Congratulations MS Transportation Engineering/MCP student Jon Atkins on being awarded the Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center Masters Student of the Year.
“I have watched Jon demonstrate a rare combination of technical brilliance, teaching dedication, and extraordinary resilience,” says DCRP Assistant Professor Maryam Hosseini, Capstone advisor and GSI and GSR supervisor. “In five years of working with graduate students across multiple institutions, Jon stands among the most talented, creative, and collegial students I have worked with.”
During his time as a student at Berkeley:
- Jon jumped into a research project six months in with Professor Daniel Chatman and quickly revamped the data collection process and mentored two graduate students.
- Took on a full-time research position with the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center conducting original data research, while continuing the above project and training another student on the modeling process he developed.
- Served as a Graduate Student Instructor for Urban Informatics and Visualization, making himself available to students, maintaining the course website, and helping shape activities and assignments.
- Took a summer internship at the Visualization, Imaging, and Data Analytics (VIDA) at NYU’s Computer Science Department, where he made substantial research contributions and introduced StreetTransformer, a large-scale project that led to two sub-projects built on a shared data foundation: one deploys this data as an operational retrieval-augmented system prototype and the other transforms the same data into an evaluation benchmark with a novel methodological contribution. Each sub-project led to a paper, both of which were accepted at workshops in highly competitive international conferences.
Outside the classroom, Jon put his research ideals into practice: creating community as Communications Chair of the department, advocating for safer, more human-scale streets as a Board member of Walk Oakland Bike Oakland, and volunteering as a mechanic at his local bike co-op.
“What I appreciate most about Jon is how he combines technical excellence with genuine character,” says Hosseini. “He is thoughtful, ethical, collaborative, and a team-player. Someone who grasps concepts quickly but remains open to learning new skills and approaches. He thinks beautifully about complex problems and brings creative vision to his work.”
Atkins was recognized at the UCLA Pacific Coast Transportation Workshop Feb. 20-21, 2026.