Author: sshao45

Recently, Georgia Tech’s Stephanie Amoaning-Yankson was awarded a 2015 American Association of University Women (AAUW) doctoral fellowship. 

The AAUW has a long and distinguished history of advancing educational and professional opportunities for women in the United States and around the globe.The International Fellowship program has been in existence since 1917. The program provides support for one year of graduate study  in the United States to women who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Recipients are selected for academic achievement and demonstrated commitment to women and girls. Recipients return to their home countries to become leaders in business, government, academia, community activism, the arts, and sciences.

Stephanie is a third year Ph.D. student originally from Ghana. She graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana. She then participated in the Ghana National Service Scheme where she worked for a year as a volunteer teaching assistant for the Transportation Engineering course at KNUST. In the fall of 2012, Stephanie came to Atlanta to pursue graduate studies at Georgia Tech focusing her research on incorporating resiliency considerations in transportation system management. Stephanie currently serves as the President of the American Society of Highway Engineers (ASHE) at Georgia Tech, as well as, the treasurer of the Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS@GT). 

Last week was a good one for first-year Ph.D. students Atiyya Shaw and Brittany Suttner.

The pair of School of Civil and Environmental Engineering students learned they’d won graduate research fellowships from the National Science Foundation, some of the most coveted funding for graduate students.

Now they can stretch their research in new directions or into risky areas of inquiry thanks to the fellowship’s three years of support.

“Receiving a prestigious award such as this will help to advance my career as a researcher tremendously.” – Brittany Suttner, first-year Ph.D. student and NSF fellowship recipient

“This fellowship will help me to take this project in new directions and to explore more of the high-risk/high-reward questions that can often be difficult to secure funding for,” said Suttner, who is developing ways to assess water quality and risk to public health by using the genetic markers of bacteria that usually indicate fecal contamination.

“There is a great need to improve water quality worldwide and the field of water quality monitoring [and] treatment can stand to improve dramatically with molecular and genetic applications, yet there has been little development in this area,” Suttner said.

“With an increasing human population on Earth, assessing water quality and the risk to human health becomes increasingly more important and an essential part of civil infrastructure and, hence, sustainability,” said Kostas Konstantinidis, an associate professor in the School and Suttner’s adviser.

“Brittany is a highly meticulous student with genuine curiosity about every aspect of her work. I expect her research will have a significant impact on water quality testing and human health.”

“I am both humbled and honored that NSF has chosen to invest in me as a graduate student researcher.” – Atiyya Shaw, first-year Ph.D. student and NSF fellowship recipient

“By its nature, my research project is very open-ended, and this fellowship allows me the freedom to pursue various opportunities, without necessarily being tied to a sponsor’s [interests],” said Shaw, who hopes to marry that freedom with sponsor-driven research questions to better understand — and model — the visual search patterns of drivers and other users of transportation systems.

The idea is to improve roadway designs and how information is delivered to users. And her work could also help in the development of driver-less cars.

“I also hope to focus on the application of these findings in the development of sensitive autonomous vehicle vision and guidance technologies that excel in a roadway environment designed for human perception,” Shaw said.

“Atiyya is one of the most intelligent and motivated students I have had the privilege to work with,” said Michael Hunter, Shaw’s Ph.D. adviser. “The NSF fellowship is a recognition of her great potential and will offer her the freedom to aggressively pursue her research.”

The NSF fellowship program supports some of the best graduate students across the country to help build a pipeline of top scientists and engineers, according to the agency. Winners are students “who have demonstrated their potential for significant achievements in science and engineering.”

Story credit: Joshua Stewart, CEE News Release

GTI is proud to announce that the Georgia Tech Institute of Transportation Engineers(ITE) team has won the Georgia ITE (GAITE) Traffic Bowl competition. The competition, which was held on March 13, culminated in a victory over the Southern Polytechnic State University for the team, consisting of Georgia Tech graduate students James Anderson, Abhilasha Saroj, and Atiyya Shaw.

