One of the essential parts of the mission of the Traffic Safety Center is to train future researchers, academics and policymakers in traffic safety. To that end, the Center employs graduate student researchers from a variety of disciplines to work on projects and, in the process, get a deep immersion into select aspects of traffic safety.

This year, 17 students are working as GSRs. They come from varied backgrounds, including liberal arts, industrial engineering, epidemiology and biostatistics, architecture, environmental systems, public policy and social welfare.

Brief biographies appear below.

Rhianna Babka is pursuing a masters in social welfare with a focus on management and planning. Her current area of interest is in ensuring transportation accessibility and equity for all populations to foster healthy, safe and livable communities. In the fall of 2007, she was awarded one of two newly-created annual fellowships by the Easter Seals Project ACTION (ESPA). At the TSC, Babka is working on research that addresses barriers older adults face in accessing public transportation.

 

 

Ipsita Banerjee is a PhD student in transportation engineering. She earned a bachelors degree in architecture from Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India, and a masters degree in transportation planning and architecture. Currently, she is working on a study of the role of fatigue in freeway crashes.

 

 

 

 

John Bigham is pursuing a masters of public health degree in epidemiology and biostatistics at the School of Public Health. He received a BS in geography from The Ohio State University where he specialized in Geographic Information Systems. He worked at the Environmental Systems Research Institute in Redland, California, before coming to Berkeley as a graduate student.

 

 

 

 

Julia Day is pursuing a masters in social welfare, with a concentration in management and planning. Her interests include issues of social welfare policy, systems change and community capacity building. She is working with the TSC to provide staffing support to the Statewide Coalition on Traffic Safety (SCOTS), which brings together statewide public and private stakeholders with expertise in traffic safety, to collaborate in order to improve traffic safety strategies statewide.

Sarah Duffy is pursuing her masters degrees in public policy at the Goldman School. She received a BA from Stanford University. She is working with the TSC on a project to help Caltrans improve industrial safety.

 

 

 

 

 

Dan Hennessey received his undergraduate degree from Ohio State University and is pursuing his masters of science in transportation engineering at UC Berkeley. His interests lie in highway design and traffic flow theory. His TSC projects involve collision causes and countermeasures.

Kitae Jang received his BS in civil engineering from Hanyng University, Seoul, Korea in 2004 and MS in civil & environmental engineering from UC Berkeley. He is currently a PhD student in the transportation engineering program at UC Berkeley. His research interests are safety and operation of High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) and Toll (HOT) Lanes.

 

 

 

 

 

Eui Jae Jin received his BS and MS degrees in civil engineering from Yonsei University in South Korea, his native country. He is currently a PhD student in civil and environmental engineering. At the TSC, he is working on a skid resistance project and is also studying collisions under wet conditions where new pavement types such as Open Graded Asphalt Concrete (OGAC), Rubberized OGAC, and grooved pavement were expected to improve the drainage.

 

 

 

 

Andrew Lee is a masters candidate at the Goldman School of Public Policy. Prior to his arrival at UC Berkeley he graduated from UCLA and worked as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. His interests lie broadly in the areas of urban policy and sustainable development. He is currently working on the TSC's project on motorcycle safety, investigating the causes of the recent rise in motorcycle fatalities.

Joon ho Lee is a PhD candidate in the transportation program. He is working on quantification of the effectiveness of different types of countermeasures installed in the vicinity of ramps. The focus of the project is on evaluation of auxiliary lane construction (i.e., how collision patterns change after the lanes are built).

 

 

 

 

Junhak Lee is a PhD candidate in environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley, where he is working on environmental modeling with Geographic Information Systems(GIS) and remote sensing of forest ecosystems. He is working on a GIS crash mapping project and a project to summarize the top 5% of collision locations in California. Both projects involve converting collision databases into geographic data so that researchers can visualize and analyze the characteristics of collisions in California in a spatial and temporal manner.

 

 

 

Soon Mi Oh received her M.S. from Seoul National University. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in transportation engineering. She is studying how wet pavement contributes to crash frequency.

 

 

 

 

 

Rebecca Sanders is in her second year of the masters of city planning program, with a dual focus on transportation and urban design. She will continue her studies next year as a PhD student focusing on bicycling and its potential as a missing middle mode in North American transportation. Her current research project looks at "The Effects of Transportation Corridors' Features on Driver and Pedestrian Behavior and Community Vitality."

 

 

 

Bob Schneider received his B.A. Augustana College, Rock Island and a masters in regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 2001-2007, he worked as a transportation planner and project manager for the Toole Design Group. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student in city and regional planning at UC Berkeley. At the TSC, he is working on a pedestrian exposure project which involves modeling and counting pedestrian and bicycle travel. His interests include pedestrian and bicycle transportation safety, design, and volume modeling; and multimodal transportation impact assessments. He is teaching a course this spring, "Pedestrian and Bicycle Transportation."

 

Paul Supawanich is a masters candidate in city planning and transportation engineering at UC Berkeley. His current academic concentrations focus on transportation planning and urban design. Supawanich holds a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech. In February of 2007, he was selected as a National Science Foundation East Asia-Pacific Fellow to conduct research on Bus Rapid Transit and its effects on land values in Brisbane, Australia. Prior to graduate school, Supawanich tutored and counseled visiting domestic and international high school students during summer programs at UCLA. Currently, he is working on developing performance measures for the implementation of context-sensitive design on Caltrans highway corridors.

Carleton Wong is pursuing masters degrees in transportation engineering and city planning. He is working on a project to help Caltrans better understand the issues involved in fatigue-related collisions.

 

 

 

 

Harry Yip graduated with a BS from UC Berkeley and is studying for a masters of science in transportation engineering. He is working on rail crossing safety research, as well as the effectiveness of roundabouts.