Memorial Program Archive

Rachel Elmkies, AICP, is an urban planner and data analyst focusing on the intersection of land use, transportation, and affordable housing. She holds a B.A. in Urban Studies from Hunter College and a Master's in Regional Planning from Cornell University. Rachel was a Senior Policy Fellow at Desegregate CT/Regional Plan Association and a member of the Cornell Legal Constructs Lab. Currently, she is a volunteer geospatial analyst for the National Zoning Atlas. Her fellowship research focus is on expanding micromobility and shared mobility outside New York City.

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Growing Shared Mobility & Micromobility (SMMM) Outside NYC

Bradley Hershenson is an Information Science PhD student at the University at Albany studying cyber security, emergency preparedness, and homeland security, with research interests in transportation policy, urban planning, micromobility, and environmental sustainability. Bradley’s research focus is on identifying and understanding cultural trends and ridership patterns in underrepresented biking populations and exploring potential investments to improve the cycling experience in various communities. 

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Youth Cycling in NYC A Means for Commuting and Recreation

Jessie Ho is in the PhD program at the SUNY Buffalo Department of Civil Engineering, with a concentration in Transportation Engineering. Recognizing transportation as a vital aspect of modern life, Jessie believes in the common goal of achieving sustainability. Her research focuses on community contributions to mapping regional knowledge. Her research focus is on evaluating the practicality and implications of using an open-source mapping network as the transportation network for the New York Best Practice Model. 

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NYMTC Transportation Conformity Determination

Andrés Castelo Rebeil is a Master of Regional Planning student at Cornell University with a passion for active transportation and mass transit. After obtaining his civil engineering bachelor’s degree at Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Mexico, Andrés worked in the private and public sector supervising traffic calming infrastructure projects to improve pedestrian safety in residential areas. His research focus is on identifying best practices to improve suburban traffic safety and education programs.

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Equitable Traffic Safety Programs in the NYMTC Suburban Counties

Julia Amaral is a Brazilian Ph.D. student in Transportation Engineering in the Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment (CITE) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Before joining the Ph.D. program, she obtained her master’s degree in Transportation Engineering from Universidade de São Paulo, where she also completed her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. Her main research interests are urban freight and passenger transportation. Her goal is to enhance transportation efficiency in cities, improving livability and reducing environmental impacts. Besides her academic work, Julia is the president of the Women in Transportation (WTS) student chapter at her university, and she volunteers giving online physics classes to low-income teenagers in Brazil.

In grad school, Julia has been involved in several multidisciplinary research projects in which she had the opportunity to broaden her experience and knowledge in transportation. She has participated in several stages of research including data collection, behavioral modeling, processing of archival GPS data, development of state-of-the-art simulation tools, among others.

Julia’s September 11th memorial program project focuses on helping NYMTC to update the Socioeconomic and Demographic (SED) forecasting and Zonal Allocation Process (ZAP) models for the New York Metropolitan Region. She will research and evaluate new methods found in the literature and in practice on other MPOs. The ultimate objective is to recommend enhancements or alternatives to the existing SED and ZAP models that would enable NYMTC’s staff to independently develop future forecasts.

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Analysis of Socioeconomic and Demographics Methodologies and Forecasting Solutions

Fabian Barch is a PhD Candidate in Sociology of Education at New York University. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in Education Studies and French from Washington University in St. Louis. He has been a part of multiple research teams which used large data to better understand how work conditions relate to teacher job satisfaction, and to explore racial disparities in exclusionary school discipline practices. His doctoral research explores the relationship between students’ experiences with housing instability and their academic performance. His research interests center around questions of equity and access to public goods.

Fabian’s September 11th program internship is with the Regional & Strategic Planning subdivision’s Strategic Planning Unit, helping to identify and develop racial equity performance measures. This work continues the efforts of the Equity & Inclusion in Planning Working Group to expand on the agency’s commitment to improve transportation outcomes for all communities. The project seeks to further develop the Department of Transportation’s ability to track the impacts of their equity efforts, and to help maintain accountability in transportation planning.

