Shaheen Receives 2017 Roy W. Crum Award

September 25, 2017

Transportation Sustainability Research Center (TSRC) Co-Director Susan Shaheen is being recognized for her distinguished achievements in transportation research with the 2017 Roy W. Crum Award, which will be presented during the TRB Annual Meeting's Chairman's Luncheon on Wednesday, January 10, 2018 in Washington DC.

“This is a huge honor,” says Shaheen. “I’ve been deeply passionate about my research in shared mobility and sustainable transportation, since starting my doctoral degree in the early 1990s. The prestigious Roy W. Crum award, which recognizes my contributions to transportation research over the last two decades, is both humbling and gratifying.

Named for Roy W. Crum, who served as the Board’s director from 1928 until his death in 1951, the Crum Award recognizes outstanding leadership in transportation research or research administration. It represents the highest honor that Transportation Research Board, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, can bestow. In addition to her leadership at TSRC, Shaheen is an Adjunct Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

Shaheen is an internationally-recognized leader in research on shared mobility and environmentally friendly transportation. Her research has broken new ground in carsharing, bikesharing, and shared-ride services for more than two decades. She has also advanced sustainable transportation research in the areas of smart parking management for public transit and trucks; ecorouting for private vehicles and freight; fuel cell, electric, and plug-in hybrid vehicles and infrastructure; smart cities; and older mobility. She has authored 60 journal articles, more than 120 reports and proceedings articles, nine book chapters, and co-edited two books. 

Her research projects on carsharing, smart parking, and older mobility have received national awards. She envisions a new transportation future in which advanced information, automated, and clean fuel technologies are integrated to offer travelers many of the same advantages as personal vehicles, yet provide tripmaking options that are more diverse and environmentally and socially sustainable. Her contributions have included reaching out to, and bringing together, a broad array of stakeholders to work together to help make this vision a reality. 

For almost 20 years, Shaheen has provided continual service to the Transportation Research Board as either a chair or member of Technical Activities Division groups, standing committees, or subcommittees; Studies and Special Programs committees; and Transit Cooperative Research Program, National Highway Cooperative Research Program, and Airport Cooperative Research Program panels. She was a member of the committee that produced TRB Special Report 319: Between Public and Private Mobility: Examining the Rise of Technology-Enabled Transportation Services that analyzed how innovative transportation services, including shared-ride services, carsharing, bikesharing, and microtransit, are changing mobility for millions of travelers. The report called upon policymakers and regulators to formulate consistent policies that encourage competition among emerging and traditional transportation services in order to improve mobility, safety, and sustainability. 

Shaheen has also served as the Policy and Behavioral Research Program Leader at California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways and as a special assistant to the Director’s Office of the California Department of Transportation. She has been named one of the top 10 academic thought leaders in transportation by the Eno Transportation Foundation and received two “Excellence in Management” awards from UC Berkeley.

She is a desk editor for the journal Transport Policy and is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation and the International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology. She is a member of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Program Advisory Committee to the U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary and the Mobile Source Technical Review Subcommittee to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Act Advisory Committee. 

Shaheen has a Ph.D. from UC Davis in ecology, focusing on the energy and environmental aspects of transportation, and an M.S. from the University of Rochester in public policy analysis. 

TRB’s 97th Annual Meeting takes place Janu. 7-11, 2018, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, in Washington, D.C. The meeting covers all transportation issues, with 5,000 presentations in more than 800 sessions. A number of sessions and workshops will focus on the meeting’s spotlight theme, Transportation: Moving the Economy of the Future. The meeting is expected to attract more than 13,000 transportation professionals from around the world.