The Institute of Transportation Studies Berkeley was well represented at the National Academies of Medicine Engineering and Science's Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. January 12-16, 2020.
UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab had 89 faculty, staff, and students involved in research, in addition to the dozen or more attendees from Cal who went to sessions throughout the week. See our tweets and photos from the week.
Our research was involved in 72 sessions: 15 sessions were presided over by Cal affiliates; 4 committees were led by Cal faculty and staff; and 38 posters, 28 presentations, and 10 workshops involved our research.
In addition, ITS Berkeley hosted a fun reception for alumni, friends, faculty, staff and students to catch up, network, and socialize at Cuba Libre Restaurant and Rum Bar, and faculty, staff and students earned several awards throughout the meeting:
Congratulations to Civil and Environmental Engineering professor Joan Walker for being awarded the Zephyr Leadership Award. Dr. Walker’s leadership of the Transportation Research Board Travel Forecasting Committee produced an appropriate and much needed reflection of our industry and a renewed drive towards self-improvement, which directly resulted in the creation of the Zephyr Foundation. Dr. Walker is known as a caring and dedicated mentor who has provided useful guidance and a much-appreciated open door to her many students in addition to any industry professional who is lucky enough to introduce themselves to her. As an academic, Dr. Walker has led our field in cross-collaboration with the fields of behavioral economics, environmental justice, and data science to produce relevant and actionable research. In short, Dr. Walker embodies a can-do spirit that is healthily never satisfied with the status quo, always curious about how to improve, and always willing to take on and lead the challenge required to get there…and she is a nice person to boot.
Congratulations to recent Civil and Environmental Engineering alum Timothy Brathwaite on earning the first place Eric Pas Dissertation Award from the International Association for Travel Behavior. Brathwaite is a data scientist at Lyft. He obtained his Ph.D. in transportation engineering from the University of California (UC) at Berkeley under the supervision of Professor Walker. Motivated by efforts to predict the demand for bicycling under various policy scenarios, Brathwaite’s dissertation made methodological improvements to discrete choice models to account for omitted roadway variables, traveler “irrationality,” and the typically low number of cyclists in household travel surveys. He was also the UCCONNECT Outstanding Graduate Student of 2016.
Congratulations to City and Regional Planning doctoral student Madeleine Parker who was awarded Best Paratransit Paper Award from the Paratransit Committee for her paper: Benefits & Challenges of On-Demand E-Hailing Paratransit Programs: A Case Study of Pilot Programs in New York City & Boston. Parker is a Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellow and advised by Karen Chapple. Parker’s research interests include climate change adaptation, resilience planning, affordable housing, transportation equity, urban mobility, spatial inequality, participatory mapping, data science and spatial analysis.
Congratulations to City and Regional Planning doctoral student Pavan Yedavalli, who earned Best Poster Presentation among all doctoral students at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Poster Showcase for his poster: Simulating the effects of urban air mobility on travel behavior and land use in urban environments. Yedavalli is a Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellow and is advised by professors Paul Waddell and Daniel Rodriguez. His research interests include smart cities, urban mobility, wireless IoT systems and drones in cities, urban data science and informatics, intelligent transportation systems, urban mapping, and travel behavior.
Congratulations to ITS Associate Director Daniel Rodriguez on his contribution to the Pedestrians Committee Best Paper Award for Safety and Data: Pedestrian Injuries in North Carolina, 2007–2012: A Comparative Analysis Using Police, Emergency Department, and Death Certificate Data Sources. The paper was written by Laura Sandt, UNC Highway Safety Research Center; Scott Proescholdbell, North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services; Kelly Evenson, Susan Ennett, Whitney Robinson, Katherine Harmon and Stephen Marshall, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in addition to Rodriguez.
Congratulations to Transportation Sustainability Research Center Director and Civil and Environmental Engineering professor Susan Shaheen on joining the TRB Executive Committee and becoming the vice chair.
And congratulations to Shaheen and TSRC researcher Adam Cohen who are on the Inaugural Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board Editorial BoardThe journal is open for year-round submission.