Neelima Ghanta is currently the Deputy Chief Operations Officer at DDOT. She oversees the Streetlights, Traffic signals and ITS, Automated Traffic Enforcement, Strategic Traffic Operations and Strategic Acquisitions Unit teams within Operations Administration. 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 at an intersection to state level 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.