12 Students Awarded Eisenhower Fellowships

October 23, 2020

Congratulations to the 12 UC Berkeley ITS students who received Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program (DDETFP) fellowships for the coming year.

“ITS Berkeley has a long tradition of producing strong fellowship award winners who have greatly contributed to the transportation and planning fields,” says ITS Berkeley Director Alexandre Bayen. “It is exciting to see the broadness of topics our awardees are covering, and especially heartening to see some of our students and their research earning awards for a second year.”

Winners include: doctoral student Mohamed Amine Bouzaghrane, advised by Civil Environmental and Engineering (CEE) professor Joan Walker; doctoral student Teddy Forscher, advised by Walker, CEE professor Susan Shaheen, and City and Regional Planning (DCRP) professor emerita Betty Deakin; MCP student Gregory Harasym; doctoral student Chester Harvey, advised by DCRP professor Daniel Rodriguez; masters student Kathy Jang, advised by Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professor Alexandre Bayen; doctoral student Jessica Lazarus, advised by Shaheen and Bayen; MCP student Lily MacIver; doctoral student Aqshems Nichols, advised by Walker and Shaheen; doctoral student Alexandra Pan advised by Susan Shaheen; doctoral student Madeleine Parker advised by DCRP professor Karen Chapple; doctoral student Eugene Vinitsky, advised by Bayen; and doctoral student Pavan Yedavalli, advised by DCRP professor Paul Waddell.

The Eisenhower Fellowship is a competitive program administered by the Federal Highway Administration for the Department of Transportation. The fellowships are awarded to students pursuing degrees in transportation-related disciplines and aim to advance the transportation workforce by helping to attract the nation's brightest minds to the field of transportation, encouraging future transportation professionals to seek advanced degrees, and helping to retain top talent in the U.S. transportation industry. The awards are merit-based and generally result in 150-200 grants annually, subject to the availability of funds.

The program also supports Fellows to participate in the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, held online this year Jan. 21–22 and 25–29 2021 for sessions and exhibits and Jan. 5–8 and 11–15 for committee meetings. 

Winners and their research interests include:

Mohamed Amine Bouzaghrane

Research interests: Behavioral modeling, causal inference, and machine learning

Teddy Forscher

Research interests: Investigating the effects of road and area pricing strategies on goods movement in urban areas, with particular interest in the emergence of shared-use platforms for first- and last-mile movements

Gregory Harasym

Transportation planning, Travel demand modeling, Healthy transportation alternatives, Climate change mitigation, environmental justice and health disparities in low-income neighborhoods - especially as they relate to existing transit infrastructure.

Chester Harvey

Research interests: Urban design, street spaces, active transportation, spatial cognition, geodata

Kathy Jang

Research interests: applied machine learning, reinforcement learning, and control (via Machine Learning)

Jessica Lazarus

Research interests: Development of innovative shared-mobility services and their effects on the proliferation of multi-modal transportation in urban settings

Lily MacIver

Impacts of air pollution on low-income communities of color, climate and health equity, community-led policy advocacy and planning, community-based participatory research, and GIS-based analysis.

Aqshems Nichols

Research interests: transportation altruism, public transit regeneration, and community engagement methods

Alexandra Pan

Shared mobility and travel behavior

Madeleine Parker

Climate change adaptation, resilience planning, affordable housing, transportation equity, urban mobility, spatial inequality, participatory mapping, data science, spatial analysis

Eugene Vinitsky

Research interests: Using multi-agent reinforcement learning to help autonomous vehicles mitigate poor human driving patterns, transferring these controllers from simulator to reality, and developing open-source tools to allow researchers to study the interaction of autonomous vehicles and humans

Pavan Yedavalli

Research interests: Smart cities, urban mobility, wireless IoT systems and drones in cities, urban data science and informatics, intelligent transportation systems, urban mapping, and travel behavior