School of Transportation at Southeast University was founded in 1995, and its history dates back to the transportation department of National Southeast University and road works group in the civil engineering department of National Central University in 1920s-1930s, followed by road research group of civil engineering department of Nanjing Institute of Technology in 1950s-1980s. Afterwards, it evolved into the transportation engineering research institute in 1987 and the department of traffic and transportation engineering in 1989.
School of Transportation presently includes eight departments, eight research institutes, two research centers and two industrial organizations. It has post-doctoral research station for "traffic and transportation engineering", national key primary discipline of "traffic and transportation engineering", doctoral degree awarding authority for transportation and civil engineering primary disciplines, doctoral and master degree awarding authority for 9 and 13 sub-disciplines, respectively. Among them, two sub-disciplines are funded to recruit ministry of education Yangtze River Scholars, including highway and railway engineering and transportation planning and management. The school also homes Southeast University branch of the national road traffic management technology research center, Jiangsu provincial traffic planning and management key laboratory and national road traffic engineering experimental and educational demonstration center. The School of Transportation owes the most complete set of transportation related disciplines, leading the transportation related research in China.
The fields of study in School of Transportation cover highway traffic and transportation, geotechnical engineering, urban traffic, road traffic management, civilian airport, port and waterway, etc. The school has significant impact on the domestic transportation research and application as a leader in high-tech research and knowledge diffusion, resulting in very high ranking in China. In national assessment of the primary discipline in 2009, traffic and transportation primary discipline ranked second (road traffic class ranked first). From year 2000, school of transportation undertook more than 100 important projects, including national 973 plan, 863 plan, science and technology supporting plan, state natural science foundation projects. The school participated actively in national key project of science research project, such as the national urban traffic "smooth traffic project", expressway, Changjiang River bridge, subway project，national road traffic safety science and technology plan of action，etc. The research funds achieve 450 million yuan for the past 5 years. The school of transportation obtained 8 national scientific and technological progress awards and more than 80 provincial and ministerial level progress awards in science and technology. At the same time, the school has published more than 2500 papers and monographs, with 700 papers cited by EI and SCI.
There are more than 2000 enrolled students and 203 faculty/staff, including 166 fulltime faculty members. Among them there are 1 academician, 1 national distinguished educator, 1 “thousand person plan” professor, 4 Cheung Kong （Changjiang）scholars, 46 doctor supervisors, 41 professors, 71 associate professors and 118 young faculty members with PhD degree in the school. The school of transportation obtained more than 20 teaching achievement prizes at the national and provincial level.