Spotlight on UC Davis PhD Anmol Pahwa
Meet Anmol Pahwa, PhD Candidate in Civil Engineering at UC Davis with a subfield focus in Transportation Engineering. Anmol, who was born and raised in India, knew from an early age that he wanted to study civil engineering and dedicate his career to transportation. Anmol credits his father, a civil engineer working for Indian Railways, as his inspiration for selecting his field of interest.
Anmol earned his Bachelor’s in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi. In addition to his studies, Anmol also held several internships. His first was with the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, where he contributed to underground tunneling projects and examined the reliability of Delhi's Transportation System. He held an additional internship position at the Oilfield Service Company, Schlumberger, where he furthered his experience in the field and developed inventory management tools.
Anmol shares that he has found transportation engineering to be not only a fascinating field of study but also fundamental to urban planning, another interest of his. “Its multidisciplinary nature offers wider research opportunities in the fields of passenger mobility, freight flows, environment, health, safety, operations science and more,” he explained.
Anmol plans to pursue a career in academia. He shares that he is mainly drawn towards equity, environment, and health-related aspects of sustainable transportation, specifically in the context of urban freight flow. “My research focuses on modeling urban freight flow and last-mile logistics,” he notes. “Some of my recent works include modeling last-mile delivery to assess sustainability of e-commerce delivery, assessing the tradeoffs associated with eco-friendly cargo routing and reducing exposure of disadvantaged communities to harmful pollutants, and modeling e-commerce responses to the pandemic.”
Beyond research, Anmol enjoys science outreach and writes blogs that both summarize and describe his research projects in detail, making his research accessible to a broad audience.
This article was originally featured in the University of Southern California and California State University, Long Beach's METRANS Transportation Center's newsletter and authored by Alejandra Reyes, an undergraduate student attending the University of Southern California studying Civil Engineering with an emphasis in Construction Engineering and Management. She currently writes for the METRANS newsletter and is also an active member in the Toastmasters Club.