2012 UTSP Participants
(L-R) Brooke Ullman, Amelia Celoza, Gene Hawkins, Kayla Weimert, Melisa Finley
The SWUTC sponsored Undergraduate Transportation Scholars Program (UTSP) at Texas A&M University concluded it’s twenty-second successful year in July. This annual summer program, directed by Dr. Gene Hawkins, recruits upper-level undergraduate students from diverse academic backgrounds into a 10-week program designed to provide each student with a research/work experience that will help them get a head start on their careers. The individual students are paired with a mentor while in the program, who assist the student in developing a research proposal, conducting a small transportation engineering research project, presenting findings to peers, and preparing a paper in journal format. While in the program, students make field trips to various transportation agencies and attend professional meetings such as the summer meeting of TexITE. At the end of the term, students make presentations on their research and produce a paper for publication.
On July 27th, the two students sponsored this summer by the UTSP made their final research presentations to a room of transportation professionals at the Texas Transportation Institute State Highway Research Building on the TAMU campus. Amelia Celonz from Arizona State University (Ms. Brooke Ullman, mentor) presented her research Analysis of Factors Influencing Run-off Road Crashes on Horizontal Curves. And Kayla Weimert from Norwich University (Ms. Melisa Finley, mentor) presented her work on the Impact of Nighttime Work Zone Lighting on Motorists’ Detection of Objects.
These papers will be published in the Compendium of Student Papers and made available in the publications section of this website.