It was a desire to see his designs implemented in the real world that pushed Uday Tallapragada to become an engineer. As a traffic engineer for ms consultants, he says “I am very excited when I drive through projects that I have worked on.”

Mr. Tallapragada performs both traffic engineering design and traffic studies, and has considerable knowledge in highway lighting design. “I feel the biggest trend in our industry is the introduction of green technologies such as LED luminaires for lighting and adaptive signal control for traffic signals where the controllers react to traffic in real time.” He recently worked on the Southside Expressway project in Charleston, West Virginia. Because this was the first project in West Virginia to use LED luminaires for highway lighting, there were no specs available and no previous projects that could be used as a sample for design. So, Mr. Tallapragada helped developed technical specs that will be used for subsequent projects in the state.

Mr. Tallapragada is the first engineer in his family and the first family member to leave his home country of India to pursue graduate studies in the United States. “Before leaving India, I had never seen snow in my life. Arriving in Michigan on January 1, 2001, in below zero weather was a huge shock!” Mr. Tallapragada is happy to say he has come to terms with both the weather and cultural differences over the past eleven years. “I slowly adapted to the American way of life and made some lifelong friends along the way.”

Recently, Mr. Tallapragada won the 2011 Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Ohio Section Young Engineer Award.

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