The mission of the Center for Research and Education in Advanced Transportation Ecosystems is to serve as the master integrator of resources and expertise to address grand challenges of the global aviation industry while creating opportunities for URM faculty, staff, and students.
The global aviation industry has identified grand challenges in safety; sustainability; workforce development; artificial intelligence/machine language and data sciences in aviation operations; advanced air mobility; financial resource management; and cybersecurity. The School of Aviation and Transportation Technology has been developing faculty expertise and industry partnerships to respond to these challenges. In this pursuit, we have secured state-of-the-art research and instructional equipment, recruited leading faculty experts, developed master’s and doctoral programs, hosted a national symposium on aviation, and facilitated conditions to set-up formal agreements with key industry partners and funding agencies. The next logical step is to create an organizational entity—such as the proposed center—to facilitate administration and purposeful growth of the research projects, customized micro-credentials, short courses, and stackable instructional modules, and support meaningful faculty development, including the creation of fellowships for URM candidates. CREATE will provide an entrepreneurial platform to harness the university’s global partnerships such as the recently announced corporate partnerships with Saab and Ericsson in support of a smart airport, as well as the more developed partnerships in countries such as India and Colombia, that are strategically poised for growth across the transportation ecosystem.