In June of 2006, Dr. Robert Honea became the first director of KU TRI. Dr. Honea, a Georgia native, had been a director of the Transportation Technology Center and National Transportation Research Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) before leaving in 2001 after 30 years of service. While at ORNL, he led the effort to build an 85,000-square-foot transportation research facility and coordinated more than $120 million in research and development work for the Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Department of Defense (DOD), the state of Tennessee, private industries, and nonprofit organizations.
Dr. Honea began his career as a university professor and a principal investigator (PI) on National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Department of Defense research grants. He also was an IEEE/NASA Science Faculty Research Fellow at Marshall Space Flight Center where he assisted in establishing Marshall's Earth Resources and Remote Sensing Research Program. From 1974 to 2001 he was a scientist, a research manager and a program director at the Department of Energy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In October 2001, he took a research position at the University of Tennessee as a senior research associate in the Joint UT/ORNL Center for Homeland Security and Counter-proliferation. He also served as a consultant to ORNL and several startup companies.
Dr. Honea has published more than 100 journal articles, reports, papers, and presentations. These publications cover a broad range of fields including transportation, remote sensing, environmental and economic modeling, energy technology development, industrial location theory, national security, and defense deployment systems. Dr. Honea received his BS degree in mathematics and MA degree in quantitative geography from the University of Georgia, and his Ph.D. in industrial location theory and regional modeling geography from the University of Florida.
