Program Description
Transportation supports personal autonomy and social connectivity, and increasingly vehicles themselves are becoming autonomous and connected. Students will conduct cutting-edge transportation research in areas including transportation cybersecurity, modeling, public transportation, network GIS, transportation education, and the impacts of transportation on public health. Students will be paired with faculty based on interest.
Potential Research Areas
- Modeling NextGen Mobility Services begins with understanding the needs of travelers. Using open-access and/or crowdsourced mobility data students will develop agent-based simulations and help design community-level transportation services that meet community needs.
- Impact of Transportation on Food Deserts: Students will explore real-world GIS mapping research questions including how underserved and low-income neighborhoods access grocery stores and fresh food, as well as the role of public transportation, infrastructure, and transportation policy in solving this health issue.
- Network GIS for Transportation: Students will solve a real-world transportation access problem concerning the provision of health services in a rural context using network data structures in a GIS context. Students will implement network optimization models on transport networks (Shortest Path, Travelling Salesman, Vehicle Routing).
- STEM Transportation Curriculum Design: Students will conduct interdisciplinary research and design STEM-based autonomous and connected transportation systems curriculum for middle school computer science courses.
- Safety impacts of advanced driver assistance technologies: Students will collect data on vehicle assistant and autonomous safety systems and help analyze data on the impact of these systems on incidents and crashes.
- Cybersecurity in Emerging Connected and Automated Transportation Systems: Students will engage in connected and automated transportation cybersecurity research. They will gain hands-on experience in cyber vulnerabilities, generating attack data, develop and test detection strategies, and explore attack mitigation techniques.
- Modeling Connected and Automated Traffic: Students will use advanced microsimulation tools and traffic signal technology to simulate and study traffic dynamics and assess how vehicle technologies will impact traffic operations.
- Human-Autonomy Interaction in Driving Simulator: Students will examine how various psychological correlates, such as cognitive load, decision-making, and trust, impact driving behaviors and the perceived autonomy of drivers in complex driving situations using a state-of-the-art driving simulator.
Program Contact
- Eric Courchesne, Alabama Transportation Institute, ercourchesne@ua.edu.
Apply Online By: Friday, March 1st