Hongyu Zheng, a fourth year PhD student in my group, had won 2023 Transportation and Development Institute Bob Camilone Memorial Scholarship. The other recipient of the award is Adrian Hernandez, another PhD student in our transportation program.
Congratulations to both gentlemen! We take pride in their accomplishment and are confident that they will continue to excel in his academic and professional pursuits.heir
Last month my group received a one-year seed grant from Northwestern University’s McCormick Catalyst Fund to study transportation equity. The main idea is to incorporate various ethical theories into public transportation system design and analyze the implications. The project initially originated from my interest in the theory of justice (see my review of John Rawls’ book). More details about the project can be found here. Stay tuned for a forthcoming paper that summarizes some initial results.
Last week, my group formally received a new NSF grant sponsored by Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) Program. A joint effort with Professor Zhaoran Wang from Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Science, this three-year project aims to formulate and experiment with an integrative
approach to applying machine learning (ML) for traffic management.
Last week I learned my former student, Dr. Mehrnaz Ghamami, was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at Michigan State University. She is the second of my former students to have earned tenure. Mehrnaz and her husband, Dr. Ali Zockaie, both graduated from our program in 2015, were hired by the same department at the same time, and are now promoted together. I am so proud of their accomplishments and feel immensely happy for their good fortune (to be able to always stay together in academia is no easy feat for a couple) and well deserved promotions!
Our paper on transit design for COVID was finally published in Transportation Research Part A. You may also read a previous post about this paper.
The idea was initially conceived at the peak of the first wave (April 2020) and the first submission to TR-A was made later that year (November). In this particular case, the review process was excruciatingly long. The second round alone took more than six months, and yielded no actionable comments. Anyway, I am glad it ended with a positive note for Hongyuan – this was his first publication in my group.
I finally decided that I need a research+blog type place to share my work and writing. My student told me Northwestern provides a web-hosting service based on WordPress. I have a few hours to spare since it is a MLK day. The tool seems quite reasonable and hence I took the plunge. Let’s see how it goes…