Interdisciplinary Analysis

Texas A&M Transportation Institute
1111 RELLIS Parkway
Room 5206
Bryan, TX 77807
(979) 317-2253
[email protected]

Dr. Birt is an associate research scientist Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI), in the Environment and Air Quality Division. His research interests include transportation modeling; information transfer and decision support; and systems modeling. He currently serves as manager of TTI’s Transportation Modeling program.

Dr. Birt’s research focuses on transportation emissions, ecological and human (social) systems, risk assessment, and decision support. This research generally involves simulation, statistical and mathematical modeling, geographic information systems, and web based information technology. He is currently interested in the transfer of theory from ecology/sociology to transportation and engineering domains, and vice versa.

Dr. Birt has worked on a variety of problems focused on the management of ecological systems and the interactions between transportation and the environment. Dr. Birt has published research on a diverse range of problems including: transportation emissions, decision support tools, the ecological and societal impact of irruptive forests pests, sustainability of rangelands, remote sensing, and pests in urban ecosystems. He has served as PI or CO-PI on problems involving transportation emissions, transportation resilience, wildlife-traffic interactions, computational fluid dynamics, transportation policy, and transportation planning.

Before joining TTI in 2014, Dr. Birt was an associate research scientist at the Knowledge Engineering Laboratory, in the Department of Entomology at Texas A&M (eight years). He also worked for four years at Syngenta AG (UK) as an environmental risk assessor, developing custom models to demonstrate the environmental safety of pesticides to government regulators. He obtained his Ph.D. from Birmingham University (UK) and a B.Sc. degree in Zoology from Reading University (UK).