Rate My Professor Monica Menendez

Monica Menendez is a Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi and a Global Network Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. She serves as the Director and Lead Principal Investigator of the Research Center for Interacting Urban Networks (CITIES) at NYU Abu Dhabi. Menendez earned her PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006, an MSc in the same field from Berkeley in 2003, and dual degrees in Civil Engineering and Architectural Engineering from the University of Miami in 2002, graduating summa cum laude. Prior to joining NYU Abu Dhabi in 2018, she directed the Traffic Engineering research group at ETH Zurich from 2010 to 2017 and worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company.

Her research focuses on the monitoring, modeling, and control of multimodal transportation systems using new technologies and data sources. Menendez has authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal publications and more than 200 conference contributions, book chapters, editorials, and technical reports. Key works include book chapters on adaptive bus control (2021, International Encyclopedia of Transportation), the external costs of parking (2020, Parking regulation and management), and recent papers such as "No time for stopping: A Stop-Less Autonomous Modular (SLAM) bus service" (2025), "A seamless bus network without external transfers using autonomous modular vehicles" (2024), and "Urban traffic analysis and forecasting through shared Koopman eigenmodes" (2025), all in Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies or related journals. She received the NYU Abu Dhabi Distinguished Research Award in 2021, NSF Fellowship, Gordon F. Newell Award during her Berkeley studies, and over 20 scholarships and awards; five co-authored papers earned best-paper awards in recent years. Menendez serves on editorial boards of top transportation journals, the International Advisory Committee of the International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory, and the Mohammed bin Rashid Academy of Scientists. Her contributions include developing the largest multi-city traffic dataset from 23,541 detectors across 40 cities and comprehensive urban traffic reviews.