ITS students are among the most honored in academic planning — and 2018 was no exception. Once again, graduate students and doctoral candidates at ITS took home a number of the country’s most prestigious awards for transportation scholarship.

Anne E. Brown, who completed her Ph.D. this spring, was the third ITS scholar in the past four years to receive the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Barclay Gibbs Jones Award for best dissertation in planning for her project Ridehail Revolution: Ridehail Travel and Equity in Los Angeles (read the policy briefs here and here). The project also earned Dr. Brown the Council of University Transportation Centers’ Charley V. Wooten award for outstanding doctoral thesis in transportation policy and planning, and she was named the Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center’s student of the year. She is now an assistant professor at the University of Oregon.  

Melissa D. Sather, a 2018 graduate of the UCLA Luskin Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program, was also recognized by the Council of University Transportation Centers, winning the Neville A. Parker Award for outstanding master’s project in the field of policy and planning, and science and technology for her capstone report A New Model for Transit: Transit/TNC Partnerships in Western Riverside County (read the policy brief here).

Two current ITS doctoral candidates, Hannah King and Miriam Pinski, saw their research honored with scholarships from the Los Angeles chapter of the Women’s Transportation Seminar. “I hope I can make my mark in academia, affecting policies that make transit systems safe and convenient for women and girls,” said Pinski (pictured above) at the awards ceremony.  “I hope to research and teach transportation planning at the graduate level,” said King. “Receiving the WTS-LA Scholarship takes me one step closer to reaching that goal, and, I hope, in some small way will better enable me to give back to the wider transportation community.“

Several ITS scholars were recipients of the annual Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program awards:

  • Cassie Halls, a first-year MURP student
  • Dustin Khuu, a second-year MURP student completing the capstone project “Assessing Barriers to Mobility and Accessibility in Watts: A Case Study of the Jordan Downs Housing Development”
  • Hannah King, a third-year urban planning doctoral student studying travel behavior, gentrification and displacement, and new mobility
  • Miriam Pinski, a first-year urban planning doctoral student studying transportation and equity issues for vulnerable populations, such as older adults and women
  • Jacob Wasserman, a second-year MURP student completing the capstone project “A Time and a Place for Every Rider?: Geographic and Temporal Changes in Bay Area Transit Ridership”
  • Teo Wickland, a fourth-year urban planning doctoral student completing the dissertation “Pluralizing Transportation Epistemologies: Culture, Environment, and Mobile Materialities in French Polynesia”

Congratulations to all, and ITS looks forward to honoring more groundbreaking research in 2019!