Congratulations to recent Department of City and Regional Planning Masters of City Planning alum Kathryn Exon Smith, who has been awarded the Charley V. Wootan Memorial - Masters Award by the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC) for her capstone project “Building Back Better: Centralized Infrastructure Planning, Crisis Governance, and the Promise of Canada’s Permanent Transit Fund”
“Katherine's work and collaborations, in all regards, are phenomenal -- from her above and beyond Master's thesis on transportation regional governance to charting her own path in my graduate transportation studio conducting an in-depth analysis of freight and passenger rail shared corridors, an understudied critical area of research,” says her advisor, City and Regional Planning Associate Professor Karen Trapenberg Frick.
The award, named after the director of the Texas Transportation Institute from 1976 to 1993, is given annually to transportation graduate students for the best Doctoral dissertation and Master’s thesis in the field of policy and planning in transportation studies. Winners will be recognized at the CUTC Annual Awards banquet held on Saturday, Jan. 4, 2025, in Washington, D.C.
Exon Smith was also awarded the Outstanding Master's Student Award by ITS Berkeley for her brilliant, creative, knowledgeable and reliable hard work, and collaborative research. She is also noted for cultivating strong relationships with team colleagues and resourcefully initiating and maintaining practitioner-client relations and project sponsorship.
In addition, Exon Smith worked on a project and wrote a white paper with UC Berkeley Professors Emeriti Elizabeth Deakin and Karen Chapple examining the lessons that could be learned from California's MPO experience that could guide policy for Ontario and Toronto–a paper that is being shared with senior government officials in Canada. Her co-authors praised her work as being performed on the same level.
Exon Smith also worked on an SB1-funded project on transit and downtowns, where she has been a mainstay in the work, reviewing the academic literature, documenting and critiquing plans, and organizing and analyzing interviews and focus groups.
Exon Smith holds a B.A. in History, Political Science, and Spanish from the University of Toronto–Victoria University as well as an M.A. in History from the University of Toronto. She is currently a Board Member and the Chair of the Nomination Committee of the Canadian Studies Program and began working as a Senior Research Officer at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities.