Civil Engineering graduate student Julie Yu Qiao has been awarded the Neville A. Parker Science & Technology award for an outstanding MS non-thesis research report. This award is given by the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC) and is sponsored by the American Roads and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA). It will be presented to her at the CUTC Annual Awards Banquet on January 9, 2016 in Washington,D.C., as part of the events surrounding the 95th annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board.

Ms. Qiao's research developed and implemented a framework for evaluating multimodal transportation system of systems on the basis of travel flexibility, connectivity, modal market demand shifts, and congestion mitigation. The research applied the framework to evaluate the addition of high speed rail in the Midwest, and the analysis was carried out using computer simulation.