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Establishing Community Context

Cristina Mejia Cancelado is pursuing a Master of Urban Planning at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service. Cristina is a lawyer from Universidad de los Andes (Bogota, Colombia) with a minor in public policy and Economics and she has experience in Colombia's public sector and in consulting. She worked at the National Planning Department as an assistant to the Deputy Director for Land Use Planning and then she was an assistant to the Deputy Minister of Rural Development for strategic projects. Later, Cristina joined Steer a transport consulting firm in which she worked in several types of project that gave her a grasp of transport sector, land use planning and urban planning as a whole. Some projects in which she worked are TOD railway public transportation projects, the institutional strengthening of the Ministry of Transport, the adaptation of UK project formulation methodologies to the Latin American context, and electromobility projects in various countries in Latin-America. She’s very interested on how to mainstream the gender and inclusion perspective to transport projects to create more inclusive cities.

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Coordinated Street Furniture Franchise

Tao Liang is pursuing a Master of Transportation Planning and Engineering degree at NYU. Before graduate school, he worked as an architect in China for three years. His research interest is urban data analysis, using data augmented approaches to identify city problems and optimize design solutions. Tao will be an integral staff member responsible for researching and completing a project entitled “Infrastructure is Public Space: Building Healthy, Resilient and Sustainable Corridors” for which he will assist NYCDOT staff in formulating the Healthy Corridor Index in the context of environmental health; access internal and external resources; perform data management regarding safety, mobility, and accessibility; conduct research on socioeconomic, demographic, and environmental sustainability topics; execute accompanying overlap mapping; and prepare designs, graphic representations, and presentations.

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Healthy Corridor Index

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David Anton is a second-year student of the Masters in Public Administration at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Prior to his graduate studies, David acted as policy advisor for Argentina’s Federal Government in the areas of transit planning and affordability. He also acted as policy advisor for Argentina’s Presidency of the G20 Economic Forum, supporting the harmonization of regulations concerning public-private partnerships for infrastructure development among country members. David also has experience in the private sector, conducting economic and financial valuation of infrastructure assets as part of Compass Lexecon’s International Arbitration Practice. He graduated with a BA in Economics in 2015 from the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina.

At SIPA, David became increasingly interested in topics related to revitalizing cities and assessing the socioeconomic impacts of infrastructure projects and urban policy interventions. He also interned with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and worked on a capstone project with Daimler Trucks North America, advising the firm on how to work with local governments in adapting freight transport regulations.

David’s September 11th Scholar Project is at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC), where he is studying the impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the agency’s Socioeconomic and Demographic Forecasts and Travel Demand models. The project is focused on how the increase in telework due to the pandemic will have long-term implications in the location of job opportunities across the New York Metropolitan Area and changing commuting patterns.

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COVID 19 Impacts on Socioeconomic, Demographic and Travel Demand Forecasts

Seth Kerr is pursuing a Master of Urban Planning degree at NYU Wagner School of Public Service. Before graduate school, he served as a United States Army Officer specializing in medical logistics for eight years. During his service, Seth spent six years living in Kenya and Germany. He enjoyed riding transit systems worldwide and fulfilled his dream of riding the Shinkansen bullet train in Japan.

Seth is passionate about infrastructure and climate resiliency. He has a special interest in improving sustainable transportation options and believes wholeheartedly in the power of the humble, underrated bus. Bus Rapid Transit is captivating to Seth, and he would love to bring more dedicated busways to NYC, or ITDP rated BRT systems to US cities.

Seth’s September 11th project focuses on helping NYMTC improve its federal aid-eligible infrastructure condition monitoring and financial forecasting processes. He has had the opportunity to benchmark MPOs and State DOTs across the country for best practices. Seth will also help NYMTC develop an internal checklist for the Regional Transportation Plan financial forecasting process.

Next year for his last year of graduate school, Seth will serve as a John D. Solomon Fellow with New York City Emergency Management (NYCEM).

