The Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium would like to congratulate two of its affiliated students who took home hefty scholarships this past week from the Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS).

Kristi Currans of Portland State University and Jessica Bloomfield of the University of Oregon were both awarded scholarships at a May 26 dinner at Wilf’s in Union Station. The Women’s Transportation Seminar was established by the federal government with the goal of transforming the transportation industry through the advancement of women. Overall, WTS awarded $15,500 in scholarships this year to women pursuing higher education and careers in transportation.

Currans, a graduate Civil Engineering student at PSU, took home a $3,500 Graduate Scholarship. She holds an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from Oregon State University, where she was named Student of the Year in 2010. Currently, Curran is working with travel demand modeling as part of a workforce training program between PSU and the Oregon Department of Transportation. Active in the American Society of Civil Engineers,

the Institute of Transportation Engineers and Students in Transportation Engineering, she would like to teach and perform transportation research at a university level in the future.

Currently pursuing a double Masters degree in Community and Regional Planning and Law at UO, Bloomfield was awarded a $5,000 Leadership Scholarship.  She is a graduate research fellow for OTREC’s Sustainable Cities Initiative (More Info on Sustainable Cities here), working on transportation policy and legislation. Her concentration in land use and transportation planning has lent itself well to the Sustainable Cities Initiative, which seeks to integrate legislative and policy research, education and public service within city and transportation planning. In the future, Jessica would like to use her background in planning and law to “establish policies that encourage—perhaps mandate—sustainable transportation projects throughout the nation.”