معرفی
Natacha Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Rhode Island (URI), located in the Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering. She specializes in transportation engineering, traffic flow analysis, and disaster management. Her research focuses on topics like pedestrian evacuation during extreme events, traffic anomaly detection, and climate change impacts on infrastructure. She has served as Co-PI on a 2018 grant for the University Transportation Center Regional 1 collaboration with the University of Maine.
Education: PhD in Civil and Materials Engineering from the University of Illinois (1994), MS in Civil Engineering from the University of Maryland (1989), and BS in Civil Engineering from Université d’État d’Haïti (1984).
Research interests span interdisciplinary areas including sustainable infrastructure design, pavement performance prediction, and resilience of transportation networks. Recent work emphasizes climate adaptation strategies for road systems and hurricane risk mitigation in coastal regions.
Her publications highlight contributions to highway geometric design optimization, pavement rehabilitation techniques, and software development for multidisciplinary research collaboration. She has advised multiple graduate students whose theses/dissertations address transportation challenges such as hurricane evacuation modeling and asphalt recycling.
Labs/Teams: Active in URI’s transportation research initiatives, contributing to both academic and applied projects in civil engineering.
