Dr. Talia McCray

Talia McCray is an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin. She specializes in transportation planning and accessibility challenges for low-income populations, who are often dependent on public transportation. Her research explores innovative data collection methodologies which capture the “why” of travel demand and unsatisfied demand. Her work has taken her to South Africa to model the socio-economic and environmental factors that affect prenatal care for women living in rural South Africa and to Quebec City, Canada, where she utilized GIS to organize and analyze data taken from focus groups and the self-mapping of individual space of low-income women, to better understand the challenges of using public transportation to access activities. Recent work includes studies that have both a research and outreach focus in analyzing the activity patterns of low-income youth in Providence, RI, and Austin, TX. The RI study sought to capture how youth experience their lives with respect to violence, and considered implications for their use of the city around them through tracking their activities. Current projects include designing transit mobility training programs for Austin youth and collecting GIS data on their perceptions and use of the communities in which they live. In addition the author has begun to explore the healthcare utilization patterns of low-income youth in Travis County.

Dr. McCray earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, in urban technological and environmental planning, specializing in transportation planning. Her MS is from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, in electrical engineering. She graduated with high honors from Bennett College (BS mathematics) and North Carolina A&T State University (BS electrical engineering), both in Greensboro, NC. Dr. McCray teaches in the areas of transportation social equity, accessibility, healthcare planning, and general planning courses.