Farewell to Karl Hedrick and a Welcome to Samer Madanat California PATH Change of Leadership :

continued on page 15 S erving as the Director of PATH for the past six years has been a very rewarding experience for me. I took over immediately after DEMO’97 from Professor Pravin Varaiya who had led PATH during the years of the NAHSC (National Automated Highway Systems Consortia). We faced some very difficult times after the demise of the NAHSC but were able to maintain our position as the leading international research institute in vehicle automation while greatly expanding our role in traffic management and information. Pat Conroy and later Hamed Benouar led this initiative and worked closely with Caltrans to apply ITS to the states transportation problems. I am very happy to turn over the reigns of PATH to Professor Samer Madanat. He has had a very successful career as transportation academic in our Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Transportation group. After obtaining his PhD from MIT in 1988 he joined the faculty at Purdue University and finally joined the Berkeley faculty in 1996. His area of research is in transportation systems analysis and infrastructure management. He has worked closely with both the US Department of Transportation and Caltrans. He has an exciting vision for PATH and the energy and enthusiasm to make it happen. I look forward to continue working with Samer and to help him in any way I can to make his vision come true. A Word from Karl Hedrick A Word from Samer Madanat The New PATH: Moving Research into Field Operational Tests