Hi there, Rajat here!

About me

I'm a post-doctoral researcher in the Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. My advisor is Dr. Satish Ukkusuri.

Education

I did my Ph.D. at Purdue University, supervised by Dr. Satish Ukkusuri.
I completed my Master's program at Michigan State University, where I was supervised by Dr. Timothy Gates.
I did my Bachelor's at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, where I was advised by Dr. Indrajit Ghosh.

Research interests

My primary research interests are human mobility dynamics and transportation planning, including transportation equity, spatial accessibility, mobility patterns and travel behavior, urban environment and emissions, and network science.
My Ph.D. dissertation is titled Advancing the quantitative assessment of transportation equity for planning. I investigate three aspects of transport equity issues in the U.S. – accessibility to opportunities, unfair distribution of vehicular emissions, and impact of residential location and mobility on health outcomes.
I'm very interested in spatial data analysis, especially expolatory analysis and visualization.
Below is a graphical summary of my research works tagged by type, topic, period, and associated techniques/data:

News

[Mar 5, 2025] Invited talk: "Beyond Traffic: How Integrated Transport Systems Can Transform Cities", as part of the biweekly seminar series “Civil Engineering for the Future” hosted by Dr. Nitin Tiwari at the School of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
[Mar 3, 2025] Workshop: Helped organize a one-day workshop with Dr. Vaneet Aggarwal titled "Multi-Agent reinforcement Learning for Transportation Autonomy" (MALTA) at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2025 in Philadelphia, USA, organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
[Jan 5–9, 2025] Conference: Presented three research posters at the Transportation Research Board 104th Annual Meeting in Washington D.C., titled (i) "Modal accessibility differences using cross-modal floating catchment area", (ii) "What determines travel time and distance decay in spatial interaction and accessibility?", and (iii) "Breathing in the burden: Health inequity due to traffic-related air pollution".
[Nov 20, 2024] Paper: Article published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction titled "Modeling hurricane evacuation/return under compound risks—Evidence from Hurricane Ida".
[Nov 12 & 19, 2024] Guest lecture: Delivered two guest lectures on (i) "The Strategic Side of Freight Supply Chains" and (ii) "Supply Contracts" in CE 597 (Smart Logistics) at Purdue University.
[Nov 11, 2024] Paper: Article published in the Journal of Transport Geography, titled "What determines travel time and distance decay in spatial interaction and accessibility?".
[Oct 30, 2024] Paper: Article published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction titled "Household evacuation decision making during simultaneous events: Hurricane Ida and the COVID-19 pandemic".
[Sep 24 & 26, 2024] Guest lecture: Delivered a guest lecture on Discrete Choice Modeling in Transportation and conducted a group discussion on understanding the nuances of multi-variate linear regression in traffic safety analysis for the course CE614 (Statistical and Econometric Methods I) taught by Prof. Nadia Gkritza.
[Aug 12, 2024] Job update: Joined as a post-doctoral researcher at Purdue University under the supervision of Prof. Satish Ukkusuri.
[Feb 25, 2023] News highlight: Research highlighted in an article of The Washington Post: "These researchers use satellite photos, AI to map crosswalks and fill gaps".

Publications

Peer-reviewed Journals

Spatial Access of America: Multiple indicators of accessibility to opportunities.

Verma, R., S. Mittal, S.V. Ukkusuri

Under review in Scientific Data (2025)

Modal accessibility differences using cross-modal floating catchment area.

Verma, R., S. Mittal, M. Debnath, S.V. Ukkusuri

Under review in Environment and Planning – Part B: Urban Analytics and City Science (2024)

What determines travel time and distance decay in spatial interaction and accessibility?

