National Institute for Transportation and Communities

Amanda Dillon, University of Utah

Amanda Dillon is a research assistant in the University of Utah's Metropolitan Research Center. She has received both NITC and WTS scholarships, and has recently been hired as a community planner in the urban design studio of MHTN Architects, a major architecture firm in Salt Lake City.

LinkedIn

Tell us about yourself?

I’m a second year dual master’s student in city and metropolitan planning and real estate development at the University of Utah. I came to Utah via New York City where I spent 6 years working in the nonprofit sector. Prior to that, I did community development in the U.S. Peace Corps for two and a half years in Mauritania and Mozambique. Utah is an exciting place to study planning, transportation, and development because the population is growing and the built environment is changing so fast. I became interested in transportation and our (unhealthy) relationship with cars at a young age growing up in Los Angeles. Now that I’m in Salt Lake City, I’m focused on researching and creating more sustainable relationships between transportation and land management.

What (or who) has influenced your career path in transportation?

As I mentioned, I grew up in Los Angeles, and went to undergrad in Orange County. I formed my early impressions of transportation...

This page serves as a homebase for our coverage of the 2019 Transportation Research Board (TRB) annual conference. Check back here for ongoing updates, as well as our Twitter and Facebook.

• NITC GUIDE TO TRB (PDF): Our printable schedule of where all of our NITC researchers will be presenting at lectures, poster sessions, and workshops

• NITC RECEPTION AT TRB: Join us for transportation bingo and networking on Tuesday, January 15 (7:30–10:30pm) nearby at Fado Irish Pub

• NITC STUDENT AWARD AT CUTC BANQUET: We’ll be celebrating our 2018 NITC “Student of the Year,"  Travis Glick of Portland State University, at the annual CUTC Banquet. Travis is a NITC scholar and graduate research assistant, and will present work in three TRB sessions.

MULTI-UNIVERSITY COLLABORATIVE PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS:

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The latest Small Starts Grant projects, selected by NITC's executive committee, will explore equitable access to mobility options, communicating the applied value of GPS data to agencies, and transportation resiliency in natural disasters.

This annual NITC funding program is a unique opportunity to tackle small-scale ($20,000 or less in scope) research projects. In contrast to our larger, annual flagship program ($30–150K), Small Starts enables us to include researchers who:

• Bring a diverse, interdisciplinary perspective and may not have considered applying a transportation lens to their work before.
• Offer a new voice in the field, whether they’re untenured faculty or a researcher who has not received a NITC grant before.
• Seek to kick-start a larger project by first tackling an exploratory study smaller in scope.

THE NEW PROJECTS

The new projects represent a mix of topics and disciplines across our partner campuses, aimed at supporting and advancing mobility with a focus on creating equitable transportation options. These projects total $60,000 in funding for this round.

Keunhyun Park, Assistant Professor at Utah State University, Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

Keunhyun Park graduated from the University of Utah in the spring of 2018, and is now a tenure-track assistant professor at Utah State University. In January 2018 he received a TRB Best Paper Award for "Travel Behavior in TODs vs. non-TODs: Using Cluster Analysis and Propensity Score Matching (PDF)," a paper he coauthored based on a NITC-funded research project with Brenda Scheer and Reid Ewing of the University of Utah. Selection was made by the Transportation and Land Development Committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB).

Utah State Profile | LinkedIn

Tell us about yourself:

I am from South Korea, where I studied landscape architecture for both my undergraduate and...