Transportation Sustainability Research Center Co-Director, Civil and Environmental Engineering Adjunct Professor and faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Susan Shaheen accepted the 2017 Roy W. Crum Distinguished Service Award for her distinguished achievements in transportation research at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting's Chairman's Luncheon on Jan. 10, 2018. She was presented with the award by her dissertation advisor and former chariman of the TRB executive committee Dan Sperling, the Director of ITS Davis.
Named for Roy W. Crum, who served as the Transportation Research Board’s executive director from 1928 until his death in 1951, TRB’s Crum Award recognizes outstanding leadership in transportation research or research administration.
Shaheen is an internationally recognized leader in research on shared mobility and environmentally friendly transportation. Her research has broken new ground in carsharing, bikesharing, and shared-ride services for more than two decades. She has also advanced sustainable transportation research in the areas of smart parking management for public transit and trucks; ecorouting for private vehicles and freight; fuel cell, electric, and plug-in hybrid vehicles and infrastructure; smart cities; and older mobility.
She has authored 60 journal articles, more than 120 reports and proceedings articles, nine book chapters, and co-edited two books. Her research projects on carsharing, smart parking, and older mobility have received national awards. She envisions a new transportation future in which advanced information, automated, and clean fuel technologies are integrated to offer travelers many of the same advantages as personal vehicles, yet provide tripmaking options that are more diverse and environmentally and socially sustainable. Her contributions have included reaching out to, and bringing together, a broad array of stakeholders to work together to help make this vision a reality.
For almost 20 years, Shaheen has provided continual service to TRB as either a chair or member of Technical Activities Division groups, standing committees, or subcommittees; Studies and Special Programs committees; and Transit Cooperative Research Program, National Highway Cooperative Research Program, and Airport Cooperative Research Program panels. She was a member of the committee that produced TRB Special Report 319: Between Public and Private Mobility: Examining the Rise of Technology-Enabled Transportation Services, which analyzed how innovative transportation services, including shared-ride services, carsharing, bikesharing, and microtransit, are changing mobility for millions of travelers. The report called upon policymakers and regulators to formulate consistent policies that encourage competition among emerging and traditional transportation services in order to improve mobility, safety, and sustainability.
Shaheen has also served as the Policy and Behavioral Research Program Leader at California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways and as a special assistant to the Director’s Office of the California Department of Transportation. She has been named one of the top 10 academic thought leaders in transportation by the Eno Transportation Foundation and received two “Excellence in Management” awards from UC Berkeley. She is a desk editor for the journal Transport Policy and is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation and the International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology.
She is a member of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Program Advisory Committee to the U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary and the Mobile Source Technical Review Subcommittee to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Act Advisory Committee. Shaheen has a Ph.D. from UC Davis in ecology, focusing on the energy and environmental aspects of transportation, and an M.S. from the University of Rochester in public policy analysis.
The mission of TRB is to provide leadership in transportation innovation and progress through research and information exchange, conducted within a setting that is objective, interdisciplinary, and multimodal. The annual meeting -- a major focal point of TRB's activities -- provides an opportunity for transportation professionals from all over the world to exchange information of common interest. Approximately 13,000 policymakers, administrators, practitioners, researchers, and representatives of government, industry, and academic institutions are expected to attend the 97th TRB Annual Meeting, taking place Jan. 7-11, 2018. The meeting, held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., includes more than 5,000 presentations in more than 800 sessions and workshops covering all aspects of transportation. TRB is a program unit of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine -- private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, technology, and medicine. The Academies operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln. For more information, visit http://national-academies.org.