A paper co-authored by Civil Engineering Professor Srinivas Peeta and Civil Engineering Ph.D. candidate George Kalafatas won the best paper award at the 10th International Conference on Applications of Advanced Technologies in Transportation (AATT) in Athens, Greece. It was selected as the Best Paper in Traffic Engineering from more than 800 papers from over 25 countries. The conference was attended by nearly 1000 delegates and the award was presented on May 29, 2008. The paper, titled "A Direct Bridge between Dynamic Traffic Assignment and Graph Theory," proposes an innovative modeling approach for dynamic traffic systems in the context of real-time operations. From a theoretical standpoint, dynamic traffic networks are modeled using an exact graph-theoretic representation. This enables the elegant illustration of the synergy between traffic flow networks and graph theory. From an application standpoint, dynamic traffic systems can be simulated in significantly reduced computational times. This is an important step towards real-time route guidance in congested traffic networks, as crucial estimates on the network status can be provided faster to drivers.