UC Davis' Sarah Dennis Models Public Health Impacts From Heavy-Duty Trucks in Her Research
Meet the NCST's 2024 Student of the Year, Sarah Dennis!
Meet Sarah Dennis, a recent Civil Engineering Ph.D. recipient from the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) and the NCST’s 2024 Outstanding Student of the Year!
From obtaining her B.S. in Public Health and M.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), a M.S. in Epidemiology from UC Davis, and newly a Ph.D., Sarah’s impressive academic journey captures her intersecting interests in sustainable transportation systems, freight, public health, and environmental justice. For Sarah, this curiosity sparked at a young age when she learned about “last-mile” delivery from her father who drove for UPS, and the importance of health, especially involving transportation, from her Danish mother and family trips to Denmark.
These experiences provided a foundation for Sarah’s pursuit of higher education as a first generation college student. During her undergraduate years at UNLV, Sarah grew fascinated with a course about public health and the built environment taught by Dr. Courtney Coughenour. As the class centered around creating a safe, efficient, functional, and healthy built environment for all, Sarah was able to explore her interests with the help of Dr. Coughenour, who introduced Sarah to her future Master’s Advisor, Dr. Alexander Pez.
Outside of academia, Sarah’s interests continued to grow after serving as Treasurer for the UC Davis student chapter of Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS) and interning for CA Group Inc., a transportation engineering firm, out of their Las Vegas office. From this internship, Sarah learned about the extent to which research aligns with the engineering field. Sarah would like to thank Jim Caviola for his generosity and kindness in this early engineering experience!
In her recent research, Sarah developed models to quantify the public health impacts of trucks at the vehicle, regional, and state-levels. Sarah’s dissertation, “Integrating human exposure into freight transportation modeling for a sustainable and equitable future,” delves into the various methods and tools used to quantify equity and public health impacts of heavy-duty trucks. As a culminating model, her dissertation is a first-of-its-kind mobile source reduced complexity air quality model. This model can quantify community-level morbidity and mortality outcomes of different transportation projects impacting vehicle miles traveled from passenger cars and heavy-duty trucks. Dr. Miguel Jaller, Sarah’s Ph.D. advisor, helped her explore and find her academic interests. Sarah would like to thank him for his mentorship, support, expertise and kindness.
Glancing toward the future, Sarah aims to grow her research by forging professional connections to continue advocating for equitable, healthy, and safe transportation systems. As Sarah details:
“My long-term goals are still in support of these principles, but hopefully with the added opportunity to mentor and support students and other similarly aimed professionals… My hope is to influence meaningful changes that can improve how we, as a society, interact with and experience our transportation systems.”
In 2021, Sarah was awarded Best Teaching Assistant for the UC Davis Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering – providing similar support for students that she received from mentors throughout her academic and professional experiences. Along with completing her Ph.D., Sarah is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Urban Freight Lab at the University of Washington.
Congratulations on all your achievements, Sarah!