Plenary Session 3

Dr. Joe Zietsman is the Deputy Agency Director of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) where he oversees TTI’s vast research portfolio. He is a national expert on emissions, air quality, and sustainable transportation. He is also the director of the USDOT-funded Center for Advancing Research in Transportation Emissions, Energy and Health (CARTEEH), established in 2016 and renewed again in 2022. He is a past Chair of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committee on Sustainable Transportation and has served in various capacities on TRB committees and task forces. He is a registered professional engineer and is a member of the Graduate Faculty of Texas A&M University. He holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Texas A&M University.

After graduating from RWTH Aachen University in 2016 with an M.Sc. degree in Automotive Engineering, Timo Woopen joined the Automated Driving Department at the Institute for Automotive Engineering (ika) of RWTH Aachen University. His primary research interests include automated and connected vehicles, alongside infrastructural support. He contributed to local initiatives aimed at establishing an urban proving ground at the Aldenhoven Testing Center near Aachen.From 2018 to 2023, Timo Woopen served as the overall project manager for the UNICARagil project. UNICARagil focuses on pioneering modular architectures for agile and automated vehicle concepts, funded by the German Ministry of Research and Education with over €32 million. Since 2019, is head of the Vehicle Intelligence & Automated Driving division at ika. In 2021, he additionally assumed the role of CEO at Thinking Cars GmbH, a startup spawned from the UNICARagil project.

Dr. Viktoriya Kolarova has been working at the Institute of Transport Research at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) for 10 years and currently heads the “Automated and Connected Driving” research group. She has a master’s degree in psychology, a doctorate in traffic modeling and an executive master’s degree in business administration. Ms. Kolarova and her group focus on investigating user acceptance and the effects of automation in the transport sector on individual mobility and society. In addition to managing and supervising national and international scientific projects, Ms. Kolarova supports the exchange of knowledge and strategic research on automated and connected driving through her work on various committees (e.g., the Round Table Autonomous Driving organized by the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport) and through her lecturing activities at leading German Universities.