Anderson, Saroj, and Shaw will now proceed to the Southern District (SDITE) Traffic Bowl Competiton  in Biloxi, Mississippi, on April 19-22, 2015. This competition is also known as the William Temple Scholarship Challenge Traffic Bowl. In the competition, teams of three students from each Section compete in a Jeopardy-style challenge, with answers and questions based on traffic and transportation-related topics. 

A team from Georgia Tech previously won the SDITE competition in 2010, going on to represent Georgia Tech, GAITE, and the SDITE in Vancouver, British Columbia. 

Recently, the Eno Center for Transportation announced its selections for fellows for the 2015 Future Leaders Development Conference. Among those chosen for this honor is Georgia Tech third year doctoral student Alice Grossman.

Grossman, who will participate in the conference in Washington, D.C, with the other fellows this summer, said that “the conference will be an excellent opportunity to learn more about transportation policymaking from the source, by meeting and hearing from leaders in politics, industry, advocacy groups, and think tanks,” noting that the conference “will provide invaluable insight for [her] dissertation research and play a role in what career path [she] choose[s].” 

Her career path has already been distinguished. In previous years, she has been selected for a number of awards, including a 2014 Dwight D. Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship, as well as working with Georgia Tech Professor Randall Guensler on her doctoral research. 

This research involves studying how metropolitan planning organizations adjust their priorities and performance measures in light of changing federal transportation policy, assessing how external factors and historical practices shape current performance standards. 

Past fellows from among Georgia Tech’s transportation engineering students include Jamie Fischer in 2014, Margaret-Avis Akofio-Sowah in 2013, and Josie Kressner in 2012.

Voters in the City of Atlanta will decide in a few weeks on a $250 million bond referendum that includes, among other things, millions to sync the traffic signals across the city.

The idea is to improve flow in areas like Midtown and Downtown, where drivers can be stopped at almost every light now.

Creative Loafing’s Max Blau asked the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Michael Hunter how syncing works.

Michael Hunter, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, tells CL that traffic signal syncing can improve quality of life for residents through reducing travel times, stops, and delays. But he says it’s important to consider all modes of transportation — be it driving a car, riding a streetcar, pedaling on a bike, or walking on foot — in the process. That particularly includes letting lights stay green long enough for pedestrians to cross streets and coordinating signals in a way that discourages speeding.

In addition, Hunter says that major transportation projects such as traffic signal synchronization often lack enough cash in their budgets to keep the road investments in working shape. He says more local government officials, including those in Atlanta, given the proposed $250 million infrastructure investment, should only build what they can afford to maintain.

“If you’re going to pay for the infrastructure, you need to have a way to maintain it,” he says. “Construction isn’t the big challenge. The overlooked part is maintaining it.”

Read the full article on the Creative Loafing site.

(Teaser image courtesy of Ian Britton via FreeFoto.com.)

Story courtesy of Josh Stewart, CEE News Release.

Recently, Dr. Angshuman Guin‘s work was highlighed in a Fox 5 Atlanta news story. Guin, of Georgia Tech‘s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is researching ways to make interstate ramp meters more efficient and to speed up interstate travel, among his many other projects.

For this research project, Guin has plotted travel time in relation to ramp meters, showing when traffic begins to build and how modifying ramp wait times can be used as a tool to control highway congestion levels. Through his work, travel times can be reduced by up to 24%, and several research posters have been produced.

To view each poster, click its name:

Previous Slide 4/4 NextReal-Time Work Zone Travel Time

The Georgia Department of Transportation has been very supportive of Guin’s research. For more information on his current projects, please follow the links below. These ten projects cover diverse sectors within the fields of civil and transportation engineering, and are impacting the state of transportation as it is currently known.

