Undergraduate Student
Carolina Solis Blanco
Undergraduate Research Assistant - CE
Carolina is an undergraduate Industrial Engineering student from Costa Rica. She is interested in emerging transportation technologies, and on understanding the environmental and economic implications of different transportation methods. As a student currently pursuing a minor in psychology, she is also very interested in learning not only how transportation impacts people’s lives, but on how people’s motivations and choices can impact transportation itself. By gaining a better understanding of all of these concepts, she wishes to be able to apply them in order to optimize and improve the efficiency and sustainability of transportation systems in the future.
This semester, Carolina will be participating in the Discovery Park Undergraduate Research Internship Program to further pursue her interest in the future of transportation. Currently, there is limited information regarding the public discussion on equity issues during the transportation electrification process. In this project, Carolina will aim to gain a better understanding of these issues by collecting and analyzing crowdsourced data (e.g., Twitter data) concerning the public discussion of electric vehicles. Specifically, the project will examine how social discussion of electric vehicles has changed over time, how it differs between different regions, and how it compares to other transportation modes, e.g., autonomous vehicles and shared micro-mobilities.
In addition to her engineering studies, Carolina loves to relax by reading, learning Italian, exercising, and practicing arm balances. She is also the Service Director in the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and is an active member of a few other organizations on campus such as PurdueTHINK and the salsa club.