow, UK. She is the founding director of the Urban Big Data Centre, a UK-wide infrastructure for urban research funded by UKRI. She was a Marie Curie Fellow of the European Commission, and her postdoctoral fellowship was funded by the NSF’s Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Institute of Statistical Sciences.