PhD Spotlight: John Moody, PhD’25, Civil and Environmental Engineering
John Moody, PhD’25, civil and environmental engineering, focused his research on improving the maintenance of urban rail systems, designing strategies to increase available time for maintenance activities and frameworks to quantify and act on the trade-offs between maintenance and revenue of passenger-carrying service.
John Moody, PhD’25, civil and environmental engineering, began pursuing a PhD at Northeastern in 2021 after earning an MS in transportation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the Transit Mobility Lab, led by his advisor, Professor Haris Koutsopoulos. Highly passionate about public transit and railway systems, Moody focused his research on improving the maintenance of urban rail systems, designing strategies to increase available time for maintenance activities and frameworks to quantify and act on the trade-offs between maintenance and revenue of passenger-carrying service. This research was performed in collaboration with the MIT-Northeastern Transit Lab and its academic research partnership with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA)—the operator of the Washington, D.C. Metrorail system. The partnership allowed Moody to hone in on tactical solutions that work within the complex operational and organizational realities of large urban railway systems while bringing optimization and data analytics to real-world problems, including resource allocation, scheduling, and quantifying rider behavior, service reliability, and maintenance productivity.
Moody’s contributions have been published in the Transportation Research Record and presented at several conferences, including the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., the Transit Data 2024 symposium in London, UK, and the World Conference on Transport Research in Montreal, Quebec. Moody also led a focus group of transit agency professionals in maintenance and management to collaborate on shared challenges as part of the MIT-Northeastern Transit Lab-affiliated Transit Research Consortium. In 2024, Moody was awarded the College of Engineering PhD Outstanding Research Award. He is now working as a senior operations performance manager at Keolis Commuter Services, which is the operator of the MBTA Commuter Rail system.