1. Centerline Rumble Strips Safety Impact Evaluation
2. Cooperative Vehicle-Highway Automation (CVHA) Technology: Simulation of Benefits and Operational Issues
3. Enhanced Role of Activity Center Transportation Organizations in Regional Mobility
4. Evaluation of Intersection Countermeasures on High-Speed Rural Multilane Facilities
5. Evaluation of the Cost Effectiveness of Illumination as a Safety Treatment at Rural Intersections
6. Feasibility Study for Using Video Detection System Data to Supplement Automatic Traffic Recorder Data
7. Integrating Intersection Traffic Signal Data into a Traffic Monitoring Program
8. Micro-Simulation Based Framework for Freeway Travel Time Forecasting Summary
9. Real Time Estimation of Arterial Travel Time and Operational Measures through Integration of Real Time Fixed Sensor Data and Simulation
10. Safety Impact Study of Centerline Rumble Strips in Georgia

On Tuesday, September 24, 2014, the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) and the Georgia Transportation Institute (GTI) jointly hosted the second annual GDOT/GTI Transportation Research Poster Session.

Th event was held at GDOT headquarters, One Georgia Center, at 600 West Peachtree St NW in Atlanta. All transportation researchers at GTI’s member universities, including Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, Southern Polytechnic State University, Mercer University, and Albany State University were invited to display their active and recently-completed research projects sponsored by GDOT.

To view a poster gallery of all posters from the 2013 and 2014 poster session, click here.

The headquarters of the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) is situated mere blocks from a top research institution, the Georgia Institute of Technology. But there’s more to the connection between GDOT and Georgia Tech than close proximity. 

Since GDOT came into existence in 1972, it has continually worked to better the state’s roadways and transportation systems. Its robust research program supports transportation research conducted at universities across Georgia. GDOT has sponsored over 100 research proejcts at Georgia Tech, spanning a wide variety of subdisciplines within the transportation industry.

WABE 90.1 FM recently spotlighted the collaboration of Georgia Tech professor Wayne Daley, Jonathan Holmes of the Georgia Tech Research Institute, and David Jared, of GDOT, in producing a revolutionary road-repairing robot. 

The instrument, known as Roadbot, has taken over 10 years to develop, and these efforts have culminated in the creation of a prototype bot, capable of sensing a crack, photographing it, and computing how to apply asphalt to repair the crack. Fully automated, Roadbot is capable of repairing cracks at five times the speed of conventional manual repairwork. 

Roadbot works its magic on a section of highway (Jonathan Holmes, GTRI)

To read more on the project and WABE’s article, click here.

A full listing of GDOT-sponsored projects may be found here, with projects ranging from Dr. Randall Guensler’s “Effective Capacity Analysis and Traffic Data Collection for the I-85 HOV to HOT Conversion“, to Dr. Adjo Amekudzi Kennedy’s “Evidence-Based Design Applications in Transportation Asset Management“. 

First-year Ph.D. student Atiyya Shaw has won support for her studies from the International Road Federation as a class of 2016 fellow.

The award, announced this month, includes a grant to help Shaw continue her full-time studies in the 2015-2016 academic year and attend the Road Scholar Program in Washington D.C.

According to the federation, “The [fellowship] program enhances the professional curriculum of graduate students in fields related to the development of better and safer roads and their ability to meaningfully improve transportation in their home countries.”

“Scientific research and progress are dependent upon a constant source of innovation and young talent in a profession that hinges on the seamless passing of intellectual and philosophical approaches from teacher to student over time,” Shaw wrote in a recent conference paper. “Researchers, therefore, inherit a duty that is implicit in their work: to train, mentor and inspire those who have chosen to pursue educational advancement within their fields.”

“I have a passion for research and teaching, and I hope to make a difference by guiding, educating and inspiring the next generation of engineers,” said Shaw, whose research focuses on transportation safety and operations under Associate Professor Michael Hunter.

The fellowship is the second award to come Shaw’s way in recent months; she won the 2014 Helene M. Overly Memorial Scholarship from the Women’s Transportation Seminar in October.

Story courtesy of Josh Stewart, CEE News Release