Fred Mannering, PhD
Executive Director, Center for Urban Transportation Research, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, USF
Fred Mannering is an American engineering professor known for fundamentally advancing the use of statistical and econometric methods in transportation engineering and highway safety analysis. His work has provided the analytical backbone for understanding complexities relating to accident causation, travel demand, and the behavioral and economic forces shaping transportation systems. Mannering received his undergraduate engineering degree from the University of Saskatchewan, MS degree from Purdue University, and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of economist Clifford Winston and Nobel laureate Daniel McFadden, exposing him to cutting-edge econometric thinking that would profoundly shape his approach to research.
Mannering began his academic career as an assistant professor at the Pennsylvania State University, and in the late 1980’s, he moved to the University of Washington, where he served as a professor and eventually as chair of the Civil and Environmental Engineering department. In the early 2000’s Mannering joined Purdue University, first as the Head of the School of Civil Engineering and later as the Charles Pankow Professor. This era marked a deepening of his focus on highway safety. At Purdue, he was instrumental in advancing the statistical analysis of crash data, mentoring a generation of graduate students, and authoring two influential textbooks that have been used to educate over 100,000 engineering students. Also, while at Purdue, he served as the Editor-in-Chief of the prestigious journal Transportation Research Part B: Methodological from 2004 to 2012, guiding the publication of foundational methodological work in the transportation field. He later became the founding Editor-in-Chief of Analytic Methods in Accident Research in 2013, creating a dedicated venue for high-level methodological discourse in safety analytics. Finally, in 2015, Mannering joined the University of South Florida, where he is currently a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and serves as the Executive Director of the Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR).
Mannering has authored over 180 journal articles, and his published work has been cited over 45,000 times. He is a recipient of numerous awards including the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Wilbur S. Smith Award, James Laurie Prize, and Arthur M. Wellington Prize. For multiple consecutive years, he has been named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher, placing him among the top 1% of cited scholars worldwide. The Eno Center for Transportation recognized him as one of the top ten transportation thought leaders in academia in 2016, and in 2026 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), one of the highest distinctions in the engineering field, “for contributions to transportation engineering data science and innovations in highway safety analytics”.