Prateek Bansal

Biography

Dr Prateek Bansal is a Presidential Young (Assistant) Professor who joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in December 2021. Before joining NUS, he was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Imperial College London. Dr Bansal leads the Behavioural Computational Science (BeCoS) lab at NUS. His group develops novel methods at the intersection of AI, Econometrics, Causal Inference, and Psychology to nudge and forecast mobility behaviour and the adoption of emerging technologies at an individual level and urban scale.

Qualifications

• PhD, Transportation Engineering (Minor: Statistics and Econometrics), Cornell University, USA, 2016-2019
• MS, Transportation Engineering (Minor: Statistical Modelling), The University of Texas at Austin, USA, 2013-2015
• BTech, Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, 2008-2013

Position Held

• Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore, 2021 – Present
• Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, Imperial College London, UK, 2019-2021
• Exchange scholar, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile, 2018
• Exchange scholar, University of California, Berkeley, USA, 2018
• Visiting researcher, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 2015
• Research intern, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2013
• Research intern, University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada, 2012
• Research intern, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, 2012

Grants, Honours & Awards

• Best Poster Award, 8th Conference of Transportation Research Group of India, Guwahati, 2025.
• Best Paper Award, 17^th World Conference of Transport Research, Montreal, Canada, 2023
• Outstanding Paper Award, 40^th International Conference of the Korean Society of Transport, 2022
• Presidential Young Professorship, National University of Singapore, 2021
• Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, UK, 2020
• Exchange Research Grant, Cornell University, 2018
• Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship, Honourable Mention, 2018
• David Bruton Graduate Fellowship, the University of Texas at Austin, 2015
• Texas Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Scholarship, 2015
• Multiple travel awards by NSF, SIAM, IIF, Fields Institute, & World Bank (~US$26,000), 2015-2018

Professional Activities 

• Elected board member, International Association of Travel Behaviour Research (IATBR), 2024-2027
• Associate Editor, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2026-Present
• Associate Editor, Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2026-Present
• Editorial Board Member, Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 2026-Present
• Editorial Board Member, Data Science in Transportation, 2023-Present
• Editorial Advisory Board Member, Journal of Choice Modelling, 2023-Present
• Standing Committee Member, TRB Travel Data & Methods (AED17), Transportation Research Board, 2025-present
• Standing Committee, Travel Survey Methods (AEP25), Transportation Research Board, 2023-2025
• Standing Committee, Travel Forecasting (AEP50), Transportation Research Board, 2023-2025

Invited Seminars

• Keynote speaker, 17th workshop on Discrete Choice Models, EPFL, Switzerland 2025
• Invited Talk, Big Data, AI and Transport Planning Workshop, University of Washington, 2025
• Invited Talk, Data, Network, and AI Summer Research Camp, KAIST, 2025
• Invited Talk, Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, Singapore, 2025
• Invited expert on Carsharing, CNA’s Talking Point. (see video here, 250,000+ views), 2023
• Keynote speaker, 22^nd Summer School of Behavior Modeling 2023, University of Tokyo, 2023
• Keynote speaker, 14^th International Conference on Traffic & Granular Flow, India, 2022

Research Interests 

The main themes of the BeCoS lab are summarized below:

Individual-level Modelling:
1. Data-driven Choice Models
2. Modelling Neurophysiological Data
3. Built Environment and Human Perception

System-level Modelling:
1. Data-driven Activity-based Modelling
2. Causal Inference for Urban Systems
3. Adaptive Infrastructure Planning

Selected Publications

1. Vo, Khoa D., Eui-Jin Kim, Huichang Lee, and Prateek Bansal. “Harnessing household travel survey with smart card data to generate spatiotemporally-diverse activity schedules for transit users.” Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 205 (2026): 103388.
2. Zhang, Bin, Qingyao Xin, Siyuan Chen, Zhaohua Wang, Yang Lu, Niu Niu, Fang Zhang, Guangchuan Liu, and Prateek Bansal. “Behavioral uncertainty in EV charging drives heterogeneous grid load variability under climate goals.” Nature Communications 17, no. 1 (2026): 43.
3. Kock, Lucas, Linda SL Tan, Prateek Bansal, and David J. Nott. “Variational inference for hierarchical models with conditional scale and skewness corrections.” Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics (2026): 1-11.
4. Muñoz, Sebastián, Vladimir Maksimenko, Bastian Henriquez-Jara, Prateek Bansal, and Omar David Perez. “In-lab versus web-based eye-tracking in decision-making: A systematic comparison on multiple display-size conditions mimicking common electronic devices.” Behavior Research Methods 57, no. 12 (2025): 339.
5. Zhang, Bin, Qingyao Xin, Siyuan Chen, Bo Wang, Hao Li, Zhaohua Wang, and Prateek Bansal. “Lithium-ion battery recycling relieves the threat to material scarcity amid China’s electric vehicle ambitions.” Nature Communications 16, no. 1 (2025): 6661.
6. Maksimenko, Vladimir, Xinwei Li, Eui-Jin Kim, and Prateek Bansal. “Video-Based experiments better unveil societal biases towards ethical decisions of autonomous vehicles.” Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 179 (2025): 105284.
7. Ding, Jiaxuan, Eui-Jin Kim, Vladimir Maksimenko, and Prateek Bansal. “Can decoy effects nudge ride-hailing drivers’ preferences for electric vehicles?” Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 196 (2025): 104470.
8. Kim, Eui-Jin, and Prateek Bansal. “A new flexible and partially monotonic discrete choice model.” Transportation research part B: methodological 183 (2024): 102947.
9. Huo, Jinghai, Rubal Dua, and Prateek Bansal. “Inverse product differentiation logit model: Holy grail or not?” Energy Economics 131 (2024): 107379.
10. Kim, Eui-Jin, and Prateek Bansal. “A deep generative model for feasible and diverse population synthesis.” Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 148 (2023): 104053.
11. Bansal, Prateek, Daniel Hörcher, and Daniel J. Graham. “A dynamic choice model to estimate the user cost of crowding with large-scale transit data.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (2022): 1-25.
12. Bansal, Prateek, Vahid Keshavarzzadeh, Angelo Guevara, Ricardo A. Daziano, and Shanjun Li. Designed quadrature to approximate integrals in maximum simulated likelihood estimation.” The Econometrics Journal 25, no. 2 (2022): 301-321.
13. Bansal, Prateek, Rico Krueger*, and Daniel J. Graham. “Fast Bayesian estimation of spatial count data models.” Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 157 (2021): 107152.
14. Bansal, Prateek, Rico Krueger*, Michel Bierlaire, Ricardo A. Daziano, and Taha H. Rashidi. “Bayesian estimation of mixed multinomial logit models: Advances & simulation-based evaluations.” Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 131(2020): 124-142.