Kumares Sinha named Honorary Member of ITE
Kumares C. Sinha, the Edgar B. and Hedwig M. Olson Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering, has been named an Honorary Member by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), the highest recognition of notable and outstanding professional achievement ITE presents to an individual.
ITE is an international membership association of transportation professionals who work to improve mobility and safety for all transportation system users and help build smart and livable communities. Since its founding in 1930, it has bestowed the Honorary Membership on only 97 members. From the ranks of Purdue researchers, Dr. Sinha follows in the footsteps of former Dean of Engineering Andrew Potter in 1948 and former Civil Engineering Head and Professor Harold Michael in 1980.
Dr. Sinha’s long and sustained service to the transportation industry has taken him across the globe, and has had profound impact as a mentor on ITE members from students all the way up to leaders at the International level. Dr. Sinha serves as the Edgar B. & Hedwig M. Olson Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering at Purdue University. He was the Head of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems Area from 1981-2001 and Director of the Joint Transportation Research Program of Purdue University and Indiana Department of Transportation from 1995-2010. For more than 5 decades, his research has covered an enormity of areas, from highway engineering, traffic operations and safety analysis to land use-transportation system modelling, transportation financing, civil infrastructure management, and applications of emerging technologies in transportation. He has developed and taught a wide variety of transportation courses, including traffic engineering, public transportation, infrastructure planning and management, and intelligent transportation systems.
Dr. Sinha’s work in the industry does not know borders, and his interest in transportation began as a college student at Jadavpur University in India when he contemplated the challenge of building roads in areas with alluvial soils and rivers prone to frequent flooding. With an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering, post-graduate studies in Town Planning and Municipal Engineering, and doctoral work in Transportation Engineering to inform physical infrastructure development, he has taken this intrigue with planning and engineering throughout his career. In the mid-1980s, Dr. Sinha became involved with the World Bank when he was invited to develop a resource base for considering environmental and ecological impacts of land transportation. Since then, he has served as a Transportation Systems consultant for more than 30 different Work Bank projects in places including Bangladesh, Nepal, Palestine, China, India, Iran, and Yemen.
Dr. Sinha has been dedicated to the profession and influential with many organizations, including ITE. He served on the Executive Committee of the Transportation Research Board and is currently on the editorial boards of five professional journals, including the Journal of Transportation Engineering as Editor-In-Chief Emeritus. Professor Sinha was Advisor to Purdue University’s ITE Student Chapter in the 1970s. While he is no longer the advisor, he continues to stay active supporting this successful chapter and its students including holding regular seminars. Dr. Sinha has supervised more than 50 Ph.D. candidates, 30 post-doctoral scholars, and hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students.