Neelima Ghanta is currently the Acting Chief Operations Officer at DDOT. She oversees Operations Administration which is over 50% of the agency staff. Operations Administration spans Streetlights, Traffic signals and ITS, Automated Traffic Enforcement, Urban Forestry, Traffic Operations, and Public Space Management. She is a transportation thought leader with 18 years of international experience in technical and leadership roles.
Prior to DDOT, she led multi-modal transportation projects from vision to design in the United States and New Zealand. She considers herself a plan-gineer who uses data and tools to ‘tell the story’ to the public, politicians, clients, and even peers. Her passion for transportation started during a summer internship in a major metropolitan city in India which exposed the detrimental effects of traffic on the economy, health, and environment.
She is a certified professional engineer and a chartered member of Engineering New Zealand. She has a Master's degree from Virginia Tech in Civil Engineering. She served on the boards of Women in Urbanism, NZ, WTS-DC and chaired multiple committees with ITE-DC and Transportation Group of Engineering New Zealand.