Mr. Neal Hawkins is a licensed professional engineer with 34 years of experience in traffic engineering, operations, and safety. Throughout his career, he has held various key roles, including city traffic engineer, consultant, and, for the past two decades, academic researcher. Mr. Hawkins leads research initiatives across diverse domains such as traffic operations, safety, managing disruptions, weather, connected vehicles, work zones, pavement markings, and infrastructure. He holds the position of Associate Director for the Institute for Transportation at Iowa State University, and he leads numerous research projects as principal investigator (PI) or Co-PI. He established and now co-directs the Center for Transportation Research and Education’s Real-Time Analytics of Transportation Data (REACTOR) Laboratory, which is a collaborative research initiative focused on streaming analytics and decision support tools for public agencies. Additionally, Mr. Hawkins fulfills the role of the Iowa Department of Transportation’s (DOT’s) Traffic Operations Research Engineer and serves as an adjunct assistant professor in Iowa State’s Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering. He also co-leads the Federal Highway Administration’s Pooled Fund (Aurora), which includes 19 state DOTs focused on road weather information systems and operations.
