Hi there, Rajat here!

About me

I'm a Ph.D. candidate in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. My advisor is Dr. Satish Ukkusuri.

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 assesment 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 data analysis, especially expolatory analysis and visualization.

Education

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.

Publications

Peer-reviewed Journals

What determines travel time and distance decay in spatial interaction and ac- cessibility?

R. Verma, S.V. Ukkusuri

Under review in International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (2024)

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

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

Under review in International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (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.C. 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)

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

2021 IEEE International Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), 2021, pp. 1833-1838

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 Posters

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) (2019)

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.