CCAT Receives the 2026 Technology Transfer Leadership Award
Photo credit: Calvin Tuttle/University of Michigan, College of Engineering, UMTRI
Dr. Henry Liu, Director of the Center for Connected and Automated Transportation (CCAT), has accepted the Technology Transfer Leadership Award by the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC), a national honor recognizing outstanding leadership in designing and delivering technology transfer programs. Dr. Liu received the award during the CUTC Winter Banquet at the 2026 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
Starting in 2019, the award has recognized the efforts of five university transportation centers from across the country that have successfully scaled and transferred their research into real-world deployments. These universities include the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Morgan State University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Auburn University Transportation Research Center. Awardees are invited to present their programs at the CUTC Summer Meeting, scheduled for June 15-17 in Auburn, Alabama. Debby Bezzina, Managing Director of CCAT, will serve as the presenter during this meeting.
CUTC is an organization established in 1979 by the major transportation research centers and institutes across the United States. According to their website, CUTC’s mission is to “promote university research, education, workforce development, and technology transfer as essential to the nation’s transportation system”. This is the third award CCAT received during the 2026 CUTC Winter Meeting, following Richard Ajagu being named Student of the Year and Dr. Zachary Jerome receiving the Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award. Four projects were recognized for validating the safety performance of autonomous vehicles (AVs), decreasing the frequency of motion sickness, improving traffic signal timing, and measuring an individual’s experience with transportation insecurity.
“Thank you CUTC for this incredible recognition. On behalf of the Region 5 UTC, Center for Connected and Automated Transportation, am honored to accept this award. This is a team award, so I wanted to recognize the CCAT team for their work, particularly Debby Bezzina, Calvin Tuttle, and the numerous CCAT researchers who contributed.”
Dr. Henry Liu, Director, Center for Connected and Automated Transportation (CCAT)
TeraSim is an open-source, generative simulation platform that reproduces city-scale driving environments with scientific realism and interactive fidelity. It builds complete digital twins of real cities, generates naturalistic and adversarial traffic, produces photorealistic sensor data, and connects directly with autonomous-driving stacks such as Autoware for closed-loop testing. Original research for the development of TeraSim was funded by CCAT through multiple projects (1, 2, 3). The core components of TeraSim were subsequently published in a series of papers in prestigious journals, including Nature and Nature Communications. The open-source platform has been utilized by numerous companies and academic institutions, including Isuzo, BotAuto, and Autoware/TierV. TeraSim has been licensed to SaferDrive AI, a University of Michigan spin-off co-founded by Howie Sun. Sun, Liu, and the University of Michigan have a financial interest in SaferDrive AI.
PREACT is a technology that uses vehicle prediction and anticipatory seat cues to help mitigate car sickness in passenger vehicles. With half of children and one in three adults experiencing motion sickness, this is a growing concern with the adoption of autonomous vehicle technology, where everyone becomes a passenger. Originally developed at the University of Michigan, PREACT was supported by CCAT through an initial grant of $450,000. Following promising test results in mitigating motion sickness, a top-three global OEM has partnered with the PREACT team to develop a customized version of the technology. A University of Michigan spin-off named Motion Sync, led by Professor Shorya Awtar and Daniel Sousa Schulman.
“I also want to acknowledge the guidance we have received from the USDOT UTC team, including Dr. Firas Ibrahim, Caesar Singh, and Amy Stearns. Last, but not least, this year is critical for transportation bill reauthorization. Hopefully, our work will help to demonstrate the importance of the UTC program and its real-world impact. Let’s work together to get UTC reauthorized,” said Dr. Henry Liu, who also serves as Director of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI).
Photo credit: Calvin Tuttle/University of Michigan, College of Engineering, UMTRI
There are approximately 320,000 traffic signals in the United States, and the annual congestion costs, both direct and indirect, associated with those intersections amount to $22.9 billion. Most signals operate on a preset time-of-day signal plan. Sometimes, cities send engineers to count vehicles to retime their signals, which is costly and leads to infrequent updates. The Optimized Signal as a Service (OSaaS) monitors current traffic signal performance, diagnoses issues, and targets retiming interventions, providing a low-cost solution for municipalities. The system was deployed in Birmingham, MI, and found a 20% to 30% decrease in the number of stops at signalized intersections. Connected Traffic Intelligence, a University of Michigan spin-off, has been launched by Dr. Zachary Jerome, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UMTRI. Connected Traffic Intelligence has licensed the technology, and a patent application has been accepted. Liu, Jerome and the University of Michigan have a financial interest in Connected Traffic Intelligence.
The Transportation Security Index (TSI), developed by Dr. Alexanda K. Murphy, is a publicly available, validated measurement tool that assesses an individual’s experience with transportation insecurity, a condition in which a person is unable to regularly travel from one place to another in a safe and timely manner due to a lack of necessary transportation resources. Modeled after the Food Security Index, the TSI poses a series of questions that ask how often, in the past 30 days, a person has experienced several unique symptoms of transportation insecurity as observed in qualitative research, such as arriving late to destinations, skipping trips, worrying about inconveniencing ride-givers, or feeling left out. The TSI has been widely adopted across the country by state departments of transportation, nonprofit organizations, and researchers for planning, research, and evaluation purposes. CCAT funded research to reduce survey costs and respondent burden by developing a 3-Item Transportation Security Index.
This story was written by Calvin Tuttle of the Center for Connected and Automated Transportation (CCAT).