Welcome
The Stern Research Group in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering at the University of Minnesota studies problems relating to transportation data, sensing, and control using both traditional civil engineering techniques as well as methods from computer science, statistics, control theory, and other disciplines. This includes both pure and applied research using computational methods and data collection. The underlying question to many of the problems we address is: how can we use data to improve the management of transportation systems?
Dr. Raphael Stern is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, Dr. Stern was a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Munich and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Stern received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Illinois.
Dr. Stern’s research interests include topics at the boundary between computation, sensing, and transportation generally described as transportation cyber-physical systems. This includes research on autonomous vehicles and how they will influence traffic flow, as well as how they can be used for traffic control and estimation. More broadly, Dr. Stern has interests in how transportation data can be leveraged to better understand how humans navigate our built infrastructure both at the city and at the national scale.
Our team members come from a variety of backgrounds including both traditional civil engineering as well as computer science, machine learning, and systems engineering. More information on current and past team members is available under the Research Team tab.
More information on current research projects can be found under the Research tab. If you would like more information about the work being done by the Stern Research Group, please use the contact info on the Contact page.