Pablo Guarda

Pablo Guarda

Scientist

Career

Education

Awards

My academic journey

I completed a PhD in Transportation Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Sean Qian in 2023. To contribute to the research efforts of my lab (MAC), my PhD enhanced traditional transportation network models by leveraging existing behavioral theories to depict travelers' decision-making at the micro level together with machine learning techniques to facilitate the analysis of high dimensional data at the network level. Before starting my PhD, I gained extensive experience in research, teaching and consulting in projects related with data science and transportation.

Research experience

After completing my PhD, I worked for Fujitsu Research of America (FRA) as a Senior Researcher. At FRA, I developed advanced traffic simulation and optimization technologies to enhance the Fujitsu's Social Digital Twin (SDT) platform. My core projects leveraged machine learning, network modeling, optimization and computer vision to enhance large-scale, data-driven traffic simulators. I also led a team of data scientists to productionize and extend the traffic simulation technology developed during my PhD. Thanks to multiple collaborations, my time at FRA was very productive in terms of research output and impact. In less than two years, I filed two patents and published a journal article and two conference papers in top venues of the transportation and computer vision fields.

Before my PhD, I also gained relevant research experience. During the first semester of 2018, I worked as a research assistant for the Bus Rapid Transit Centre of Excellence (BRT-CoE) to extend the research conducted during my M.S. at UCL. Back in 2014, I had been a research assistant at the Bus Rapid Transit Centre of Excellence (BRT-CoE) and at the office of CEDEUS in Santiago, Chile. At CEDEUS, I conducted research on fare evasion in public transport and presented this work in various international conferences. During this period, I was the recipient of the Michael Beesley Award for my article Decreasing fare evasion without fines? A microeconomic analysis, which was later published in the journal Research in Transportation Economics. As a result of my master's thesis work, I previously published the article What is behind fare evasion in urban bus systems? An econometric approach in Transport Research Part A: Policy and Practice.​ I was always interested in the policy implications of my research on fare evasion and thus, I was actively collaborating in public events and academic workshops held in Santiago, Chile. </div>

Teaching experience

During my PhD at CMU, I served as teaching assistant for the courses Data Analytics for Engineered Systems (Fall 2019) and Geographic Information Systems (Fall 2020). Before starting my PhD, I worked for one year as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Civil Engineering (DIC) at the University of Concepcion, Chile where I taught courses on: (1) Optimization, (2) Fundamentals of Transportation Engineering and (3) Transportation Planning. During this time, I also coauthored a research paper with colleagues from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Civil Engineering which modelled the relationship between food purchase habits and mobility patterns in Concepcion, Chile through a state-of-the-art econometric framework.

Consulting experience

In 2018, I was hired as external consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to develop a predictive tool of fare evasion in public transport. I had the opportunity to leverage large-scale spatiotemporal datasets provided by the Chilean Minister of Transportation to predict bus stops and routes with high level of fare evasion. During 2016, I worked for 5 months as a Transport Research Intern at the Ross Center for Sustainable Cities at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Washington DC. At WRI, I conducted research and data analysis as part of a project with the IDB and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) to promote low carbon technology transfer in Latin America and the Caribbean. I also collaborated with the BRT-CoE in a project aimed at rethinking the next generation of BRT in China. As part of this project, researchers from WRI and the China Urban Sustainable Transport Research Center (CUSTReC) published the article Comparing Chinese and Non-Chinese Bus Rapid Transit: Evidence from Evaluation of Global BRT Based on BRT Design Indicators published in the journal Transportation Research Record. This article was also an input for a policy paper led by researchers from WRI where I am co-author. After finishing my internship, I worked as a external consultant for WRI on a report exploring the relationships between design elements and operational performance in BRTs.

CV

To download my CV, please click here.