ITS Berkeley Earns 8 Eisenhower Fellowships

December 10, 2018

ITS Berkeley is excited to announce eight UC Berkeley students have received Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program (DDETFP) fellowships for the coming year.

“This is really exciting to see the number of students earning Eisenhower fellowships from ITS Berkeley and the broadness of topics that they are covering,” says ITS Berkeley Director Alexandre Bayen.

Winners include Abigail Cochran and Xiao Yun "Jayne" Chang, advised by Dan Chatman; Ryan Laws, advised by Karen Trapenberg Frick; Stephen Wong, advised by Susan Shaheen; Jeremy Halpern, advised by Daniel Rodriquez; and Fangyu Wu, Jessica Lazarus, and Eugene Vinitsky, all advised by Bayen.

The Eisenhower Fellowship is a competitive program administered by the Federal Highway Administration for the Department of Transportation. Winners receive a financial award and are invited to attend the annual Transportation Research Board meeting, held January 13-17, 2019 this year.

Research interests include:

Cochran: Urban governance, data science, technology, international planning, and transportation

Chang: Design of user-friendly public transit systems, data-driven transportation planning and transit operation, and influence of transportation infrastructure and physical environments on human behaviors and well-being

Halpern: Transportation policy, planning and engineering, megaproject management, bus rapid transit systems, travel demand modeling, and equity and displacement modeling


Laws: Transportation planning and the effects of autonomous vehicles on regional economies

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


Vinitsky: Using reinforcement learning to design controllers for complex systems, in particular, using reinforcement learning to help autonomous vehicles mitigate poor human driving patterns.


Wong: Transportation and emergency management and policy for disasters, evacuation choice behavior and planning, sharing economy partnerships during emergencies, and transportation resilience

Wu: Enforcement learning, computer vision, and control theory