news>>awards>>malchow honored by maritime journal

Matthew Malchow, who earned his Ph.D. last year while a graduate student at the Institute of Transportation Studies, won second place in the first Ph.D. Competition hosted by the International Journal of Maritime Economics (IJME) with his doctoral dissertation, "An Analysis of Port Selection." An international jury and members of the editorial board of the journal considered approximately 20 dissertations submitted over a three-year period between 1999 and 2002 before choosing the top five.

"The objective of my dissertation was to model the selection of a port for each shipment on a disaggregate level, given characteristics that describe each port and the shipment. Such a model could potentially be used to predict future traffic through ports, which would be useful for analyzing maritime investments or assigning vessel schedules," explained Malchow, a postdoctoral researcher with the California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH) program. His advisor was Adib Kanafani, former director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and former chairman of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, where he is Edward G. and John R. Cahill Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Malchow's thesis and those of the other top winners will be published next year in a special issue of IJME.