Megan Hoklas Selected to Receive 2015 Naomi Ledé Outstanding Masters Student Award –
Megan’s passion for transportation engineering began while she was studying abroad in Vienna, Austria. Riding the U-bahn was her first encounter with a rapid transit system; experiencing its efficiency firsthand ignited a fire in her to learn more about transportation systems and people’s travel behavior patterns.
While completing her bachelors at the University of Texas at Austin, Megan participated in the Undergraduate Summer Internship in Transportation program where she assisted a graduate student with their Transportation Research Board paper. This resulted in her being named co-author on An Empirical Investigation into the Time-Use and Activity Patterns of Dual-Earner Couples With and Without Young Children. Thereafter, she became an undergraduate research assistant under Dr. Chandra Bhat working on various Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) projects, which continued into her master’s program at UT Austin.
Megan wrote her master’s thesis on An Integrated Latent Construct Modeling Framework for Predicting Physical Activity Engagement and Health Outcomes, which focused on the connection between public health and human activity-travel patterns. Beyond academics, Megan was an officer in the Institute of Transportation Engineering UT Chapter, a part of the winning 2014 National Grand Championship Traffic Bowl team, and a grader for undergraduate transportation classes at UT.
She graduated in December 2014 with her Masters and is now a traffic engineer-in-training at HDR, Inc in Austin, Texas. It is her ultimate goal to create an efficient transportation system in Texas that will positively impact the community and those riding it, the same way the U-bahn impacted hers.
This award is presented annually by the SWUTC and comes with a $1,000 cash award.