Transportation Research Board
research institute
The Transportation Research Board (TRB) is a division of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). TRB's mission is to mobilize expertise, experience, and knowledge to anticipate and solve complex transportation-related challenges. Committees, researchers, and staff are focused on advancing resilient infrastructure, exploring transformative technologies, and protecting the public’s health and safety. The board publishes research via four cooperative research programs and through consensus studies, which may be requested by the U.S. Congress.
As one of seven major divisions of the NASEM, TRB research is objective and interdisciplinary. TRB hosts nearly 200 standing technical committees that address specific aspects of transportation, and the TRB Annual Meeting attracts thousands of transportation professionals.
History
The Transportation Research Board was established in 1920 as the "National Advisory Board on Highway Research" and changed its name to the "Highway Research Board" from 1925 until 1974, when it was renamed again as the "Transportation Research Board." It has commissioned ad hoc research since 1950, become more involved in multimodal transport in the 1960s, and continues to research across various transportation modes.
Activities and organization
TRB's varied activities annually draw on over 8,000 engineers, planners, scientists, academics, and other transportation researchers from the public and private sectors, who volunteer expertise in the public interest by participating on TRB committees, panels, and task forces.
TRB hosts its annual meeting in Washington DC every January, gathering approximately 14,000 transportation professionals from across the United States and around the world.
At the 2025 TRB Annual Meeting, Nuria Fernandez was presented with the Frank Turner Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Transportation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Transportation Research Board” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.