NTC Director Speaks at White House ARPA-I Summit

National Transportation Center Director Mansoureh Jeihani attended the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Infrastructure (ARPA-I) White House Summit this Tuesday to discuss how the new agency’s budding relationship with the NTC and other university transportation centers could be harnessed to pursue more bold research.

With support from ARPA-I, Scientists at Morgan State and beyond could pursue more “high risk-high reward technologies,” she said, facilitating the kind of long-term research that provides the freedom and flexibility that ordinary funding models often don’t allow for.

Established under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) of 2021, the ARPA-I supoports technological research to improve and maintain physical and digital infrastructure in the United States. This year’s White House summit, the first of its kind, brings together leading academics and policymakers in the transportation and development sectors to discuss how emerging technologies can be leveraged to create a more efficient, equitable, and sustainable transportation network.

Jeihani sat on the summit’s “Spotlights on Innovations in Safety” panel, where speakers addressed the growing challenges faced by municipalities as they address aging infrastructure and climbing pedestrian fatalities. The urgency of the topic was emphasized by the collapse of a portion of the I-95 interstate corridor near Philadelphia that occurred just a day earlier.

Several panelists mentioned the necessity of more durable building materials, noting that many of the techniques to maintain and develop traffic infrastructure had changed little over the past several decades. Others discussed how partnerships like those proposed by ARPA-I have led to significant technological developments in recent years, with the most visible example being self-driving cars.