Peter Jin Receives 2024 ACECNJ Educator of the Year Award
More than 400 industry leaders attended the American Council of Engineering Companies of New Jersey’s (ACECNJ) March event when Peter Jin, an associate professor in the School of Engineering Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), received its Educator of the Year Award.
The award, according to ACECNJ, honors engineering educators who throughout their career have had a positive impact on the engineering profession and policy leadership.
Jin is most proud of his collaboration with Middlesex County and the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) that established the DataCity Smart Mobility Testing Ground as a living laboratory. “It’s a 2.2-mile open-road testing corridor with 12 roadside instrumentation sites incorporating self-driving technologies and Verizon’s latest 4G/5G-based C-V2, or Cellular-Vehicle-to-Everything,” explains Jin. “It currently collects over 200GB of raw high-resolution video and LiDAR data every day at every site.”
Jin predicts DataCity will become a major research and educational platform for next-generation smart city and smart mobility technologies. In addition, a state-of-the-art control center resulting from a second collaboration with Middlesex County will open in late spring in Piscataway that will eventually migrate to the New Brunswick Innovation Hub, Helix.
While Jin has contributed to SoE and CEE department activities in the past, this year he nominated his undergraduate student Marcelo Miyoshi for the ACECNJ student scholarship award. “He won the award, which was announced at the same event,” Jin reports.
He attributes a recent boost in transportation capstone projects among senior civil engineering students at Rutgers as a result of ads for the DataCity program during Rutgers basketball games. “I want to thank our sponsoring agencies, Middlesex County, and NJDOT and our project champions – Mr. John Pulomena and former NJDOT Commissioner Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti.”
For Jin, the award is an honor that recognizes the collaborative effort between public, private, and academic partners. “I’ll use this as a motivation to making the DataCity program a world-class program in enabling the education, research and development, and workforce training for future mobility technologies,” he says.
