Dr. Yinhai Wang is a professor in transportation engineering and the founding director of the Smart Transportation Applications and Research Laboratory (STAR Lab) at the University of Washington (UW). He also serves as director for Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans), USDOT University Transportation Center for Federal Region 10. He earned his Ph.D. in transportation engineering from the University of Tokyo (1998. Dr. Wang's active research fields include traffic sensing, transportation data science, artificial intelligence (AI) methods and applications, edge computing, traffic operations and simulation, smart urban mobility, transportation safety, etc.

Dr. Wang is chair of the AI and Advanced Computing Committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) and co-chair for the Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Impact Committee for American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). He served as president of the ASCE Transportation and Development Institute (T&DI) in 2018-2019. Dr. Wang received the IEEE International Smart Cities Conference's Best Paper Award for 2020 and ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering Best Paper Award for 2003. He was also the winner of Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Innovation in Education Award for 2018.