December 2016

UH-Manoa in collaboration with the universities of Alaska, Idaho and Washington was successful in receiving a 5-year Tier-1 University Transportation Center (UTC) from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Only 36 out of more than 400 proposals were successful. UH’s research budget share is $1.6M over five years. The focus of the research is on Transportation Safety Equity for Rural, Isolated, Tribal and Indigenous Communities. The PIs are Dr. Guohui Zhang and Dr. Panos Prevedouros.

The purpose of the UTCs is to conduct research that directly supports the priorities of the U.S. DOT to promote the safe, efficient and environmentally sound movement people and goods.  UTCs work with regional, state, local and tribal transportation agencies to help find solutions to challenges that directly impact their communities and affect the efficiency of the nation’s transportation system.

Hailing Li, a CS undergrad and mentee of CEE Asst. Prof. Gaur Johnson was awarded a $5000 grant from Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program for her project “Reliability of Punching Shear Strength Prediction for Existing Buildings.” She won 1st place in the Engineering and Computer Science category. The project was started when Hailing was a dual major in CEE and CS. Congratulations!

CEE Ph.D student Qiong (Linda) Wu and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Cong Chen, both under the guidance Dr. Guohui Zhang, attended the 10th University Transportation Center Spotlight Conference: Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety on Dec 1-2, 2016 at the National Academy of Sciences Keck Center in Washington D. C. They presented “Bayesian Network-based Pedestrian/Bicyclist Behavioral Analysis Impacted by Age, Gender, Sobriety Heterogeneity in Non-Motorist-Involved Intersection-Related Crashes.”