Position Title
Co-Director, Transit Research Center
Associate Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering
Professor Watkins is a leading expert in transit, whose research contributes to the goal of expanding mobility options by improving transit, walking, bicycling, and other alternatives to driving. Her projects are wide-ranging, including basic behavioral research that identifies factors influencing individual travel choices and overall travel patterns as well as applied research carried out in partnership with transportation agencies that leads to innovation in practice.
She is especially well-known for her development of the award-winning OneBusAway program, which paved the way for providing real-time next-bus countdown information to riders. Some of her more recent efforts are an avid cyclist using novel survey research, crowdsourced data, and instrumented bicycles to understand cyclist infrastructure preferences.