Center for Transportation Research and Education

A team of Institute for Transportation (InTrans) graduate students won the Transportation Technology Tournament, beating out 14 other teams across the United States and Canada.

The tournament, in its ninth year, is hosted at the Institute for Transportation (ITE) Annual Meeting and led by the National Operations Center of Excellence (NOCoE) and the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) ITS Joint Program Office. This year’s event had a record number of 15 student teams competing and an unprecedented 4 finalist teams that competed at the ITE Annual Meeting in Detroit, MI.

“It still feels a little unreal; winning the tournament means everything to us. We spent months working on the project, and having it recognized at the national level was a moment none of us will forget. The dedication shown by my teammates was unmatched. Despite their tight grad school schedules, they were committed to our success,” said InTrans graduate student Camilla Junaid, who captained the winning team.

Her fellow teammates and InTrans doctoral students studying civil engineering included Pratik Sapkota, Adnan Inusah, Sarah Carr, and Gideon Owusu. InTrans Research Scientist and Iowa State University Associate Professor Christopher Day served as the team’s academic mentor.

Per NOCoE, the goal of this tournament is to give students real-world experience by tackling meaningful transportation challenges and coming up with an innovative intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and transportation systems management and operations (TSMO) solution to improve transportation safety. It also gives students the opportunity to showcase their technical and teamwork skills and prepare them for the workforce.

The InTrans team’s winning solution drew on Iowa crash records from 2018 to 2026 to design a connected vehicle–based queue warning system that reaches drivers of both connected and non-connected vehicles through multiple channels, which prompts their controlled deceleration, reduces their abrupt braking, and thus interrupts the potential chain of events that often lead to secondary crashes on high-speed, rural, non-work-zone roadways where drivers are less likely to anticipate a disruption.

“I want to congratulate the students on winning the competition,” said Day, who consulted with the students on their idea, offered guidance on systems engineering concepts related to the competition, and then provided feedback on their presentation. “They did an outstanding job communicating their concept to the judges and the win was well-deserved.”

Junaid said she discovered the tournament while looking for opportunities to explore real-world applications of the theoretical knowledge she gained during graduate school and approached some InTrans colleagues to form the team and then Day to advise them.

“Dr. Day connected us with several industry professionals, including the Iowa DOT’s Tim Simodynes, who were incredibly helpful in narrowing down our problem statement and refining our solution,” Junaid said. “Our mentors were phenomenal, encouraging us to the very end.”

The 2026 tournament began with a kickoff back in February and included three training modules before the teams submitted final solutions documents focused on TSMO and safe systems approaches in the spring. Typically, three teams are selected as finalists, but due to “such strong submissions,” the judges chose four teams to compete at the final event during the ITE Annual Meeting.

The other three finalists were from the University of Texas at Arlington and two teams from South Carolina State University. During the final competition, each team had 10 minutes to present their solutions before facing questions from a panel of judges drawn from the ITS and TSMO industry.

The tournament, which began in 2018, has only had InTrans compete once before, in 2020.