Moshe Ben-Akiva

Moshe Ben-Akiva is the Edmund K. Turner Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he has served on the faculty since 1973. In Engineering, he earned a B.S. degree in 1968 from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, an M.S. in 1971, and a Ph.D. in 1973 from MIT. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of the Aegean, Université Lumière Lyon, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and University of Antwerp. Ben-Akiva directs the MIT Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Lab and serves as Principal Investigator at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). His academic career includes consulting for organizations such as Hague Consulting Group, RAND Europe, and Cambridge Systematics, where he was a Senior Principal and Board member. He has advised companies including Memetics and ChoiceStream, provided litigation support to Analysis Group and Brattle Group, and served as Chief Scientific Advisor to Mobile Market Monitor. Recently, he was a member of the Future Interstate Highway System Committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Ben-Akiva's research interests encompass transportation systems analysis, intelligent transportation systems, demand modeling, econometrics, and infrastructure management. He developed DynaMIT, a system for dynamic network management. He co-authored the textbook Discrete Choice Analysis: Theory and Application to Travel Demand Analysis with Steven Lerman (MIT Press, 1985) and has published nearly 400 papers in refereed journals and conferences. Notable publications include 'Dynamic network models and driver information systems' (Transportation Research A, 1991, with A. de Palma and I. Kaysi), 'Travel demand model system for the information era' (Transportation, 1996, with J.L. Bowman and D. Gopinath), and 'Network state estimation and prediction for real-time transportation management applications' (Networks and Spatial Economics, 2001, with M. Bierlaire et al.). His contributions have profoundly influenced discrete choice modeling, travel behavior analysis, and real-time traffic systems. Major awards include election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2025 for advances in transportation and infrastructure systems modeling and demand analysis; Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences; Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association for Travel Behavior Research (2006); Jules Dupuit Prize from the World Conference on Transport Research Society (2007); Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ITS Society Outstanding Application Award for DynaMIT; and Samuel M. Seegal Prize from the MIT School of Engineering.