Dr. Simona MIHAITA is an Assoc. Prof. at the University of Technology in Sydney and founder of the Future Mobility Lab. She received her PhD from the “Institute National Polytechnique de Grenoble”, France in 2012, after 3 years of being awarded an “Allocation de Recherche” by the French government and an International ERASMUS scholarship. After her PhD graduation, she worked as an Assistant Prof. in Computer Science in the University of Lumiere Lyon II and as a Research Scientist and Assistant Prof. in the University of Lorraine, France. She moved to Australia in 2015 and joined Data61 as a Senior Researcher and Team Leader of the Intelligent Mobility group. 

Her research focus is road safety, incident management, response plan optimisation, risky driver behaviour prediction, Artificial Intelligence and data science, traffic congestion, incident duration and severity prediction, multi-modal public transport, connected and autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, micromobility (e-scooters, e-bikes), multi-objective optimisation. 

She is a winner of the 2024 UTS Jenny Edwards Fellowship, 2023 iAwards, 2022 Women in AI Infrastructure across Australia and New Zealand, a triple finalist with the FMlab group in the 2021 ITS Australia Awards in the Transport Data Excellence and R&D, 2021 IoT Smart Cities, a group winner of the 2018 National ITS Awards, an awarded IEEE Senior Member in 2020, a finalist in the 2019 Australian Smart Cities Award, and a nominee of the 2019 Prime Minister's Science Awards. 

Dr. Mihaita holds several leadership roles in various initiatives such as the Australian-Singapore Strategic Partnership via an ARC Linkage collaboration, the “Premiere’s Innovation Initiative” for intelligent congestion management with TfNSW, the “On-Demand Mobility” trials with Keolis Downer, the “Electric vehicle modelling impact” with AEMO, the Investigation of positioning accuracy of connected vehicles with the Road Safety Centre in TfNSW, etc.

Simona has been elected in 2024 as a Board Director for ITS Australia, and is currently an ARC DP and LP Assessor, a Program Committee Member for the ITS Australia - Road Tolling and Technology, Australasian Data Mining Conference (AusDM’19), ITS Australia Summit 2019, and serves as reviewer for TRB, IFAC World Congress, Journal of ITS, Journal of Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory, KSII, JCLP and more. She is an active organiser of various Special Interest Sessions for ITS World Congress and Silver Member of ITS Australia.


More details can be found at: www.simonamihaita.com