Grad student Seo Youn Yoon has been awarded an Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship of $1500 to cover travel costs to the 2009 Annual Transportation Research Board meeting in Washington DC. The US Department of Transportation’s Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program was established in 1991 to attract qualified students to the field of transportation education and research and to advance transportation workforce development. Seo Youn’s adviser, Kostas Goulias, notes: “It is very hard to get award funding for foreign nationals,” so he is doubly proud that two of his students were among this year’s recipients. There were 178 applications for the Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship this year, and less than 70 received funding.
Seo Youn’s research focuses on two questions fundamental to transportation studies, i.e., what shapes people’s decisions about travel behavior, and how can the mechanism underlying people’s behavior be captured? To address these issues, Seo Youn proposes to use GIS to develop a measurement procedure that captures accessible opportunities from individual movement through time and space, and to use econometric models which consider human interaction to assess the significance of the accessibility measures. To quote Seo Youn, “this research addresses the relationship between urban development patterns and travel behavior and the propagation of the impact on behavior through human interaction. The result from this study will enhance the understanding of the impact of urban development and land use change on travel behavior and help establish better transportation policies.”
