About

I am an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Houston, joining in Fall 2026. I direct the Behavioral Machine Learning and Systems (BMLS) Lab, where we develop machine learning frameworks to model human and organizational decision-making within complex transportation and urban systems.

I earned my PhD in Transportation Engineering from the University of Washington (2025), co-advised by Cynthia Chen and Shuai Huang. My doctoral work was partially supported by the College of Engineering Dean’s Fellowship and the Valle Fellowship, which enabled a visiting PhD position at the Technical University of Denmark, hosted by Filipe Rodrigues. Prior to UW, I received my B.S. in Civil Engineering (Honors) and a Minor in Business Foundations from the University of Texas at Austin, where I worked with Christian Claudel.

My research leverages probabilistic modeling, kernel methods, and representation learning to extract insights from high-dimensional mobility and urban data, with an emphasis on uncertainty quantification, bias mitigation, and interpretability. For a full overview of research directions and open positions, visit the BMLS Lab website.

I am recruiting fully-funded PhD students for Fall 2026. Strong backgrounds in ML, statistics, or transportation/systems engineering welcome.

Email: eugurel@Central.UH.EDU (CV available upon request)

News

• 03/2026 — New paper: “On predicting sociodemographics from mobility signals” in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems [pdf]
• 03/2026 — Joining the University of Houston ISE department as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Fall 2026. Recruiting multiple fully-funded PhD positions.
• 01/2026 — Started as Postdoctoral Associate at NYU Tandon, affiliated with the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), working with Professor Takahiro Yabe.
• 2025 — New paper: “From biases to opportunities: leveraging LBS data for next-generation transportation planning” in Transportation Research Part C [pdf]
• 2025 — New paper: “COVID & telecommuting-induced changes in individual activity and travel patterns” in Transport Policy [pdf]
• 2025 — New paper: “A Framework for Measuring and Benchmarking Fairness of Generative Crowd-Flow Models” in ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies [pdf] [code]
• 2025 — New paper: “Beat the Morning Rush: Survival Analysis-Informed DNNs with Collaborative Filtering to Predict Departure Times” in IEEE Open Journal of ITS [pdf]
• 2025 — Visited the Machine Learning for Smart Mobility group at DTU, supervised by Professor Filipe Rodrigues.
• 2025 — Tutorial on human mobility analysis using passively-generated mobile data [recording] [slides] [code]
• 2025 — New journal publication out! “Exploring biases in travel behavior patterns in big passively-generated mobile data from 11 U.S. cities” in the Journal of Transport Geography [pdf]
• 2024 — Granted the Michael Kyte Region 10 Outstanding Student of the Year Award from PacTrans.
• 2024 — New journal publication out! “Metropolitan Planning Organizations’ Uses of and Needs for Big Data” in Transport Findings. [pdf]
• 2024 — New paper: “Learning to generate synthetic human mobility data: A physics-regularized Gaussian process approach” in Transportation Research Part B [pdf] [code]
• 2024 — Served as a co-project lead on a Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) project @ the eScience Institute. [website]
• 2024 — New paper: “Correcting Missingness in Passively-Generated Mobile Data with Multi-Task Gaussian Processes” in Transportation Research Part C [pdf] [code]
• 2024 — Invited podium presentation at the 25th International Symposium on Transportation and Traffic Theory (ISTTT 25). [code]
• 2024 — Joined Instacart as a Machine Learning PhD summer intern.
• 2022 — Started summer internship as a Consulting Intern at Fehr & Peers in Seattle, WA.
• 2021 — Joined the THINK lab at the University of Washington.
• 2021 — Graduated B.S. Civil Engineering (Honors) + Minor in Business Foundations, UT Austin. Awarded the College of Engineering Dean’s Fellowship from UW.