COVID research team – including seven students – win young professionals award

Seven UCLA students won the 2021 Young Professionals in Transportation Excellence in Innovation/Research Award for their rapid-research project “Monitoring and Adjusting Transit Service During a Pandemic.”

The student team comprised doctoral students Hao Ding, Julene Paul and Sam Speroni, master’s students Eric Dasmalchi MURP ‘21 and Yu Hong Hwang MURP ‘21, and undergraduate students Tianxing Dai ‘21 and Maya Desai ‘21. The team also included UCLA ITS’ Brian D. Taylor as principal investigator and John Gahbauer as project manager.

The project produced three separate policy briefs, one report, a white paper, an open-data spreadsheet, two web-based visualizations of transit changes, and a book chapter over the span of just three months. All of these outputs sought to address — in real-time with relatively little data at their disposal — how the COVID-19 pandemic would impact public transportation and its operators.

For each of these projects, students played a significant role. 

Dasmalchi spearheaded the creation of two interactive tools: one that allowed researchers, journalists and members of the public to easily analyze the impact of transit service across a variety of transit lines, and another that displayed where and when crowding was occurring on these same lines. 

Speroni and Hwang interviewed dozens of practitioners to decode how the planning profession was implementing service changes. 

Paul used the spatial analysis of changes in transit supply and demand to evaluate the equity implications of service changes, while fellow doctoral student Ding co-authored a white paper on public health’s response to the pandemic. 

Undergraduate student Dai wrote a white paper comparing “crowding” definitions. Fellow undergrad Desai tracked news and industry updates to keep the team abreast of changes in the transit industry’s pandemic response, and contributed to the literature review. 

This team of students and researchers produced a body of work that addressed a sudden and urgent need within the transit industry for coherent information on a rapidly spreading problem. For this, YPT provided the team with some well-earned recognition.