Home | News | NWO TOP Grant awarded to TI Fellow Neil Olver
News | March 10, 2016

NWO TOP Grant awarded to TI Fellow Neil Olver

Research fellow Neil Olver has been awarded a prestigious Physical Sciences TOP grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for the research project “Understanding dynamic aspects of traffic”. This grant will fund a PhD position.

The TOP-Grants competition is set up for proposals for innovative or high-risk scientific research that addresses questions of high quality and urgency. Applications should have evident importance for astronomy, computer science and/or mathematics.

Traffic is a serious societal problem, especially in large urban areas. It is also a topic of intense theoretical study. Traffic users are “strategic” in that they adapt their route choice based on delays and congestions caused partly by other road users. This project proposes to understand this strategic behaviour in a model that takes into account that traffic congestion varies over time. Many basic questions, such as computing the equilibrium behaviour of the system, remain unanswered.

Neil Olver is assistant professor in the Department of Econometrics and Operations Research at VU University Amsterdam. He is also affiliated with Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI). He completed his PhD studies at McGill University, Canada, and was a postdoc at MIT. He is originally from South Africa.