Nan Part Of $4.5 Million Doe Grant

Energy Dept. grant studies the provision of personalized, real-time traveler information designed to incentivize energy-efficient travel.

Dr. Xiaoli Nan, Director of the University of Maryland Center for Health and Risk Communication and Associate Professor of Communication Science in the Department of Communication, is part of a multidisciplinary research team that has been awarded a competitive $4.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) to study the provision of personalized, real-time traveler information designed to incentivize energy-efficient travel behaviors.

The multidisciplinary team consists of researchers from four different universities specialized in such diverse fields as communication science, civil and environmental engineering, and economics. As Co-Principal Investigator on this project, Dr. Nan will be overseeing the behavior research part of the project and be responsible for developing and testing the effectiveness of incentive structure for motivating user compliance with personalized, real-time travel advices delivered through an innovative mobile app platform. The overarching goal of this project is to develop technology that will enable individual travelers to adopt energy-efficient travel behaviors in order to reduce overall energy consumption (and fuel emission) in transportation systems.

This award is one of only five made via a national competition by the DOE through its newest TRANSNET initiative.