2025 Letter from the Director
2025 Annual Report
Letter from the Director
CTR closed fiscal year 2025 at $14.5 million in annual expenditures. Three years ago, that number was $8.1 million. We nearly doubled the center’s research enterprise by investing in people, partnerships, and the research areas where Tennessee has a right to lead.
Our funding base is diversified by design. Federal sponsors account for 42% of our revenue. The Tennessee Department of Transportation provides 32%. The Tennessee Highway Safety Office contributes 7%. Industry, foundations, and other state agencies make up the remaining 19%. No single sponsor dominates, and that makes CTR more resilient.
We secured $8.3 million in new awards this year across 14 funded projects. Another 19 proposals were approved and are advancing toward a contract. In total, our faculty submitted 37 proposals worth $28.7 million, a pipeline that reflects both the ambition and the competitiveness of this team. TDOT funded 13 new projects spanning pavement performance, aeronautics, freight waterways, data systems, and the I-24 Smart Corridor evaluation. Our freight university transportation center, FERSC, moved into its third year of research across a six-institution consortium. We also launched two new platform projects funded by the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development: one to build a statewide automotive cybersecurity testing capability, and another to develop an AI-driven disaster management platform, each at $500,000.
Our faculty and students showed up. At the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., they presented in 54 poster and lectern sessions. I spoke on the convergence of electric vehicles and autonomous technology at the Electric Mobility Innovations Conference in Cleveland, Tennessee, on AI for transportation at the UTK Sparks event, and on cybersecurity for airport ground transportation at the national Airport Ground Transportation Association conference. These are the stages where CTR’s work reaches the people who fund and use it.
Our outreach programs reached deeper into Tennessee this year. #GetConvinced held 21 teen driver safety events, engaging more than 2,300 high school students. Tennessee Vans delivered its 1,162nd vehicle and added 8 new nonprofit partners, bringing the program’s reach to 362 organizations statewide. We hosted visiting scholar Vladyslav Panchenko through the BridgeUSA Ukrainian Academic Fellows Program, as well as Alphonse Nkurunziza from the University of Rwanda. And two of our graduate research assistants, Matthew Davis and Allison Rewalt, were named UTC Outstanding Students of the Year.
The path forward is clear. We are competing for the next generation of federal transportation center awards. We are deepening our partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory through the UT-ORII Transportation Convergent Research Initiative. And we are expanding CTR’s capacity in cybersecurity, freight resilience, and advanced mobility. This center was built to lead, and FY2025 showed exactly that.
Kevin Heaslip, P.E.
Professor and Director
Center for Transportation Research
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