The 1st international Ph. D. symposium on transportation opened successfully at Dec. 16th to 17th, 2012. Prof. Yiqiu TAN and Prof. Decheng FENG hosted the opening ceremony and Prof. Imad Al-Qadi and Prof. Decheng FENG gave a welcome address on the ceremony.

This symposium was supported by the Graduate School and the International affairs office of HIT, the research institutes of Liangning DOT and Jilin DOT. Prof. Xuemei DING, the vice president of HIT, gave an address on the opening ceremony. The dean of the graduate school of HIT, Prof. Liang ZHEN; the dean of the school of transportation science and Engineering, Tongji University, Prof. Lijun SUN; the dean of the school of civil Engineering, Prof. Feng FAN, and the dean and vice dean of the school of transportation science and Engineering, HIT, Prof. Xiangchen HOU and Prof. Guofang WU attended the opening ceremony.

Eight Professors and seven Ph.D students from UIUC, Mississippi State University, Univesity of Tennessee and Texas A&M University attended the symposium this time. Meanwhile, professors and Ph. D. students from the Hongkong Polytechnic University, Taiwan Cheng kung University, Changan University, Tongji University, Southeastern University attended this symposium.

The topics of this symposium covered advanced pavement technologies, asphalt pavement technologies, advanced transportation management and planning technologies, transportation safety, and multidisciplinary hot topics. 67 out of 105 papers were accepted. Dr. Meng GUO, Lihua LIU, Robert Grover Allen, Yu QIAN, Jaime Hernandez, Alexander S. Brand were selected as the outstanding presentations.

The 2nd international Ph. D. symposium on transportation will be hosted by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Sep. 2013.