R. Verma, S.V. Ukkusuri

Journal of Transport Geography, 122(104061) (2024)

Household Evacuation Decision Making During Simultaneous Disasters: Hurricane Ida and the COVID-19 Pandemic

L. Siebeneck , Z. Lei, P. Sharma, R. Verma, P., Osazuwa-Peters, S.V. Ukkusuri

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 114(104914) (2024)

Modeling hurricane evacuation/return under compounding risks – Evidence from Hurricane Ida

Z. Lei, R. Verma, L. Siebeneck , S.V. Ukkusuri

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 114(104977) (2024)

Comparison of home detection algorithms using smartphone GPS data

R. Verma, S. Mittal, Z. Lei, X. Chen, S.V. Ukkusuri

EPJ Data Science, 13(6) (2024)

Crosswalk detection from satellite imagery for pedestrian network completion

R. Verma, S.V. Ukkusuri

Transportation Research Record, 0(0) (2023)

A link criticality approach for pedestrian network design to promote walking

R. Verma, S.V. Ukkusuri

npj Urban Sustainability, 3(48) (2023)

Progression of hurricane evacuation-related dynamic decision-making with information processing

R. Verma, J. Shen, B. Benedict, P. Murray-Tuite, S.V. Ukkusuri

Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 108(103323) (2022)

Spatiotemporal contact density explains the disparity of COVID-19 spread in urban neighborhoods

R. Verma, T. Yabe, S.V. Ukkusuri

Scientific Reports, 11(10952) (2021)

Comparison of Support Vector and Non-Linear Regression Models for Estimating Large-Scale Vehicular Emissions, Incorporating Network-Wide Fundamental Diagram for Heterogeneous Vehicles

R. Saedi, R. Verma, A. Zockaei, M. Ghamami, T.J. Gates

Transportation Research Record, 2674(5), 70–84 (2020)

Behavioral analysis of drivers following winter maintenance trucks enabled with collision avoidance system

R. Verma, R. Saedi, A. Zockaie, T.J. Gates

Transportation Research Record, 2673(10) (2019)

A framework for incorporating the network fundamental diagram into large-scale emission estimation

Saedi, R., Verma, R., Zockaei, A., Ghamami, M., Gates, T.J.

Journal of Transport & Health 9, S54-S55 (2018)

Conference Proceedings

How information heterogeneity influences traffic congestion during hurricane evacuation

Verma, R., Z. Lei, J. Xue, J. Shen, H. Gehlot, S.V. Ukkusuri, P. Murray-Tuite

Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), 1833–1838 (2021)

Conference Posters

Modal accessibility differences using cross-modal floating catchment area.

Verma, R., S. Mittal, M. Debnath, S.V. Ukkusuri

104th Annual Meeting of Transportation Research Board (TRB) (Jan 2024, Washington D.C.)

Breathing in the burden: Health inequity due to traffic-related air pollution.

R.S. Tumula, Verma, R., K. Gkritza, S.V. Ukkusuri

104th Annual Meeting of Transportation Research Board (TRB) (Jan 2024, Washington D.C.)

Assessing Indiana’s transportation and environmental equity using large-scale data.

Verma, R., D. Holguin, M. Debnath, S.V. Ukkusuri

ASCE International Conference on Transportation & Development (Jun 2024, Atlanta)

Leveraging large-scale cell phone geolocation data to inform high-resolution transportation planning in Indiana.

Verma, R., S.V. Ukkusuri

109th Purdue Road School Conference and Expo (Mar 2023, West Lafayette)

An Efficient Calibration Methodology of Microsimulation Model for Signalized Intersections under Heterogeneous and Indiscipline Traffic Environment

Paul, M., Verma, R., Ghosh, I.

98th Annual Meeting of Transportation Research Board (TRB) (Jan 2019, Washington D.C.)

M.S. Thesis

Evaluation of a Rear-End Collision Avoidance System on Winter Maintenance Trucks

Verma, R., Michigan State University

Projects

Kumbh Mela Experiment

This project was an ambitious dig at stuyding the pedestrian movement dynamics of large crowds. The event chosen for this study was the 2016 Kumbh Mela (a major Hindu pilgrimage fair) held at Ujjain, creating one of the largest peaceful gatherings in the world at the time. As part of many tasks and sub-projects, including "Spatial Analysis of Pedestrian Crowds", I worked on pedestrian traffic models to help improve downstream data processing. I studied the social force method in traffic flow theory and created a MATLAB applet for enumerating people and recording their movement trajectory from camera footage.