Dr. Kontou is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on planning sustainable transportation systems and modeling their interdependencies with energy systems and the environment. She earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering, focusing on transportation systems, from University of Florida, and holds a M.Sc. from Virginia Tech, and a Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens in the same field. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the National Renewable Energy Lab and the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Kontou is an NSF CAREER awardee, a Council of University Transportation Centers-Cambridge Systematics New Faculty Award recipient, an Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Faculty Scholar, a US-Africa Frontiers and a US Frontiers of Engineering Invited Participant, and a Levenick Sustainability Teaching Fellow at the University of Illinois. She is an Associate Editor of the Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment journal and a member of the Transportation Research Board Committee on Transportation Energy Data and Technology.