Hongren Gong is an Associate Professor and doctoral supervisor in the Department of Road and Airport Engineering. He graduated from the University of Tennessee, USA in 2018, obtaining a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering and a Master's degree in Statistics. After graduation, he worked at the university as a postdoctoral researcher, focusing on big data-driven road asset management, performance prediction, and optimization of operation and maintenance decisions, automatic perception and recognition of pavement conditions, and mining of road image information. In January 2021, he joined the Department of Road and Airport Engineering of the School of Transportation Engineering at Tongji University.
Over the past five years, he has published of 28 SCI journal papers as first/corresponding author (including 18 papers in JCR Q1 journals) and inclusion of 1 paper in ESI highly cited papers. He has been awarded funding for 1 National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Young Scientist Project, 1 Shanghai Natural Science Foundation project, and support from the "Overseas High-Level Talent" program in Shanghai. He has won first place twice in the Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) International Data Analysis Competition. He has contributed to the editing of two EI-indexed academic paper collections (ranked 2nd and 5th, respectively) and organized two special issues in authoritative SCI journals, International Journal of Pavement Engineering and Road Materials and Pavement Design, in the field of road engineering. He serves as a junior editor for the Journal of Road Engineering.
Education
PhD (2018), The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States, Civil Engineering
MS (2018), The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States, Statistics
MS (2013), Chongqing Jiaotong University, China, Road and Rail Engineering
BS (2010), Chongqing Jiaotong University, China, Highway and Urban Road Engineering
Experience
· 2018.08-2020.10, Postdoctoral Research Associate, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States
· 2021.1-2023.12, Assistant Professor, College of Transportation Engineering
2024.01-Present, Associate Professor, College of Transportation Engineering
Research interests
· Road/Airport pavement maintenance and asset management
· Advanced sensing technologies applied in transportation infrastructure condition survey
· Computer vision and machine learning integrated road/airport pavement condition assessment
Honors & Awards
· 2020，International Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) data analysis contest，First Prize Winner （Graduate Category）
· 2018，International Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) data analysis contest，First Prize Winner （Aramiz Lopez Challenge Category）
Publications
1. Gong, Hongren, Ting Fu, Yiren Sun, Zhongyin Guo, Lin Cong, Wei Hu, and Ziwen Ling. "Two-vehicle driver-injury severity: A multivariate random parameters logit approach." Analytic methods in accident research 33 (2022): 100190.
2. Zhang, Miaomiao, Hongren Gong, Xiaoyang Jia, Xi Jiang, Ning Feng, and Baoshan Huang. "Determining pavement structural number with traffic speed deflectometer measurements." Transportation Geotechnics 35 (2022): 100774.
3. Gong, Hongren, Yiren Sun, Yuanshuai Dong, Wei Hu, Bingye Han, Pawel Polaczyk, and Baoshan Huang. "An efficient and robust method for predicting asphalt concrete dynamic modulus." International Journal of Pavement Engineering (2021): 1-12.
4. Gong, Hongren, Yiren Sun, Wei Hu, and Baoshan Huang. "Neural networks for fatigue cracking prediction using outputs from pavement mechanistic-empirical design." International Journal of Pavement Engineering 22, no. 2 (2021): 162-172. （ESI）
5. Chen, Liuxiao, Boming Tang, Tangzhi Liu, Hao Xiang, Qijin Sheng, and Hongren Gong*. "Modeling traffic noise in a mountainous city using artificial neural networks and gradient correction." Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment 78 (2020): 102196.
6. Gong, Hongren, Yiren Sun, and Baoshan Huang. "Estimating asphalt concrete modulus of existing flexible pavements for mechanistic-empirical rehabilitation analyses." Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering 31, no. 11 (2019): 04019252.
7. Gong, Hongren, Yiren Sun, and Baoshan Huang. "Gradient boosted models for enhancing fatigue cracking prediction in mechanistic-empirical pavement design guide." Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part B: Pavements 145, no. 2 (2019): 04019014.
8. Gong, Hongren, Yiren Sun, Xiang Shu, and Baoshan Huang. "Use of random forests regression for predicting IRI of asphalt pavements." Construction and Building Materials 189 (2018): 890-897.
9. Gong, Hongren, Baoshan Huang, Xiang Shu, and Sampson Udeh. "Local calibration of the fatigue cracking models in the mechanistic-empirical pavement design guide for Tennessee." Road Materials and Pavement Design 18, no. sup3 (2017): 130-138.
10. Gong, Hongren, Qiao Dong, Baoshan Huang, and Xiaoyang Jia. "Effectiveness analyses of flexible pavement preventive maintenance treatments with LTPP SPS-3 experiment data." Journal of Transportation Engineering 142, no. 2 (2016): 04015045.