Biography

Dr. Kari Edison Watkins, P.E., is the Frederick Law Olmsted Associate Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She returned to her undergraduate alma mater to become a faculty member in 2011 after completing her PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research looks at how technology and public space can be used to encourage active (biking, walking) and collective (transit, rideshare) transportation modes. Dr. Watkins’ academic career began focused on transit travel time reliability and the effects of transit traveler information. She co-created the OneBusAway program (http://onebusaway.org/) to provide real-time next bus countdown information and other transit information tools for transit riders in greater Seattle-Tacoma. OneBusAway has won numerous awards and Dr. Watkins dissertation was awarded the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC) Wootan Award for best dissertation in transportation policy and planning. As a long time cyclist, Dr. Watkins has more recently focused on cyclist infrastructure preferences through survey research, instrumented bicycles, and crowdsourced cycling data. Dr. Watkins has been recognized with the CUTC New Faculty Award, as a Mass Transit Magazine Top 40 under 40, as a three-time invitee to a National Academy of Engineers Frontiers of Engineering, and as a Top 100 Influential Women in Georgia by Engineering Georgia. Prior to her doctoral studies, Dr. Watkins worked for a decade as a senior transportation engineer at Wilbur Smith Associates in New Haven, Connecticut. In line with her years in industry, Dr. Watkins’ teaching focus is on including multimodal transportation concepts throughout the curriculum and sending top-notch engineers into the workforce through practical experience in the Senior Capstone course.