Three PhD engineering students win prestigious Eisenhower transportation fellowships
Three civil engineering Ph.D. students have received prestigious Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowships, an honor that highlights Vanderbilt’s thriving position as an epicenter of connected cities and transit research. The fellows were selected through a competitive process that included university panels and a national selection panel.
The awards are made by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration to students pursuing master’s or doctoral degrees in transportation-related disciplines. The fellowship program encourages future transportation professionals to seek advanced degrees and helps to retain top talent in the U.S. transportation industry.
The Eisenhower fellows were honored at the recent Transportation Research Board of the National Academies at its 2022 annual meeting Jan. 9-13 in Washington D.C.
The grant may cover a combination of tuition and fees, stipend, and one-time costs associated with participating in the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting.
The Ph.D. students and their study areas are:
- Yanbing Wang, civil engineering, advised by Dan Work, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and computer science. Wang’s research focuses on control of dynamic systems and data assimilation with applications to complex traffic flows and adaptive cruise-controlled vehicles. She also is interested in smart-city technologies such as urban-scaled sensing and big data analytics.
- Matthew Nice, civil engineering, advised by Dan Work. His research interests are broadly in transportation cyber-physical systems that include autonomous vehicles, sensor networks, and human-in-the-loop systems. Nice is a member of the Work Research Group, a transportation cyber-physical systems lab at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University.
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Madeline Allen, civil engineering, advised by Mark Abkowitz, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Studies. Allen’s research interests include data-driven land, resource, and emergency management decisions through GIS- and remote-sensing-based research and developing a methodological framework to conduct comprehensive flood risk and resilience assessments at the community-level scale.
Contact: Brenda Ellis, 615 343-6314