Dr. Khan is a licensed Professional Engineer and Professional Traffic Operations Engineer with 23 years of experience in the traffic and transportation engineering field. Nisar holds a M.S. degree and Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering from Purdue University. Dr. Khan has worked on a number of Resurfacing, Restoration, and Rehabilitation (RRR) projects; corridor studies and traffic engineering studies; and roadway, signalization, lighting, signing, and pavement marking design. He is the Project Manager for the Development of Alternative Lighting Design Standards for Environmentally Sensitive Coastal Areas project. This project, also known as the "turtle lighting project," is intended to minimize the negative impact of roadway/street lighting on sea turtles. Roadway lighting interferes with the nesting of female turtles and is particularly disastrous for young hatchlings that are disoriented by the lights and instead of moving to the sea, start moving towards the roadway lights and get killed. This project aims at emulating the success of an existing experimental turtle lighting project in which the pole-mounted roadway lights are turned off from March through October, and internally illuminated (LED) roadway markers are installed along the lane lines of the road.
What do you enjoy most about your position?
I like the mix of work; there are many things I have learned and become good at, and yet there are still many new and challenging things to do.
As part of my supervisory duties, I try to find out the rationale for what was done and presented to me for review/approval and see if I can improve it without redoing the whole thing. It's a challenge I like.
It feels great when someone says, "Oh, I figured that out but my folks would take it as authentic coming from you."
What to you do to recharge your batteries?
I read, listen to music. I don't know why, but my daughter says that from my careful selection of what I listen to, it seems that all good music has been composed 20-25 years ago and not much has happened since then.
What book have you read recently? Or what is your top Internet bookmark?
I recently read two books: Ravelstein by Saul Bellow and The Murder Artist by John Case. It has been debated whether the title character in Ravelstein is based on Allan Bloom [renowned academic, philosopher, and essayist] or Paul Wolfowitz [current President of the World Bank and Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2001-2005].
I'm embarrassed to admit that my top Internet bookmark is "Doing Business with FDOT"; www.nytimes.com is a distant second.
What are the aspects of living in Florida that you most enjoy?
I can go out for a walk in December and January in my T-shirt, and I don't have to drive in snow.
If you could have dinner with anyone, who would it be?
I'm always fascinated by great architectural works and their creators. My first choice would therefore be Zaha Hadid, the exceptionally talented Baghdad-born (Iraq) architect who has designed several landmark buildings in Europe, Asia, and North America, including the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, OH. My second choice would be the legendary Indian singer Lata Mangeshkar, the "Nightingale of India." She has been singing since the late 1940s in pretty much all major Indian languages and is in the Guiness World Records as the most recorded singer in the world. She does not record much these days, but in her heyday whenever I used to hear a great new song from her, I couldn't stop saying, "Let you have one more day out of my life to continue singing like this."