Spring 2021 Dissertation Grant and Graduate Fellowship Awardees
Congratulations to our UC Riverside, University of Vermont, Georgia Tech, and UC Davis dissertation grant and graduate fellowship recipients for the 2021-2022 cycle! Our recent awardees are contributing to research on electric vehicle charging infrastructure, minimizing emissions of electric vehicle charging, e-commerce, dock-less e-bike share, public transportation, and developing emission models for marine vessels.
Yusuf Jubair | Electrical Engineering, UC Riverside
NCST Dissertation Award
Yusuf is currently focusing on electric vehicle integration into the smart grid. Yusuf’s research involves a centralized optimization approach for integrated distributed energy resources and smart charging and discharging strategies for electric vehicles. Yusuf hopes to build on this research by continuing to study electric vehicles in the future and contributing to solving the global climate crisis.
Jacqueline Garrido | Electrical Engineering, UC Riverside
NCST Graduate Fellowship Award
Jacqueline’s current research focuses on studying electric vehicle charging behaviors in an effort to minimize carbon emissions. Aligning with California’s goal of 100% zero emission vehicles by 2035, this project will address smart and innovative solutions both to charge these vehicles and optimize vehicle schedules and routes, with the goal of minimizing carbon dioxide emissions. Jacqueline plans to pursue a career in academia and continue to seek innovative strategies to address challenges within the transportation sector.
Chas Frederickson | Mechanical Engineering, UC Riverside
NCST Graduate Fellowship Award
Chas’ current research involves studying the operational patterns of marine vessels and various non-road equipment, including construction, agricultural, and cargo transfer port equipment. The marine vessel aspect of the research focuses on harbor craft vessels and their operational patterns within their resident harbors. In the future, Chas aims to expand his current research on marine vessels by incorporating ocean-going vessels.
Luis Fernando Enriquez-Contreras | Electrical Engineering, UC Riverside
NCST Graduate Fellowship Award
Luis is currently working on developing a free and open-source Python library that is meant to facilitate and optimize the data acquisition and control of the various components of a microgrid and electric vehicle charging infrastructure. With this award, Luis plans to dedicate the time necessary to focus on all the details necessary to make this library useful for researchers.
Ryan Drover | Chemical and Environmental Engineering, UC Riverside
NCST Graduate Fellowship Award
Ryan works with the collaborative health exposure studies in collaboration with the UC Riverside School of Medicine and the multidisciplinary BREATHE Center. Ryan’s current project involves developing engine load-specific emission factors (EFs) and the comparison between mode-specific and engine load-specific EFs for gaseous and particulate pollutants. This will support a comprehensive analysis of marine emissions to atmospheric pollution in coastal and inland communities. Ryan plans to continue pursuing research in tangible, sustainability focused areas.
Parsa Pezeshknejad | Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Vermont
NCST Graduate Fellowship Award
Parsa’s work explores the reasons that individuals may or may not return to public transit in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This project draws on survey responses from transit users during the pandemic and intends to create a follow-up survey to assess the likelihood of different types of transit riders returning once the majority of the U.S. population is vaccinated.
Parker King | Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Vermont
NCST Graduate Fellowship Award
Parker’s project aims to inform the design of electric vehicle incentive programs, particularly in smaller and rural communities that have not been the focus of prior investigation and where the market penetration of electric vehicles has been lower. The project will also contribute to a greater understanding how incentive programs can be designed to improve program effectiveness and equity for lower income and rural households.
Caleb Weed | Sustainable Transportation Systems, Georgia Tech
NCST Dissertation Award
Caleb’s current work surrounds short-haul and regional trucking operations. These operations offer an opportunity to analyze the potential of battery electric medium- and heavy- duty trucks to reduce emission and save money. Caleb’s study identifies heavily trafficked freight truck routes in Georgia and quantifies electrification benefits for fleets operating on these corridors.
Huiying Fan | Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Tech
NCST Dissertation Award
This research extends Georgia Tech’s previous efforts in the application of regional travel demand model path retention algorithms. Huiying’s current research goal is to produce a path-specific and demographically explicit dataset for regional-model-predicted transit travel, and the competing shortest automobile path, to conduct an equity assessment of travel key performance indicators across different demographic groups.
Ziyi Dai | Sustainable Transportation Systems, Georgia Tech
NCST Dissertation Award
Ziyi’s research examines the differentiation between hybrid electric vehicle (HEV), plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) and battery electric vehicle (BEV) users through various factors such as: user household socio-demographic attributes, daily travel pattern, and energy usage profile. The differentiation between HEVs, PHEVs and BEVs in the proposed choice modeling is expected to significantly improve the tour-vehicle assignment functionality in future activity-based travel demand models as electric vehicles continue to penetrate the household travel market over time.
Anmol Pahwa | Transportation Engineering, UC Davis
NCST Dissertation Award
Anmol’s latest work acknowledges the recent growth of e-commerce and how it impacts the demands for last-mile delivery. In this project, Anmol focuses on the development and evaluation of sustainable last-mile strategies to manage the increase in online shopping. The work proposes to gain a comprehensive knowledge of the capabilities of different last-mile strategies and policies for varied markets and delivery environments.
Tatsuya Fukushige | Transportation Technology and Policy, UC Davis
NCST Dissertation Award
Bike-share operations often rely on costly rebalancing methods by operators due to users unevenly redistributing bikes across the service area. Tatsuya’s project assesses the potential for an incentive program where users may help to solve the rebalancing problem for bike-share systems. The incentive program, where users would pick-up or drop-off bikes in targeted areas, could help ensure a more harmonious system. Within this work, Tatsuya will develop a simulation model to gauge the effectiveness of such a program.