Intelligent Transportation Lab | Washington State University

Jia Li, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Washington State University

Research Interests

I am interested in developing physics-grounded game theory and machine learning methods towards understanding and solving congestion and safety problems in transportation systems. My current research embraces:

Understanding and inducing multi-agent cooperation in mixed-autonomy transportation
Multimodal perception and reasoning for driving scene understanding and risk forecast

Publications

List of publications available at:

Students

PhD student

Shuyi Wang (Fall 2025–now): working on collaborative perception and vision-language models (VLM) for risk understanding
Lingxiao Zhou (Fall 2025–now): working on modeling and multi-agent learning and control for mixed-autonomy traffic

Undergraduate student

Elie Nonde (Fall 2026–now).

Teaching

Course materials are posted on Canvas.

CE 322: Transportation Engineering
CE 521: Data Science in Built Environment

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to National Science Foundation, Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans), Center for Healthy and Durable Transportation (CHDT), Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT), and Port of Whitman County for generous funding support and in-kind contributions to the research in my team.

Available Positions

If you are interested in pursuing Ph.D. or M.S. or working as undergraduate assistant with me, please send me an email and include your resume and a description of your motivations.