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Infrastructure Condition Monitoring and Revenue/Expenditure Forecasting

Niloufar Nouri started her PhD in civil engineering program at the City College of New York in 2014. She obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degree in environmental engineering in her home country Iran. Her doctoral research activity lies in the intersection of resilient infrastructure systems and data-driven environmental risk assessment. Along with her PhD studies, she worked as an adjunct lecturer at CUNY Bronx Community College. Niloufar has been involved in various data-oriented projects while working as a research scientist at NOAA-CESSRT. She has a solid background in big data analysis using Python and R.

Niloufar’s September 11th Memorial program research will be on evaluating new methods of collecting travel data and identifying how such methods can complement traditional travel surveys. She will identify potential alternative travel data sources such as cellular data and Location Based Services (LBS) and will analyze their methodology, statistical properties, strengths and limitations.

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The Future of Travel Surveys

Carla Tejada is a Ph.D. student in Transportation Engineering at the City College of New York. Before joining the City College of New York, Carla obtained a master’s degree in Logistics and Supply Chain from the University of Maryland at College Park and a graduate certificate in Supply Chain Management from MIT. She also spent several years in the industry in companies such as DHL Express and SONY. 

Carla’s September 11th program internship is with The New York City Department of Transportation with the Pedestrian Unit (NYCDOT). NYC is the city with the highest number of pedestrian trips in the United States. Carla’s work focuses on developing a Pedestrian Network Flow Model that will allow the Unit to identify pedestrian generators, dense walking areas, and walking trip flow within New York City. This model will provide information to the New York City Comprehensive Pedestrian Map that will help create more rationality in the decision-making process within NYC streets.

Carla’s research interest is in commercial freight logistics and planning, multimodal interactions in the urban scenario, and network modeling and optimization. Her dissertation focuses on e-commerce and the interactions that urban deliveries have with people and the urban environment.

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Modelling Pedestrian Demand in New York City

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Gabrielle O’Grady is a second year M.S. student studying Sustainability in the Urban Environment at the City College of New York.  The interdisciplinary program recognizes the multi-faceted considerations needed to design sustainable and resilient urban infrastructure. Her studies involve coursework in architecture, engineering, science, and social science. She completed her Bachelors of Science degree on the dean’s list in biological sciences and chemistry at the University of Connecticut.

Post undergrad Gabrielle has worked in the medical field as a clinical research coordinator and as a patient access representative. This required listening to patients’ needs, strong organizational skills, data work, understanding of study protocol, and communication between the different players. Gabrielle enjoys design and painting, being active, traveling, and getting out in nature.

She aims to use her compassion, analytical skills, and design eye to be a part of New York City’s infrastructure planning. Gabrielle is most interested in helping create designs that are not only aesthetically pleasing, structurally sound, and functional, but are also environmentally responsible, socially conscientious, and accessible to all.

Most recently, Gabrielle has received her LEED Green Associate certification. She has interned at the CIUS Building Performance Laboratory where she has worked on large data sets from the Department of Education to recommend preventative maintenance strategies and improve buildings and their energy efficiencies. She has also worked in their Building Re-tuning Laboratory studying energy information systems (EIS) and building automation system (BAS) trend charts to support building re-tuning recommendations for operators.

Gabrielle’s September 11^th scholar project will be at New York City’s Department of Transportation in the Transportation Planning and Management Division. She will be working with the Mobility Management team and key stakeholders to produce the 2020 Mobility Management Resource Guide. The resource guide is a compilation of all accessible transportation information in the New York City region. It details amenities and infrastructure improvements to improve walking and rolling accessibility.  It also includes NYC DOT’s accessible programs and services and informs readers how to access them.

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Mobility Management Resource Guide Update

Yaxin Zhang is a third year Ph.D student in the Grove School of Engineering at the City College of New York.  Her specialization is transportation.  Prior to coming to CCNY, Yaxin began her undergraduate program at Taiyuan Industrial College in China where she studied polymer materials and engineering and then received a master’s degree in logistics and operations management from Cardiff University in the UK.

While studying at Cardiff University, Yaxin began to see “connections” that influence transportation performance such as the relationship between growth of e-commerce and traffic congestion. She also realized that awareness of “environmental, social and behavioral science issues are required in order to plan and manage transportation operations.”

