The research of CEE doctoral student Josie Kressner was recognized earlier this month by Outside the Box, a national transportation engineering competition hosted by George Mason University.
As the grand prize winner, Kressner took home $10,000. Her award-winning video summarizes many of her research interests at Georgia Tech.
As a transportation engineering graduate student, Kressner has been focusing on the employment of alternative methods for updating the transportation planning process. Her dissertation assesses the viability of substituting more traditional travel surveys and traffic counts with targeted marketing and cell phone data.
Kressner earned her undergraduate degrees at Washington University in St. Louis and completed her master's at Georgia Tech in August 2011. She is working under the advisement of Dr. Laurie A. Garrow, and she is also working on several projects with Dr. Kari E. Watkins. She is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), a Georgia Tech Presidential Fellowship, and two national awards from both WTS Advancing Women in Transportation and the Society of Women Engineers.
“Josie’s work has generated a lot of interest from the transportation planning community” her advisor, Dr. Laurie Garrow, said. “Her passion for challenging our field to think in new ways is infectious, and her commitment to developing models that will benefit the community is evident in her submission.”
The Cameron Rian Hays Outside of the Box competition challenges young transportation professionals (under the age of 35) to produce a 2,000-word essay, Powerpoint presentation, video, or other media form that conveys a viable and actionable plan to solve a current transportation or transportation policy problem.