Shifting into High Gear
In the fall of 2023, the University of Tennessee launched the multidisciplinary Institute for Future Mobility, a research cluster devoted to revolutionizing the transportation sector in Knoxville and around the world.
Since its inception, the institute has hired six tenure-track faculty and eight new research faculty across three UT colleges, the Center for Transportation Research (CTR), and the UT-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute (UTORII).
The cluster now includes over 150 students, faculty, and staff researchers focused on mobility and transport, including representatives from every college at the university. Research expenditures for the cluster have increased by 75 percent over the past two years, exceeding $14 million in the 2025 fiscal year.
“I can’t think of any other university that has put this level of investment in mobility and transport research. What we’re building here at UT is unique,” said Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Kevin Heaslip, the director of both the Institute for Future Mobility and the CTR. “The growth in research that we’ve been able to do since this cluster started has significantly elevated UT’s standing within the field.”
With contributions from experts in so many fields, the Future of Mobility cluster can take a comprehensive view of the transportation sector—with research spanning not just new technologies but also the social, behavioral, and economic effects of their implementation.
For instance, would people rely too heavily on a driving assistance program and stop watching the road, or find it frustrating and deactivate it? How would self-driving vehicles impact the job market? Should Knoxville Area Transit (KAT) implement neighborhood shuttles that safely ferry people to major bus routes?
“Understanding how people would interact with new transportation technology is of the utmost importance,” Heaslip said. “We’re doing work that will help us understand how we can design a technology and integrate it in a way that will improve mobility while keeping people safe.”
Career and Community Impacts
Thanks to university support, industry partnerships, and the incredible breadth of its members’ expertise, the Institute of Future Mobility is already having impacts on the transportation sector at multiple scales.
Student researchers and early-career faculty are mentored by more established cluster faculty, creating research projects and networks of expertise that transcend traditional department and college barriers.
“We go about mentoring faculty in teaching, research, and service in ways I never had the opportunity for,” Heaslip said. “It’s a huge ecosystem.”
Cluster research begins at the campus level, with several projects devoted to improving intersection safety throughout Knoxville and helping with parking challenges at UT’s flagship campus.
Research studies scale through the state and regional levels—helping Nashville prepare for self-driving cars, for example—and up to national programs advocating for seatbelt use or training engineers in the skills needed to build and maintain public transit infrastructure.
“The big thing that I try to stress is that everything that we do should be focused on creating opportunities for others,” said Heaslip. “There’s funding and mentorship opportunities for new and established faculty, research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, and then community opportunities that come from our research. The opportunities we’ve built over the last several years are the impact that I’m most proud of.”
Results on a Global Scale
The Institute of Future Mobility is also bringing UT’s transportation expertise overseas. In one notable example, several cluster researchers are currently collaborating with the Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure and the University of Rwanda to develop public transit infrastructure in the capital city of Kigali.
Following the Rwandan genocide, Kigali has one of the youngest populations on Earth, and it is expected to double in the next five years. At the same time, the nation’s per capita wealth has been increasing exponentially.
The Rwandan government’s goal is to build out public transit so citizens do not have to make car ownership their first priority—and so they can avoid the kind of air pollution and traffic jams that plague so many cities.
“A lot of the challenges we’re researching are not unique to Knoxville or unique to Kigali—these are challenges that we’re facing all over the world,” Heaslip said. “The work that we’re doing in this institute has applications from the local to the global scale.”
Contact
Izzie Gall ([email protected])