Rate My Professor Haris Koutsopoulos

Haris Koutsopoulos is the COE Distinguished Professor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. He received his B.Sc.Eng. from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 1980, M.S. in Transportation from MIT in 1983, and Ph.D. in Transportation Systems from MIT in 1986. Before joining Northeastern University in Fall 2014, he held faculty appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. He is also a research affiliate with the Transit Research Program at MIT.

His research interests focus on urban transportation networks and informatics, public transportation operations, and mobility on demand. Koutsopoulos has been a pioneer and leader in traffic simulation modeling for over 20 years, developing influential tools including MITSIMLab and DynaMIT for dynamic traffic management, driving behavior models integrated into these simulators, BusMezzo for transit simulation, and SimMETRO for subway systems. Key recent publications include 'Leveraging Individual and Collective Regularity to Profile and Segment User Locations from Mobile Phone Data' with Y. Leng and J. Zhao (ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, 2021), 'Predictive decision support platform and its application in crowding prediction and passenger information generation' with P. Noursalehi and J. Zhao (Transportation Research Part C, 2021), 'Unplanned Disruption Analysis in Urban Railway Systems Using Smart Card Data' with T. Liu and Z. Ma (Urban Rail Transit, 2021), and 'Virus Transmission Risk in Urban Rail Systems: A Microscopic Simulation-based Analysis of Spatio-temporal Characteristics' with J. Zhou (Transportation Research Record, 2021). He has received the Traffic Simulation Lifetime Achievement Award from the Transportation Research Board in 2016, the IBM Smarter Planet Award, and the Northeastern University College of Engineering Distinguished Faculty Award in 2026. His contributions have advanced transportation analysis, planning, and operations through data-driven simulation and network science.