Global sources of the U.S. transportation research workforce

Understanding how transportation research capacity is built and sustained requires empirical evidence on who enters the academic workforce, where they are trained, and how the workforce’s composition evolves over time. This paper provides a field-level measurement baseline for the U.S. transportation research workforce using a harmonized roster of 553 transportation-focused faculty across 151 ranked U.S. civil and environmental engineering departments assembled from publicly available sources. Positioned at the intersection of science, geography of knowledge, and academic labor market research, the study characterizes the geographic origins of the workforce by tracing where faculty completed their undergraduate education, a pre-doctoral indicator of how the field sources advanced human capital from global higher education systems. Two patterns emerge. First, faculty with undergraduate training in the United States represent the largest single source of workforce capacity (approximately one third) but do not constitute a majority. China is the second largest origin (just over one fifth), followed by a broad set of countries spanning many world regions. Second, the origins of newly entering faculty have shifted across cohorts defined by Ph.D. completion year: the domestic share has declined since the 1990s while the share trained in China has increased. These results indicate that the U.S. transportation academic workforce draws on global higher education and mobility systems. They provide an empirical baseline for transportation programs, professional societies, and federal agencies concerned with research capacity, knowledge diffusion, and workforce resilience.