Joshua Davidson and Jasmine Wu credit their success in earning a prestigious Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship to support from faculty member Megan Ryerson and other Penn students.
If transportation is fundamentally about connecting people, that’s especially true for two Weitzman students in the Department of City & Regional Planning who earlier this year received a Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship, widely considered the most prestigious honor for emerging scholars in the transportation profession.
“The Eisenhower Fellowship recognizes graduate students in transportation engaging in the most innovative work to benefit society and benefit the environment from all different modalities,” says Megan Ryerson, associate dean for research and UPS Chair for Transportation at the Weitzman School.
Joshua Davidson, a 2023 candidate for the PhD in City & Regional Planning, received funding for research examining changes in bike share use in Philadelphia during the COVID-19 pandemic using rigorous statistical methodologies, and Jasmine Siyu Wu, a 2023 Master of City Planning candidate was funded for her master’s thesis examining disparities in teenagers’ access to driver education through a mobility-equity lens. Her research also earned the Witte-Sakamoto Family Prize in City & Regional Planning, a $50,000 fellowship awarded annually to an exceptional master’s student at the Weitzman School.
Although the Eisenhower Fellowships are awarded for individual projects, Davidson and Wu both cite the close collaboration and professional network they found in the research group led by Ryerson as being central to their success.
“It’s a culture where everybody helps everybody else,” Davidson says. “It’s expected that you’re going to do wonderful work, and you’re empowered to.” He notes that the group hosts regular social gatherings for past and present students, and there’s an active Slack channel where they exchange ideas and find support. In fact, Davidson credits Ryerson’s research group for more than a decade of Eisenhower Fellowships for Weitzman students.
“I remember the first time I went to TRB,” says Ryerson. “I said, ‘This is it. This is the field for me.'"
With appointments in the Department of City & Regional Planning at Weitzman and Electrical & Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, Ryerson founded the Center for Safe Mobility to examine how street designers understand, measure, and implement safety interventions, and she serves as the research director of Mobility21, a National University Transportation Center that investigates technologies, policies, incentives and training programs for improving the mobility of people and goods in the 21st century efficiently and safely.
Davidson and Wu have collaborated with Ryerson and other students to publish their findings in well-read journals known for rigorous scholarship with impact, such as Traffic Injury Prevention, Transportation Research Record, and Accident Analysis and Prevention. Among their student colleagues and co-authors is Shriya Karam, a fourth-year undergraduate in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Penn, also a member of Ryerson’s lab, who also earned an Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship this year.
“In my lab, we have undergraduate and graduate students from different disciplines working alongside one another,” says Ryerson. “Recently, Josh and I have engaged with students in economics, engineering, and urban studies to study, for example, the impact of SEPTA’s first new bus line in 20 years. The output isn’t just the studies: it’s a generation of engineers, applied economists, and planners learning to work across disciplines for a greater good.”
Established in 1983 by the US Department of Transportation, the Eisenhower Fellowships are given annually to students pursuing a master’s or doctoral degree in transportation-related disciplines. The program has three stated goals: (1) advance the transportation workforce by helping to attract the nation’s brightest minds to the field of transportation, (2) encourage future transportation professionals to seek advanced degrees, and (3) help retain top talent in the U.S. transportation industry.
Fellows are also funded to attend the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting—the largest gathering of students, practitioners, policy makers, and scholars of transportation anywhere. The program includes multiple sessions devoted to the Fellows, some of whom are presenting their work to a professional audience for the first time. It’s a formative experience. “I remember the first time I went to TRB,” says Ryerson. “I said, ‘This is it. This is the field for me. This is an incredible group of people who want to use their science for the public good.’”
Davidson describes the excitement of meeting scholars from around the world who are guided by the same question—in his case, “How can we learn about biking and bike share use from shocks–like the COVID-19 pandemic–to make infrastructure planning make more sense for people who don’t get around by car?” One of the people Davidson met at his presentation was responsible for research that provided the foundation for his own; another was a researcher who studied the fleets of Spanish parents and children who bicycled to school together.
For her TRB presentation, Wu analyzed data from Ohio, where, in addition to in-school coursework, new drivers are required to complete behind-the-wheel training with licensed instructors that can cost upwards of $600. Wu led the analytical effort that identified that it is socioeconomic background, rather than proximity to training centers, that is the primary barrier to teens engaging in drivers education; and that these socioeconomic barriers prevent them from gaining safe driving skills as well as access to the mobility that comes from getting one’s drivers license early. Wu’s findings have led to proposals for driver education scholarships and other policy interventions could improve access to driver education. The meeting gave her the opportunity to talk to people from Ohio and other states about their own experiences with driver education. “Those conversations gave me a better understanding of the research question and the context and helped me shape my research so that my findings have the most impact,” says Wu.
This fall, Davidson will begin a tenure-track position at Oberlin College as assistant professor of statistics and data science, and Wu will begin her PhD studies at Weitzman. But both look forward to staying connected and possibly collaborating in the future.
“The relationships don’t end with graduation,” says Wu, noting that alums and current students have started collaborating, often from afar, without ever having met in person. “It’s one of the reasons I chose to stay at Penn.”
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