UofL Engineering Professor Earns First-Ever EPSCoR Fellow Award for CEE Department

By Michael Phillips

Speed School celebrates a first for its Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering: Assistant Professor Yueshuai “Brian” He has been awarded an NSF EPSCoR Research Fellowship, marking the first time a CEE faculty member has received this distinction. The two-year, $190,437 award, officially titled “EPSCoR Research Fellows: NSF: Transforming Transportation Planning in EPSCoR Jurisdictions through AI-Enhanced Mobility Data and Foundational Modeling,” will fund a collaborative research partnership between UofL and Northeastern University aimed at reshaping how transportation planners understand and predict human travel behavior in data-limited regions.

He’s research sits at the intersection of transportation engineering, artificial intelligence and data science. “Transportation affects nearly every aspect of daily life, from access to jobs and healthcare to economic development and community resilience,” he said. He has long been drawn to understanding how individual travel decisions add up to shape entire transportation systems, and sees today’s explosion of large-scale mobility data as a turning point. “The rapid growth of large-scale mobility data has created an opportunity to move beyond traditional survey-based approaches and develop data-driven models that capture travel behavior with much greater detail.”

Through the fellowship, He will develop new methods to enhance sparse mobility data, correct for sampling biases, and reconstruct incomplete travel trajectories. That enriched data will feed a foundation AI mobility model trained on large-scale datasets, which he will later adapt and test using Louisville-area data to demonstrate real-world applications in transportation demand forecasting.

The fellowship begins in January 2027 and runs for two years, during which He will conduct research at Northeastern University, drawing on its longitudinal mobility datasets and high-performance computing resources. “A successful outcome would include new AI-based methodologies, reproducible computational workflows, strong collaborative publications, and lasting research partnerships between the University of Louisville and Northeastern University,” he said.

Beyond the technical outcomes, He hopes the award will have a lasting impact on his department. “I hope this award helps raise the visibility of the innovative research being conducted within our department and demonstrates the potential for interdisciplinary collaborations in transportation, artificial intelligence, and data science,” he said, adding that the fellowship will also create new training and research opportunities for CEE graduate students and help build momentum for future collaborative funding efforts.

“I am truly honored to receive this award and grateful for the support of my department and university throughout the proposal process,” He said.