The understanding of the multiple, connecting issues together with an “interest in making things work more efficiently” led Yaxin to her current studies at the Grove School.  Here she has been able to apply a variety of research methods, survey techniques, and analytical approaches. Her research area was mainly focus on e-commerce, city logistics and parking activity in New York City.

Yaxin’s September 11^th  internship is Analyzing and Monitoring Congestion and Transportation Performance Measures Using Big Data. In this role, she will assist NYMTC staff by using real-time probe data to produce more accurate analyses of congestion in the NYMTC planning area.  The project will focus on the use of The National Performance Management Research Data Set (NPMRDS), which is used in the computation of performance measures for both Transportation Performance Management (TPM) and the Congestion Management Process (CMP).

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Analyzing Freight Congestion and Transportation Performance Measures Using National Performance Measurement Research Data Set (NPMRDS)

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Amirhossein Baghestani is a PhD student in Transportation Engineering at the City College of New York. His September 11th Program internship is with NYMTC with the Technical Group. He acquired a Master of Science in Transportation Planning and Engineering from Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran, in 2013.

His research mainly focuses on travel behavior analysis, travel demand modeling, and discrete choice models, which has resulted in many scientific articles. Prior to joining CCNY, he worked as a Research Assistant in the transportation planning department of Tarahan Parse Research Institute for four years where he was involved in transportation projects such as travel demand modeling and comprehensive transportation studies.

His research topic is Sensitivity Analysis of New York Best Practice Model (BPM) Highway Attributes. The BPM is used to conduct federally-required Transportation Conformity Determinations and Regional Emissions Analyses. It is also used to assess the impact of transportation projects in the Regional Transportation Plan and the Transportation Improvement Program on performance measures such as travel time, vehicle speed, and congestion. Amir will survey transportation project attributes that have been coded into the NYBPM and then will help evaluate and classify them by priority. He will also assist with model runs that will measure the impact of changing certain attributes on model outcomes and will evaluate the results and develop guidelines for project coding.

Nury Gutierrez is an incoming MS student in Sustainability in the Urban Environment, at the City College of New York. She graduated with a BA in Sociology from CCNY in 2017 and recently worked as a research assistant at the college for a social science study analyzing the potential impacts of rezoning and Business Improvement Districts in Inwood, New York. She also completed a nine-month internship in the management office of the Hazardous Materials-HAZMAT team for MTA New York City Transit in the Security Department. Prior to this, Nury obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Management in her home country of Colombia. She specialized in Natural Resources, Environment and Disaster Prevention Management. Nury’s September 11th Memorial Program research will be with NYMTC. She will work on Community Planning Initiatives to develop enhanced outreach and planning linkages with communities of concern throughout NYMTC’s planning area, as defined in NYMTC’s Title VI program. It will include grassroots outreach to local communities regarding key developments for the MPO; collaborating with municipal government officials, community-based organizations, advocates and other interested stakeholders; as well scheduling and executing community workshop meetings to identify planning issues and gather suggestions for improved outreach.

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Shirin Najafabadi is a PhD student in Transportation Engineering at the City College of New York. Her 9/11 program internship is with NYMTC and she will work closely with NYMTC Planning Group to work on “Vertical Integration of Land Use and Transportation Planning” project. NYMTC’s members introduced the idea of Coordinated Development Emphasis Areas (CDEAs) in Plan 2045, the recently adopted Regional Transportation Plan. These are areas within the NYMTC planning area, where land development and transportation investment planning are to be coordinated to achieve environmental sustainability, local economic revitalization, and improved quality of life. Her role is to research methods to establish the influence of NYMTC’s regional transportation plans on municipal land use planning decisions. Conversely, she will also research methods to help NYMTC ensure that municipal planning efforts are incorporated into the regional planning perspective.

Ms. Shirin Najafabadi has received her M.S. in Transportation Planning on May 2014 from the State University of New York at Albany, and has been admitted to the CCNY Ph.D. program through an extremely competitive selection process. Ms. Najafabadi’s record in transportation planning, modeling and analysis has been outstanding. Her research involves the application of mathematical optimization, machine learning and statistics to transportation problems.

