Established as a normal school in 1923, today Rowan is a comprehensive public university serving nearly 10,000 students in a Graduate School and colleges of Business, Communication, Education, Engineering, Fine & Performing Arts, and Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Rowan’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department conducts transportation research in the areas of pavement design, materials, rail crossing safety, structural design of bridges, and structural design and testing of transit vehicles.

Other areas of research that relate to transportation include renewable energy technologies, diesel combustion, distributed instrumentation systems and smart sensors, and vehicle systems integration.