Johanna Zmud, Ph.D.

TTI Senior Research Scientist
Division Head
Head, Multimodal Planning Division

Education

• Ph.D., Social Science, University of Southern California (USC), 1992

Short Biography

Dr. Zmud is a senior research scientist at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) and director of its Washington, D.C., office. She has nearly 30 years of transportation research and consulting experience, with clients at the federal, state, and metropolitan levels as well as international clients. She is an internationally acknowledged innovator in bridging transportation research, data, information, and technology. Throughout her professional career, her major research areas have been mobility analysis, technology applications for travel-data collection, emerging data management issues (e.g., data governance, ownership, and privacy), and the impacts of new technologies on travel demand. Two current policy studies at TTI pertain to autonomous vehicle-deployment scenarios and the impact of autonomous vehicles on travel mode choice and distance.

Prior to her current position, she directed the transportation, space and technology program at the RAND Corporation, a public-policy think tank. The program focused on transportation policy as it pertained to transportation funding and investment, sustainable urban mobility, travel behavior and demand analysis, alternative fuels and vehicle technologies, transportation safety, and public health, as well as science, technology, and civil-space policy. Topics of RAND policy studies and publications include: autonomous-vehicle technology, the impact of socio-demographics on travel demand, mobility scenarios for the United States, future auto mobility in the BRIC countries, mobility scenarios for China, barriers to use of license-plate readers in law enforcement, electronic surveillance technologies, and innovative data-gathering strategies for truck activity data.

Prior to joining RAND, she was a senior executive who built and successfully managed a prominent transportation research practice, NuStats, LLC, specializing in travel-behavior capture and analysis. She was also a visionary who partnered to start a mobility technology firm, GeoStats, LLC, for the real-time capture of travel-behavior information. In addition to capture of passenger and freight data for transportation planning and modeling, she has been highly involved in road-user charging and tolling studies. She has also served as a founding board member of the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority.

Active in the Transportation Research Board, she currently chairs a subcommittee on Data Privacy, Security and Protection Policy, and an NCHRP study panel for a Transportation Data Program Self-Assessment Guide. She serves on a special task force on Big Data for Freight Applications and as a former chair and member of a special task force on Data for Decisions and Performance Measures.