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Vertical Integration Of Land Use and Transportation Planning

Siddharth Shah is a student in the Masters of Urban Planning at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. As part of the 9/11 Memorial Scholarship program, he will intern at the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) in their Research, Safety and Implementation team. At NYCDOT, his work will involve updating the Vision Zero Pedestrian Safety Borough Plans, first published in 2015, by analyzing the progress on the previous commitments and the impacts on pedestrian safety in Vision Zero priority locations. He shall simultaneously help the Research, Safety and Implementation team in their ongoing policy research to make the streets of New York City safer for all.

Mr. Shah obtained a Master of Science in Civil Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelors of Technology from CEPT University (India), where he received the convocation award for Academic Excellence. He has a broad interest in the built environment of cities with a focus on the areas of transportation, environment, and infrastructure in developed as well as developing economies.

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Bahman Moghimi is a PhD student in Transportation Engineering, at City College of New York. His 9/11 program in¬ternship is with NYMTC and he will work to do a full documentation and report discussing the impact of Transit Signal Priority on travel speeds, travel time, congestion, delay, air quality and also evaluate how it can impact on the bigger scale of transportation planning in the New York Metropolitan area. The overall internship process will be about surveying of the TSP projects done in NYMTC region, the TSP tactics used and how much they could reach the objective function, also studying planning tools of NYBPM, PPS-AQ and CMP and run the applications to find how these tools can potentially be used for TSP at the regional level, and furthermore, suggesting the potential scenarios to utilize the benefits of TSP in the NYBPM modeling process, performing a pilot test and prepare the final report on all of the findings.

Bahman Moghimi is a master graduate from Northeastern University in Boston where he received a Dean’s Fellowship award. He was working as a Research Assistant at Northeastern University for 2 years on the project; Self-Organizing Traffic Control and Signal Priority for Transit, prior joining to the CCNY for his PhD. His research is about actuated traffic signal control, transit signal priority, traffic simulation, data analysis, and transportation network analysis; thus far, he has published a lot of journal and conference papers in this research area.

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Transit Signal Priority and its Effect on Traffic Congestion and Air Quality

Mr. Patricio Vicuna studied for his B.Sc. in Statistics and Computer Science, M.Sc. in Operation Research, Advanced Diploma in Data Mining and Project Management, has been admitted into the PhD. Program in Civil Engineering in the field of Transportation at The City College of New York - CUNY (2012); his research is focused in the Development of a Decision Support Tool to Evaluate Transit Improvements Using a Metaheuristic based Model, his advisor is Professor Camille Kamga and co-advisor Dr. Kyriacos Mouskos.

Mr. Vicuna will be working on Automatic Vehicle Location Data Mining, Visualization, and Dashboard Functionality for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, under the supervision of Mrs. Susan McSherry.

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AVL Data Analysis

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Gauri Jumde, a Master’s of Urban Planning candidate at NYU, will also intern at NYMTC for the preparation of Regional Bicycle – Pedestrian Handbook. The project will result in a best practices document to illustrate successful projects in the NYMTC area that enhance mobility, safety, sustainability, and economic development. Gauri’s main responsibility will be to assist in defining the improvement strategies, provide the research on what is working, illustrate successful regional projects, describe the fund sources that were used, and possibly to describe how the project was conceived and the path to construction. This handbook will serve as a type of catalog that planners could use for reference when they are developing projects and applying for funding. Gauri’s supervisor at NYMTC is Larry McAuliffe, Manager of Sustainability.

Dan Wan is a PhD student in Transportation Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering in CUNY. Her research interests are big data analysis, transit, signal control, and transport finance. For this internship, she will study riders’ perceptions of Select Bus Service (a form of Bus Rapid Transit) elements in New York City. The important ridership drivers will be identified. An analysis of how Select Bus Service elements affect bus operations will be finished to help NYCDOT and NYCT design future SBS routes. To complete this project, Dan needs to work closely with transit professionals, do on-broad survey, deal with real world data, and use some analysis tools. She will work with Transit Development Group in NYCDOT. Aaron Sugiura is her direct supervisor.

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